February 2005 - Posts
Howard has created a
very nice looking tool for creating scripts for the SDC Build tools
along with source. With a bit of work this could be adapted for NAnt and MsBuild, prehaps as a opensource project? If Howard is interested in releasing the source for a OSS project who would be interested in developing this?
Been a short blogging month for me this month, demands on my time are intense at the moment. Seeing a lot of testing bloggers come online, its great to see. I suspect that the buzz around TS may have something to do with it but also seeing
folks blogging FxCop (I really must finish the custom FxCop post) as well as
NAnt etc.
From my own point of view, the build and test system has been running for several weeks now with more and more projects being added (25+). The start of a move to subversion was also added and also continues to run very nicely. I have also finished up tweaking the
CC.net XSL so we now have full MbUnit support. All in all the team is enjoying a full build system. A
bug database is something we have recently started looking at, to this end we have started using
the Gemini system and so far we are really impressed with it. A few things I would like to see would be greater support for source control systems, it supports CVSNT and VSS out of the box and its web service interface can be used for other source control systems. However its more customization work that project demands limit. I would also love to see a RSS feed, again its something that could be coded but time is limited.
Mike Roberts (whom is one of the folks responsible for CC.net and a huge help for CC.net users and hackers) blogs about a new approach for ditching webforms in favour of a IHttpHandler/HTML appoach. While his approach is interesting the point on ASP.NET being bad to unit test I do want to comment on.
ASP.NET does support Page MVC as natural part of it, if you consider extending this to architectural MVC then you have the controller and model easily seperated from the view. Testing these can then be done like testing any other class. Another option (if your sticking to page MVC as well) is to use a unit testing system thats been designed for testing ASP.NET pages and controls in proc. NUnitASP is an example of such a system and can be used with NUnit (and quite easily be adapted to MbUnit).
Michal has a great post on his Low level IL concept, the papers and slides Michal mentions are well worth a look. I am a self connfessed CLR wonk, live and breath it, so I note with interest that the
Phoenix project is up and running for research academic use only. I would love to see this opened up for general use, I always had a problem with the fact that CLR/Rotor research does not seem to get support from Microsoft with reguards to individual projects, its something a community site with research papers, forums and other useful info would be great for.
If your playing around with the current CTP release of Avalon here are a few links that be of help.
I have had a few folks ask me about providing the source for the
MbUnit port of
NUnitASP, as doing this would require forking the NUnitASP code base it was decided that the code would not be added to the NUnitASP project. The good news is, Jim has made a lot of changes that means for the next release you a port can be created and added to the code base with out a fork risk, or you can port a later verson to suit your needs.
- To do this first download a NUnitASP release, don't obtain the source from CVS unless you get a later branch (due to the changes mentioned previously) its just as easy to get the source from the download section however
- When you have the source remove the NUnit dll referances and add the MbUnit dll referances (MbUnit Core and MbUnit Framework dlls), make sure you also remove the NUnit referances in the code and referance MbUnit.Core.Framework and MbUnit.Framework.
- Your going to now get a lot of errrors, as such change the Assertion.Assert calls to Assert.*, by * I mean you will need to match as carefully as you can, by and large use AreEqual and IsFalse/IsTrue but use what ever works best.
With that done you should be able to recompile and run your tests using MbUnit with out a problem. Any questions let me know.
Been shaping this article for a while, not written or tested code on paper for a while but its good to go back to and remember just why and what we are testing. This is another point raised by the SDE/Test interview, again no saying at all its right but its my take on it., if you spot any mistakes or errors then do let me know.
A few years back I knew Lisp quite well, over the years I had learnt other languages and done other things. I was sorting through my book collection and came across
Paul Grahams Lisp book (another hero of mine), stright away I thought its time I get back to Lisp. So as and when I find time I am going to re-learn Lisp, I dod say at the start of the year I would make an effort to get into Ruby and indeed I still aim to but it would be nice to explore Lisp first, I do remember using CLOS in awe, its simply super powerful OO, can't wait to see it again.
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