James Newkirk's Blog : General

The CodePlex Team and the patterns & practices Summit

jamesnewkirk — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 02:56:00 GMT

The CodePlex team will be well represented again at the patterns & practices Summit in Redmond, WA - November 5-9, 2007 . We will be presenting or co-presenting the following sessions:

"Yet Another Talk on Agility" - Brad Wilson and Peter Provost
Dependency Injection Frameworks - Brad Wilson and Scott Densmore
EntLib Devolved - Scott Densmore
Make It Your Own - Scott Densmore
Lessons Learned in Programmer Testing - Jim Newkirk
CodePlex is sponsoring an evening event on Tuesday titled "Open Source in the Enterprise".

Peter's not on the CodePlex team but we like him just the same. For additonal information on the summit and all of the sessions please click here.

Why you should not use Setup and Teardown in NUnit

jamesnewkirk — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 01:48:00 GMT

I just posted my thoughts about Setup and Teardown at my new blog home. Click here.

Moving Day

jamesnewkirk — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 18:44:00 GMT

I have decided for a number of reasons to move my blog to a new address. The new address is http://jamesnewkirk.typepad.com. For a few posts I will be cross-posting but about a month from now I will be at the new address exclusively. Please join me at my new blog home.

TechEd 2007

jamesnewkirk — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 03:04:42 GMT

I will be at TechEd next week. I am helping out my co-author Will Stott at a Chalk-Talk Session on Monday, June 4 at 4:45p. The session is titled, "Microsoft Visual Studio Team System for Agile Teams".

In addition to this I will be at the "Open Source Software in Enterprise Development" panel discussion at lunch time on Thursday.

I will also be at one of the Microsoft booths at various times (I'll post more details on Sunday). If you questions/comments/complaints about CodePlex please drop by and let me know.

Teamprise and CodePlex

jamesnewkirk — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 06:09:00 GMT

When we launched CodePlex last June we thought there might be an issue with some projects that had contributors who did not work on Windows. This was confirmed when we heard feedback loud and clear saying I cannot put my project on CodePlex because the only client that you have for Source Control is Team Explorer.

Well that was certainly true until today... Earlier today Teamprise announced a complimentary license of the Teamprise client suite for anyone wanting to connect to an open source project on CodePlex. I can't thank Martin Woodward enough and the rest of the team at Teamprise for offering their great tool to our customers. This opens up CodePlex to a larger number of potential projects who in the past may have considered other open source hosting solutions.

If you are CodePlex contributor click here to sign up to receive the complimentary license.

How to make sense of Code Coverage metrics

jamesnewkirk — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 02:14:00 GMT

(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 team leader to mandate a minimum code coverage number (like "all code must have at least 80% code coverage before being checked in"). As agile advocates, you'd expect that our team's TDD'd code would have 100% code coverage. And you'd be wrong.

We could all agree that test-covered code is better than not, so we probably also agree that a high coverage number is better than a low one. Why can't we come up with a hard and fast number that means "good"? The answer is that it's different for every project, and even for a single project, that number may change over time. It is inevitable that code is written which isn't covered by a unit test. A few examples of acceptable code without tests might include: web service wrappers generated by Visual Studio, views in a Model-View-Presenter system, and code for which failure is only possible because the underlying platform fails (like helper methods that pass default values into more complex .NET CLR methods).

So when you run that code coverage system for the first time and it pops up "73%", what next? Well, if it's the first time you've run the test, you're probably going to check out that other 27% and see how you categorize it. Does that code need coverage or not? If so, use the lack of code coverage to educate yourself on taking smaller steps in TDD. But if not, what then? Is 73% a magical number?

The answer lies in a metric that can be used to predict the weather, barometric pressure. Today, weather.com says the barometric pressure in Seattle is 29.66”Hg and falling. More important than the absolute measurement is the trend: it tells you that the overcast and drizzling rain outside is going to get worse, not better. The two pieces of information - value and trend - are used to predict what will happen next. The same can be said for code coverage. You can determine the relative health of your tests by using the value and the trend to determine the appropriate action. That’s the important bit: code coverage gives you relative measurements against itself, not an absolute measurement against a target value. If your coverage fell from 73% to 72%, would you be worried? What if it fell from 73% to 67%?

Rather than holding your team to an absolute goal, use the trend to determine when you should invest time to figure out where you're covered and not, and to determine what to do about it.

