I'm a command line app junkie as I love working with it. I guess it's my DOS/Linux roots but I find things go faster when you're not dealing with a GUI and a mouse. Command line tools like NAnt and MSBuild have all sorts of options and syntax. Some of it discoverable, some of it not so much. NAnt for...

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)...

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...

This is just a post to direct people to the CI Feature Matrix that ThoughtWorks maintains. If you're up in the air about choosing a CI system, then this is the page for you. They maintain an unbiased view (their words, not mine) of all the CI systems out there (and there are a lot of them). So if you...

I have Mingle 2.0 upgraded in our test environment and have been going through the new features, upgrade woes, and some remarks from the peanut gallery. Here's the rundown on this Agile planning tool. Upgrading Upgrading was a bit of a pain. To do the test I backed up our Mingle db and restored it to...

A co-worker turned me onto Project White , an automated UI testing framework by ThoughtWorks. This along the same lines as NUnitForms and other automated systems. It's basically Selenium for WinForms (which rocks in its own right) so I thought I would dig more into White (it has support for WPF as well...

I got an email from ScrumMaster Andrea about an update I should do to my Scrum Tools Roundup post . Andrea drew my attention to the Agilo for Scrum tool, an open source add-on for the Trac Project . The Trac project is a wiki/issue tracking system (written in Python, my #2 favourite language next to...

For the longest time, I've been using NCover for coverage. It was free, gave good results and with NCoverExplorer and CI integration it was the perfect tool. Easy to use, easy to setup, and worth the typical hassle of new tools (setup, learning, configuration, etc.) NCover has since gone commercial and...

I mentioned we were getting a release of TreeSurgeon out that included 2005 and now 2008 support. The code is all checked in so if you're interested in getting it, go for it. The "official" release hasn't been put together yet for due to problems with the third party libraries and tools TS includes when...

I'm a big fan of the Planning Poker technique for estimating. It basically is a process where everyone in the room gets together with cards and estimates effort for user stories. Each card has a number on it (a modified fibinacci sequence) of 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, and 100. Then everyone reveals...