Andrew Stopford's Weblog

A look ahead at 2006

As is custom on my blog, the last day of year brings reflection on the year gone by and how my predictions on the year went. I managed 3 out of 8 of my yearly predictions.

• MSBuild will run fully on 1.1 and SDC Build Tools will retire.
• MbUnit will go opensource and rule the world.
• CruiseControl will reach 1.0 (gotta happen its so close :) and will add several features to better support MbUnit and the code coverage tools.

The one I am most proud of is the MbUnit prediction, mainly because I helped it happen and TBH did'nt see me taking it over. I am glad to be leading the effort however and look foward to its growth in 2006. CCNet reached 1.0 as predicted and now has the 1.1 milestone approaching and in 2006 thats sure to be reached. MSBuild will support 1.1 unoffically, while not around yet it was announced in 2005 so it counts ;-)

So what about what I am doing in 2006, unlike previous years I am not going to say, 2005 was a terrible year for me on many different levels, one of the worse I can remember.  As such I am just going to let things happen in 2006. 

So what about predictions for 2006 (and the last two I hope I am proved wrong about).

• TD.net will rock and rule the world in 2006, Jamie is going to spring some real joy in 2006.
• Already this year we have seen major growth in Web 2.0\AJAX and thanks to Google and others 2006 will bring more of the web 2.0 vision into life
• Java will go opensource, with IBM\Apache creating a opensource Java, Sun will start the wheels turning and a new foundation will be started to make Java OSS.
• .NET 2.0 Rotor will see the light of day.
• Mono will fully support .NET 2.0, the Mono JScript engine will make it to the offical distro and XBuild will become as fully functional as MSBuild and become the Mono compile engine.
• Adobe (Macromedia) Flex will show some real muscle in 2006 and will be a tour de force in bringing RIA to the enterprise Java world. 2006 will not see .NET support (and by 2007 I'll still be waiting).
• Microsoft will open up folly after folly at the RIA world, WPF, Sparkle, Orcas, Vista. By the end of 2006 Microsoft will still be the only provider of .NET applications and solutions to the RIA space and everyone else will have missed the boat completely (and by then it will be too late to catch up).

Thats it, have a safe and happy night tonight and see you in 2006.

Practical development enviroments book

I came across this book on the O'Reilly site, it does look interesting with coverage on project planning, build servers, SCM, unit testing, bug tracking, release management and lots of other subjects. It looks to have a Java slant to the book with the some of the tools mentioned but a lot of this would cross over to .NET. If the nice folks at O'Reilly want me to review I would be glad to ;-)

Early days for Cider

If you have installed the December 2004 WinFx CTP most of you will know by now it has the VS2005 'Orcas' parts, and whats new is the visual designer for XAML (Cider). Sam thinks it rocks, I would rate it as pretty cool, but also pretty useless. Its prone to crashing, the layouts don't work correctly and as a development tool it needs a lot of work. That said, its early days so its to be expected and to see where they are heading is indeed very cool. However if you really want a visual layout tool for XAML, hang onto XAMLPad just a bit longer.

Windows Vista networking pain

I tried running the December Vista drop today, installed fine but unlike previous versions this is refusing to work with my network card. Using IPv4 only it looks like the network is connected but it pinging anything on the network gives me a "General failure error" and when I try pinging it the request times out, for some reason its just not working. Any ideas folks?

Throwing Ice at the Fire

Charlie has a post on the "Death of NUnit", in the post Charlie looks at the releases, the NUnit road map and who else is in the .net unit test space (with a post to come on that). A lot of people are talking about MSTest\VSTS but the fact remains that NUnit like MbUnit has much more, for power you simply can't compare the two. I am keeping my cards close to my chest on whats in store for 2006 but I am certain that the unit testing in .NET will be really be shook up for the better, much better.

The NUnit roadmap is interesting to read, they are busy adding new asserts and features. Of course I am bias but much of what you see, exists in MbUnit (CollectionAssert, FileAssert and DB rollback attribute to name a few).

JUnit 4.0

This list of JUnit 4.0 features is interesting, in .NET the use of attributes to mark tests has been around a while now, in Java its called annoations. The exception and timed test (time out) both exist within MbUnit (and have been around in the framework for quite some time), as does the ArrayAssert (I wonder who is looking at who ;-).

Predictions in Java

With the end of year almost here the predictions for next year have started, I noticed on the JavaLobby that Rick Ross has some predictions for next year and largely states that the Java community can not think it lives in a bubble and must be aware of everyone and everything else in the world. Everyone is gulity of that though, not watching what the others are doing. I for one often drool over some of the tools that the Java community creates, its them that started unit testing tools, code coverage tools and many other tools. Still today they have an impressive range of tools and a buzzing opensource community that is forever creating the tools. With the IBM\Apache effort to create a true opensource Java and pressure on Sun to make Java opensource I can only imagine what Java will become if the same community is unleashed upon it. I think 2006 could be very interesting year for Java and for us all.

Chickenfoot

Chickenfoot is a tool that puts a programming environment in Firefox so you can write scripts to manipulate web pages and automate web browsing. In Chickenfoot, scripts are written in a superset of Javascript that includes special functions specific to web tasks.

Via Lambda, I could see this being useful for functional testing.

MSBuild 3323 error

I ran into this one today-

error MSB3323: Unable to find manifest signing certificate in the certificate store.

This application uses AutoUpdate and has been building fine, suddenly its stopped.  Google draws a blank, anyone else run into this?

Update: see the comments for how to resolve this.

Slowest blogging month ever

For me this has so far been the slowest blogging month ever, a combination of work, mbunit and illness has meant a poor show. Here's hoping I at least make it to 10 posts before 2006.