July 2008 - Posts
I'll be giving a talk on MbUnit at the next ThoughtWorks geek night here in Manchester, UK on the 27th of August. The night will be a double bill, right after me Chris Morris will be leading a workshop designed to find out what you believe quality means in the software you develop. The talk I will give will be a version of the one I gave last year at AgileNorth only updated for the MbUnit v3. The next time I will give this talk will be hopefully DDD towards the end of year, so either vote for me when the time comes or if you can't wait then get your self down to Manchester.
Picture this, large scale enterprise app, small scale legacy application, third party code...in other words a code base you are not fully familar with and need to understand. Sure enough can apply the feathers rules but if your in a hurrry to understand to understand a code base to start making changes (and a green field option is not an option) then what do you do? I'm on the look out for a tool that can allow you to explore a code base, explore object dependencies and pathways. Ideas welcome.
While eating my lunch I was running through google reader and started reading a post from Glen, this lead me in turn to Hammett (the guy that founded the Castle project) and this post literally blew me away.
Microsoft have been snapping some of the coolest, smartest dudes in the commnity lately, first Haack, then Rob, then Hansleman, now....Hammet. It is a very long time coming, Hammett is a seriously smart dude and fully deserves it. He will be joining them on the MEF team, as that is not directly related to Castle (although I am sure the IoC stuff make use of the MEF) he gets to keep working on the project, very cool.
I do wonder when Oren, Jeremy and Jeff (also super smart dudes) will be joining the mother ship.
Jeff's recent post I cannot repeat enough, with both MbUnit and Gallio we have made sure that we have credited folks where we have reimplemented their ideas and concepts. If they took the time to come up with the concept\idea then we feel it was only right to credit them for that concep\idea, while there may be little legal standing it is a polite and professional thing to do. During my time as V2 lead, Roy contacted me about a failure on our part to credit him for the Rollback attribute in the MbUnit code and we quickly corrected it. It was Roys concept and it was only fair to give notice of that. Me and Jeff have recently noticed several other OSS projects who have copied some of the concepts\ideas from MbUnit\Gallio and we ask that those concerned give us the same consideration.
Jeff Attwood has a post on possibily the greatest man in the computing age, Alan Turing. As Jeff states during WW2 Alan helped break the enigma code and went on to become one of the fore-fathers of AI. There are several books on Alans life that are well worth reading with the Andrew Hodges book one of the best.
Alan is one of my personal heros, some of Alans greatest work in computing occured here in Manchester, the place I was born and grew up in. After the war Alan conducted research into computing and maths at the University of Manchester. He worked on one of the first computers ever built the Manchester Mark 1 as well as conducting a great deal of his AI and machine learning research there. The memorial you see above was built in his honor and rightly so, with out him I cannot imagine what the world may have become.
One of the changes made in MbUnit v3 alpha 3 was support for the Visual Studio Team System test runner. As Jeff points out, we are the first to offer this kind of support. At the moment the support is experimental but we will be driving foward more in the coming weeks and months.
You will need to install MbUnit v3 alpha 3, if your upgrading from v2 to v3 there will be some compatability issues (I'll cover these in a later post).
Take this simple test
Make sure you have MbUnit and Gallio referanced
Recompile and the test should now show in the Test View window
Just like a MSTest test you can now run through the test window.
Jeff has news on a couple of updates to the MbUnit v3 beta 3 release including.
The R# 4.0 support does mean that you can run MbUnit 3.0 and 2.0 in R# but if you prefer you can work directly with MbUnit v2.0 (rather than through Gallio) via Alberts plugin.
My thanks to Jeff and the whole team, who have worked hard to help make this happen (Jeff in particular works all hours to bring this to you).
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