Sam Gentile's Blog (if (DeveloperTask == Communication && OS == Windows)

Still real tired from my Oklahoma trip, partying with Raymond sure is exhausting-).

Agile/Development Tools

• On my short list for some time now, is to switch from NUnit to the definitely superior MbUnit. My friend Andrew has done some great work with this tool and he has a new release out with the beta 1 release of MbUnit 2.4. New features in this drop. I really need to switch and get my team to switch over. It's just been an inertia thing with NUNit as I knew all along MbUnit was better
  • Testing private methods for .NET 2.0 rom Ben Hall.
  • Database rollback support for .NET 2.0 from Cathal Connolly and Todd Menier.
  • NUnit style explicit support from Graham Hey.
• Speaking of NUnit, they also have a new release, NUnit 2.4 Release Candidate (2.4.0). The Release Notes are here and include some nice features:
  • A new syntax and internal architecture for Asserts is being introduced in this release, based on the notion of constraints found in JMock and NMock.
    • The Assert.That method is used to make an assertion based on a constraint Assert.That( actual, constraint, message, args ); Assert.That( actual, constraint, message ); Assert.That( actual, constraint );
    • The constraint argument may be specified directly using one of the built-in constraint classes or a user-defined class.
    • It may also be specified using one of the syntax helpers provided as static methods of the Is class, such as Is.Null Is.Empty Is.EqualTo( object ) Is.CollectionContaining( object ) Is.SubsetOf( collection )
• SCSF is one of the most visible Microsoft projects being done in an Agile way. They are crazy as us doing one week Iterations. Blaine has some reflections on Iteration 3.
• CB brother, Jeremy asks what OSS tools are you using in development? As I answered there, they include:

  • NUnit

  • CruiseControl.Net

  • FitNesseDotNet

  • RhinoMocks

  • Subversion

  • TortoiseSVN

  • Ankh

  • Wiki

• Speaking of tools. my good buddy Tomas (see you next week!) has a nice list of Text Editors
• One of the things Raymond and I discussed in Oklahoma was Code Coverage. I don't know quite what I feel about it. We don't do it on our project and I have not felt the compulsion to do so. It definitely can be used in a lot of wrong ways, to get numbers and metrics for process sake. I asked Raymond what the numbers really meant? For me, its important to have the right kind of tests and to work in a TDD fashion. If you have tested everything that could possibly break and you have fully designed the code well, then you have full coverage. I don't need numbers to tell me that. Anyhow, Espresso Fueled Development has a discussion here and points to Jim Newkirk and Brad Wilson have an interesting blog post on code coverage and what it means.

Software Architecture

• Much of the first hour of the new Service Oriented Sam show involves patterns from the fine PAG folks on WSSF and Domain-Driven Design. Only one person in the audience (the night one) had heard of Evan's book on DDD. So I am really hammering the point home on my new talks about why DDD is vitally important for .NET Architects and Developers who want to design great systems. Dave has some really great DDD resources here with is talk, code and links. Check it out!!
• Nick Malik has a great post Perhaps it is time to declare victory in the battle of Rules Engines vs. Dependency Injection where he says, "I watched on the sidelines, not long ago, as a team of architects carefully inspected and examined different technologies for managing a rules engine.  I found it interesting, but not terribly pertinent, because...well... to be honest... rules engines tend to create more problems than they solve." Amen. I have had business pushing one of these for many months on our project and come to similar conclusions.

Windows Vista/Visual Studio

• Thank God the Visual Studio 2005 Update for Vista is out because the beta one sure didn't work

CLR/C#

• Excellent discussion of the the Predicate delegate in C# from Jeremy

WCF/WF/Orcas

• Moustafa Khalil Ahmed has an excellent post listing the additions and changes in WCF and WF Orcas. This is the stuff I will be blogging a lot about this month. Certainly, for me, the #1 one is the following given that integrating Indigo and WF is a major pain in the ass right now through the cumbersome Data Exchange Service:
  • WF & WCF integration: 
    •    New WCF Send and Receive Activities
    •   Enhanced Workflow and Service hosting
• Matt Winkler has a great post as well on the above
• Meanwhile, Steve Maine posts about the improved HTTP/POX programming support in the Orcas release of WCF. Don't want to do WS-*/SOAP? Want to do HTTP/REST/POX? You can easily with the same model.
• Steve also posts on the Partial Trust Support for WCF in Orcas. This is one agonizing thing that the team had to drop out of V1 and will help in a lot of hosting scenarios
• Starting to get the sense that Orcas is a major release for WCF and WF? You should because it is!
• Bart talks about a nice touch - the new look and feel in the IDE

I'm listening to Showdown by Electric Light Orchestra on the album Flashback