Andrew Stopford's Weblog

Revised MbUnit site and docs

One of the points often raised is that MbUnit lacks a finishing professional touch and it's something that matters a great deal to me. A few weeks ago I asked Dan Maharry to join the MbUnit team as our documentation manager. Dan is a former Wrox editor and author and a dedicated professional in the field of documentation and working along side the ever hardworking Ben Hall has written from scratch a set of user guides and a API set. We are off to a great start but as Dan notes we are far from complete and a lot more hard work remains, let Dan or my self know your thoughts on the docs and what else you would like to see?

In addition to the docs we have also added new sections to the MbUnit site to help further improve our experience to new and old users alike, again my thanks to Ben for pumping in his spare time hours (and when faced with finding a new house and new job) to help on this effort.

I'd like to add that the entire team is working very hard literally day and night on the next generation of MbUnit (and my thanks and respect to the entire team for there dedication and hardwork) and we have a new 2.4 release in the wings, busy times.

MbUnit on Facebook

I'm rather hooked on Facebook, it's almost myspace meets friends reunited and is all all grown up :) It's a great place to connect with folks and it's really amazing who is on the site. Jamie mentioned it a while back but I have added a facebook group for MbUnit fans here, if your a MbUnit fan and on Facebook be sure to sign up.

The dddark side

For the fun of it I spent most of this afternoon using this dark VS theme, and pushed the font size up a point. A few things I have noted.

• At first you don't see anything, my eyes are so used to lots of white that my retina was wide open and I could'nt see anything for the first few minutes.
• After a while you see everything, it's very weird but my focus was w i d e r.
• After a hour in the editor going back to all white backgrounds is like staring into the sun (which then gives you a headache).
• You show off your to work mates\friends your hacker colors, start wearing black t shirts, wear sandles and grow your hair long (no chance in my case).

Joking a-side the colors in this scheme are a lot easier on the eyes when your eyes finally adjust to the change in light levels and after a while I was as happy in this scheme as the normal one (and my eyes felt happier), give it a run and see what you think.

Writing some code that may already exist?

It's wild friday afternoon idea time but it's occured to me that a very cool R# feature could be a feature to keep tabs on you and suggest that the class/function your writing may have have previously been written and suggest posible matches for refactoring. A nifty way of doing this could be score up the OM of your code and suggest possible odd's of a match based on some bayesian scoring. I see this being super useful for those with slippery memories who forget after a couple of hours of coding that a simliar peice of code may already exist and for those working with leagacy code who may be working with thousands of lines and with out the heat seeking test suite.