Introduction

History, or at least working within my company, has shown that the simplest, most basic implementations of code stand the most chance of being correct. As soon as code is littered with endless if-then-else scenarios or numerous configuration options, it becomes increasingly difficult to spot the core logic, and inevitably, the bugs or inconsistencies.

Working in the Microsoft space, I have become increasingly frustrated with the typical low signal-to-noise ratio of documentation, samples and articles about Microsoft technologies. Exacerbated by the fact that Microsoft developers (or more specifically Visual Studio developers) have become ever-more dependent on code generators, hidden-away partial classes, and bloated configuration files, there is a tendency for code examples to be little more than screenshots showing which buttons should be pushed within Visual Studio, and which of the configuration options should be tweaked in the sea of automatically generated XML.

The code samples I plan to show in this blog will attempt to represent the simplest implementations of particular technologies. Paring back the unnecessary bloat from Visual Studio's code generators and from the multitude of code samples on the web is often a fairly time-consuming task, and the primary purpose of these posts is to record any outcomes as notes to myself. Nonetheless, I hope they might also prove useful to others.