Andrew Stopford's Weblog

The work\life balance and my absence of late.

andrewstopford — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:36:00 GMT

For the first time in 7 years of blogging I almost managed no blog posts in a month. I (for fun) graphed the last 12 months of blog posts and sure enough the amount of posts has seen a steady drop. I then graphed all the posts I have made on weblogs.asp.net and since peaking in 2004 I have been on a decline ever since. There are several reasons why, but my now near total flat line needs explanation.

With the work/life balance and my new family growing the balance tips in favour of more time with my family and less time at the computer. As such blogging\writing\opensource and generally all things out side of the day job has gone the way of the pear (i.e I have stopped). I've had a good run, of the 11 years I have been working in this industry all of them have seen me doing things out side of the day job, from blogging, article writing, book authoring and reviewing, to 4 years of user forum support (as a Macromedia Evangelist) and 3 years of open source\MbUnit. I've had time for all these things but things have changed and as much as I love geeking out I won't have Darcey growing up with her dad a stranger. More so, Emma has been for years a 'computer widow' while I was geeking it up, that has to stop.

I came close to closing this blog, I just don't have that much to say anymore. However, Emma convinced me other wise and I'll aim for a couple of posts a month however I may manage none at all.

The design in TDD

andrewstopford — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:13:00 GMT

Lately I've been drafting posts on my daily commute and post them up in batches (just in case you were wondering :).

I recall an article (not sure where I read it) about Ron Jeffries and his ability as an 'alpha architect'. Such people are rare, the design they have mostly in their mind with TDD providing a way of slightly reshaping the design and proving the model (in a pair session that can mean validating each other’s ideas). Another kind of folks is the folks that have a general system picture but design a piece at a time with model shaping and validation occurring as they go. Both are no less a way of designing and developing a system but while the 'alpha architect' has considered overall, system considerations and won't introduce design faults, the other folks need to go carefully to avoid those faults.

The point that TDD is a design process seems to get missed, writing tests before your code is only part of the process and not the sum total. The trouble I have found is that the design process tends to be an organic one, a rhythm that you adopt and you’re not aware of what process you’re following. So in this post I am going to attempt to lay out some of those considerations, not sure I will capture them all and you may have your own, leave us a comment with yours.

SOC

A car is not made from one part but many, with each part such as the engine or wheels made up from other parts. Does the engine depend on the door handle or the windscreen wiper blades? No. Each part, object or concern is separated from the rest but is associated in such a way that you can still achieve your aim without any dependencies on each concern. Relating that back to code, if a car class had an internal Ferrari engine object could we create a Porsche car from that car class? If the car class held a reference to an engine object that the Ferrari object was sub class off could we instead create a Porsche sub class and our Porsche car have the right engine? The practice of SOC is really a good OO practice in that you ensure your classes are so tightly bound to other concerns that you losing all the polymorphic benefits.

TDD helps us here in that we look at all of the concerns of the class and how that class behaves in isolation and with associated concerns integrating with the class. If in writing and then developing the test it fails randomly, your setup and surround is heavy or you are forcing the test into a deep integration test then chances are the class and its concerns are bound up too tight and it's a candidate for further refactoring.

Integration and Isolation

Take your class in isolation, can you isolate it? If you can what are its dependencies, if you’re testing it what kind of dependencies do you need and how deep are they. The more complex it is to take a class in isolation then your likely looking at a smell and some further refactoring is required. TDD forces you into putting a class into isolation and not being 5 levels deep in a system. You’re focused on that class alone and once taken out of context you can really learn if it will hold up.

Jeremy’s most recent post talked about using static and integration styles in your tests, it's a great post and well worth taking your time over. One thing that is worth mentioning about integration is that integration means as light as you can make it. If your using a lot of other actual concrete concerns to achieve isolation then it's a smell, the cohesion between your class and its concerns is too tightly bound. If you can use mocks or doubles in place of the concerns and your class knows no difference, working as it would normally then you’re in a happy place. Sometimes you can't avoid using an actual and sometimes it makes sense but too many and too often would be a smell, finding a balance is half the skill.

