Robert Hurlbut's Blog

I scheduled some time ago to attend Devscovery next week in Washington, DC, but I have now had to postpone it to the next time which is at the end of August in Redmond, WA. Kudos to Paula at Wintellect for moving things around at the last moment to make it possible for a transfer. One of my projects is hitting a major deadline next week, and I need to spend the time here (though I was really, really looking forward to this training time before a busy month of June).

Andrew Duthie talks about this great opportunity if you are looking for some top notch training from the Wintellect guys.

The TechEd BOF (Birds of a Feather) voting is over and mine was accepted. Here is the schedule:
 
   Developing software as a non-administrator - Wed, June 8, 7:45pm 6:30 pm
 
This will be a discussion only -- no presentation. We will talk about the whys as well as experiences of those who have tried it and best practices for those willing to give it a shot. I have talked to Aaron Margosis about possibly joining in, and hope that Andrew Duthie, Don Kiely, Keith Brown and others could as well. It should be fun!

Update: I don't know why or how I got the time wrong, but it is at 6:30 pm on Wednesday.

I was planning to attend the "Got Indigo?" Day at Microsoft, Waltham, MA, but have had to put some hours in on finishing my current project. I will be there tonight, though, to hear David Chappell's excellent summary.

Aaron Weiker has been blogging some of his notes from the sesssions. Excellent!

My good friend Andrew Stopford has taken the lead in moving MbUnit (a great tool he asked me to try for the longest time, and when I did, I loved it!) to OSS again. MbUnit was created by Jonathan de Halleux (Peli), who has since gone to Microsoft. It was briefly moved under TestDriven.NET (headed by Jamie Cansdale) after Peli didn't have the cycles anymore. Now, Andrew is leading the charge!

Andrew is looking for help from the community, and asks you join the MbUnit lists. Subscribed!

I was asked last week and informed Friday that I was selected to be one of the Technical Experts at the Connected Systems Infrastructure (CSI) Track Cabanas during TechEd 2005.

This is very exciting for me as it will be my first TechEd, as well as getting to talk about and interact with others also interested in one of my favorite areas in .NET.

This is for those local to my area (Boston and surrounding) that look for updates on this group:

Our very successful Boston Code Brew is meeting tomorrow night, April 20, 2005, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm at The Asgard in Cambridge, MA. We have a private meeting room set up for us along with access to a full screen to hook up laptops, etc.. After 8:00 pm, they open the area to other diners -- we are still free to stay and socialize, but the area won't be "private" anymore. If you read this, and plan on attending, please let me know so we can give the restaurant an accurate count.

We are continuing our tour of Design Patterns (started last month) with several people talking about real-world uses of patterns and how they are implemented in .NET.

Since we started in January, we have averaged around 17 people in attendance. Obviously, that is a little large for a Code Brew (study group). Who knows -- we may start a couple of these. The meetings have been great so far with in-depth discussions about security, databases (indexing, tuning, and other best practices), and Design Patterns. We are talking about a night of Indigo as well at some point as more of us dig into the bits.

I really enjoyed my talk at the Vermont .NET User Group on Monday night. There were lots of questions, and everyone seemed to very interested in the techniques. I turned the talk into a more interactive session as opposed to a "conference session" because I wanted to give everyone an opportunity to get questions answered.

Of course, I showed NUnit, but I also briefly showed TestDriven.NET and MbUnit. I really want to dig into MbUnit more as it looks to be a really powerful unit testing solution -- I am realizing some of the things I have tried to do with NUnit are already built natively into MbUnit!

I have posted the slides from my talk here. Code will be soon to follow. 

Along with speaking to the group, I especially liked catching up with Julie, Dave, and meeting Roman and Zack (Zack also started a Code Brew in Burlington).  

NOTE: My posts have been sporadic lately as I have been working non-stop on a couple of big projects through my company lately. My apologies for the delay in making the slides and code available.

I will be speaking at the Vermont .NET Users Group in Burlington, Vermont on Monday, April 11. My topic will be Unit Testing, Test Driven Development, and NUnit. I am really looking forward to again seeing Julie Lerman (who does a fantastic job of leading the group), Dave Burke, and meeting Roman Rehak (Roman has graciously offered for me to stay at his house). I am also looking forward to seeing the great group of people I met the last time I was at the Vermont group.

According to Julie, they will be handing out Dr. Neil Roodyn's book eXtreme .NET as one of the swag gifts. I hadn't read this book before, so over the last couple of days I have been reading it. So far, I would place it as a good introductory book to eXtreme Programming techniques using .NET. In terms of what to read first, second, and third, I recommend Kent Beck's book on Extreme Programming Explained and his book Test Driven Development: By Example, and then Dr. Neil's book For a more in-depth treatment, look at Jim Newkirk's excellent Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .NET.

In Dr. Neil's book, one term that I wasn't familiar with (at least the name) is "spiking". Spiking, according to Dr. Neil, is using rapid experimentation to validate your expectations about behavior, in this case, within the .NET Framework. I do that a lot when I am not sure about something and need to create some quick tests to validate or counter my assumptions. Its a powerful technique and time should be allowed for it when necessary.

After mentioning a "least privileged user" problem with Tree Surgeon a couple of days ago, Mike Roberts very kindly fixed the main problem of where to save the development tree.

You can find the updated version here. Thanks, Mike!

I will look at the problem of associating the program with multiple users this weekend and may submit a fix -- gives me a chance to look at another installer application.