www.it-ebooks.info For your convenience Apress has placed some of the front matter material after the index. Please use the Bookmarks and Contents at a Glance links to access them. www.it-ebooks.info iv Contents at a Glance  About the Author xiii  About the Technical Reviewer xiv  Acknowledgments xv  Introduction xvi  Chapter 1: Ruthlessly Helpful 1  Chapter 2: NET Practice Areas 15  Chapter 3: Achieving Desired Results 37  Chapter 4: Quantifying Value 55  Chapter 5: Strategy 71  Chapter 6: NET Rules and Regulations 85  Chapter 7: Powerful C# Constructs 107  Chapter 8: Automated Testing 129  Chapter 9: Build Automation 173  Chapter 10: Continuous Integration 201  Chapter 11: Code Analysis 231  Chapter 12: Test Frameworks 265  Chapter 13: Aversions and Biases 313  Index 343 www.it-ebooks.info xvi Introduction Pro .NET Best Practices is a book that was primarily written for professional software developers who want to bring new and different .NET practices to their teams and organization. The phrase best practice is a handy way to describe widely-used practices and generally-accepted standards that many .NET developers in many organizations have found to be good and effective practices. Because best practices cannot work in every situation, the book encourages you to sort out what may or may not work well for your situation. The adoption of new and different practices is a central theme of this book. Consider the four levels at which best practices are embraced: • Individual: You or any individual adopts better practices to increase personal and professional productivity, quality, thoroughness, and overall effectiveness. • Group: The team adopts better practices to be more industrious together, avoid problems, achieve desired results, improve interpersonal relationships, and work more effectively with other teams. • Organization: Your company, agency, or firm adopts better practices to bring more positive outcomes to the organization, attract and retain employees, satisfy end-user expectations, and make stakeholders happy. • Profession: Better practices are widely adopted and become generally-accepted standards, patterns, and principles that bring alignment to software development and benefit to all that follow them. In an ideal world, best practices are quickly adopted at all four levels. However, this is not realistic for many of the reasons discussed in this book’s early chapters. Pragmatists know that they usually cannot control all four levels within their current circumstances and can only influence a few. And so they work within their span of control and spheres of influence. As you read this book, think about adopting better practices within those areas you can control and positively shaping those areas that you do influence. Pro .NET Best Practices is a practical reference on the best practices that you can apply to your .NET projects today. You will learn standards, techniques, and conventions that are realistic and helpful to achieving results. The book covers a broad range of practices and principles with an emphasis on tools and technologies for • Automated testing • Build automation • Continuous integration • Code analysis www.it-ebooks.info  INTRODUCTION xvii To get warmed up, you can turn to the sample .NET best practices scorecard in Appendix B. If you take the time to score your current project, what might the score tell you about where things currently stand? Hopefully, completing the scorecard prompts these kinds of questions: • What are the best practices you want to see adopted? Why are they important to you? Do you foresee any obstacles or barriers? • What practice on the scorecard should you, your team, or your organization focus on first? Do you prioritize practices that offer greater efficiencies or help to prevent problems? • How would you revise the scorecard to make it fully apply to your current situation? What practices would you add to the list? What practices would you remove? • Once you have the scorecard that is right for you, how often would you reassess it? Is yearly too infrequent? Is weekly too intrusive and demotivating? Adopting best practices is an initiative that is guided by having relevant objectives and a way to track progress. Put together the right scorecard, based on your situation. Track it regularly and use the overall score as a gauge that indicates and validates your continuous improvement. If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward. Thomas Edison The complex problems in life require iterative solutions. Edison knew that patience and perseverance are an inventor’s competitive advantage. The same is true for best practices. It is better to take an iterative and incremental approach to adopting new and different practices. Be patient with it, stick to it, and have fun with it. Who This Book Is For This book is for anyone who has a stake in bringing better practices to software development. Developers As a developer, you have personal practices that make you an effective software developer. Are there new and different practices that could make you a more effective developer? This book offers realistic, practicable, and truly helpful best practices. The early chapters focus on the benefits, relevance, and purpose behind adopting best practices. The later chapters focus on technologies, tools, and techniques that bring greater effectiveness. The final chapter examines the influence of biases and aversions and how you can overcome these obstacles to adopting better practices. www.it-ebooks.info  INTRODUCTION xviii Team Leaders As a team leader, you see the team develop software through their current practices. Could the team perform better and achieve better outcomes with new and different practices? You can expect that this book will offer you pragmatic advice on how to implement suitable