Things around

Consider the concerns around the class, what does the class need as inputs, what does it need for its processing and for its outputs. Those considerations would help you decide what you want to mock, double or actual. For example a class adds an entry to a database as a net product, a test (or for that matter another concern making use of the class) does not care how this product occurs; only that it has occurred. It would be a good mock candidate as we are not reusing the db entry further down the test process and as such we only care the method has occurred. If you wanted to emulate some kind of processing or validation, for example loading a collection of data, then a double could be useful. Following the same contract as the actual, the double would be a light weight emulation that the test could use.

Cross Cuts

Cross cutting concerns are (but not limited to) things like logging, security and validation etc. Things that may not be central to the core parts of the class like processing or logic but needed in the general scheme of the operation of the class. If you find your concerns reusing other concerns more and more often than these could be a cross cuts. To aid re-use and isolation you will want to ensure the cross cuts don't affect the SUT when under test. There are several tools are you disposal (such as DI, IoC and AOP) to service the cross cuts.

Microsoft MVC and MbUnit

andrewstopford — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:47:00 GMT

You may recall ScottGu's post about the new feature in latest drop of the MS MVC framework that allows you to pick your unit test framework of choice. With Mix08 now wrapped up and the framework released I can show you what the MbUnit templates look like. You will need either MbUnit 2.4.2 or MbUnit 3.0 alpha 2, early previews of these are available if you really like the edge, but more stable drops are coming, with 2.4.2 installed here is what you will see.

When created you would see

The test project depends on the name of your project, for example "myproject" would be "myprojecttests" etc. The project is preloaded with your main project and a referance to the MbUnit.Framework dll. For the moment we have a default test for the controller, which looks like.

using MbUnit.Framework;

[TestFixture]
public class HomeControllerTests
{
    [Test]
    public void About()
    {
        //
        // TODO: Add test logic here
        //
    }
    [Test]
    public void Index()
    {
        //
        // TODO: Add test logic here
        //
    }
}

Notice default tests for your about and index page, these match the default about and index controllers. The template only referances what you need so you don't need to refactor out any unrequired referances.

Note that the MVC team has blogged about how to add and use NUnit templates including NUnit\Rhino templates. To save you some steps we have added the templates to the installers, I did an inital drop of the template but Jeff did all the work to make this happen and we would welcome your feedback.

Vote for generic co\contra generic variance

andrewstopford — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:59:00 GMT

Back in 2006 I wrote about the co\contra variance generics support in .NET, fast foward to today and with the last few .NET releases not effecting the CLR this is still missing. I have high hopes the next version will bring some changes to the CLR and to ensure that this happens the change report needs some votes, add yours to parent bug here.

IronScheme

andrewstopford — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 08:54:00 GMT

I have been watching the development of IronLisp, a Lisp compiler for the DLR for a while now. A little while ago it was released onto codeplex and more recently the project was dropped and reformed as IronScheme (Scheme being a Lisp variant). Great to see another language on the DLE, apart from IronRuby and IronPythoin (and LOLCODE :D) I wonder what other languages are targeting it and if MS have a research\compiler program for it yet?

IronMonkey

andrewstopford — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:43:00 GMT

Todays Flex 3 announcement also carried with it the announcement of an Adobe OSS site. I was looking around the Tamarin site when I noticed the IronMoney project. Being lead by Seo Sanghyeon, an IronPython developer, I at first thought it was an attempt to get ECMAScript Edition 4 running the DLR. However it seems to be an attempt to get IronPython and IronRuby to run on the Tamarin VM. What I can't figure out is why not attempt to run Python\Ruby on Tamarin? I guess in targeting the IL then IronMonkey can execute the assemblies but surely to help better shape the VM in it's support of dynamic languages why not target languages other than ECMAScript?

MS MVC source

andrewstopford — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 17:22:00 GMT

With Darceys arrivial this month I've not really being pay much attention to the various announcements. However I went over ScottGu's MVC framework announcement again and something caught my eye.

Starting with this next preview, we are also going to make the ASP.NET MVC Framework source code downloadable as a buildable VS project solution. This will enable you to easily view and debug the ASP.NET MVC Framework source code. We are also going to include a license that permits you to optionally make patches to the ASP.NET MVC Framework source code in the event that you run into a bug in an application you are developing with it.

The license won't enable you to redistribute your patched version of ASP.NET MVC (we want to avoid having multiple incompatible ASP.NET MVC versions floating around and colliding with each other). But it will enable developers who want to get started building ASP.NET MVC applications immediately to make progress - and not have to worry about getting blocked by an interim bug that they can't work around.

