Why You have to use Coding Conventions

Gil Fink — Sat, 02 May 2009 17:34:00 GMT

Why You have to use Coding Conventions

Tomorrow I’m going to
a client in order to help
in constructing a coding
conventions document for
their project. One question
that I sometimes hear is why
to use coding conventions in
projects? This post will try
to answer the question.

What are Coding Conventions?

Taken from Wikipedia –
“Coding conventions are
a set of guidelines for a
specific programming
language that recommend
programming style, practices and methods for each aspect of a piece
program written in this language. These conventions usually cover
file organization, indentation, comments, declarations, statements,
white space, naming conventions, programming practices and etc.”

Why to use Coding Conventions?

The main reasons to use coding conventions:

Comprehensible code – Coding conventions enforce coding
standards on the development teams and therefore makes
the code comprehensible to read and understand.
Avoiding pitfalls – the coding conventions dictate
programming practices that can help to reduce pitfalls that
someone else fell into in the past.
Help to spread knowledge easily – coding conventions help to
spread the ideas you write in your code more easily to other
developers in the team.

How to Enforce Coding Conventions?

Code Review Process – during code review you can enforce
the conventions of your company on the developers.
Code Conventions Tools – there are a lot of tools that can
help you to integrate the coding conventions into the
development process. For example, you can use Microsoft FxCop
to check conventions by creating rules for those conventions or
You can use Code Style Enforcer to checks the code against
a configurable code standard and best practices.
There are more tools out there that can help you to enforce
coding conventions.
Coding Conventions Documents – you should create your
company’s coding conventions document which every developer
should know. There is a great document that was written by
Juval Lowy that you can download from here which is very
recommend to use. That document can be your building block
for creating your own coding conventions in your company.

Summary

Lets sum up, I think that coding conventions are essential
tool for a quality and successful projects. In the post I wrote
about coding conventions and why you should use them.
I also wrote how you can enforce coding conventions.
What do you think about coding conventions? I’m very interested
to know.

Deep Code Analysis With NDepend

Gil Fink — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 12:37:00 GMT

Deep Code Analysis With NDepend

A few weeks ago,
I was contacted by
Patrick Smacchia,
a C# MVP, that I
read his articles on
one of my favorite
blog sites – CodeBetter.
Patrick asked me if I want to evaluate NDepend professional edition.
Without thinking twice, I agreed and this post is a review of the product.
I want to thank Patrick for the opportunity to evaluate a professional product
which I wanted to test for a while (I downloaded the evaluation edition a few
weeks before Patrick contact me and now I had the opportunity to download
the professional edition).

What is NDepend?

From NDepend site:
”NDepend is a tool that simplifies managing a complex .NET code base. Architects and
developers can analyze code structure, specify design rules, plan massive refactoring,
do effective code reviews and master evolution by comparing different versions of the
code.

The result is better communication, improved quality, easier maintenance and
faster development.”

NDepend is a great tool!
It is a static analyzer for a compiled code. It is suited for developers and architects
that want to analyze the written code and get very helpful output data.
The output data that NDepend produces can help to improve the
code quality and design. At first, I thought That the tool resembles the FxCop tool
but as I tested it further, I now understand that it allows me to drill down better and
deeper into my code and also it supplies a visual analysis that is more intuitive for me.

NDepend Features

NDepend has the following features:

I can tell that the most awesome feature is the CQL (Code Query
Language) which enables to write SQL like queries to get reflection details.
In FxCop to do the same thing enforces you to write rules or plug-ins which are less
intuitive then the CQL.

Documentation, Documentation, Documentation

The most helpful thing about NDepend is its documentation. Sometimes, when I
download a tool or a product, I wish that it’ll be documented properly. Most of the
tools aren’t documented at all or have a minor documentation. This issue is very
annoying because you pay a lot of money for tools and you expect that it will have
a decent documentation. The NDepend site is full of documentation and screen
casts that help to get start with the tool very fast.

Some Small Examples

When NDepend load you get the following startup page:

As you can see, the tool can be integrated into Visual Studio (2005, 2008)
and also into reflector (which is a must have tool for a developers).

I used the New Project button from the File menu to build a new analysis project:

You can now Browse or Drag & Drop assemblies to be analyzed.

After I dragged a simple assembly I got the following results:

What you can see in the screen are Dependency Graph, Dependency Matrix
and the Metrics View which is set to the number of code lines in my example.
In the bottom are the CQL Queries View which enables the use of CQL to
inspect the code. This is only a minor assembly and NDepend gave me a lot of details
that I used to refactor the assembly and now the code is better written.

Summary

NDepend is a highly professional product. With its variety of features it can
supply a very deep analysis to the code you write. I only scratched the surface of
the product in this review.
One last important thing, I wasn’t paid or obligated to write this review and its my thoughts
only. I think a tool like NDepend can really help you to get a deep insight and perspective
on how you build your application and then help you to improve your code.

Gil Fink's Blog : Code Analysis

Why You have to use Coding Conventions

Why You have to use Coding Conventions

What are Coding Conventions?

Why to use Coding Conventions?

How to Enforce Coding Conventions?

Summary

Deep Code Analysis With NDepend

Deep Code Analysis With NDepend

What is NDepend?

NDepend Features

Documentation, Documentation, Documentation

Some Small Examples

Summary