Good Programming Practice

This week I have spent some time playing with jQuery components and as a programmer I am always interested in understanding the code rather than just plugging it in and leaving it that. One thing that struck me looking through the source is the amount of code that looks like this

  if (condition) 
      DoSomething();

The key point about this code is the lack of curly braces around the if/else statements - this is a practice I have always tried to avoid and don't particularly like. The truth of course is that with or without braces the code will do exactly the same thing and the issue is more to do with semantics and readability than it is to do with the code itself.

I mentioned this on Twitter and got some interesting responses back from other developers - the main one being that this is probably a language specific question as many languages/frameworks simply won't allow this sort of syntax in the first place.

I have stolen borrowed C# code from the web on many occasions and have very rarly seen this type of code yet in JavaScript it seems to be the norm. Why this is the case I am not really sure, of course file size is an issue in JavaScript which is not so relevant in C# due to its compiled nature but if you are following best practices then you are already minifying your scripts before going live anyway (you are aren't you?) so an extra few lines in your uncompressed files will make little different after compression.

The other thing that people mentioned on Twitter is that the code above would not be acceptable but if it all sat on one line then it would probably would be alright, like this -

  if (condition) DoSomething();

The difference it minimal but from a readability point of view I can see justification for it. It is much clearer what is intended - the problem with the first case is it may be possible for a future developer to come along and do the following

  if (condition) 
      DoSomething();
      DoNextThing();

Which would obviously not do what was expected - this is just a hypothetical case and probably wouldn't really happen in reality but it opens up the possibility that it could. The simple answer is to program defensively and, as most people on Twitter seemed to agree, add the braces in.

What is your opinion? Is there ever a valid reason not to add the braces? What happens in other languages?

ELMAH

In my last post about ASP.NET MVC I mentioned ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers) and thought I would expand on what it is and what it does. In essence it is a way of logging unhandled errors in your code - one of the key features which I like is it is able to be used on a running app without the need to recompile and deploy.

As a good programmer I am sure that you always try to catch errors and recover gracefully from them - you also probably log those errors to a database or file. Unfortunately however hard you try a user will find a way to break your well crafted code - of course if you have done things correctly they will see a nice custom error page, rather than the yellow screen of death.

The problem with this is that because these errors are unhandled and not logged finding out exactly what caused the error is not exactly easy, in my experience relying on users to give you any useful information is not a great strategy, in a perfect world what you really want is to be able to see the actual yellow screen of death with the full error and stack trace. This is what ELMAH gives you, with just a few lines in the Web.config it can log the error details to a database (or any other of its supported storage methods) - the error log can then be opened in a browser and in most cases the original error screen can be viewed.

The advantages for tracking individual errors are obviously massive however for every error that is reported there must be a whole bunch which are not reported - ELMAH lets you track these as well, in fact this is one of the main reasons the guys at Stackoverflow use it.

One small issue I would note is that the original code only works with CustomErrors set to false, which for live code is a big no-no, so is great for development purposes but it not really usable for a deployed app. To get around this limitation you can implement this patch by the original author.

It is easy to install (even on existing apps), gives you time saving information and in general makes your life easier - all this and it is free! So, if you are not using it, why not?

ASP.NET MVC Hello World

Whilst I do my best to keep up with new programming concepts and techniques the reality is that there is always something new to learn and not enough hours in the day so I am committed to trying to learn at least one new thing a week.

One area I have been wanting to learn more about is ASP.NET MVC which was Microsoft's response to the success of Ruby on Rails. Like Ruby on Rails it is built on the (fairly old) concept of a Model-View-Controller architecture which is a better fit to the Web's natural statelessness than the forced state of standard Web Forms.

I have done plenty of reading on the subject and completed a few small tutorials in the past but never had the time to get to in depth so this week I have been delving deeper into the technology and trying to build a boilerplate solution which I can roll out across projects - you can see the results over on github - this is by no means complete and still has a number of issues but it does include some important elements -

• Uses ASP.NET MVC 3 with the new Razor view engine and a HTML5 boilerplate template 
• Error Logging via ELMAH - if you haven't heard of this before it is really worth checking out, I will probably do a blog post on it in the future.
• LLBLGen Pro 3.1 for O/RM Mapping with some custom template modifications for generating entity interfaces in order to help implement the repository pattern.
• Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection is handled by Castle Windsor and is so easy to set up but has so many benefits.
• Built using TDD concepts using NUnit   

One of the hardest things I have found is trying to work out exactly what belongs in which layer, as an example - my initial design required the controller to know about the LLBL entities which created a dependency between the UI and the Data Access Layer which was obviously a bad design so I had to fix that (via the custom LLBL templates).

