September 2005 - Posts
The Joel test is one of those things thats worth bringing to front every now and again, in Joel's own words.
A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you've got serious problems. The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like Microsoft run at 12 full-time.
Something I really want to do is write a book on MbUnit, formats I have seen that is of interest is the
Pragmatic 'Friday' format or the O'Reilly pocket book format. Stright to the point, clear and concise examples to get folks up and running with MbUnit and using it on their projects. What I need to judge for a publisher is interest levels, what I need is folks to leave me a comment. With enough comments, interest in this can be judged and then the MbUnit community and folks new to our community can get a book that would be of real value to them, the balls in your court folks.
Andy Hunt explains what
"Broken Windows" means and why its so very vital to make time for and to address on your project.
Some folks would be in deep shock in hearing this but I do hear it. When your under pressure, deadlines, milestones, then the temptation is code, code, code. No unit tests, either during (agile) or after (waterfall etc) code and you could be looking at a bug hunt or at worst bug smash (so many bugs your project fails) and that means time and money fixing those bugs. With unit tests you reduce (and with process improvement on your use of them) then elimate bugs, so in reality you have not lost any time at all, with unit tests you can speed up the work, refactor in confidence, create better code, sit back and enjoy your coffee.
I have posted about this before and was pointed at the MonoRail project (a sort of Ruby on Rails project for .NET run on the Castle Project). I will admit I have yet to look in any great depth at MonoRail but I have long felt the need for a new model to web programming in ASP.NET that follows MVC in a far more isolated fashion than ASPX allows.
ASPX is not unit testable, its so tightly bound that you have no way of unit testing aspx code behind. ASPX is not testable in the same fashion as all your other code, I need a far more isolated model.
ASPX does not give me render control, even the revent work does not give me complete control over what is ouput. When we look at MonoRail we can see that you can append a template engine and have complete control over your view, Hammet puts it well in this post.
ASPX and viewstate, done right it can be your friend, done wrong and its a page load increasing monster. I want something far more manageable.
Update: A comment quite rightly states you can unit test code behind using NUnitASPX, I however want a model thats more like all my other testing and does not require a web server etc to fire page events.
FishEye is nifty tool for reporting on CVS/SVN repos. It's a breeze to install but their are some pitfalls.
- Download FishEye and obtain a license key.
- Unzip FishEye to the directiory you wish to run FishEye from, a bug causes FishEye to fail if that directiory has spaces so be careful.
- Copy the license key to that directory
- Fire up FishEye using start.bat in the bin directory
- Follow these instructions to setup your SVN repos for FishEye use. I used svn propset fisheye.access "allow" URL where URL is the URL of my SVN repos.
- Open your browser and goto http://localhost:8080/ and you can then add your SVN repos (1).
All up and running when the SVN repos is added you may decide to run FishEye as a windows service, see details here on how to get that up and running.
(1) I am having trouble with file SVN url's in the current beta, this is noted here.
While
watching this vid on LINQ I noticed on the board behind Anders a list of languages and what looks Z#, any clues?
Via Paschal, a demo by Manuel Clement who shows off the tool from a designers point of view and the designer-to-developer work flow aspects. This aspect is vital in media teams, by they web or other media (digital TV, devices etc) and that aspect will cross over far more into software development with Avalon. So with Sparkle you have your designer do what they do best and creating some kick ass Avalon stuff. Your developers can then take the XAML files and do what they do best and start coding. Notice that its one tool for designers and one tool for developers, each is great at what it does but you don't loose the feel of workflow nor one tool trying to do too much.
People have been asking how I had seen Sparkle, I am a member of the Microsoft CAB (Customer Advisory Board) for the product, all those years around Generator and Flash. I have added a new Sparkle category, I will saying a lot more about Sparkle over time so your welcome to keep a watch.
Manuel is a strong voice in the design market and has a number of books in the Flash space, someone with such a strong understanding of designers will really show in Sparkle.
Cesar has an update on the progress of the JScript compiler for Mono, sounds like the project is really taking shape and its great he has folks helping on the project, working on test suites etc. I am buzzed to hear about some of the features he has planned, E4X support would be really interesting to see. Given the LINQ stuff I wonder what work Mono will do for that, if they make it a part of the runtime/typesystem as MS surely will then E4X support could use that.
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