best practices likely to be followed by project members. You learn how to get best practices started and keep them from falling out of practice. You learn how to gain support for following best practices from all stakeholders by recognizing and overcoming biases, highlighting the gap between current results and desired results, and demonstrating the value of following best practices. How This Book Is Structured Pro .NET Best Practices presents the topics to provide reasonable breath and go into depth on key practices. For example, the chapter on code analysis looks at both static and dynamic analysis, and it goes into depth with FxCop and StyleCop. The goal is to strike the balance between covering all the topics, discussing the widely-used tools and technologies, and having a reasonable chapter length. Chapters 1 through 5 are focused on the context of new and different practices. Since adopting better practices is an initiative, it is important to know what practices to prioritize and where to uncover better practices within your organization and current circumstances. • Chapter 1 shows how to choose new and different practices that are better practices for you, your team, and your organization. • Chapter 2 draws out ways to uncover better practices in the areas of .NET and general software development that provide an opportunity to discover or learn and apply better practices. • Chapter 3 presents practical advice on how to get team members to collaborate with each other and work toward a common purpose. • Chapter 4 describes specific practices to help with quantifying the value of adopting better development practices. • Chapter 5 provides you with practices to help you focus on strategy and the strategic implications of current practices. Chapters 6 through 9 are focused on a developer’s individual practices. These chapters discuss guidelines and conventions to follow, effective approaches, and tips and tricks that are worth knowing. The overarching theme is that each developer helps the whole team succeed by being a more effective developer. • Chapter 6 helps sort out the generalized statements, principles, practices, and procedures that best serve as.NET rules and regulations that support effective and innovative development. • Chapter 7 is an informal review of the C# language’s power both to harness its own strengths and to recognize that effective development is a key part of following .NET practices. • Chapter 8 describes many specific practices to improve test code, consistent with the principles behind effective development and automated testing. www.it-ebooks.info  INTRODUCTION xix • Chapter 9 discusses using build automation to remove error-prone steps, to establish repeatability and consistency, and to improve the build and deployment processes. Chapters 10 through 12 are focused on supporting tools, products, and technologies. These chapters describe the purpose of various tool sets and present some recommendations on applications and products worth evaluating. • Chapter 10 presents the continuous integration lifecycle with a description of the steps involved within each of the processes. Through effective continuous integration practices, the project can save time, improve team effectiveness, and provide early detection of problems. • Chapter 11 provides an overview of many static and dynamic tools, technologies, and approaches with an emphasis on improvements that provide continuous, automated monitoring. • Chapter 12 is a comprehensive list of testing frameworks and tools with a blend of commercial and open-source alternatives. The final chapter, Chapter 13, is about the aversions and biases that keep many individuals, teams, and organizations from adopting better practices. You may face someone’s reluctance to accept or acknowledge a new or different practice as potentially better. You may struggle against another’s tendency to hold a particular view of a new or different practice that undercuts and weakens its potential. Many people resist change even if it is for the better. This chapter helps you understand how aversions and biases impact change so that you can identify them, cope with them, and hopefully manage them. Appendix A provides a list of resources organized by topic. Many of the resources are either referenced throughout the book or are good sources for further reading. Either way, once you are ready to tackle a .NET practice area, this appendix is a good way to delve into the details. Appendix B provides a scorecard for you to use while evaluating and tracking best practices. As discussed earlier in the Introduction, this scorecard is a starting point for your ongoing initiative to bring better practices to .NET development. Prerequisites To follow along with the examples in this book, you need the following: • A good working knowledge of the .NET Framework 4.0 and the C# language • Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. Many examples in the text refer to features of the Professional, Premium, or Ultimate editions of Visual Studio 2010. A few code samples work with Visual Studio 2010 Express. • Many samples use Microsoft SQL Server Express, but other versions should work fine. Some use the database that comes with the MVC Music Store tutorial, available at mvcmusicstore.codeplex.com. • NUnit version 2.5.10 or later, available at nunit.org. • Moq version 4.0.0 or later, available at code.google.com/p/moq. www.it-ebooks.info  INTRODUCTION xx • FxCop version 10.0 or later. I wrote a blog post that describes how to extract the FxCop 10.0 setup program from the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4. With the FxCopSetup.exe file, you can run the installer on your development machine or build server. See http://ruthlesslyhelpful.net/2011/06/09/liberate-fxcop-10-0/. • StyleCop version 4.5.25 