Chrome arrived with massive design revamp

This article was written when Google had decided to revamp its flagship UI of Chrome on completion of its 10 years. Finally, Chrome version 69 is released with all the expected changes.

As seen in the below snap, Chrome now looks having a sleek and flat interface with the power of the "Material Design" framework:

Tabs of Chrome now looks exactly similar to Firefox whereas the address bar has curved borders. Shortcut icons are modified from large squares into smaller circles. So now 10 shortcut icons can be accommodated instead of 8 icons earlier. A new interface is experienced on the Settings page also.

Google Chrome is the lightweight and most popular browser due to its consistent user experience across any platform. Chrome is already improved in terms of security aspects in their recent upgrade. In a bold step further, they have announced to uplift the look and feel in the next upgrade which is a massive design revamp.

The new version of Chrome is planned to be rolled out at the beginning of September according to 9to5Google. This upgrade will apply to all operating systems across all devices.

Google has already developed the "Material Design" framework for responsive design which is a tough competitor of the Bootstrap framework.

The upcoming roll-out of Chrome will be based on "Material Design" themes to include rounded edges. The browser tabs will now appear in the form of a pill shape which is a huge divergence from the initial launch of Chrome that had angular edges.

Refer to this article to explore more recent security upgrades done in Chrome by enabling a default ad-blocker.

You can also have a preview and try new features that are going to arrive by downloading the beta version of Chrome.

Improve code quality in .Net applications

Writing source code for any requirement is always a head-scratching activity. But when it comes to improving the quality of code, it seems to be a different world.

Though maintaining code quality looks like overhead at the beginning of the project, but as code grows and the development team expands, the initial effort on focusing on setup quality gateways looks fruitful.

Few tools and techniques are summarised here which should become an integral part of each .Net project.

Find unused code:

ReSharper is one of the best code analysis tools that can be integrated with Visual Studio. 

To find unused code in your solution right-click on the solution > Select "Find Code Issues" > One of the results is "Unused Symbols". This will show you classes, methods, etc. that aren't used.

Reference - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/245963/find-unused-code

Discover dead code using Visual Studio Code Analysis:

Visual Studio provides this feature out-of-the-box. Right-click on the solution > Analyze > Run Code Analysis on Solution.

Reference - https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/habibh/2009/07/31/discover-dead-code-in-your-application-using-code-analysis/

Static code analysis tool:

StyleCop and FxCop are the most popular tools that can be included in the project to maintain coding standards defined by the organisation. 

They are available as a NuGet package and gets auto-configured when added. These tools follow basic coding standards defined by Microsoft but can be customised further as per the need.

It can be configured to fail the build if any of its code quality checks fail. It can also be configured to fail the build if any warnings are identified. This ensures the code delivered is of optimum quality.

Enable Gated check-in using VSTS Build Definition:

Gated check-in builds ensures that the checked-in code is always free from compilation errors. This can be enabled in Visual Studio using TVFS projects using VSTS Build Definition, though this feature is still not available in Git team projects.

Reference - https://www.codeproject.com/Tips/1168853/Enabling-Gated-Check-in-using-Visual-Studio-Team-S

Code coverage analysis:

Code coverage analysis is available out-of-the-box in Visual Studio. This analysis indicates the percentage of unit tests written for the project.

The attribute [ExcludeFromCodeCoverage] can be applied to the class files that need to be excluded from code coverage. Make sure not to apply this attribute on the application code, as it will produce over-inflated coverage metrics.

Class files created automatically by adding service references must be excluded from code coverage. The CodeCoverage.runsettings file can be used to accomplish this.

Include automation scripts:

When development is in progress, there are several instances where fixing one issue or developing a new story would unexpectedly break existing functionality. 

QA team can only focus on testing the specific feature or user story in a sprint. But as the system scales, it becomes practically impossible for the QA team to perform integration testing in each sprint.

Automation scripts are proven to be a boon in such cases which can be executed either manually or scheduled after each deployment. This can also be added into the Continuous Integration pipeline to automatically run after each deployment.

Selenium scripts are recommended for automated testing in .Net applications. Selenium is powerful enough to execute scripts on the server even in absence of any browser. This is made possible by adding a specific browser driver as a NuGet package. Some browsers like chrome can be run in headless mode to execute the scripts faster as this will run chrome in the background.

Though surprising it is not recommended to use Internet Explorer anymore but focuses your application to fully functional on Chrome or Firefox.

Use mocking framework:

Mocking frameworks like NSubstitute or MOQ helps to write unit tests by mocking the reference layer. This means while writing unit tests for the web layer you can mock the business layer; similarly while writing unit tests for the business layer you can mock the service layer.

Design patterns:

Few design patterns are a must-have for any development. They include dependency injection, factory pattern, service pattern and repository pattern.

Dependency injection with Unity framework can be easily integrated with a NuGet package. It is highly recommended to use the DI pattern as it also helps in writing effective unit tests with a mocking framework.

Exclude NuGet packages from code check-in:

TFS or VSTS can be configured to download the NuGet package from nuget.org during the Build process.

Whenever a NuGet package is added to any project, it not only download its assemblies but also adds an entry into packages.config file. Hence it is the best approach to eliminate any NuGet package from check-in into source control and just check-in respective packages.config file.

Build quality checks:

Add task "Build Quality Checks" in the VSTS Build process. Build can be configured to break based on quality metrics like a number of warnings or code coverage.

You can also specify a code coverage threshold that is the minimum code coverage value in percentage terms.