DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by david_holland

A TDD success story

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 01:59:50 GMT

A real world story about how test-driven development led to a highly successful project.

Done means Done

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:29:25 GMT

A great post about setting realistic expectations when developing software. In many cases, we're even fooling ourselves sometimes.

Why should you care about test driven development?

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 01:05:55 GMT

You've been writing software for many years. You've worked on several different projects that were very important to your company, and you were able to deliver them on time. So why should you change the way that you write code? I was in the same place at one time, but now I've found a better way.

Deep Fried Bytes 52: Learning Dark Arts of Debugging from Scott Walker

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:04:26 GMT

Have you always wanted to learn more about debugging your software? Or just really want to know what your software is doing especially when it has bugs? We have a treat for you. In this episode, Keith and Woody sat down with Scott Walker to get some tips and tricks for setting up a debugging environment first and then how to use the tools properly to fix those nasty errors your customers and users keep having.

Visual Studio 2010 Keyboard Shortcuts Poster

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 14:00:00 GMT

You can now download the reference cards (available as print ready pdf's) for the default keybindings in Visual Studio 2010 for Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++ and Visual F# over here

Comparing and Contrasting Moq and Rhino Mocks

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:40:09 GMT

My friend Jon is starting a training course in an effort to quickly bring developers up to speed on test driven development. As part of this effort, he has developed a unit test suite aimed at helping folks understand Rhino Mocks, a popular testing tool. After looking through the tests and seeing a lot of the Rhino API that I wasn't familiar with, I wondered if there were similar undiscovered nooks in my favorite mocking framework: Moq.

How to use Rhino Mocks - documented through tests

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:11:15 GMT

I wanted to come up with a way to show people how to use Rhino Mocks (other than telling them to read the documentation). What better way to do this than by showing you how it works through a bunch of simple unit tests that document how Rhino Mocks works?

Working with WCF: Part One: Introduction and Your First Service

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:30:00 GMT

I've been playing with WCF since .NET 3 came out. Sometimes I have to be reminded that not everybody is as familiar with all it's "cob-webby corners" as I am. And that's OK. Often (too often) I encounter someone who has NEVER used WCF and doesn't even know where to begin.That's not so OK.

Composition versus Inheritance

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:45:00 GMT

Discusses the benefit of Composition versus Inheritance. Touches on IoC Containers and how they can help you achieve more granular bits of code that make your applications more flexible and easier to maintain.

The business value of test-driven development

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:28:36 GMT

Most businesses are creating software for one primary reason - to make money. In order to make money, we need software that meets the needs of the business and can be developed and maintained in a reasonable amount of time with a high level of quality. Test-driven development is a discipline that will help you achieve these goals.

Make TDD your meal ticket in 2010

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 19:45:15 GMT

It's almost the time of the year where people start making new year's resolutions and setting goals for the upcoming year. Allow me to propose something for your list: make TDD your meal ticket in 2010.

Make your project pluggable with StructureMap

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:01:18 GMT

Hot ot use custom conventions to make your Ioc live easy.

It's Okay To Write Unit Tests

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:45:00 GMT

A few simple reasons why you should be writing unit tests.

ReSharper 5.0 Overview

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:00:00 GMT

As promised, we're publishing a general ReSharper 5.0 overview, elaborating on its feature set. Please keep in mind that this is a preliminary document. The general picture will stay unchanged, but local amendments cannot be ruled out at this point, and many user interface items will probably change.

Why I don't like hand rolled data access layers

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:33:56 GMT

In my last post, I mentioned that I think that hand rolled data access layers using stored procedures are a bad thing, and one of my co-workers asked me to elaborate.

My first foray into Ruby on Rails

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:23:01 GMT

I finally broke down, set aside some time, and learned Ruby on Rails. My previous experience had been the Ruby Koans, random discussions with people, and a couple quick demos. So basically I knew Ruby, but not Rails.

Comparing Design Patterns in C# and Ruby: The Command Pattern

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:15:04 GMT

An example of how to use the command pattern to perform (and undo) actions in C# and Ruby.

Finally Understanding the Merits of TDD

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:00:07 GMT

I'm not a TDD person...or at least I wasn't until last week. Up until then, I had read the blogs and looked at the examples to try to understand TDD and unit testing (with mocking) in general. Almost all of the examples I was shown demonstrated very basic scenarios that, in most cases, were too trivial to show value. I would ask people who would speak about unit testing in general how you'd do a specific scenario and would get mix responses ranging from "just try it" to "you should be using this tool and it'll just write the tests for you".

Writing Great Unit Tests: Best and Worst Practises

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 03:30:04 GMT

A suite of good unit tests is immensely valuable: it documents your design, and makes it easier to refactor and expand your code while retaining a clear overview of each component's behaviour. However, a suite of *bad* unit tests is immensely painful: it doesn't prove anything clearly, and can severely inhibit your ability to refactor or alter your code in any way. How can you be sure to write unit tests that contribute positively to your project and don't end up being a liability?

ASP.NET MVC, TDD and AutoMapper

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:30:00 GMT

This post is in response to a question on a recent article I wrote about mapping domain entities to presentation models with AutoMapper, an object-object mapper for .NET. Today I will give a brief example of how we can tie it all together in an ASP.NET MVC application using dependency injection and application services.

NerdDinner with Fluent NHibernate Part 1 - The domain model

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 09:30:01 GMT

This is the first post in a series of three where I'm going to see how we can change the NerdDinner project to use Fluent NHibernate instead of LINQ to SQL. In the first post we are going to take a look at the domain model.

Comparing Design Patterns in C# and Ruby: The Iterator Pattern

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:03:43 GMT

Comparing the differences in how the Iterator pattern may be implemented in C# and Ruby.

What should you learn next?

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 22:12:40 GMT

If you were to ask me, instead of learning some new technology, every developer should try to become experts in software design patterns and principles and practices that will help you become a better developer with the technologies that you already know. Our industry has a much bigger need for developers that write well-designed, loosely coupled, well-tested code than we need for people with a basic knowledge of WPF or Silverlight.

NHibernate Linq Released

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 10:15:03 GMT

Official release announcement for NHibernate Linq 1.0 RTM. Congratulations!

TDD Starter Kit - Sample Projects and Links

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:34:54 GMT

Test driven development is a proven technique that will help you write well tested and well designed code, but it takes some practice. Here are some sample projects that you can work through to get some practice, along with my completed solutions so that you can see how I did it, and some TDD-related links that might help you along the way.