Extreme DRYness

I ran across an interesting scenario at work today that I think merits some discussion. In this post, I’ll cover what DRY is, and when following it religiously may actually cause problems.

Hide Your Secrets

In the last post we discussed why it could be preferred to expose all of your methods publicly. However, I deliberately left something out. Some of you may have noticed.

The Case Against Private Methods

Yeah. This post is titled that.

How to Version Assemblies Destined for Nuget

Okay. Seriously. Versioning of third-party Nuget packages has been the bane of my existence for the past week. Nuget declares that packages under its system should follow Sematic Versioning, and that’s great… for the package. But it becomes a problem when the same versioning scheme is followed for the assembly.

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Microsoft Did It Wrong

It’s been several years since Microsoft announced that Newtonsoft’s Json.Net would be the default JSON serializer. If you deal with JSON communication over the web at all, you probably already know this. It’s not exactly news.

However, there does seem to be a small desire among those in the web development community who would like to use alternate serializers. Personally, I’d like to use my own serializer, Manatee.Json. I originally created it out of a dissatisfaction with Json.Net, and naturally (and perhaps from some bias) think it to be superior.

The Case Against Static Classes

Static classes cannot be instantiated. That means they serve only serve one purpose: providing data and functionality to all areas of an application. They are a close relative to the evil global variable.

Nulls and Extension Methods

I recently came across this blog post in which the author provides a tip on how extension methods can be used, suggesting that they can be safely used on null objects. While his suggestion is valid, I cringed at the idea because it severely hampers code readability.