James Newkirk's Blog : Microsoft patterns & practices

The CodePlex Team and the patterns & practices Summit

jamesnewkirk — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 07:25:00 GMT

The CodePlex team will be well represented (in fact you might get sick of us) at the patterns & practices Summit in Redmond, WA - October 9-12, 2006 . We will be presenting or co-presenting the following sessions:

Application Frameworks in IT - Jonathan Wanagel
Dependency Injection Architecture - Brad Wilson
Evolving to Patterns - Jim Newkirk
"The Agile Talk on Agility" - Brad Wilson and Peter Provost
TDD for GUIs - Brad Wilson
Micro-Pairing - Brad Wilson and Peter Provost

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.

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.

CodePlex.com Beta

jamesnewkirk — Tue, 16 May 2006 17:43:00 GMT

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 in collaborative development projects. The web-site launched last Thursday, May 11, 2006 and is currently in beta. I encourage you to check out the site at http://codeplex.com . I look forward to getting your feedback on what we did right, wrong and suggestions on how to improve. Please feel free to respond directly. Alternatively we also have a project on the CodePlex site (here) where you can post your comments in the discussion forum.

We currently have 12 projects on the site and as we progress through the beta there will be additional projects and more content in each individual project. Some of the current projects include the "Atlas" Control Toolkit, NUnitLite, and IronPython. If you are interested in hosting your project on the site please send me an email. In this beta period we will be increasing the number of projects slowly as we scale out the infrastructure to ensure high reliability and availability for our users.

PDC05 Sessions

jamesnewkirk — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 21:45:00 GMT

I will be in Los Angeles next week (September 13-16, 2005).

On Wednesday (September 14) and Thursday (September 15) I will be in the Product Pavilion at the GotDotNet station. I don't have specific times in which I will be there but if you let me know a time I will be sure to be there. If you get a chance I would like to hear about what features you feel are important in the next version of the GotDotNet workspaces and as always, I like to talk to people about their experiences and challenges doing Test-Driven Development.

On Friday (September 16) at 10:30 AM, I'll be participating in a panel discussion entitled "Advances in Agile Development". The people participating on the panel include: Randy Miller, Peter Provost, Donald Reifer, Don Reinertsen, Clemens Szyperski, and Kumar Vadaparty. I hope we will have a lively discussion and debate. One way for you to help out is to ask questions. If you are planning on attending please get involved by asking questions. If you cannot make it please post questions as a comment below and we'll add them to the questions from the audience. If you ask a question I will post a summary of the answers.

NUnit Converter V0.5

jamesnewkirk — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 21:36:00 GMT

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 in Enterprise Library. The other feature that was added to this version is a report on the results of the conversion which is displayed in the output window.

My next focus will be on providing information on the conversion process itself. I will display more comprehensive conversion information including information about whether or not a class could be converted. At the moment the only thing that could fail is when a test fixture class uses inheritance. However, there is functionality in V2.2 of NUnit that just will not convert and I want that to output as errors in the task list and output window. This is a big step along the way of fully supporting V2.2 and requires a change to the way that I was doing the conversion. Prior to this I was able to look at each individual attribute and just convert it. However I cannot do that and give you status about a specific test or test fixture. I should have this next version out by the middle of August.

I am looking forward to feedback. If you have suggestions or problems please send me email or enter bugs on the workspace.

NUnit Converter V0.4

jamesnewkirk — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 09:11:00 GMT

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 a project. The early versions worked on single files.

I had intended to add this feature at some point but I figured there was no time like the present. Plus it will help them convert their files quicker. As in previous releases of the converter I do not automatically create test projects as part of the conversion process. You will have to create the test projects that are appropriate for your solution and copy the NUnit code into the test project. Once the files are there you can convert all them with one click of the mouse.

The next set of features is to fully support V2.2 of NUnit.

You can download the latest release at http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/nunitaddons. If you have any comments please send me mail or use the message boards/bug tracker in the GotDotNet workspace.

NUnit Converter V0.3

jamesnewkirk — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 10:12:00 GMT

There is a new version (0.3) of the converter in the GotDotNet workspace. Click here to download.

This version adds support for VB.NET and fixes a few bugs that I discovered as I did more extensive acceptance testing. I have done much more acceptance testing with C# conversion because I have a lot more files that are C# based. If people have a lot of VB.NET files I would appreciate any help you can provide by trying to convert them and letting me know what the issues you encounter. That way I can add the issues as new tests and the next version will be better. This release has only been tested with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2.

My next feature priority is to convert whole projects. In addition I will be fixing bugs as they are encountered and posting new releases as appropriate.

Thanks and I look forward to the feedback.

NUnit Tests and Visual Studio 2005 Team System

jamesnewkirk — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 22:15:00 GMT

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 with the tests I’ve written in NUnit. Well, I have started working on a conversion tool. I am ready to demonstrate this at least for C# files. If you would like to see how it works please come by the Community Lounge (MSCOMM Community Lounge # 16) at the times listed below and we can take it for a spin. I do want to get a plug in for my old group, patterns & practices. I am using the Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) to integrate the conversion tool into Visual Studio. For more information about GAT you can read Wojtek's blog or you can download here.

Monday, June 6th 4-7 PM
Tuesday. June 7th 12-4 PM
Wednesday, June 8th 9-11 AM, 3-5 PM
Thursday, June 9th 3-6 PM

It would be great to get feedback on the progress to date. Note: At the moment I have not nailed down how this conversion tool will be shipped.

