If you’re not using xUnit (and you should be), at least consider adopting the practices they have for dealing with exceptions in unit tests. From the very first release, they moved us from this: [ExpectedException(typeof(InvalidOperationException))] public...

This morning, I had a conversation with a colleague of mine who has recently started using EDD about "exposing things just for the purpose of testing." Although I have run across the odd occasion where I may need to add a get property to a class in order...

The main reason for my lack of blogs posts recently has been the final push to get Gatineau (adCenter Analytics) out the door and I'm happy to say that it's gone live :) I'll try to get a few screenshots up next week. You'll need an adCenter account to...

Dark Side of the Web Panel with Jaewoong Lee (Daum), Dan Rose (Facebook), Chris Alden (SixApart) and a lawyer. Anonymity allows people to be expressive/rude; if you're rude in real life you probably will be online too. South Korea developed government...

One of my teammates just sent a link to LINQPad , a small application written by the authors of C# 3.0 in a Nutshell . Looks like a great tool for anyone that wants to learn LINQ or needs to execute queries on a regular basis.

Back in the 'early days' of xUnit, I posted an example of how to use the BeforeAfterTestAttribute to modify a test's current identity. Now that there is an official xUnit.net Extensions project , I've cleaned it up and submitted the code in change set...

If you're interested in taking advantage of multiple processors and code in .NET with a minimal amount of effort then this is the library for you. The introductory MSDN article is here . Long live Parallel.For() :)

It's been tough not being able to write about anything that we work on here in Dublin, but slowly the details are starting to come out. Ian's latest post on what we presented at e-Metrics includes a demo video of Graffiti, an automatic tagging module...

Our team here in Dublin has launched a recruiting site at http://www.joinmicrosofteurope.com/ . It's got information on what it's like to work here, some of the many benefits, and first-hand interviews with members of our team. As well, we're starting...

Those of you who have switched over to xUnit.Net may have a received a nasty surprise with the 'type members layout' feature of ReSharper: it doesn't respect method attributes. Namely, you can tell it to not reorder methods in an NUnit fixture like this...

There has been mixed reaction to the removal of [SetUp] and [TearDown] in xUnit.net. Personally, I think it's great as it helps to raise unit test 'smells', particularly around how classes interact with each another. Here's a small example of how we can...

Depending on how your unit tests are setup, you may not be running as the proper user and won't have the necessary permissions to invoke a method. If this happens, you can easily alter the principle thread's identity with the following code. For...

NUnit is dead! Long live xUnit.net! There are several cool features, including aspect-like extensibility for tests, but the two changes that will immediately make a difference in my day-to-day coding are: [ExpectedException] is gone. In...

I'm currently working on a project that has a Cache database that stores query results, and so naturally there are times when I'm playing inside of Management Studio that I want to delete the cache. However, I don't want to drop the entire database (because...

Toby is less than happy. Due to some unforeseen circumstances , he recently lost all the code he'd been working on for the EDM project. For some unknown reason, he'd never bothered to setup a source control server and vows to not make the same mistake...

One morning, as Toby is drinking his cup of hot water, a thought strikes him - did the acceptance stories really cover everything he discovered about the domain in the first few days? Slightly worried, he finds the paragraph he so proudly wrote a while...

So it's become obvious that having a large, all-encompassing EDMSystem class was probably not the way to go. It did give us a way to express what we wanted our acceptance tests to do, but the time has come to bite the bullet and take a look at where the...

Being passionate about anything can have its drawbacks; in my zeal to give inside-out development a shot, I completely disregarded a couple principles I hold dear. SRP ? Out the window. Test-first code? Left by the side of the road. I do have a set of...

During my rather long wait for the plane in Dublin this morning, I had the opportunity to revisit Toby and his company's EDM. Unfortunately, by the time I got to some stories, I was actually in the air with no internet access and as such had to just leave...

One of the neat things I saw at the Agile conference was a short demo of RSpec and RBehave . Intrigued, I did a quick search and found the .NET equivalents: Behave# and NSpec . Note: I'm not sure I completely understand the differences between xSpec...

Yesterday afternoon I attended a workshop held by Michael Feathers and Emmanuel Gaillot called 'Design Sense - Can We Teach Deep Design Skill With Perceptual Examples?' The aim was to see if, after developing for many years, we gain the ability to sense...

Agilitization Robustification Administrivia

This morning's I went to a session called 'Ruby's Secret Sauce: Metaprogramming' . It was interactive and so I had my first opportunity to try out some of the neat things you can do in Ruby. Here are a few things that stuck out for me: method_missing...

This morning was Paul King's presentation on 'Agile Developer Practices for Dynamic Languages.' Although we're not using Ruby or Groovy, with the updates coming in .NET 3.5, it was still good to see what challenges we could face in the future. Some of...

Yesterday afternoon I attended Emmanuel Gaillot's 'Shout Kata' session - programming a full client-server infrastructure in TDD. Even though I was quite jetlagged, it was an enjoyable time. Using ruby, he built a very simple chat server and client in...