Tips

Centrally managing dependencies in your C# solutions

August 15, 2024  3 minute read  

Today, I’d like to talk about the best way to centrally manage dependencies in your dotNET solutions. It’s common for a single solution to comprise multiple projects. The happy path for maintaining dependencies in Visual Studio involves right-clicking on the project and selecting “Manage NuGet packages…”. Once you have a set of packages, you can keep them in sync by right-clicking on the solution and doing the same thing. By using “Manage NuGet packages” for the solution, you can update m...

Better data validation exceptions with C#

August 10, 2024  6 minute read  

There are times when I look at code I have written and think to myself “there has to be a better way.” When I start thinking like this, I start by looking at the documentation - the .NET official documentation is incredibly well written and simple to digest, and the fundamentals section is something I believe every language documentation should aspire to. Take exceptions, for example. When I started my career in software development, methods were written with a block of validations at the ...

Documenting open-source projects

February 12, 2019  6 minute read  

Over the last 25 years, I’ve contributed to and written a lot of technical documentation, whether it is in the form of official documentation, blogs, tutorials, or books. Tech writers, who have nothing but access to engineers to work with, turn conversations into a guide that is equally suitable for a complete beginner and an expert. If you are an engineer, you definitely need to institute a “Tech Writer Appreciation Day”. That being said, learning research is rooted in psychology. The way w...