Csharp

Reading F#

A tweet about some C# code rewritten in F# got me interested yesterday.

If you know a little F# it’s easy get sucked into thinking that having much fewer lines of code, and less noise generally makes F# code automatically better, cleaner, easier to read than C#. But, of course, that’s only true for people who know enough F# to read it.

When I see very smart C# devs unable to decipher what the F# code is doing, that gets me very interested.

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Unit Testing Events And Callbacks In C#

The Problem

When you want to unit test a method it’s usually pretty simple. Call the method, pass it it’s parameters and assert against it’s return value, or some other property of the object that may have changed.

What happens when a method doesn’t return a value, or update some property? What happens when it leads (perhaps after some delay) to an event firing, or a callback getting called?

Events firing and callbacks getting called are very similar, but subtly different, so I’ll cover them both.

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C# Is Too Damn Noisy

I am growing increasingly frustrated with C#. I think the reason for that may be my exposure to languages like F#. In many ways my feelings for C# are quite similar to feelings I had about VB.Net when I was first exposed to C#.

It’s taken me a while to figure out what it is that I find irritating about C# and I think I’m ready to call it. The problem with C# is exactly the same problem I had with VB.Net, it’s too damn noisy.

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I is for Interface

Back in 1995 I sat in a large ballroom to listen to politicians from the North and South of Ireland talk about the peace process, which at that time was far from a sure thing.

A story, told by one of the Unionists stuck in my head. He told of how he had been involved in selling a ceasefire to loyalist paramilitaries and one of the questions that he was faced with was.

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The Anagrams Kata

The following is my C# implementation of the Anagrams Kata as described on cyber-dojo.com

Write a program to generate all potential anagrams of an input string.

For example, the potential anagrams of “biro” are

biro bior brio broi boir bori
ibro ibor irbo irob iobr iorb
rbio rboi ribo riob roib robi
obir obri oibr oirb orbi orib

Let’s write a test.

[Test]
public void NoCharacters()
{
    var expected = new List<string> {""};
    Assert.That(Anagrams.Of(""), Is.EqualTo(expected));
}

As is almost always the case, we start with the degenerate case of an empty string. We don’t do this solely to ensure the degenerate case is handled (that’s part of it), but with this first test we’re thinking about the API of our new code.

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Fluent Mocking

Here’s a scenario (for once not a hypothetical scenario, this is a real system I worked on). I was building a wizard based app. To be more accurate I was building lots of wizard based apps.

After a couple of wizards the functionality became clear and I extracted it to it’s own framework. My apps could then focus on actual bread and butter functionality.

Two of the objects in my framework are ‘Wizard’ and ‘WizardStep’. A Wizard contains WizardSteps. You get the idea.

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