Contents tagged with .NET

  • Absolute positioning in VS2005 HTML designer

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    In Visual Studio .NET 2003, ASPX pages included a property called pageLayout, which defaulted to “GridLayout” – essentially, CSS absolute positioning for all form elements. Although this is a horrible idea in a production application (I assume MS did it to make it easier to demo rapid application building), it does turn out to have a handy use – it makes it easy to quickly sketch out web forms for UI design or prototyping.

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  • Uh-oh - TestDriven.NET goes commercial

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    Today Jamie Cansdale announced big news - TestDriven.NET is now a commercial product. Although not a huge surprise (signs have been there for a while), this change may very well have some serious repercussions. I know a lot of developers (including me) have TD.NET deeply embedded in their development process. Being suddenly asked to pay for this tool is kind of like - well, kind of like being asked to suddenly pay for NUnit.

    I don't begrudge Jamie's right to try to turn what has obviously become a major time investment for him into a money-making venture. I do, however, think this change is going to complicate a lot of people's lives. Anyone who lives in budget-constrained enterprise where ordering software is like pulling teeth (a lot of people, I suspect) is now going to have to justify a new purchase.

    My big question about the change is this - what about people already using it? Are they now suddenly software pirates? I know that Jamie still has a free "personal" license, but that only supports "trial users, students and open source developers" - not your average joe professional developer.

    I do wish Jamie luck in his new venture. But in the end I wonder if he's already been too successful - he may have gotten so many people hooked on integrated unit testing that an open-source competitor may soon spring up. Anyone from the NUnit team out there? :)
     

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