Bruno Peeters Technical Blog

By default, Windows uses a maximum length for paths that is 260 characters. This includes the drive letter – for example “C:\” – and the terminating null character. So this leaves you up to 256 characters for a path. This limitiation is defined due to the restrictions of the Windows API.

You can however use longer path names, that are up to 32767 characters. Within C#, there are serveral ways to achieve this:

• By adding \\?\ in front of a path;
• Using Windows 10 version 1067 or higher, updating the systems registry and your application manifest.

When you read a certain magazine or newspaper, you don’t have the feeling that the articles are written by a number of persons each having their own personalities and characteristics. When reading the first article, you can’t decide when looking at another article by looking at the use of words if it is written by the same person or not. The same strategy we see back at clean written code: it will show consistency throughout the solution. If applied well, you can’t tell that some class is written by one developer and another class by another developer.

What is actually the benefit of having all code written down like it is written by the same person? Note that we spent more time reading back code than we spend time at writing the code. If this is the case, you want fellow programmers to quickly grasp the main important things you want to achieve by the code you’ve written. One thing that helps with this is having the same coding style all over the same code base.

NuGet packages eases the reuse of components. A NuGet package can contain different kinds of resources, like libraries, or header files. These resources are packed in a NuGet package. You can use a package in your solution and refer to one of the resources in the package.

During development, it can be convenient to just create your NuGet package locally and test it locally. Therefore you don’t need to set up your own hosting environment, like for example Artifactory, you just can host your packages on a local disk. Although the scenario where you publish your package to an external host is rather described everywhere, the latter one is a scenario that is interesting as a workaround not having to publish your package you are developing directly to an external source.

We will look at how to define the content of your NuGet package, create it, store it locally and eventually consume it.

Assume you have a layered system, build-up using the separation of concerns principle. We have a UI layer, a services layer and a database layer. The UI layer communicates with a service layer, which communicates with a database layer. As the names describe, the UI layer is responsible for showing an UI to the user, the services take care of main logic of the application and the data access layer communicates internally with a database.

Within C++, you have the const keyword, that can be used to say to the one which calls the method that the argument which passed through the const parameter won’t be changed within the method. This is merely adding a contract. Sure, the compiler does some checking for you, but still it is possible to change the value of your const parameter. See for example this nice example (obtained from https://isocpp.org/wiki/faq/const-correctness#aliasing-and-const):

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Design by contract is a technique, introduced by Betrand Meyer and applied within the Eiffel programming language. The concept allows a programmer to document the rights and responsibilities of everyone who uses your code. A contract (not to be confused with a .Net WCF contract) can contain the following elements:

• A precondition;
• An invariant;
• A postcondition.

Preconditions state the conditions that must be met in order to enter the method. For example a parameter “i” must have a positive value. Postconditions describe the conditions of the result of the method. An invariant states the condition which will be always be true, seen from a perspective from the calling party. Using the pre-, postconditions and invariants you can also show the correctness of a program. Read More…