Visitor pattern navigation support with ReSharper

I love the visitor pattern, it enables open/closed principle which is a great fundamental part of maintainability and clean code. You can read more about the pattern here. There is one down side of this pattern, and that is navigation. Consider this code.

_cqsClient.ExecuteCommand(new MyCommand());

If you navigate to ExecuteCommand you will just end up at some close to the metal code that executes your command handlers. And if you try to find all usages for the Command you will only find usages of its constructor (becasuse of the new keyword).

With vanilla ReSharper you need to first navigate to the class and then do a find all usages on the class declaration and navigate to the command handler from there. Very counter productive. But ReSharper is extendable!
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Flexible integration tests with dacpac support

Integration tests are an important aspect of software development, high code coverage does improve code quality. But the tests need to be flexible and fast so they do not hinder the developers in their daily work. On the build server speed doesn’t matter that much, but a good test suite must be fast enough so that the developers choose to use it instead of running the system manually to test their features. Thats how you get good code coverage. Sadly publishing a dacpac is anything but fast. But there are clever tactics you can apply to make it work good as your daily testing platform.
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Build server – client contracts with dotnet CLI

Now days type safety is common within the web-world with TypeScript and on the horizon WebAssembly with .NET Core (Blazor etc). I have for a long time advocated for the importance of this, especially when we are talking the contract between server and client. For example this T4 template that spits out C# CQS types as javascript.

T4 doesn’t play well with Dot Net Core, but we now have the dotnet CLI toolset we can use instead.
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Client – server event aggregation with React

I implemented my client/server event aggregation library in Vue yesterday and thought it was time for React. I must say React is alot different from Vue, and since I come from Knockout Vue was very easy to adopt. Though after som fiddling I got the hang of it. 😀

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Client – server event aggregation with Vue

I have ment to look into Vue for a long time. Finally I took my time and fell in love right away. The simplicity and modularity is just great. I also saw how easy you can extend it so I decided to implement a plugin for my SignalR event aggregation library.

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Client – server event aggregation with SignalR ASP.NET Core

Event aggregation is really a pattern i like, there is something elegant about firing events and subscribers can listen to them without knowing who fired them. This creates decoupled domains both in backends and frontends. Back in 2013, at my customer of that time we saw an increasing demand for pub / sub and immediate update. We fired events on the backend event bus and in the frontend we had SignalR Hubs that picked up the events and forwarded them to the clients. This caused duplicated and similar code both on the client and on the web server. I decided to create an abstraction layer between SignalR and the event aggregator. The result is a library called SignalR.EventAggregatorProxy

It has now been ported to support ASP.NET Core, this article will focus on the changes, for the orginal article go here.

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Pathfinding and environmental awareness

We’ve produced a very short devlog about the pathfinding / environmental awareness part of the AI development process for Virtual Warfighter. It describes how we’ve solved the problem of allowing AI soldiers to make different pathfinding choices, more intelligent than just take the shortest path.

We will probably expand upon this in the future by describing more, such as how to make the AI avoid exposed routes in favor of more concealed ones, if possible.

All this is part of the work being done for our upcoming coop game mode.

visualstudio.com changes UI daily

Whats going on with vs.com? We use it for issue tracking, version control and as a general CI platform. They literary change the UI every week and even daily. It’s very frustrating that you can not be granted to learn the UI and become efficient with it before they change it partially or entirely.

Microsoft, if you read this, continuous delivery is great but changing the UI at this rate is not productive for anyone.

</rant over>

Z-Wave – A system architects view

I’ve been looking into smart home systems lately. Z-Wave seemed like a popular choice and I liked the possible scenarios you could achieve with it. So I have played around with it for a few days now, and my final verdict on it, looking through my system architect eyes is that the entire thing must been developed by hackers, at least the software stack. Let me tell you why… (more…)