Reference Books these days

Some amazing books which I am keeping with me these days for reference and going through portions whenever I get the opportunity.

Amazon List: http://amzn.com/w/LJTHFOO05T4U

TITLE

C# in Depth, Second Edition by Jon Skeet

CLR via C#, Second Edition (Pro Developer) by Jeffrey Richter (Author)

Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries (2nd Edition) by Krzysztof Cwalina, Brad Abrams

Microsoft® .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise (Pro-Developer)​ by Dino Esposito, Andrea Saltarello

Microsoft® Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition (Patterns & Pra​ctices) by Microsoft Patterns & Practices Team (Author)

NHibernate 3.0 Cookbook by Jason Dentler

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler

Professional ASP.NET Design Patterns by Scott Millett

Programming Entity Framework: DbContext by Julia Lerman, Rowan Miller

 

Writing Fluent API in your applications

Fluent Interfaces / APIs are an amazing way of chaining methods and passing the input of the previous operation to the next operation. This reduces the amount of code required to declare similar objects or setting properties and configurations of the same object and makes the code more readable. Martin Fowler and Eric Evans coined the term back in 2005 (http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FluentInterface.html)

The implementation is very straight forward. The general pattern is to have chained methods each of which should be self-referential (should return object of its own type) and a terminating method to end the chain.

Following is a simplest example, a Number class which provides self-referential methods of operations returning the Number Object itself and an Equals method to terminate the chain.

    public class Number

    {

        private int _number;

        public Number(int num)

        {

            _number = num;

        }

        public Number Add(int num)

        {

            _number += num;

            return this;

        }

        public Number Subtract(int num)

        {

            _number -= num;

            return this;

        }

        public Number Multiply(int num)

        {

            _number *= num;

            return this;

        }

        public Number Divide(int num)

        {

            _number /= num;

            return this;

        }

        public int Equals()

        {

            return _number;

        }

    }

So, we can use the number class as follows by chaining the operations together.

              Console.WriteLine(

                new Number(10)

                .Add(10)

                .Subtract(5)

                .Multiply(10)

                .Divide(2)

                .Equals()

                );