Community Blogs

Sasha and Alon have released an open source project called " Non Paged CLR Host " which has the following benefits(quoted): Applications will benefit from no paging during normal operation.   Even if other applications are actively allocating memory, allocations performed under the non-paged CLR host will be locked into physical memory. No paging will occur when the application is idle , providing a great benefit to low-latency processes such as GUI applications (even if the user has fallen asleep in front of the monitor).  The normal working set management scheme employed by Windows will not affect processes running under the non-paged CLR host. That's Pretty cool. I've had the pleasure of working on a project with...

Here's a sneak preview of the upcoming Typemock Racer product, which I'm currently working on. We should be out in private CTP in a couple of weeks I hope. Typemock Racer tries to solve one huge problem for developers working in multi threaded environments: Detecting code that can result in deadlocks or race conditions. It does this by providing a framework API which you can use in your tests (under NUnit for example), that allows you to execrise your code under test until it finds a deadlock or times out. Here's an example of how you'd use it. Consider the following class which has two methods, that if run by two seperate threads, can result in a deadlock condition: At some point in time the threads could execute such that thread...

In the previous post I introduced Depender , to help find dependency issues in your code (usually for testing). I've added extensibility to it so that you can write your own rules. If you download depender there will also be a "src" directory in the zip file, which shows how the current rules it uses were built. it should be really easy to created your own rules. Just : create your own assembly that has a name ending with ".Rules.dll" Implement IRule in your class, or, if you want to parse the contents of a method, inherit from MethodParserRule. your rule will be automatically loaded according to the assembly naming convention and its interface. here's how a simple rule looks:   public class FindOverridableMethodsRule...

Depender is a tool that I created to illustrate several concepts both for my book and both for my training classes. I think it should prove valuable (as it gets more and more features) to anyone who is trying to write tests for existing code.   Depender allows you to load an assembly and inspect the types within it according to very simple rules. the main question on my mind and I run it is: "How easy would it be to test class X?". Depender will list all the classes in the assembly and for each one will try to detect possible testability problems (non decoupling) and places where you might be able to "inject" your own implementation (calls to virtual methods, fields that are interfaces or types who are not sealed..etc...

I got turned onto a fairly new tool by a friend and was interested in checking it out. It's called Microsoft StyleCop and done in the style of FxCop but rather than analyzing assemblies it looks at code for formatting and style rules. The original use was within Microsoft for keeping code across all teams consistent. Imagine having to deal with hundreds of developers moving around an organization like Microsoft where there are dozens of major teams (Windows, Office, Visual Studio, Games, etc.) and millions of lines of code. It helps if the code is consistent in style so people moving between teams don't have to re-learn how the "style" of that new team works. Makes sense and I can see where there's benefit, even in smaller...

We’ve released version 2.0 of Tree Surgeon . This is the first major release since I took the project over from Mike Roberts. This release adds the following features: 2005 and 2008 support in addition to the original 2003 support Ability to choose the unit test framework generated (NUnit or MbUnit) Updated tool resources to latest versions NAnt build scripts will use the appropriate .NET versions (1.1, 2.0 and 3.5) Minor bug fixes Improved User Interface Please download the latest project files here . Source code, zip file, and installer are all available. Read More...

A new release of Tree Surgeon is forthcoming and I’m looking to the community to see if someone with some time and artistic skills on their hands would be interested in putting together a logo to kick things up a notch. Tree Surgeon is a .NET development tree generator. Just give it the name of your project, and it will set up a development tree for you in seconds. The UI for Tree Surgeon is pretty simple and it doesn’t need to be extravagant (you run it once to create a new solution tree and you’re done, this generally doesn’t happen dozens of times a day unless you’re someone like me). However it would be nice to have something snappy as a splash screen and give the product a little branding. The image will be used in the product itself (probably...

Thought this might be useful. On a new project where you're using the Castle Windsor container for Dependency Injection, this is a handy spec to have: [ TestFixture ] public class When_starting_the_application : Spec { [ Test ] public void verify_Castle_Windsor_mappings_are_correct () { IWindsorContainer container = new WindsorContainer ( "castle.xml" ); foreach ( IHandler handler in container . Kernel . GetAssignableHandlers ( typeof ( object ))) { container . Resolve ( handler . ComponentModel . Service ); } } } It doesn't guarantee that someone missed adding something to your configuration, but this way anytime someone adds a type to the configuration this will verify the mapping is right. Very often I move things around...

A couple of weeks ago the aspNetPRO magazine's annual Reader's Choice Awards were published in their latest issue. DevExpress swept the awards, winning nine different categories as well as product of the year . I've blogged before about DevExpress and how I've been quite impressed with a lot of their tools (CodeRush, XtraReports, controls...). I've also gotten to know a bunch of members of their team over the last couple of years and enjoy hanging out with them at conferences and other events . While the Reader's Choice awards are not as rigorous of a standard as, say, a Consumer Reports analysis, it is a strong indicator that a lot of customers are very happy with DX's products. The fact that they were able to beat...

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