Project Startup Guidelines

There is such a diversity of projects that a developer can work on, it's very hard to know if you've started doing things the correct way. A startup checklist is a good place to start but they can be hard to come up with - then someone sent me a link to Patrick Cauldwell's blog which is an excellent account of items that should be considered when starting/working on any project. Well done Patrick - it's far too easy to steal this and adapt it for your needs but many of the disciplines in there excellent. It's well worth a read

One item that caught my eye whilst reading though was "only the public interface should be public". When using test driven development, you can end up making methods public purely for test purposes. This is not a good idea and as Patrick suggested, you should take advantage of the InternalsVisibleTo attributes which allows you to test private methods from test assemblies. Very useful and very easy to setup. I'll post on this technique later.