StyleCop is an extremely useful Visual Studio plugin that helps you validate your style against a set of predefined rules. It runs straight from the editor and shows errors and warnings in your error list.
The big benefits of using this tool become clear in projects with larger team sizes. All developers will code in the same style, and in the long run it helps your code base staying clean. Our advice: Don’t accept any warnings from StyleCop, like you should in your code.
In this video we demonstrate the basic functionality of StyleCop, and how to use it. We also recommend to run it as part of your gated check-in to make sure your code stays clean and properly documented, even when the deadline comes close!
You can download the plugin here. Make sure that if you use it you also have a look at GhostDoc
Mobile-Friendly Sign UpIt may seem like a small improvement, but displaying the right keyboard to a user can help ease friction on sign up, and make the whole process faster and more pleasant.
Taking Your Craft SeriouslyAlthough it is easily overlooked, being a software engineer comes with a great responsibility. According to Robert C Martin, a regular new car comes with 100 million lines of code, where he jokingly adds ‘written by a 22-year-old at 3 o’clock in the morning’. It scares him, and if you are tech savvy I am sure you share that opinion. Although funny – this is NOT a joke—being a software engineer does put you in situations where you write code at 3 in the morning for a piece of software that affect the lives or at least the livelihood of people.
Vertical Rhythm in Your CSSTypography and typesetting form the foundation by which your whole user interface stand on. For a designer, everything else—color, art direction—is relative to the intention of the product owner. It’s very malleable. The one thing that should be unbendable is the system by which the letters are laid out on the page. If it’s not solidly built, it can grow bloated and unwieldy. Small changes that would usually take less than an hour to apply, would take double—or even triple—the development time. The size of your file can also double than how it normally would be, and that’s not good for performance. On the other hand, if it’s not the code that doesn’t suffer, it’s the legibility that takes a hit. The vertical rhythm gets compromised in ways that can easily tire the eye of the user.
