Saturday, August 10, 2013

Open Source and .NET Development.

I have an ebook reader so what do you want me to do but read. I read the book Open Source .NET Development. I've always been interested in Open Source projects. I am a .NET developer so they went together. They talked mostly about the Open Source tools to build a .NET project. They left out one thing. The people, the people and personalities involved in building a project using the open source tools.

The books was written in 2004. I don't think they had knowledge that XML documentation was now a built in standard feature of Visual Studio. They talked about using NDoc to document the project with XML documentation. That's a great tool but you have to get the programs to write the documentation first.

I work on projects with alot of undocumented features and methods. It would some times be great if I could use the Object Browser and find the method and the classes I need. This is not always the case. Someone has to first take the time to type /// in order to start the documentation of the method. Then they have to put something in there.

The next chapters talk about unit testing. Well the hard part with this is you have to define what unit testing is. The idea that you just test one little thing.