Articles About Software Development Technique

In this article I will begin with a discussion of home-grown vs. off-the-shelf persistence solutions, including areas to consider when deciding between the two, and advice for choosing the best off-the-shelf solution to meet your needs. I will also share suggestions and advice from my own experiences with O/R mapping and persistence APIs, with a focus on "best practices."

In a way, we programmers are quite lucky. We get the opportunity to create entire worlds out of nothing but thin air. Our very own worlds, complete with our own laws of physics. We may get those laws wrong of course, but it's still fun.

This article presents a set of general error handling principles and illustrates them in action with a downloadable VB.NET project, including a demonstration program and a reusable .NET exception handling DLL.

Do you test your code before you send it downstream? How much confidence do you have that another code change won't break something?

The reasons the business decided to rebuild the application are fairly typical: the original architecture was short-sighted and does not scale; the code base is convoluted and fragile...

Judging someone else’s code according to our own relative correctness measurements is one thing, but what happens when we need to modify that code?

Quality code does not happen by accident. It really takes true desire in the heart of the developer.

Too often when we write code, we get caught up only in the exercise of the code itself and forget about the people who will have to use the software and maintain the code after we are long gone.

This is a "short form" version of the full "Principled Programming" list.  This shorter version only includes the principles themselves, minus the commentary and explanation.

"Principled Programming" is a collection of "principles" for professional software developers.  The principles address concrete matters such as layout and comments, as well as "softer" areas such as personal character.