Steven Benitez - Steven Benitez

ASP.NET Core Routing from the Outside In

In this article, I will show you my conventions for attribute routing and how you can make your controllers shine.

Strategies for Implementing Nullable Reference Types in .NET

Nullable reference types [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/nullable-references] offer a way to explicitly declare whether a reference type can be null. In C#, this feature is compile-time only. It is intended to help you avoid NullReferenceExceptions, but is completely ignored at runtime and does not technically guarantee

Java

Steven's Guide to Writing Quality Javadoc

Whether you're building an application or a shared library, writing quality Javadoc is an important and sometimes difficult task. What follows are my thoughts on writing quality Javadoc. Write for Both Source Code and Web Consumption Many developers read Javadoc in source code within their IDE, rather than

Tools

Adding Syntax Highlighting to a Ghost Blog

I recently added syntax highlighting of code examples to my blog using highlight.js [https://highlightjs.org/]. First, head on over to the highlight.js website and grab a copy of the library [https://highlightjs.org/download/]. You can also link to it off of a CDN. Next, you'

Java

Code Documentation with Java Annotations

A few years back, I took over a Java software project that had been written years before. The application was originally written as a generic platform that had later been refactored into a specific product. As such, there was a lot of code in the project that had been written

Tools

Improving Team Communication with Slack

I recently joined a new project at work and found that we didn't have an effective communication strategy for our team. A few of us were on IM clients, and occasionally we took to email. My project manager and I discussed it and decided to set up a

Java

Struts2 + Guice + Custom Type Conversion

If you use Google Guice [https://github.com/google/guice] you should be aware that the struts2-guice-plugin doesn't work properly for projects that use custom type conversion (e.g., converters registered in xwork-conversion.properties). If you find this affects you, here's a simple, alternate ObjectFactory that

Java

Better URLs with Struts2

I’m going to show you how to use the NamedVariablePatternMatcher to build better URLs with Struts2. Before: http://www.example.com/profiles?username=steven After: http://www.example.com/profiles/steven For this example, we’ll map an action that displays a user’s profile page. The Action public

Java

Identifying Struts2 Setters with a Custom Annotation

As a user (and avid fan) of IntelliJ, I benefit from a lot of great features in my Java IDE. One of those features is that IntelliJ will highlight code that it detects is unused. This works great in most cases, but it can’t detect code that is called