James Gregory

Making a Visual Studio 2008 plugin isn’t as hard as it sounds.

Making one that works is a bit more difficult.

Syntax highlighting is fairly straight forward, just run a tokenizer over the text and colour code each token appropriately. It’s the code sense that is causing me to go slightly mad. To determine what methods need to be listed when the intellisense pops up, you need to parse the code that’s in the document, then resolve any classes and references in there to build up a collection of methods to display. It gets more tricky when the document isn’t valid, because you can’t compile it. That’s where I am now, I need to figure out some way of partially compiling the document, or maybe using an AST walker.

Future James: This is pretty much describing AutoMapper, just take a look at that instead.

I quite dislike mapping DTOs to entities, it’s a pain, but mostly tedious and tiresome rather than difficult. I decided to try to ease things by creating a library that would resolve entity instances to their DTO counterparts.

My requirements were few but I was determined not to violate any of them.

1. Refactoring friendly. No strings for property names, changing names should give compiler errors.
2. Must simplify code.
3. Must improve maintainability.

This article serves as an introduction to the concept of Dependency Injection, and why you’d want to use it. It is not a getting started guide for using containers. If you’re interested in those, my personal preference is Castle Windsor and you can find their getting started guide here.

What are dependencies? Also referred to as couplings, dependencies are other modules that one module requires to fulfil it’s purpose.

Are dependencies bad? No, of course they’re not, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to create anything. However, highly coupled code can cause a lot of problems for your application.

If your code requires knowledge of how a dependency works, then your code is highly coupled. If your code is tied explicitly to an implementation, then your code is also highly coupled.

I dislike static methods, there I said it.

Like everything, they have their place; but as the old analogy says, when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. Static methods are being abused.

Jeff Atwood (of Coding Horror) tweeted earlier: “On Firefox: ‘add-ons aren’t a big draw for me – I just need a browser, not a circus.’”. I don’t know whether this was a quotation of himself, or someone else; but it’s something that I’ve heard mentioned before.

Just because they’re there, doesn’t mean you have to install them.