Content that is all about software development and programming! Find examples of code often written in C# along with tutorials.
Unity3D Default .NET Framework I recently wrote that I wanted to start writing more Unity3D articles because I'm starting to pick up more Unity3D hobby work. It felt like a good opportunity to share some of my learnings so that anyone searching across the web might stumble upon this and get answers to the same problems I had. Unity3D as of 2018.1.1f1 (which is the version I'm currently using), still defaults to using .NET 3.5 as the framework version. Nothing wrong with that either. I'm sure there are reasons that they have for staying at that version, probably because of Mono and cross platform reasons if I were to guess, so I'm not complaining. For reference, this setting in Unity3D is referred to as "Scripting Runtime Version". So if you're googling more about this later, that's what Unity calls it.…
What Makes Good Code? It's been a while since I've had a programming oriented post, and I figured this would be a great topic to write about. It's been a topic I've been thinking about more and more over the last year and I've been experimenting with certain patterns and practices to see if certain things actually make code "better". A lot of the information presented in this series will be completely based on my opinion, but I'll try to back up my opinion with as many concrete examples as I can. If you have a differing opinion, I'd love to hear it in the comments. I'd also like to call out that much of what I'll be discussing is in the context of object oriented programming. To be specific, there may be mostly C# examples used. If this isn't something…
Everybody Has Gone "Agile" If you're a software developer that's done interviews in the past few years, then you already know that every software development shop has gone agile. Gone are the days of waterfall software development! Developers have learned that waterfall software development is the root of all evil, and the only way to be successful is to be agile. You need to be able to adapt quickly and do standups. You need to put story point estimates on your user stories. You need retrospectives... And agility! And... more buzz words! Yes! Synergy! In the cloud! You need it! Okay, so why the sarcasm? Every single software development team is touting that they're following the principles of agile software development, but almost no team truly is. Is it a problem if they aren't actually following agile principles? Absolutely not,…
Whose Job Is It? I wanted to share my experience that I had working on a recent project. If you've been programming for a while, you've definitely heard of the single responsibility principle. If you're new to programming, maybe this is news. The principle states: That every class should have responsibility over a single part of the functionality provided by the software, and that responsibility should be entirely encapsulated by the class You could extend this concept to apply to not only classes, but methods as well. Should you have that one method that is entirely responsible for creating a database connection, connecting to a web service, downloading data, updating the database, uploading some data, and then doing some user interface rendering? What would you even call that?! The idea is really this: break down your code into separate pieces of functionality.…
Problem: Visual Studio and Unity Aren't Playing Nice! UPDATE: This is for older setups with Visual Studio and Unity. You may want to look at Assembly Definitions. I just started poking around in Unity 4.6 and I've been having a blast. I've made it to the point where I want to actually start hammering out some code, but I came across a bit of a problem: I want to start leveraging other projects I've written in my Unity solution while I'm in Visual Studio, and things are blowing up. So, what gives? Okay, so let me start by explaining why I want to do this. I understand that if I'm making a simple game, I should have no problem breaking out my unity scripts into sub folders and organizing them to be nice and pretty. The problem I'm encountering is that I…
Enforcing Interfaces This is my second installment of the series related to my small side project that I started. I mentioned in the first post that one of the things I wanted to try out with this project is coding by interfaces. There's an article over at CodeProject that I once read (I'm struggling to dig it up now, arrrrrghh) that really gave me a different perspective about using interfaces when I program. Ever since then I've been a changed man. Seriously. The main message behind the article was along the lines of: Have your classes implement your interface, and to be certain nobody is going to come by and muck around with your class's API, make sure they can't knowingly make an instance of the class. One of the easiest ways to do this (and bear with me here, I'm…
Continuous improvement involves making small changes over time to adapt your process. See how I've been adapting my one on ones with my team for the better.
Refactoring: Some Background If you're a seasoned programmer you know all about refactoring. If you're relatively new to programming, you probably have heard of refactoring but don't have that much experience actually doing it. After all, it's easier to just rewrite things from scratch instead of trying to make a huge design change part way through, right? In any mature software project, it's often the case where you'll get to a point where your code base in its current state cannot properly sustain large changes going forward. It's not really anyone's fault--it's totally natural. It's impossible to plan absolutely everything that comes up, so it's probable that at some point at least part of your software project will face refactoring. In my real life example, I was tasked with refactoring a software project that has a single owner. I'm close…
Leadership Everyone has their own variation of what leadership means. For me, leadership means empowering others to accomplish their goals and providing assistance when they need it. There were a few articles that came up on LinkedIn this week that I wanted to share with everyone and discuss how they fit into my perspective on leadership. Articles Does Your Team Work With You Or For You?: Kwame Manu-Antwi opens up the article in an interesting fashion. When I read the title of the article, I figured this was going to be the typical leadership vs management debate. However, Kwame goes into describing a scenario where he had a humbling experience from one of his team that made some sacrifices for him. This was truly an example of working for him. The entire second half of the article shares a bunch of…
A few months ago I wrote up an article on using PyTools, Visual Studio, and Python all together. I received some much appreciated positive feedback for it, but really for me it was about exploring. I had dabbled with Python a few years back and hadn't really touched it much since. I spend the bulk of my programming time in Visual Studio, so it was a great opportunity to try and bridge that gap when looking at something like IronPython. I had an individual contact me via the Dev Leader Facebook group that had come across my original article. However, he wanted a little bit more out of it. Since I had my initial exploring out of the way, I figured it was probably worth trying to come up with a semi-useful example. I could get two birds with one…
