James Newkirk's Blog

Over 13 months ago (April 4, 2005 in fact) I posted something on my blog that I was leaving the patterns & practices team. Since that time we assembled a team of people and in turn built a community site for developers to innovate and participate...

I am looking for a new example to demonstrate Test Driven Development. In the TDD book that Alexei and I wrote we demonstrated TDD using a Stack. For a copy of the chapter see http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/tdd . We felt that this was a good example...

In a previous post Ben Lowery asked the question? Why is the collection in your test fixture class static? Here is the code from the previous post: [ TestFixture ] public class BookmarkCollectionFixture { private static BookmarkCollection collection;...

I know there is nothing that I can say that will be viewed objectively, because I am a Microsoft employee and I have been tangentially involved with the VS Team System development team (I am the development lead for the patterns & practices). That...

I recently installed Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 and wanted to understand what I had to do to get NUnit running. NUnit installed without a problem. Cool, instinctively I did what I do every time I install NUnit, I run NUnit's tests. All 478 NUnit tests...

One of the often requested features of NUnit was the ability to test private member variables and private methods. I resisted because I always felt that if you limited yourself to the public interface that enabled you to freely change the implementation...

As usual when you sit down and write your first bit of code in a new language or in this case a new unit testing framework what else would you write other then the tested version of Hello World (thanks to Scott Densmore ). In this case the unit testing...

I have been getting asked quite a bit lately about updating the Test-Driven Development book. A number of things have changed since the book was published. Among them is .NET 2.0 has shipped, Visual Studio Team System has an integrated unit testing tool...

Tests in a TestFixture share common initialization code. Create a method in the TestFixture, move common initialization code to the method, and execute the method prior to each test. Before: [ Test ] public void UponCreationCountIsZero() { BookmarkCollection...

(co-authored with Brad Wilson ) Even since the release of Visual Studio Team System 2005 with easy to use code coverage tools, people inside (and outside) of Microsoft have been talking about what it means. The most common approach we've seen is for a...

I have posted an early version (0.2) of a conversion program. The program converts C# NUnit code into tests compatible with Visual Studio 2005 Team System. It is an early version - there is still much work to do. See the release notes for what is converted...

Visual Studio 2005 has a feature that will help me and hopefully you a great deal. See, I do not know how to touch type. However, many people who have seen me type think I am one of the fastest two finger typists around. This is probably not something...

You say this new unit testing tool in VS Team System is something that you want to use but you have a large number of existing tests in NUnit. For some reason you don’t have a great desire to walk through and change all the attribute names. Well...

For a number of months many people have been after to me write a blog. I have resisted because I did not want to be one of the people who started writing a blog with a lot of energy only to see it whither to a few posts a year. However over the past few...

I will be attending TechEd in Boston in June. If you have questions about CodePlex ( http://codeplex.com ) or ideas on what we need to do to improve I would like to talk with you. As it gets closer I will be setting up some specific times and a place...

From Brad Wilson (The .NET Guy) Italicize the ones you've seen and Bold the ones you actually liked. I was surprised by how many of these I had seen. I had to go to #42 "Rush Hour 2" before I missed one and I only missed 6 out of the 100. I guess it figures...

I have released V0.5. You can get it here . Due to the feedback I received from Scott Densmore this new version has support for files contained in folders within a project and a number of other bugs he and Brian Button found when converting the tests...

Sorry for the diversions and the delay. The first thing I need to is choose the first test. It really does not matter which test is chosen first, really it doesn't. I have to finish all of the tests to finish the task. There are a couple of choices. I...

The first test I implemented last week turned out to describe an excellent example of the Fake It ('Til You Make It') pattern. As we continue with the next test let's see if we will continue to "Fake It" or do we have enough tests and information to begin...

I sat down today with Peter Provost and Brian Button and we outlined a number of user stories for the Bookmark Collection TDD example. My focus for the example is on programmer tests. Therefore, I am not going to use Customer Tests, although it would...

The first story that we are going to implement in the bookmark collection is the following: Bookmark Collection CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) Our collection should inherit from IDictionary and behave accordingly This implementation and the corresponding...

In addition to GotDotNet workspaces V2 I have been busy on the testing front. A number of customers have started looking at the new testing tool in Visual Studio 2005 Team System. One of the first questions that comes to mind is what am I going to do...

As some of you may already know, I have decided to leave the patterns & practices team. I have been working with the team as a consultant and as an employee for 2 1/2 years. I have enjoyed my tenure with the group. I was able to work with great people...

It's been awhile but I have been pretty busy. I know both of these were delivered yesterday (28 January 2005) but I wanted to alert you to two new items from the patterns & practices team if you have not already heard. The first one is Enterprise...

I was talking with Scott Densmore and Brian Button who are busy converting the tests in Enterprise Library to use Visual Studio 2005 Team System and they mentioned that they would like to have the converter convert all the files that are contained in...