August 2008 Blog Posts
I've discussed why I consider unit testing to be a mandatory component of development efforts. In my travels I've encountered a number of arguments against unit testing. I've considered these arguments and they're all fatally flawed. Each argument is at its core prompted by one or more of three underlying problems: Ignorance Short Sightedness Laziness Ignorance in itself is not a crime. However a significant and essential component of being a professional software developer is identifying those areas in which you need to increase your...
It seems to be a popular misconception that the motivation for writing unit tests is the short term reduction of bugs in new code. This limited view makes it easy for developers to justify to themselves laziness in not writing properly tested code. What it ignores are the primary benefits and justifications for unit testing, what I call the "Why" of unit testing. In my experience there are two primary and significant benefits to writing comprehensive unit tests: Design and Maintainability. These attributes are closely related in that good design supports maintainability and maintainability allows the design to be...
I just tried to upgrade to the latest Subtext version but ran into issues. As this version apparently has problems with medium trust environments anyway I'm not going to keep pushing. Apologies to all none of you who would have noticed the downtime. I am however strongly resisting the urge to write my own blog engine (again) as an excuse to learn ASP.NET MVC. And by strongly resisting I mean I've downloaded the ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 release.
For most people the issues with .NET 3.5 SP1 are likely manageable. You can install it and work around the problems. Or you can hold off until they fix the issues (and they really had better fix the issues). And then there's the guy in this thread who must install .NET 3.5 SP1 to use SQL Server 2008, but can't install it because it breaks what he's doing with WPF (running it in a service). I'm really really glad I'm not him. Moreover I'm disappointed and annoyed that Microsoft hasn't paid any attention to people using their stuff in...
.NET 3.5 SP1 has only just been released any I've already seen three distinct reports that it's introduced bugs that break applications. See here and here for examples, and at least one vendor who's update list I'm on has sent a warning email to notify people .NET 3.5 SP1 breaks their product. Fortunately I've only installed it on my home system which I don't use for anything but personal development. Given the nature of .NET 3.5 (such as the shared runtime with .NET 2.0/3.0) this has the potential to break applications running on earlier .NET versions. Solid testing before...
Apparently this evening SBS will be broadcasting Olympic archery in the slot that should be occupied by Top Gear. This is wrong on so many levels. Not least of which is use of medieval weapons being considered an Olympic sport. If you really want to get me to watch, combine medieval weapons and cars. Bring back jousting. With cars. Until then can we please stop pretending that any of the Olympic events are interesting to any but the terminally dull? Hopefully one day as a species we'll get over the idiotic nationalism that drives this overly expensive stupidity. I'm...
Our chief weapon is T-SQL...and an almost fanatical devotion to Microsoft! Farewell Bwian, may you eventually become the messiah.
It's often useful to be able to run files in a solution from within Visual Studio. I use this to do things such as run batch files to build or deploy the solution. I can't claim to have invented this method which I found many years ago on a website I no longer recall, but I thought I'd pass it on due to its utility when working with build scripts. To set it up, add an external tool (Tools -> External Tools). Set it up as shown below. You'll now have an entry on the...
Many .NET projects are built entirely within Visual Studio. This is generally the easiest method when developing. However there are a number of cases where this overhead isn't desirable. These include obvious cases like build servers where Visual Studio may not even be available. It also includes less obvious cases such as having multiple solutions to be built. Opening a solution, especially a large one, in Visual Studio is a significant overhead you generally don't want to incur just to built the latest version of a supporting project. This is where build systems come into play. There are a number...