DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by Mintman

Describing the journey

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:08:55 GMT

Often when explaining something it's easy to straight to the end goal saying: "This is how to do it. Isn't it awesome?!" At this point you will get a blank stare and quite possibly a "why?" This can be frustrating, you're showing something that's an order of magnitude better than the current solution but they can't see it. This isn't their problem. They aren't idiots. It's your fault.

What's so good about OpenRasta?

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:21:47 GMT

I've been proclaiming the greatness of OpenRasta to anyone unfortunate to start talking to me about web development recently. I thought it was about time that I recorded the reasons I love it so much somewhere everyone can see. OpenRasta is by no means a finished product but it has principles at its core that I value greatly and give it massive potential.

What is BDD (Behaviour Driven Design)?

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:28:00 GMT

"What is BDD?" is a question that's been doing the rounds lately within the altnetgroup and devbookclub. There's a great deal of mysticism surrounding it as if it were some exclusive members club. I'm going to slay some of the myths and tell you what BDD really is.

BDD from scratch - mock management

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:45:43 GMT

In part one I covered how to organise your tests into the Given-When-Then style through the use of an abstract base class. In this post I'm going to show how you can manage your mocks more efficiently. Though not really a part of BDD I've found it very useful in clarifying the behaviour described in my tests as it reduces the amount of noise caused by the definition of variables.

BDD from scratch - Build your own framework (Part 1)

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 10:44:38 GMT

BDD is a higher level of unit testing, it creates better documentation of your system by recording its intent which makes your system easier to learn for new developers and relearn for when you revisit your code further down the line. I'm going to show you how to build your own BDD testing framework on top of a vanilla unit testing framework. For my example I'm going to use NUnit but I've applied the same principles with MbUnit, xUnit and it should work with any other unit testing framework too.

Comparing the performance of IronRuby, Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9 on Window

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:17:59 GMT

A benchmark comparing IronRuby, a .NET based implementation of Ruby, with two standard C-based implementations.

Refactoring Udi Dahan's domain event code

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:12:57 GMT

What I've done here is show my refactored version of the code and explain why I think it is better. What I'm going to be doing is utilising the strategy pattern to separate the logic of dispatching events from the action of requesting an event to be dispatched.

Overloading post - a change of mind

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:00:49 GMT

Explanation behind the change in post overloading mechanism in RESTful ASP.NET MVC

ASP.NET MVC route testing with HTTP verbs

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:20:50 GMT

Some simple extension methods for checking routes when you need to pass the HTTP verb as well.

RESTful ASP.NET MVC

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:30:08 GMT

This is the first in what could be a series of posts on how to modify the internals of ASP.NET MVC in order to make it work in a more RESTful manner.

The Law of Demeter Is Not A Dot Counting Exercise

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 08:45:00 GMT

As a discussion of a code expression with more than one dot grows longer, the probability that someone claims a Law of Demeter violation approaches 1

Rest - a quick summary

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:28:41 GMT

I'd read a lot of blogs talking about REST and it's benefits but I hadn't fully got it. Whilst on holiday I read RESTful Web Services, which I had seen recommended, in an effort to try and finally grok REST. I thoroughly recommend this book, it helped me connect a lot of previously separate ideas into a coherent whole. What I hope to do here is give an overview of what I've learnt from the book to act as a reference to myself and maybe help other people in the process.

Opening a Command Prompt for the solution in Visual Studio

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:57:32 GMT

Ever find yourself needing to open a command prompt for the solution? Here's a step-by-step tutorial on how to be able to do it in a single key combination.

SubSonic 3.0: The SimpleRepository « Rob Conery

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:45:01 GMT

Rob is adding a very nice simple repository to SubSonic 3.0 that will give SubSonic top-notch POCO support and very slick migrations. Mapping files be damned!

Establishing team values

Mon, 18 May 2009 15:44:23 GMT

A shared identity and core set of values can only benefit a team. This is a brief explanation of how to establish some.

Kona 3: Learning Behavior Driven Development (BDD)

Fri, 15 May 2009 20:46:26 GMT

Holy cow! Another *DD - man I really must have an IV with that Alt.NET Punch just coursing like a train in my veins! I ask for your patience with this one - cause I think BDD is a really good tool to know - whether you use it or not - knowing the workings of it will allow you to have some intelligent conversation the next time you're in Austin :).

When geek rockstars go wild

Thu, 14 May 2009 17:22:39 GMT

Saw this whilst on my way to Progressive .NET on Sunday. Don't break this guy's build!

New name for ALT.NET

Fri, 08 May 2009 18:20:22 GMT

I've always felt the name ALT.NET to be quite elitist, here I suggest an alternative.

Difference between AreEqual and AreSame

Wed, 06 May 2009 20:03:05 GMT

The difference between the two assertions are quite simple. Assert.AreSame checks that they are the exact same object, memory reference and all (in the case of .NET using ReferenceEquals). Assert.AreEqual checks that objectOne.Equals(objectTwo) will return true.

ELMAH: Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET (and MVC too!)

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:01:11 GMT

ELMAH has been one of the most useful tools for ASP.NET developers to log errors on their web applications. Now Scott has a nice talk on how to use it even in your ASP.NET MVC applications. Cool!

6 Tools To Be An Effective Web Developer

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:01:02 GMT

There has always been and probably always will be feuds over what is the best platform but what I want to show you is that those arguments are mostly irrelevant. Regardless of what platform you choose to develop on there are most of the same tools available in one form or another. The common components, for me anyway, that help me produce high quality code faster and is easier to maintain are a good IDE, easy to use unit testing and mocking frameworks, an ORM, a MVC framework, and a good JavaScript library.

M is to DSL as Drag & Drop is to programming

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:31:15 GMT

I see M as a whole lot of effort trying to optimize something that is really not that interesting, complex or really very hard. I look at the M language, the way that you worked with, the tooling and the API and I would fully agree that it is a nice parser generator. What it is not, I have to say, is a DSL toolkit. It is just one, small, part of building a DSL. And, to be perfectly honest, M is the drag & drop of DSL.

Windows Mobile is short changing .NET Developers

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 21:01:04 GMT

The .NET platform is an incredibly powerful and productive toolset that stretches itself well on the client-side, the server-side and now with Silverlight as a web-client, though with one glaring exception - on a mobile device.

Test aided development

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 22:56:22 GMT

Conveying the benefits of unit tests, even without going the whole hog to test driven development.

Teaching, Symbology, and Intellectual Materialism - The Chasm is a Vac

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 06:14:10 GMT

The world is filled with people who don't understand advanced subjects, but who would like to learn. And the world is blessed with many knowledgeable people who can't understand why the things that they've discovered, learned, and elaborated are not being soaked up by everyone else.