CodePlex Deployment - February 20, 2007

jamesnewkirk — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 04:33:00 GMT

We deployed a new version of the CodePlex software this past Tuesday. I wanted to give you a break down of the features and issues that we deployed, as well as give you a preview of some changes to the upcoming release pages that we are currently working on for the deployment on March 13th. As I mentioned in my previous blog post voting has had a huge impact on the priority of the items that we work on. For example, the feature "Ability to add a Soapbox video to home page" was created on January 8, 2007. It received a large amount of votes, 45 in fact, and we implemented and deployed it within 5 weeks. We can't promise to turn all of the work items around as quickly but the more you vote the higher the priority. In our next deployment we are working on the release pages. To give you an approximate view of the changes here is the February 20, 2007 CodePlex deployment. Note: The Comments column is something that will not be part of the deployment.

Mock-Up Of New CodePlex Release Pages (to be deployed March 13, 2007)

Total Votes: 220

Work Items

Issues (11 Votes)

Votes	*Name (links to work item on CodePlex)*	Comments
5	Add a More link on quick markup guide
2	spelling error in People tab: "Coodinators"	:) Any more spelling errors and I will be purchasing a dictionary for all team members
1	Unable to show more than 10 items per page
1	Can't delete posts	This was an oversight. I suppose all bugs are but this was truly something we intended to do but somehow did not get put into the previous release.
1	Links to anchors within in a web page don't work (used to work)
0	Special national characters not working in CodePlex	All issues prior to the implementation of voting have a vote count as zero.
0	Export To Excel Maintain Sort Order
1	the forum of CodePlex can not display chinese character

Features (209 Votes)

Votes	*Name (links to work item on CodePlex)*	Comments
48	No way to contact user	We have been wanting to do this for awhile. I hope this helps facilitate more 1 to 1 communication. We did implement it with appropriate safeguards. If you do not want to be contacted you do not have to provide your email.
45	Feature request: Ability to add a Soapbox vid to home page
40	Project Logo	Many people have been asking for customizations of the project home page. This feature allows you to change the graphic and replace the title with your own custom logo.
33	Create profile page for users	This is the beginning of work that we will be doing for individual profiles, keep your suggestions coming.
22	Go to Work Item	Believe it or not we used to have this feature. You might ask why it was removed. I removed it as a requirement when we built the new Advanced View. Its back and I probably won't take it out again.
12	The issues I have submited
6	Need to be able to bulk edit work items on codeplex	We did this explicitly on the page and it also works with right-click behavior.
3	I should be able to search for the bug reported by me	This is a duplicate of work item #3096
0	I want to multi language support on Wiki...

CodePlex Deployment - January 30, 2007

jamesnewkirk — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 05:04:00 GMT

We deployed a new version of CodePlex last week on Tuesday, January 30th. Some of the features/issues that we deployed include the following:

Forums/Discussions (56 votes) - The theme (more on this in a separate blog post) for this release was to provide an update to the forums, which have been renamed discussions. This included the ability to edit a post, and to use email as a means to notify you of follow-up replies, and a mechanism to have a discussion thread be only visible to the developers and coordinators.
Source Code Browsing (55 votes) - The source code tab has been augmented to allow anybody to view the source code directly. This was the single feature that received the largest number of votes on the CodePlex Issue Tracker.
Sponsored Ads - We now offer project owners the choice of placing sponsored ads on their project pages. Project advertising is provided through Kanoodle BrightAds, and all the proceeds from Kanoodle go entirely to the project owner. Many open source developers work long and hard on their projects and use donations or sponsorships as a way of helping to support their efforts. We wanted to give project owners the ability of having sponsored ads for their project if they choose.
New Project Creation - Prior to this release the new project creation process required the user to fill out a form and we would create the project. In this release that step is now fully automated. Any registered user can now create a project on CodePlex. All projects are created with a 30 day grace period where the person who created the project can update the wiki, upload the source code, create a release etc. If you have been waiting to create a project I encourage you to click here and get the process started.
Granular RSS Feeds (21 votes) - In addition to the overall project feed you can now subscribe to an RSS feed for just the wiki, releases, issue tracker, discussions, or source code.