Seems to have been missed and how dam cool is that ! Mind you it does raise a few questions though.

#1 Let's avoid the OSS debate, I know it's all legal etc etc but a block on any kind of patch sharing may cause a lot of frustration. The patched code cannot be shared but the patch it's self could be. Not sure if VSTS or codeplex can work in a readonly form but if the source was obtained that way (and again if VSTS\CodePlex supported it) and patches be created that could then be saved down on codeplex. If patches can't be shared then you will be reinventing the wheel a lot to overcome issues, with a patch model you will avoid the frustration. Most OSS projects work in a no-commit fasion to encourage devs to follow project standards before allowing commits, these come in the form of patches that are applied by project admins. No stopping folks applying shared out patches to there own copy if they have the means of doing so. I know I am barking up the wrong tree here but it's worth saying all the same.

#2 Does it come with a unit test suite?

Kirsty

andrewstopford — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 16:52:00 GMT

I'd like to introduce one the newest members of the weblogs family and already blogging it up a storm, Kirsty Busfield. Lady developers in our industry are very sadly a rare thing and those I have met have been dedicated and hardworking professionals who often push at there profession a lot harder than men. Kirsty is no exception, a natural when it comes to software engineering and is a real help with the MVP\TDD drive on our team (more on that later). I am looking foward to future posts and invite you to add her to your reader of choice.

Darcey

andrewstopford — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 12:46:00 GMT

This is a personal post, some of these seem to escape into feed aggs so feel free to ignore this if you wondering what it's doing in your reader :)

Three weeks ago I became a dad, the two most imporant events in my life were getting married and my daughters arrival into the world. Emma was prehaps the bravest person I've ever known, for 17 hours she laboured, in an intense amount of pain only for events to conspire and the need for c-section. Through it all, with barely no dignity left she fought. Recovering aftwards she found the strength to get back on her feet and help Darcey adjust to our world. I've known since the day I met her how amazing she is, I could expect any more of a human being to find the strength and will to do what she did and yet she found that. As long as I live I won't forget that day.

So now I am adjusting to life as a Dad, it's very intense at first and Darcey despite struggling with a little wind and colic is as good as gold. She is gaining weight every day and from one day to the next seems to change. Every day seems to bring a new climb up the learning curve but Emma just seems to breeze through it, heres to my amazing wife.

The coders cave

andrewstopford — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Our house lately has been a mine of change, 2 new windows, 1 new boiler, and stripped/paint/wallpaper 2 rooms (including the nursery) and retiled the bathroom. I did this all with the help of my family, I do enjoy DIY but depend on the guidance of my dad for the tricky jobs (like fitting a window frame). This explains some of my absence lately, working to a deadline before February and baby comes, ready or not. This has meant nearly all our rooms have been revamped apart from one, my cave.

It was bound to happen, all the rooms were sparkling in the new year but the cave remained. Emma was soon asking me to sort it out and faced with what was really a mess I made a start. Now caves are pretty much something every geek should have, it is your sanctuary, your refuge. It is a place where you can lock in your zone and code without interruption or hassle. To truly do your thing this is where you come. In my cave, by day when no one is in I have the music up on loud and by night I use headphones. Music takes out background noise, I have been coding to it for years as it blocks out talking, phones and other crap. I tend to eat, drink and even on occasion sleep in my cave. A typical cave day starts in the morning with coffee, with trips to the kitchen for more coffee. I tend to eat elsewhere so I don't end up with half of it in my keyboard but coffee is the stable drink in my cave. My cave has a window, a view is all important. It allows you to pause and think but I am also terribly nosey and like to see what is going on as the world passes by :) Having a baby is going to change all of that but for now this is how I live in my cave.

