Andrew Stopford's Weblog

The big 30

No avoiding it but tommrow I turn the big 30.

Helping you to pitch WPF

Dependency Injection/Mocks, what's best?

One of things I am still learning about is the use of DI or Mocks in my coding toolbox. What's confusing me is how to avoid creating too much complexity in my application to achieve testability. What I would love to see is concrete examples of DI/Mocks in use against say business objects that show how to achieve testability against my objects. Any thoughts, links to examples and other useful stuff would be handy on my journey.

Update: James Shore does a good job of explaining DI.

Update: Fredrik Normén answers my post with some examples, thanks Fredrik.

.net framework\winfx community site

Noticed this in my blog logs, looks like a new community site for all things WPF, WCF et al, good stuff.

Update: I suspect I was one of the first to notice this, ya heard it here first :)

WinFx == .NET 3.0

Go off the grid to enjoy a weekend of blue skys and 30c and this little number roles in (oh and the scoble news, good luck mate). This is a change in name only really but might confuse things.. What about the CLR 3.0 (it works backwards with CLR 2.0), what about ADO.NET 3.0, what about DLinq and Linq etc? Jason has some answers, what remains for me is that these things are considered "Orcas timeframe" does that mean we will see these in .NET Framework 4.0 or 3.1 etc?

Update: Brad has some further feedback to questions.

A look at WPF from a Flash background

Lee has some really cool WPF demo's and has been using WPF for his research and work projects. Lee comes from a Flash background and in this post compares his experinces so far with working with WPF\Expression to working with Flash. His insights and thoughts don't weigh in as pro Flash or pro Microsoft but is a very balanced view. Of course Microsoft still have work to do on the Expression tools and you will expect that Flash is going to win some area's and WPF in others. It's really this sort of balanced feedback that Microsoft need to listen to. Lee does mention that he spends a lot of time working with C# rather than markup, it really depends on what your doing as to where you spend your time, more advanced topics require more time in the API but thats the same for Flash or any other RIA, nature of the beast I guess.

Atlas framework testing

Recent check-ins of the Atlas toolkit on Codeplex have a testing framework included.

.NET 2.0 Remoting defect with security apps

Jamie has blogged about a breaking issue with .NET 2.0 remoting when security apps are installed, this issue will effect any application that is using .NET 2.0 Remoting. If you are running into issues with TD.Net and VS crashing out then be aware of Jamie's post. Let me repeat that this is not a TD.Net issue and will effect _any_ application that is using .NET 2.0 Remoting. Keep an eye on Jamies blog and the TD.Net mailing list for news and work-arounds.

Spring.NET

MVC and it's .NET bad times

I am a self confessed patterns junkie, I first got the patterns bug a few years back when developing software to component oriented design where you identify each pattern inside of the component. This lead me to research the GoF patterns, the MS patterns and others. Amongst these is the classic GoF patterm the Model View Controller, better known as MVC.

In the .NET world it seems MVC has had it rough, views on it adding complexity has lead to many to oppose it's adoption to the use of the lesser known Model View Presenter (MVP) pattern. The MVP pattern lends it's self well to winform multi threaded applications where MVC is seen as adding huge degree's of complexity. I do really want to focus on ASP.NET however as this can be real mucker for MVC.

Many see ASP.NET as being MVC but the code behind model really confuses things.  If we grant that the code behind and the aspx form the contoller and view then all we need is the model. While ASP.NET does follow MVC to the letter the way it goes about the pattern means that  the controller is not an independent controller, we could not take the controller and make it work with a winform page or anything outside of asp.net, it's tied very closely to the view and we start to loose the the gains of using a pattern.

So adding a true independent controller ensures that it's not tied, while it does add a level of complexity ontop of an existing controller it also means we can reapply the pattern else where and most vital of all we can test each piece as a independent entity to the rest of the pattern.

Is there a better way however, take a look at the work Mike Roberts did in the ccnet web dashboard. Mike largely drops webforms for his own framework that creates a MVC layout but uses a Front-Controller pattern to simplify the controller. Further more take a look at the Castle projects MonoRail system, which looks at creating a true MVC framework for ASP.NET.

Don't give up on MVC just yet.