There are quite a few different mocking libraries in .NET. Moq and NSubstitute seem to be by far the main ones I hear that developers use. I've used both of these in different projects, and really like them both. Whilst my preference leans towards NSubstitute, I'd be happy using either. Out of interest, I posted a Twitter poll to see what other people preferred, and the results and replies were really interesting!...

I've just recently had an issue where I'd created two accounts for the same website - one for myself and one for my wife. I quickly hit a very strange issue where if I logged into my wife's account, I would end up in my own account! I must admit, I initially jumped to thinking that the website must have some appallingly terrible authentication code. It turns out I was wrong, and it's something that might be quite common amongst multi-page login screens.

When writing tests, sometimes it can be tempting to dump a bunch of asserts into the same test to avoid duplication across multiple tests...

Last week I had a catchup meeting with a client about the progress of a platform I'm building for them, and showed them how the "devops" side of things works. Demoing it really struck me how insanely awesome all the tooling we have nowadays is, and also how much I take it for granted!

I've recently started a new contract where we do 100% pair-programming. This is the first time I've done pair-programming on anywhere near this level. In the past, I've only ever paired on an ad-hock basis either to help someone else solve an issue, or vice-versa. This is an 8-hour per day contract, where other than meetings, we're pairing for all of those 8 hours. Sounds full-on? Well, actually so far, it seems to be working pretty well! Obviously, it makes a huge difference who you're working with, and I've been lucky that I seem to be getting on well with both developers that I've paired with, and we seem to think in the same way and haven't hit any conflicts so far!

When looking at a lot of C# code nowadays, I find myself thinking "wow, that code could be made SO MUCH SMALLER!". C# is a very flexible language, allowing you to write clean and functional code, but also very bloated code.

This week we had our very first attempt at a virtual .NET Oxford event! And it seemed to go pretty well! We were joined by Mark Rendle to talk all about Roslyn! We also had a 10-minute lightning talk by Megan who works at our sponsor company, Corriculo Recruitment talking about the state of the the job market due to COVID-19.

Now that .NET Oxford is going virtual for the time being during the COVID-19 lockdown, we'll be using Zoom for next few meetups. The first one is next week where we have Mark Rendle talking about Roslyn!

Like probably most of you, I'm now working from home full-time. Or technically, from "the Everstack office", which is my house anyway. I've worked from home every Friday for a long time now, and also had a short period many years ago working from home full-time too. I've now been working from home for almost a month full-time due to the Coronavirus.

It's that time of the year again for another year in review blog post! 2019 was a great year, and I continue to feel incredibly lucky to have landed in an industry that I see as a hobby; am very passionate about; pays well; and is full of such amazing people!