The biggest problem is my cave has horded a lot of stuff. Caves are supposed to, but after a while it gets messy and you run out of space. My cave has so many spare pc parts it is like I killed and ate a giant pc. My biggest problem is books, I am a book junkie, a complete and utter lost case and collect books on just about every subject from GA's to cooking and by authors from King to Sells. I am a complete King junkie and having consumed everything he has written (short stories, Bachman and all) have started to read that other horror suspense master, Dean Koontz and have been chewing my way through his books at a rate of knots. Alas nerd books suffer with the content getting dated and my .net 1.0 books are mostly so dated they are of little value. So I started the task of reducing books, packing them into boxes (just can't bring myself to sell them) for storage. Gaps have opened up and I found myself first in my local borders (coffee in hand) checking out books and then checking prices on Amazon. Buying nerd books is something I struggle to do now. While I consume any knowledge I can the cost of books and the rate the information they contain goes out of date means I have a hard time justifying it. I tend now to treat buying books as a very rare thing and pick books that will stay topical for a long time and are so packed full that I can take my time with my consumption. Repopulating my cave is something I won't do in full but with my new found space I will enjoy picking some really great books.

To add or to create

andrewstopford — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:59:00 GMT

Ian has a good post on Java developers moving to the Scala language rather than Ruby and asks....

Maybe it is possible that rather than focusing on changes to C# the C# team should pick up on the goals of Scala, to incorporate functional language features into a new language that is more familiar to C# developers than Ruby, but at the same time is designed from the ground up to incorporate the functional programming features that otherwise might be shoehorned into C#.

I have to wonder that to push C# down a functional route may need more change than can be achieved in a single or even couple of releases with out it being a problem to those folks coming up to speed with these changes or worst not needing or finding a need for these changes. Exploration in functional, dynamic, logical and list languages can help you learn faster more effective ways to approach a problem and teach new constructs and thinking. Language groups do cross and some cross over can have some interesting effects but too much can cause a language harm, a spade should be for digging not stiring your tea.

Ians idea of creating a functional language is an interesting one but I would rather see Microsoft build better support for this group of languages into the CLR so language teams like the Boo team have a first class citizen to target.

A look ahead at 2008

andrewstopford — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 17:02:00 GMT

It's that time of year again and a custom on my blog to look back at my predictions for this year, relect on my year and look at what I think will happen over next year. Here's what I predicted and how it turned out.

2007 will be the year of patterns and testability (or I'll die trying).

2007 has been the year Microsoft announced and released a CTP of a MVC framework, +1

MonoRail will go 1.0 RTM, I think that more folks will take up MonoRail on their projects and a book or two will appear.

MonoRail has reached RC but not yet RTM, -1.

MbUnit 2.4 and MbUnit 3.0 will see light of day in 2007, MbUnit 2.4 will be a shift and MbUnit 3.0 a change. MbUnit 3.0 am I really excited about and its getting the stuff out of my head and into code.

MbUnit 2,4, 2.4.1 and 3.0 alph1 were all released in 2007, +1.

2007 will be an interesting year in general for unit test frameworks, Peli's back in test research (and expect that to see light of day in 2007) and Charlie has NUnit cooking on a roaring fire. Expect to see some very cool stuff show up in 2007 for that.

Peli announced Pex and Charlie announced NUnit 2.4, 2.4.1, 2.4.2 and has started work on 3.0. In addition MSTest has found its way into the pro sku of VS, +1.

Mix 2007 will also see some very cool stuff show up for its subjects of web and RIA, no I can't say what (again with thanks to mr nda) but if you missed the show this year then don't miss out in 2007.

Mix07 was all about ~~WPF\E~~.....Silverlight, +1

Microsoft's Ray Ozzie will take the helm fully in 2007 and more shifts in thinking will appear, Microsoft will also hire more minds into the company (they round off 2006 with Jon Udel's appointment). I think Ray will do the keynotes at Mix and PDC.

No PDC next year but it is coming in 2008 and I think Ray will keynote that. Ray did'nt take the helm but he did keynote Mix and Microsoft have been hiring by the plenty, Scott Hansleman, Phil Haack and Rob Connery all took the red pill in 2007, +1.

Mono will get a BOF at PDC 2007, the up roar that followed the last one and the Mono BOF issues and the recent issues folks have had with Microsoft and OSS in their own space means that this should happen for PDC 2007. I hope a few testing BOF's and sessions show up at PDC 2007 too.

As before, no PDC this year but I'll carry this for next year.

When I reflect fully on 2007, it has been a good and bad year. Our baby is now 7 weeks away and that is a single event that dominates my thinking. I did run into some career issues this year but I am now back on track and happier than ever. On that front this year has been one of frustration but as 2008 approaches I look foward to new challenges and a much happier outlook. It has been a busy year and with the baby on the way I chose to reduce my responsibilities, handing the reins of MbUnit to Jeff. Although I am happy to be starting my family and have found a role that I will enjoy I will be glad to see the back of 2007 and start new in 2008. So onto how I see 2008 shaping up.