I will continue to expand the project and hopefully write a follow up post in a few weeks.

Any comments/improvements would be gratefully accepted :)

Black Monday

Well, those that know me will have already heard the news but if not then here goes.

As of today the company I work for has ceased trading and I have been made redundant effective immediately. Exactly what my future holds is still uncertain although I do have some very interesting opportunities which will hopefully allow me to continue where I left off.

I have spent 5 years working for the company and seen it grow from a small 2 man operation into a thriving marketing agency and feel I played my part in that and this feels like a big kick in the teeth. There is a lot more I could say about that but this is not the time or place for that. So instead I would like to take the chance to thank everyone who has made the last 5 years so special both colleagues and clients. Special thanks must go to James (who saw my potential and gave me a chance), Mark, Charlotte, Steve, Helen and Sarah.

So long and thanks for all the fish (or should I say coffee) :(
 

My Top 5 Development Related Apps

Inspired by this Tweet by @netmag from last week, here are the 5 software programs I use for work which I couldn't live without.

1. Resharper Visual Studio Plugin - I simply could not code in Visual Studio without it, adds all the extra bits that Microsoft forgot about.
2. LLBLGen Pro - writing database access code by hand is dull and boring, that is just a fact. This marvellous O/R Mapper takes the pain out of it.
3. Google Chrome - to quote Apple "It Just Works". Fast, lightweight and with a well oiled JavaScript rendering engine make it the best browser out there at the moment.
4. Spotify - OK, not strictly work related but would struggle to get through a whole work week without it. Despite a few gaps in the catalogue (no AC/DC or Metallica) it is pretty much awesome and all for a £5 month.
5. Leech FTP - this may be a controversial one with the likes of FileZilla and various others out there. My problem with most of those is that they overcomplicate things - FTP is not a complicated thing and the fact that Leech is no longer being developed means it will continue to remain simple.          

So what do you think? Disagree or have I missed any biggies? Would be interested to know what everyone else thinks.

Telerik, IE9 and a Schoolboy error

As part of a project I am working on I have been using the rather fantastic Telerik ASP.NET Ajax controls and despite the documentation being a little bit lacking have managed to get things working very smoothly.

But today I noticed a JavaScript error appearing on one of my pages which seemed to relate directly to the Telerik controls (Unable to set value of the property 'control': object is null or undefined) - I did a search on the forums and found several people with the same problem such as this one but none of the solutions seemed to apply in my case.

Just as a side note the JavaScript error was picked up by one of my colleagues and I struggled to reproduce the problem on my own machine - I eventually tracked the problem down to IE9 and the fact it now hides the error icon in the status bar so I never caught it myself, kudos to Microsoft for that little gem and wasting a load of my time.

Anyway, I decided the best way to solve the problem was just to keep deleting things from the page until the error went away which eventually led me to a bunch of controls which I had commented out. And here is where I have to admit that I made a bit of a schoolboy error because I had used a standard HTML comment <!-- --> which meant that ASP.NET still rendered the control and its JavaScript but hides the HTML and hence generates the rather cryptic error message. So Lesson learnt, when commenting out controls use <%-- --%> instead.

And So It Begins...

First - a plea; this is the first time I have ever really blogged before so please be patient with me.

OK, now that is out of the way I will introduce myself - my name is Kevin and I am a 30 year old Web Developer based in the UK. I specialise in ASP.NET with over 6 years experience. I work for a small marketing agency based in a very posh area of Knutsford, Cheshire.

This blog is mainly to document some of the programming challenges I face daily in the hope that it may help other people with the same problem but I will also be posting personal articles as well as interesting sites from around the web.

I doubt anyone will be reading this at the moment anyway but if you are (are you really that bored?) then please send me nice comments :)

As a special treat for my first post here is a HTML5 game which should keep you busy for a while http://www.flaminglunchbox.net/curvy

Over and out
Kevin