Overall we deployed features and issues that had received 143 votes. I can't tell you how helpful the voting has been in helping us prioritize the work that we do. As I look forward to the next deployment on February 20th we are looking at the highest voted issues as candidates. Click here to see the latest issues.

CodePlex is Hiring

jamesnewkirk — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 22:36:00 GMT

Would you like to work on the CodePlex project? Now is your chance to participate in the further development of the website. The CodePlex team has an open web developer position. For details click here.

My Car was in for Patching (I mean service)

jamesnewkirk — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 01:40:00 GMT

I was having a problem with my car last week and I took it into the dealership because it is still under warranty. The problem I was having was the radio worked intermittently. I figured that there was something wrong with the radio. Wrong! I received a call from the dealership at the end of the first day and they said they would need another day because they were having difficulties patching the software modules. :)

On day 2 I called again and the dealership indicated my car would be "fixed" before the end of the day. The problem today was that some of the patches they installed caused a hardware incompatibility with the telematics unit (~OnStar) in the car and it had to be replaced to work with the patched modules.

As I drove out of the dealership with my newly patched vehicle I had this strange feeling that my car was now less reliable due to its dependence on software. I would not have had that feeling if they said they had replaced the radio. Replacing the hardware seemed like a more permanent solution, which I find interesting.

The upside of this is that since I am totally incompetant when it comes to fixing my car mechanically it appears that if the software was made available I might be able to work on my car.

CodePlex Deployment

jamesnewkirk — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 03:18:00 GMT

I have been remiss in my posting with regard to the last CodePlex deployment.

We deployed a new version of CodePlex on September 26th. Click here to see the details. There are a few things which I would like to highlight about the deployment.

Wiki Changes - We revamped the Wiki rendering engine. This has corrected a number of bugs associated with the Wiki. In additon we also made the "Preview" page work better. Lastly with regard to the Wiki we changed the way that the Wiki styled the code markup. For an example, click here.
Editing a license - We have had a number of people ask for the ability to alter a license for a project. In this deployment we added this as a feature. Most of the time an open source project does not change its license. However, there are details that need to be updated and now project coordinators can do this for their projects. We do keep a history of the license changes as well.
File Download Counts - In the previous versions of CodePlex we posted the number of file downloads in the recent activity section on the project home page. Many of you have asked for download counts to be totals as opposed to the last 7 days. In this deployment we have moved the download count from recent activity section to the releases tab. In addition we now list the total downloads on a per file basis. Thanks for the suggestion. Note: We have discovered an issue with the download counts and how they manifest themselves in the Popularity ranking on the Project Directory page. It seems that if you have an image in your wiki pages this is counted as a download as well. This is the cause of some projects having a small number of page views and very large download counts. This will be corrected in the November 7th deployment.

Please keep you comments and suggestions coming. Your feedback to date has been invaluable.

Pondering TDD in Microsoft .NET, Second Edition

jamesnewkirk — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 07:08:00 GMT

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, and most important of all there has been a great deal of learning on how to approach TDD in .NET. The last change is what compels me the most to think about updating the book. The first two things are minor in my opinion and do not warrant an update to the book.

If I were to update the book I would like to get feedback on which tool I should use in the examples (NUnit, VS Team System, or MbUnit, etc.). I imagine that no matter which tool was chosen there might be a chapter in the appendix on the other tools.

CodePlex Team Interview is now live on Channel 9

jamesnewkirk — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 04:19:00 GMT

The team interview went live today. You can find it at

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=226791

Let me know your thoughts.

CodePlex Discussions at TechEd Boston

jamesnewkirk — Sun, 28 May 2006 02:15:00 GMT

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 but please feel free to contact me. I look forward to meeting with you and getting feedback on how we can improve the site.

ARC 206 - Evolving to Patterns at TechEd

jamesnewkirk — Sun, 28 May 2006 02:09:00 GMT

I will be in Boston for TechEd in June to present a talk about design patterns and (IMO) how best to use them in your everyday development. In the past I have found design patterns talks less than inspiring. They tend to be just a presentation of a catalog. The approach that I take this time is to talk about specific code related problems and then show how applying a design pattern helps improve the code. I use refactoring once I have identified the problem and the pattern that I want to use to evolve the code. There are 2 great books that on this topic. The first is Refactoring to Patterns by Joshua Kerievsky and Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers.

The session is scheduled for Tuesday June 13 at 8:30 AM.