Microsoft hire from both the OSS world and one or two codebetter members.
MbUnit and NUnit will both release v3.0 releases and xUnit a 1.0 release. My hope is that if any new editons of James or Andys\Daves books in 2008 factor in the growing popularity of all of these frameworks.
Pex will see a release and will gain a lot attention, I will watch it with interest.
C# 4.0 will see a CTP at the PDC as an addon for VS2008. I do expect Microsoft to start talking about changes to the CLR for the 4.0 generation by the end of year but inital CTPs will be on 3.5. For the record I do think Spec# will see light in C# 4.0. I hope the next version of VB gets anonymous delegates, why is this missing still? I also hope Microsoft look to introduce generic counter\contra-variance in the CLR.
This year has been an interesting year for dynamic languages on the CLR. A little hidden by but associated with Sliverlight was the announcement of the DLR at Mix07. Born from the work of John Lam (IronRuby) and Jim Hugunin (IronPython) the DLR was ready to let Ruby and Python (and VB and Javascript) rip-roar on the CLR. The future for dynamic languages on the CLR is very rosey indeed. So what for 2008, expect to hear more about this around Mix08 time (also expect to see Miguel at Mix once again and this time talking about DLR\Moonlight, betcha). More languages will come onto the DLR, Lisp and Boo wil be candidates for 2008. I do hope someone looks at a Perl compiler for the DLR, lost in the Parrot sounds it seems forgotten ahead its Ruby brother.
The AltNet movement has gathered intense pace in 2007, the first summit saw the likes of Martin Fowler attending and ScottGu showing off the MS MVC framework for the first time. Next year will see the summit run again, this time in Seattle the week before the MVP summit. Plenty of regional summits will also happen, the UK summit is due to happen the first week of the Feb (and too close to my babys due date for me to attend). I expect at least a few BOF sessions will happen at the PDC and I really hope some main stream sessions happen as well.

My plans for 2008 will be muted as you would expect but what geek time I do get I hope to put to good general use to improve in any way I can. Letting my self loose on Amazon very soon :) Have a great 2008.

MbUnit and some news

andrewstopford — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 17:38:00 GMT

MbUnit has achieved a lot in 2 and half years, it was around that time that Peli joined Microsoft and MbUnits future was undecided. Peli wanted to open-source MbUnit but with his new role was unable to do so. I asked Peli and Jamie if I could take this on and the code was released to Tigris and later (seeking SVN rather than the then CVS) it's present home on Google Code. Morten helped out hosting the Wiki and Defect tracker (though these are now also on Google Code). On Phil's suggestion we started a new website (although we lost MbUnit.org we gained MbUnit.com, MbUnit.co.uk and MbUnit.net) and recently added a lot of changes to the site including docs and blog lists etc. What started with a handful of people including myself, Jay and a few others has grown to a core commit group of 12 with a dedicated (and professional writer and editor) docs manager. Thanks to there hardwork and dedication in three years MbUnit has gone through two major releases, a minor release and is in the middle of a rewrite. Information on MbUnit can now be found on blogs, websites, books and articles. Folks talk about it at conferences and IMHO has neally caught NUnit up in the developer minds eye (I often see referances to NUnit, MbUnit, MsTest when talking about the collective unit test frameworks for .NET). I am very proud of MbUnit and how far it has come.

I tell you all of this for a reason, MbUnit a few months ago made some changes so that the commit group make decisions by vote so no one person makes decisions. In recent months I have had less and less time, with a baby on the way and a job crisis to deal with has really effected my spare time (the drop in my blogging has been no accident). All of this means I have had less and less time to spend on MbUnit but the project has still been moving at great pace. The rewrite of MbUnit, MbUnit 3, has been lead by Jeff Brown and he in my absence has lead the team and helped in the community to keep MbUnit going forward. With my wife now in single figure weeks before our baby arrives and a new job to settle into I announced last week that I will be stepping down as MbUnits lead and Jeff will in a formal capacity take it over. Jeff and the team are gearing up MbUnit for the v3 release and we recently passed the alpha 1 milestone, lots to look foward to in 2008. I will continue to contribute and blog where I can and next year I look foward to hopefully working with my local user groups.