or later, available at stylecop.codeplex.com. Many other tools and technologies are presented and discussed throughout the book. Information on obtaining those specific applications is provided at the time the topic is discussed. Downloading the Code This book includes source code that is available for download. The source code illustrates the practices described in the book. It is not production code. You can download the code at www.apress.com by searching for and going to the detail page of Pro .NET Best Practices. On the book’s detail page is a link to the sample code compressed into a ZIP file. You can use a utility like 7-Zip (7-zip.org) or WinZip to uncompress the code. For more detailed information, go to http://www.apress.com/source-code/. Contacting the Author Stephen can be reached through • Excella Consulting: www.excella.com • E-mail: stephen.ritchie@excella.com • LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sritchie • Blog site: ruthlesslyhelpful.net www.it-ebooks.info C H A P T E R 1 1 Ruthlessly Helpful The phrase “best practices” is sometimes difficult to accept. “Best practices” is really a concept that has become a part of the software development vocabulary; however, the phrase can be troublesome because not every best practice is clearly a better practice for all situations. In fact, a practice that improves one situation might worsen another situation. For that reason, this book avoids the phrase “best practices” and favors “ruthlessly helpful practices.” That phrase embodies the idea that a ruthlessly helpful practice for you might not be right for others, which is fine. It embodies an attitude of healthy skepticism, situational relevance, and judgment. In this chapter, you learn just what that phrase means, how it relates to selecting practices, and how to apply that attitude to those areas that you feel need improvement. The word ruthless serves as a contrast to the passion and bias in the word best. Best is a superlative; there is nothing better than the best. That word is often used to press the point that no other practice needs to be considered. Some use it to shut down discussion and debate. In reality, every new and different practice needs to be carefully considered. To be ruthless, you must discount the biased arguments and zealous opinions. You want to select practices that are right for you and your team. The word helpful tries to put the focus on results and positive outcomes. In the end, a new and different practice represents a change that must show results. The results could be in fewer problems or faster problem resolution. The results could be improvements in delivery, quality, and relationships. The results could be in greater job satisfaction. You want to select practices that get results for you and your team. The most important takeaway of this chapter is that this entire book is about how to choose new and different practices that are better practices for you, your team, and your organization. Feel free to call them best practices or ruthlessly helpful practices but, in the end, you ought to see them as the practices that are entirely appropriate to you. COMMENTARY Selecting the best practice from among the many good practices is not easy. In fact, making hard decisions and dealing with dilemmas is a challenge for many projects. One technique I have learned to avoid is listing out the pros and cons. I rarely find that this approach gets to the heart of the decision. The list does not present a clear choice or direction. When selecting a new or different practice I focus on two questions: • Is the practice not good enough to apply in this situation? • Is the practice too good to pass up in this situation? www.it-ebooks.info CHAPTER 1  RUTHLESSLY HELPFUL 2 The first question attempts to exclude the practice because the situation is not right, the risks are too great, or the benefits are too marginal. The second question attempts to include the practice because it addresses current problems, has few risks, or the likely benefits are significant. This approach seems to make the decision less difficult and resolves the dilemmas that many practices present. The right choice becomes clear and better practices are adopted. As a developer on a large, multiyear software development project, I observed a curious phenomenon. Every couple of weeks, a consultant would spend the afternoon talking to the developers about the problems we were experiencing. This consultant came to be known as “the professor” and the meetings were known as the “drive-by” meetings. Most of the professor’s advice left the team confused and uncertain. We were rarely able to put the advice into practice. It all seemed very theoretical and not very appropriate to our situation. Some of what we did try either did not work or seemed to make things worse. What struck me as curious was that our team was in trouble, yet we spent a lot of time listening to and considering these unrealistic and impractical suggestions. Today I know that better practices prove themselves through application and results, and I insist on seeing both. On an earlier project, I had a very challenging programming assignment. I was given a set of detailed specifications and tasked with implementing them. The document was very difficult to read and the information extremely complex. I went to the business analyst who wrote the specifications to see if he would explain them to me. That started out as a big mistake. He was arrogant, condescending, and hostile. At one point, he said the material was so straightforward that even a five-year-old could understand it. For some reason, what he said got me to thinking and I said, “I need you to explain it to me like I am a five- year-old.” The analyst stopped and thought for a minute. Suddenly, his whole demeanor changed. He