TechEd

jamesnewkirk — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 22:07:00 GMT

I will be in Orlando next week (June 6-10, 2005). I have been working on a number of things, blogging not being one of them, but I am sure given my lack of posts you already know this. I would like to discuss with you what features you would like to see in the next version of the GotDotNet workspaces. If you are interested please come to the Community Lounge (MSCOMM Community Lounge). I will be there at the times listed below. If I am not there you can also talk with Sandy Khaund, Betsy Aoki, or Korby Parnell. This is an optimal time to provide input because we are still in the early stages of planning/development.

Monday, June 6^th 4-7 PM
Tuesday. June 7^th 12-4 PM
Wednesday, June 8^th 9-11 AM, 3-5 PM
Thursday, June 9^th 3-6 PM

I hope you get a chance to come by.

Change is good

jamesnewkirk — Tue, 05 Apr 2005 07:53:00 GMT

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 like David Trowbridge, Ward Cunningham, and my development team which includes Jonathan Wanagel, Naveen Yajaman, Scott Densmore, Peter Provost, and most recently Brad Wilson. I think and I am sure many of you would agree this is great group of people and I consider myself privileged to have worked directly with them. You may be asking yourself why I would leave. In short, am I running from a situation or running to a better situation. In this case I am embracing a new and I think a unique opportunity at Microsoft. For the past six months Sandy Khaund and I (among others) have been working on a way for Microsoft employees and customers to do collaborative software development. As Sandy says in one of his posts, be careful for what you wish for, you might get it. In fact, I will be joining Sandy’s team to lead the next generation of the GotDotNet workspaces. I have already hit the ground running and you should be seeing more posts going forward as we articulate a vision for the next version of workspaces. I realize there is a lot of competition out there (I know I used Sourceforge to build NUnit V2) and some of you have not been satisfied by the current version of the workspaces. However, we are addressing some short term needs (thanks Betsy) and I am sure you will be seeing some interesting things as we move forward. In addition to Sandy I am very much looking forward to working with Betsy Aoki and Korby Parnell.

If you have an idea/suggestion/comment/complaint about workspaces please let me know. Customer feedback will play a key role in the enhancements that we we planning for the site. Consider this your first chance to participate in the shaping of what we hope becomes the best collaborative software development site. For those that want to do more! We are currently hiring a Software Development Engineering Lead and a Software Test Engineering Lead. If you are interested drop me a line and we will talk.

patterns & practices - Enterprise Library and Pattern Share

jamesnewkirk — Sat, 29 Jan 2005 23:24:00 GMT

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 Library. Enterprise Library is a collection of seven application blocks for enterprise .NET development. The blocks in Enterprise Library assist in the following scenarios: Caching, Configuration, Cryptography, Data Access, Exception Handling, Logging and Security. The members of my team who worked on Enterprise Library included, Scott Densmore (Development Lead), Peter Provost, and Brian Button. The team has been working on this for close to a year. Not only is the functionality provided, along with the source code, but we have also shipped in the deliverable the unit tests that we use to validate the library. Congratulations to the team! If you want to find out more about Enterprise Library click here.

The second deliverable is http://patternshare.org. The PatternShare community site brings together software patterns from different authors in one place to show relationships between existing patterns and to encourage you to contribute new ones. By combining our efforts, the patterns community can increase pattern usage and better meet the needs of developers and architects who use patterns. The person on my team who worked on this project was Naveen Yajaman. Congratulations to the entire team. I encourage you to check the site as well contribute ideas of your own.

New job openings in patterns & practices

jamesnewkirk — Mon, 03 Jan 2005 18:27:00 GMT

Would you like to work on a development team that includes people like Ward Cunningham, David Trowbridge, Peter Provost, Scott Densmore, Sandy Khaund, to name a few?

We just opened two new positions in the patterns & practices development team. The first position is for a Software Development Engineer. The second position we are looking for is a Software Development Manager. In both cases we are looking for experienced people who can help mentor the team as well as execute.

If you are interested in either position please submit your resume or drop me a mail.

patterns & practices - Enterprise Library Announced

jamesnewkirk — Tue, 03 Aug 2004 07:22:00 GMT

Well summer vacation is over and it's back to work. I have a number of things which I have been working on over the past few months. The biggest news is the public announcement of Enterprise Library for patterns & practices. I encourage you to read the following blogs from some of the developers who are working on the project for more information on what has been an exciting project to be involved with.

Scott Densmore
Brian Button
Hisham Baz

I also encourage you to join the GotDotNet workspace for information on availability.

Microsoft patterns & practices Block Testing

jamesnewkirk — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 16:18:00 GMT

“Microsoft patterns and practices test team is currently working on developing guidance focusing on testing .NET application blocks. The guide's TOC and two draft chapters have been made available so its possible for others to provide feedback.

To view the draft chapters, please download them from the Releases section of http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/pagtest

The available draft chapters cover Code Review of a .net Application Block and Testing Methodologies.

Other draft chapters will be made available later covering subjects such as:
- Testing Tools
- Testing Methodologies
- Design Review of a .NET Application Block
- Code Review of a .NET Application Block
- Functionality Testing of a .NET Application Block
- Globalization Testing Of A .NET Application Block
- Performance Testing Of A .NET Application Block
- Unit testing
- Integration Testing