Andrew Stopford's Weblog

Mono's Olive

Looking through the slides from Mono Meeting 2006 and while looking at Miguels I noticed an announcement for a sub project called Olive. This looks like a Mono support for WCF and WCS, quite cool to see.

TestDriven 2.0 goes RTM

Debugging with source

webforms vs monorail

It was bound to happen sooner or later, someone comparing webforms to monorail. All of the pro's and con's make sense and from a webforms point of view it's cons like viewstate and pros like controls/vs support that stand out. For me monorails design is very important in that it follows MVC and you get an ideal world of a clean, light weight view and testability for controller and model. Anyone that has ever tried to unit test webforms will know it's a world of pain. Thats not to say you can't do patterns in webforms, MVP can be done (and Phil Hackk has a great example) but it does introduce complexities that may but folk off. In an ideal world

• webforms would have MVC baked in
• would support templates for light weight view genertion
• would bake in Atlas for templates to avoid page postbacks

DLinq and unit testing

I have been playing around with DLinq lately for unit test research. The May CTP C# 3.0 extensions for the most part work with unit test frameworks like MbUnit and NUnit and runners like td.net. DLinq is another story however, the lack of covariance in C# 3.0 means that you can't treat DLinq tables under their base type. So the thinking goes that rather than pass around DLinq table types it's easier to convert to a ICollection object like an ArrayList and pass to a MbUnit CollectionAssert.Contains. I have no idea what DLinq does to an ArrayList but the same ArrayList with the same data and same types will fail through CollectionAssert.Contains yet pass if created manually. TestDriven.net won't work full stop with DLinq and starts throwing CLR errors. So as it stands your stuck between a rock and a hard place for mixing DLinq with unit testing, it's a shame because I was pretty buzzed at the idea of mixing the two. Maybe when Orcas and .NET 3.0 turn up this will all change but for the time being it's not pretty.

Update:

If we look inside the CollectionAssert.Contains it iterates over the collection and compares to the item you expect. When it does this it treats both items as objects e.g.

value == expected 

Where value and expected are fed in as objects. The problem with the dlinq fed array occurs when it compares the two values, despite being strings as the underlying type, despite being the same value they are not being seen as equal. If you look at them in VS during a debug

 ?value
"Green"
?expected
"Green"
?value==expected
false

Clearly not right, yet if I manually populate the array then they are compared as they should be, why do I feel like Fox Mulder right now.

Firefox Cake

MBT with SpecExplorer

Peli got me interested in Model Based Testing and every since it's been a personal research topic. Today I came across a MBT project from Microsoft Research called SpecExplorer, it comes complete with a download with all the bits (a C# variant called Spec# and a other tools) to let you explore MBT in your test research.

Phil on MbUnit

It's MAX time

Microsoft Ajax security