Yet another classic. This book is an extensive compilation of refactorings that range from providing meaningful names for variable to collapsing class hierarchies. Every pattern is introduced in three stages – Motivation, Mechanics, and Example. The Motivation section presents the problem that a refactoring is trying to solve. Then the Mechanics section explains how a refactoring should be conducted. When a refactoring is a combination of other refactorings the author provides references to those refactorings so that you can easily find them in the book. The last part provides a step-by-step example of how a refactoring can be applied to existing code.
The book is neatly organized and can be used a reference book for your everyday programming endeavors.
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“Even bad code can function. But if code isn’t clean, it can bring a development organization to its knees.”
Here is another one of my favorite books. I am not sure if this book needs introduction but if you haven’t heard about it or read it, Clean Code is one of THE books on the art, I would say, of writing code. The book is all about writing clear, readable, and flexible code.
The first part of the book identifies patterns and best practices for writing clean code. Fortunately the book is not simply a compilation of patterns – in the second part of the book Robert C. Martin demonstrates how those patterns fit into real life refactoring scenarios. In the final chapter the author presents a list of code “smells” that can help you identify bad code.
Great book! Enjoy.
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Tired of writing [TestMethod] and [TestClass] when creating tests? Well, I got tired and wrote two very simple Visual Studio snippets that can create test classes and test methods.
Just copy the two .snippet files into C:\<Program Files Folder>\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC#\Snippets\1033\Visual C# , restart Visual Studio and you are good to go.
Enjoy.
Download snippets
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Recently I started writing a simple application that would help me organize my music files by automatically renaming them using their tags and moving them to their designated folders.
As expected the program will rely on the file system classes that the .Net Framework provides. Naturally, I wanted to cover the I/O logic with tests so that I am confident that when the software is used it will not do damage to my files and will behave according to my requirements. So I started writing tests…
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I have been yearning to write about this book for a long time since it had become an all-time favorite. You have got to love this book for its incredible depth, witty jokes, great style, and funky structure. Definitely a must-read for every developer.
Don’t get fooled by the name though – the author covers a lot of ground and the book could be helpful not only to developers but project/product managers, QAs, HR, even top-level management.
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Several months ago I started my hunt for a decent low contrast theme for Visual Studio and I came across a very extensive article on the subject by Scott Hanselman. I tried several themes but the one that caught my attention was Oren Ellenbogen’s Dark Scheme which is based on the Zenburn theme.
One thing that I do not like about the original themes, being a Silverlight and a WPF developer, is the fact that the XML colors were not configured. In addition to that, the output window uses a horrifying green-colored font that can make your eyes pop. Apart from those two problems I consider the two themes to be the best low contrast themes available.
I have made some adjustments to the original themes and I came up with my version which I use every day. Now the output window uses more subtle font color and the XML markup look a lot better. Here is the Zenburn Remixed:
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A couple of days ago I had to overwrite several files with another file and Windows PowerShell came to the rescue. At first it might seem that such task is trivial and it could easily be done in a minute using copy, paste, and Windows Explorer. That might be true if you are dealing with just a few files but if that is not case – if you are dealing with 50+ files which have different names – you should consider another approach.
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Once in a while you have to change the size of a VHD file and I think I have found the perfect tool for the job. It is called VHD Resizer (previously known as VHD Expander) and it very easy to use. You can grab it from the vmToolKit (http://vmtoolkit.com/) website and expand or shrink the size of any Virtual Hard Disk file with just a few clicks.
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I have just posted an article about scheduling multiple builds with Team Build and MSBuild at my Telerik blog. Here is an excerpt:
If you are working on a large project it is very probable that the project is composed of several parts/modules which are build separately. What are your options if you want to be able to rebuild the whole thing easily? If you are a Quake tournament winner equipped with Razer Copperhead mouse you could probably schedule 10 builds (in the right order) in a matter of seconds but what about your colleagues that are not so gifted? Well, there is the TfsBuild command line tool but in case you are using the 2008 version and you would like to have the freedom to choose a build agent when scheduling a build you are out of luck. It seems that the only viable option is to write a custom tool that talks directly to Team Build.
You can find the whole blog post here.
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Test driven development and testing in general are mandatory techniques if you are serious about the code that you create. That is especially true in game development where almost every piece of code is very complex. In this first post about testing I will give you a little insight about testing vectors and transformations.
The code that I am going to provide is written for the XNA framework and the Visual Studio testing framework but the concepts that are described in this post can be applied to any game development and testing platforms. Read more…
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Since this is my first post I’ve decided to start off with a post that would help anyone that is just starting with game development and is looking for the right books that will get him going.
There are primarily two problems of finding good books about game development. First there are many of them our there. Probably not as many as in some other fields but still you should spend considerable time for research. The second problem is that game development tends to be a very complex and very extensive field and unfortunately not every author can present such complex material in a digestible form.
When I first started with game development I bought about 2 dozen books and as you might expect some of them were great while others proved to be a waste of money. In attempt to save someone some time and money I have listed several books that, in my opinion, are the best. Read more…
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