Over the past month, I've written a few articles for ASP Alliance. I now need to shamelessly plug my own stuff. If I didn't post this kind of stuff on my blog, I wouldn't really be doing my job. I wrote these articles so people could read them, and linking to them here should help with that. Enjoy.
Standard Type Casting and "as" Operator Conversions
In early February, I wrote this article, which discusses in fairly easy to understand language when, why, and how to use each of these types of conversion. I am hoping that anyone who doesn't know the difference or doesn't know when to use each one, learns a little bit more about that from this article. I tried to keep things fairly basic, so people could really understand this well.
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Using Objects Instead of Enumerations
I love enumerations, but they have caused me plenty of pain in the past. Why did they cause problems for me? Well, that is because I shouldn't have been using enumerations. I've seen plenty of people doing the same thing. Sometimes you really just need to have a class instead of an enum. However, if you really do need a restricted set of values, you can use private constructors to create the only allowed instances of this object as public properties. I tend to move to this type of object as soon as I need a description, a friendlier name, or any additional logic for my enumeration.
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Beginning Test Driven Development
Lately a lot of people have been trying to learn how to test their applications, but I think there is a fairly significant learning curve preventing people from getting to that point. I am planning on writing some related articles to this one which start pulling together the different aspects of testing. I will probably be discussing Dependency Injection, Mocking, and Inversion of Control at some point. For this article I focused mainly on how to write tests. I know a bunch of people who are trying to get started testing, but don't know how or what to test.
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Let me know what you think about these articles. As long as you're nice about it, I always like getting feedback; even feedback pointing out problems in the articles.
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