September 2003 - Posts
Learn how to use NUnit and some related tools for successfully support testing a Data Access Layer for ASP.NET applications. Test driven development (TDD) has grown in popularity recently, especially with the growth of the Extreme Programming (XP) methodology. NUnit is a unit testing tool built for .NET, which follows in a long line of similar xUnit testing tools built for other platforms. It provides an easy-to-use framework for writing and running unit tests for your .NET applications.
Full article at the MSDN Library
Just to add a quick preface to Roy's post on Engineering Notebook: An Extreme Programming Episode, for those who might wonder what extreme programming (XP) actually is, a good starting point is ExtremeProgramming.org and XProgramming.com. In brief, the XP methodology mainly emphasizes on customer-driven development and team work.
Pair programming, which is an element of extreme programming, is basically working as a pair - a two (wo)man team - two programmers working side-by-side, collaborating on the same design, algorithm, code or test. One programmer, the driver, has control of the keyboard/mouse and actively implements the program. The other programmer, the observer, continuously observes the work of the driver to identify tactical (syntactic, spelling, etc.) defects and also thinks strategically about the direction of the work. Checkout PairProgramming.com for more on this methodology.
XP is practiced by many teams and companies around the world. However, it does have some critics.
Maybe this is old news for some of you guys. Anyways, I've been using two such ASP.NET applications which allow remote database administration via a web interface. It's very useful when you don't have ready access (specially on client locations) to SQL Server Enterprise Manager or when the internet connectivity is not suitable for rapid management.
The first is Web Data Administrator (from Microsoft) and the other one is ASP Enterprise Manager. Both are great for basic web-based database administration (i.e. creating tables, SP's, managing users etc.). As a side note, I don't think web-based administration tools for SQL Server have yet reached a level of maturity as with MySQL. I've used phpMyAdmin - a similar administration interface (for MySQL, written in PHP) on some occasions and it rocks! It's far ahead in terms of its feature set and what one can do with a browser-based database administration tool.
However, I also feel that probably there's limited requirement for a web-based database administration tool among most .NET/SQL Server developers since on most developer machines SQL Server Enterprise Manager is just a click away, which is not the case with MySQL since, to be the best of my knowledge, it doesn't have an advanced desktop-based database administration tool like EM.
Recently I recieved the product evaluation CD for IBM Rational XDE Developer Plus (.NET Edition). XDE combines visual modeling, runtime analysis and testing from inside the Visual Studio .NET IDE. Some other XDE features are:
- Roundtrip engineering (Visual C# .NET, Visual Basic .NET, and ASP.NET)
- Automatic or on demand code synchronization
- Free-form diagramming to enhance diagrams with pictures, shapes, and colors
- Reverse engineering of database assets into data models
- Database synchronization
- Web publishing and report generation
- Runtime analysis to detect memory errors, highlight application performance bottlenecks, and identify untested code
Overall, I found XDE to be a nice add-on tool for VS.NET specially for projects involving UML, higher logic complexity and larger work teams. If you have been a user of Rational products and also develop in VS.NET then you will really like XDE as it allows for everything from code development, visual modeling, runtime analysis, test environment, debugging and deployment, from within the VS.NET IDE.
View VS.NET Online Demo / Try It: Rational XDE Developer
Just to quickly introduce myself. My name is Ashutosh Benjamin Nilkanth (aka ashben). I work as an IT consultant in India. I've been programming for a little over 6 years now - on independent projects, freelance contracts and for companies in India, Singapore and the US - primarily using the Microsoft suite of tools and technologies including .NET (ASP.NET, VB.NET, ADO.NET, Web Services), ASP, VB (6.0 and prior), SQL Server, BizTalk etc. I've been toying with .NET since 2001 and it's been a great journey so far.
By way of this blog, I'll share my experiences, ideas and news-bits related to .NET and technology in general. So stay tuned!
Last but not the least, I would like to thank Scott Watermasysk for developing .Text and assisting me to be a part of this great community.
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