AgileNorth 2007 roundup

andrewstopford — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:03:00 GMT

As I mentioned in my last post I did'nt have an internet connection for most of the day so did'nt get a chance to write up yesterdays AgileNorth 2007 conference where I was speaking on MbUnit. I did manage to write up my thoughts on my way home and here they are.

Today was a long day, I did'nt get to bed until 1am, was up at 6am and I write this on the train home and its pushing 8pm. I do find conferences really take it out of you and speaking is even more draining, worrying about your session and then winding down after wards. I really enjoyed today though, my session was very well attended (around 30 in a room that holds 31/32) and I was up against Luke Barrett :) I had some great questions and I have taken a lot of value in the discussions I had afterwards with folks. With this mornings release of V3 I coded some V3 demos after my session and managed a 'scottgu' in taking a group of folks through it in the bar after the conference wrapped up. I really enjoyed meeting everyone and had some great discussions with Nancy Van Schooenderwoert and Chris Matts, both are key agile folks and there discussions were very thought provoking. Luke was also a lot of fun to talk to and we have long chat about the tools ThoughtWorks are working on. I look foward to do more with the AgileNorth community in the coming months.

MbUnit v3 and Gallio alpha 1

andrewstopford — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 16:47:00 GMT

I am running behind today, I had very limited internet access yesterday so this is a little behind. It's been a little over three months since our last release of MbUnit but we been stepping up the work we have been doing since on the summer to bring you the first cut of Gallio Test Automation Platform (Gallio for short) and MbUnit v3. This project has been a massive undertaking in that entire code base has been rewriteen, a ground up rewrite of everything, framework, runners, everything. As ever my thanks to the entire MbUnit commit team (in particular Jeff as v3 lead, Julian, Vadim and Graham). The release notes which I am taking from Jeffs post are as follows (FYA if you not already done so I highly recommend you add Jeffs blog to your reader of choice, Jeff will be working up more posts on features and functionality that you will want to check out).

Alpha 1 marks a significant milestone: much of the groundwork is in place. It doesn't look like much yet, but there's a whole lot going on inside. We can run MbUnit v2, MbUnit v3, NUnit v2 and xUnit.Net beta 2 tests in a variety of ways, generate reports, write plugins, and produce installer packages with integrated documentation. We can also do nifty things like embed attachments, such as WatiN screenshots, into reports.

However, this release is primarily of interest to fellow toolsmiths. We do not recommend using it in a production environment at this time. This is a work in progress. Some parts are already quite polished but there are still many loose ends. Many planned features are absent. We appreciate your interest and support in our efforts!

Alpha 2 will consolidate what we've accomplished with Alpha 1 to deliver a genuinely useful product. We plan to incorporate more work from NBehave, NUnit and other teams we are bringing on board. In addition, we'll pick up the pace on the development of the end-user tools (particularly the GUI) and of the framework components. This is also when MbUnit v3 will begin to blossom.

So whats going on here, Gallio is a neutral test platform that is an off shoot from the work we had done on MbUnit v3. Gallio is both a common framework and a set of runners for testing tools. MbUnit v3 uses Gallio as its native test platform, Gallio can also as Jeff mentions run MbUnit, NUnit and XUnit.net tests. For both migration purposes and to help improve how you are using your existing test framework we hope this will prove useful. We still have a lot of work to do but make no secrets of what we are up to, check out our road map. I do want to draw attention to the work we are doing with our new runners. Starting with Icarus, our new GUI.

Yes thats a NUnit test loaded and the tests run.

Same set of tests now using the MbUnit v2 framework instead.

Icarus is built on the Presenter-First pattern and I am also doing some work with readapting some of patterns domians to WPF (for a prototype WPF GUI). The pattern is already proving its self in breaking down our concerns and improving the testability of the app. As you can see Icarus has a brand new interface and over time will have improved filtering and reporting, look for alpha 2. Our new console runner, Echo, is also a more richer affair.

Echo also has richer reporting and filtering that get better and better as we hit alpha 2, check out the improved display. In addition we have also have new TD.Net, MsBuild and NAnt tasks (which can all run the same set of frameworks as Icarus and Echo) and for alpha 2 will be adding the much wanted R# runner. Lastly check out the improved HTML reporting.