went to the board and started explaining everything from the beginning. He gave me an overview of the requirements. As he explained things, I took notes and asked relevant questions. Whenever he went too deep or too technical, I would repeat that I needed him to explain it to me like I’m a five-year-old. Today, I find it a ruthlessly helpful practice to ask a business analyst to explain requirements that I do not understand in the most simplistic terms. Practice Selection This book presents standards, techniques, and conventions that many professional .NET developers would agree are very good practices. People with different experiences or expertise might believe there are better practices. A ruthlessly helpful practice represents a point-of-view and an assertion that following the given practice is both sensible and beneficial. Common sense dictates that having a set of sound, helpful practices in place today is more useful than spending a lot of time researching and selecting the best practice. It is important to have an efficient way to select new and different practices that focus on improving outcomes. In the book Rapid Development, 1 Steve McConnell provides a list of 27 best practices. In addition to that list, the book provides tables of many best practice candidates and a summary of best practice 1 Steve McConnell, Rapid Development (Redmond, WA.: Microsoft Press, 1996). www.it-ebooks.info [...]... illustrates the impact of better practices on the productivity in achieving desired results In the early stages of the project, results are produced during each sprint The team believes the productivity can increase with better practices A new or different practice increases productivity and more is accomplished Later on, additional changes to practices continue to improve productivity This is growing... very comprehensive treatment of the topic of best practices For commercial software development organizations looking to adopt best practices across the board this approach is a great way to organize the initiative In Rapid Development, the evaluation of best practices includes five criteria: • Potential reduction from nominal schedule • Improvement in progress visibility • Effect on schedule risk... of better practices on productivity in achieving desired results Delivery A ruthlessly helpful practice takes the current delivery situation and improves it Productivity and efficiency are improved The ability to meet milestones and deadlines is improved The team can accomplish more with the same or fewer resources These are ways that better practices improve delivery, which come from better problem... significant project this constant diet of pressure and haste is unsustainable When new and different practices focus on problem prevention and more effective issue resolution then the team is less overwhelmed by crisis Adopting better practices improves planning, coordination, and productivity Taken together, these improved approaches offer a more sustainable development environment For example, projects... introducing additional better practices further improves the situation Less effort dealing with problems means more time to devote to other important matters This is growing capability through better problem solving 7 www.it-ebooks.info CHAPTER 1  RUTHLESSLY HELPFUL Figure 1-1 The impact of better practices on the total effort spent on problems A ruthlessly helpful practice might show improvement through innovation... preconditions exist, generally-accepted and widely-used practices are useful to those project teams that are ready to benefit from the improved practices The circumstances and preconditions for common practices are better understood and more extensively discussed, which allows you to decide if the practice is appropriate and beneficial to your situation The more projects that have adopted a practice the more... not always easy or welcomed Consider new and different practices as either solving problems or bringing innovation People find it less risky to adopt better practices that solve problems Better practices that innovate frequently offer greater longterm rewards and advantages A ruthlessly helpful practice shows improvement by helping to resolve problems with less total effort For example, a change in... analysis is to find problems as early as possible by testing the limits of the method-under-test The developer anticipates potential problems as part of writing the code The developer makes sure that exceptions are handled properly This practice reveals potential 9 www.it-ebooks.info CHAPTER 1  RUTHLESSLY HELPFUL problems for the developer to address proactively These are practices that improve delivery... result of better practices is a project that is more sustainable over time Greater productivity and efficiency encourage higher levels of involvement and commitment As individuals, each team member brings more creativity and energy to the project These better practices actively improve and encourage sustainable achievement Balance A ruthlessly helpful practice brings a balanced focus on improvement to... isolate, and diagnose a problem faster Figure 1-1 is a conceptual diagram that illustrates the impact of better practices on the total effort spent on problems In the early stages of the project, significant time and effort is devoted to dealing with questions, issues, delays, defects, and other problems After a few sprints, better practices reduce the total effort devoted to dealing with problems Later on, . following best practices. How This Book Is Structured Pro .NET Best Practices presents the topics to provide reasonable breath and go into depth on key practices. . Introduction Pro .NET Best Practices is a book that was primarily written for professional software developers who want to bring new and different .NET practices