StyleCop – Clearing up confusion

bharry’s WebLog : Clearing up confusion

We found that StyleCop is, in fact, a very useful tool and it does things FxCop and TeamDev doesn’t do (and it doesn’t do the things they do). It is a wonderful complementary tool. StyleCop is a tool for doing coding style checking to verify that source code is formatted the way you want and follows the style guidelines for conventions. While there is some overlap with FxCop (like checking identifier capitalization), the overlap is miniscule as StyleCop does not do the deep analysis that the other static analysis tools do to enable code correctness checks, security checks, etc.

Good. I think this should be part of VSTS/VS in the future. Automate, automate, automate!

Spartan Programming

Coding Horror: Spartan Programming

Minimalism isn’t always the right choice, but it’s rarely the wrong choice. You could certainly do worse than to adopt the discipline of spartan programming on your next programming project.

You could a lot worse than listening when Jeff talks… And I pretty much agree with him on Spartan Programming. I like my code short and sweet, but some of the ideas are just too much. renaming variables from “msg” to “m” doesn’t really make the code any better, it just makes it a little bit harder to realize that “m” was the e-mail message. “msg” on the other hand makes it just a little bit easier to remember…

Pex – Automated Exploratory Testing for .NET

Pex – Automated Exploratory Testing for .NET | briankel | Channel 9

Pex is a tool being developed by Microsoft Research which has the potential to dramatically improve the quality of software testing while requiring minimal, if any, effort on the part of the developer. Pex can automatically generate a set of inputs for a paramaterized unit test which can effectively excercise most, if not all, possible code paths.

Pex is cool! I’m doing some testing on it myself, but the warm weather is stopping me from working really hard on it…