TestDriven.NET by Jamie Cansdale

.NET Developer Software Charity Auction

Many developers in the ISV community have kindly agreed to auction licenses of their software to support the charity Wells for Zoë and its work in Malawi.

Wells for Zoë is an Irish registered Charity set up in 2005 dedicated to the provision of safe drinking water and water storage for irrigation in four remote rural areas of Malawi.  The charity's founders cover all administrative overheads. 100% of your donation (bid) will be used to help the people in Malawi.

There are many items up for auction - large and small. Here is a great opportunity to pick up some quality software and have a positive impact on many people's lives.

The software up for auction is as follows (each item's retail price is in brackets):

MSDN Premium Subscription with Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite x 3 ($10,939) - bid *
Contributed by ex-MVP Jamie Cansdale ;-)

SourceGear Vault x 9 ($289) - bid
Contributed by Eric Sink of SourceGear

TypeMock Enterprise x 5 ($299) - bid
Contributed by Eli Lopan of TypeMock

DXperience Enterprise ($1299.99)- bid
CodeRush with Refactor! Pro ($249.99) - bid
Contributed by Mark Miller of devExpress

Shell MegaPack.Net x 3 ($295) - bid
Contributed by Atul Godbole of Sky Software

Thycotic Secret Server 10 user license ($389) - bid
Contributed by Jonathan Cogley of Thycotic Software

Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition ($1995) - bid
Syncfusion Essential Grid ($995) - bid
Syncfusion Essential Tools ($895) - bid
(new) Contributed by Syncfusion

You may also donate to Wells for Zoë even if you don't feel you can bid for any of the items.

Below are some pictures taken earlier this year showing wells installed in Malawi villages.

(*) The auction is for 3 x TestDriven.NET mugs. The winning bidders will receive an MVP Invite for MSDN Premium Subscription with Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite. The invite must be activated by Year End 2006. If you ask any MVP I'm sure they will vouch for the authenticity of these.

Ultimate .NET Developer's Software Hampers - Charity Auction

Update: The auction is now live. Rather than auctioning just 3 hampers I decided to break it up into smaller items. This will give many more people a chance to participate. You can find the list of software up for auction here. If you are a .NET developer I'm sure you will find something here of interest.

I have decided to organize a charity auction of a number of licenses for .NET developer tools. All proceeds of the auction will be given to Wells for Zoë, a charity dedicated to increasing the availability of safe drinking water and water for irrigation in rural areas of Malawi. You can read more about the project on their website or blog.

One unusual thing about this charity is that all travel and admin expenses are paid by the charity's founders themselves. Therefore all donations go directly to sourcing the much needed equipment on the ground in Malawi. You can find out more about the equipment that is needed on the donation page here.

Each hamper will consist of at least:

• MSDN Premium Subscription with Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite
• SourceGear Vault
• TypeMock Enterprise
• TestDriven.NET Enterprise
• Shell MegaPack for ActiveX and .Net
• devExpress CodeRush/Refactor! Pro (new)
• Thycotic Secret Server (new)

I'm hoping that other ISVs will be will be willing to contribute their wares and make the hampers even better. If you are an ISV who would like to be involved please contact me. I'm also very interested to hear from any MVPs with unused MVP Invite cards they would be willing to donate.

You can see pictures of some of the work done in June 2006. I've also uploaded a video of well digging to YouTube. As you can see, hacking through the rock like ground is a serious undertaking! I'll be sure to post more links and pictures afterwards to show where the money went.

Watch this space for a link to the Ebay auction (hopefully by Tue/Wed next week).

Arbitrary x86 from Partially Trusted C# App

Jeroen Frijters writes:

Yesterday I discovered a bug in the JIT that not only causes incorrect results, but also allows the type system to be circumvented, which in turn leads to the possibility of arbitrary code execution. I have a proof-of-concept that executes arbitrary x86 code from a verifiable and partially trusted C# application.

Jeroen single handedly wrote a JVM in .NET that can execute and debug Java classes from .NET/Mono. He is pretty used to exploring the dark corners of .NET and finding strange bugs. The proof-of-concept will be released after a patch has been made available via Windows Update in the next few months.

MbUnit 2.3 RTM is Live

Andrew Stopford writes:

Tonight MbUnit 2.3 RTM was released, you can download it from the MbUnit site. This release is a big one because this is MbUnits first milestone release since the project was first open sourced some 20 months ago. Many folks gave up their time to make this happen, both helping to make MbUnit work as a OSS project and in fixing bugs and adding new features through beta's and RC's through to todays release. This release has had contributions from Phil Winstanely, Johan Appelgren, Graham Hay, Joey Calisay and Jeff Brown. I would like to give all of my thanks to these folks and to the folks that helped in previous releases including Ben Hall, Jeff Brown and Marc Stober. The road to MbUnit 2.4 begins now and further along the road to 3.0.

Congratulations to Andrew Stopford and team for getting to this milestone release! I know how hard it is to successfully project manage an open source project. Andrew has done a great job of gathering an impressive team and buzz around MbUnit. Peli made a good choice when he passed MbUnit to Andrew before joining Microsoft.