testingReflections.com - .NET

Essential Visual Studio Plugins... Ghost Doc, TestDriven.NET, Smart Paster and more...

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 06:58:26 -0600

[textile].NET Developer (and friend) "Joe Field":http://joefield.mysite4now.com/blogs/blog/ sent me this link... "Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now":http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/12/VisualStudioAddins/default.aspx I already knew about "Test Driven .NET":http://www.testdriven.net/ but what is going to come in handy for me right now is "GhostDoc":http://www.roland-weigelt.de/ghostdoc since I am documenting an API (that Joe and I developed) for a client before I move focus onto another project with a new client.

The goal of GhostDoc is to automate the tedious parts of writing XML comments by looking at the name of your class or method, as well as any parameters, and making an educated guess as to how the documentation should appear based on recommended naming conventions. This is not a replacement for writing thorough documentation of your business rules and providing examples, but it will automate the mindless part of your documentation generation.

NUnit Test Runner and Profiler for Visual Studio

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 08:35:11 -0600

[textile]Looks interesting... Will have to investigate this tool...

"MailFrame NUnit TestRunner":http://www.mailframe.net/Products/TestRunner/2005/

I like the look of the visual integration with the Visual Studio editor...

"Unable to generate a temporary class" with SWExplorerAutomation...

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 04:56:08 -0500

[textile]While helping someone get started with evaluating "SWExplorerAutomation":http://home.comcast.net/~furmana/SWIEAutomation.htm (I'll call it SEA if you don't mind) on a client's site, we encountered an error almost as soon as we tried to use it... but it turned out that it had nothing to do with the tool and everything to do with a bug in an MS Security Patch... "read on to find out more":http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/2592

Expert .NET Delivery Using NAnt and CruiseControl.NET

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 01:02:36 -0500

At first glance, building and deploying applications seem simple enough. But in fact, difficult releases without any confidence or processes backing them are very common. Integration and management of a new deployment can be laborious and fraught with risk. So as team size and volume of projects grow, management becomes more difficult and risk more pronounced. This book is a guide to the implementation of good processes in a .NET environment. Author Marc Holmes focuses on actual implementation, and details patterns and anti-patterns to watch out for. He also provides a practical and in-depth look at NAnt and CruiseControl.NET, and solutions to common problem scenarios.

Rhino.Mocks v. 2.0 Announced. Yes, it's a Mock Object Framework.

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 00:56:34 -0500

Ayende has announced that he's released Rhino.Mocks v. 2.0: his own version of what he'd like in a Mock Object framework. I haven't yet got a chance to try it out, but it certainly sounds interesting!

"Rhino.Mocks is an attempt to create easier way to build and use mock objects and allow better refactoring support from the current tools. It's a hybrid approach between the pure Record/Replay of EasyMock.Net's model and NMock's expectation based model. Rhino.Mocks originated from EasyMock.Net and attempt to improve on their model to create easy to use and power mocking framework. It's free for use and modification for free and commercial software.

Technique for Manipulating the HttpContext within NUnitAsp tests

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 00:58:55 -0500

I created a Setup.aspx file that would allow me to make requests to it and pass in a static method that I wanted to call, and as a result, any code that ran inside of it would run inside the webs application domain and have access to the Session and HttpContext. Author: Robin Curry Published: June 27, 2005

Rhino Mocks: .NET mocking framework

Sun, 26 Jun 2005 13:22:27 -0500

A dynamic mock object framework for the .Net platform. Its purpose is to ease testing by allowing the developer to create mock implementations of custom objects and verify the interactions using unit testing. Rhino.Mocks is an attempt to create easier way to build and use mock objects and allow better refactoring support from the current tools. It's a hybrid approach between the pure R

Continuous Integration & .NET (2): Continuous Integration and beyond...

Thu, 19 May 2005 00:37:55 -0500

While unfamiliar to many developers, Continuous Integration is not a new concept at Microsoft, as is evident by Steve McConnell's observation. Consequently, in this second installment of a two-part article, I examine the setup of a version-control system and configuration of a Continuous Integration tool that runs off of the version-control system in the .NET environment. I then integrate these tools into the build process to test for conformance with the Microsoft .NET Framework Design Guidelines, and finally address the issue of code-coverage testing.

Continuous Integration & .NET (1): Weaving together an open-source solution

Thu, 19 May 2005 00:38:53 -0500

Several basic tools used to support Continuous Integration were ported to the .NET environment during the 1.0 release of the Framework. Other tools, such as CruiseControl and Clover, have been ported more recently. Furthermore, certain other tools such as NDoc are indigenous to .NET and only conceptually related to their Java counterparts (Java Doc, in this case). For the most part, articles written to date about these tools have addressed only a subset of the tools (usually NAnt and NUnit), thus failing to weave together a holistic Continuous Integration solution. Moreover, the unit-testing examples are function based and fail to address the database-driven reality of today's enterprise applications.

Nullable type performance

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 01:16:38 -0500

Warning! Nullable types considered hazardous to your performance.

Open Source .NET Development: ASpell.NET Case Study

Sat, 29 Jan 2005 03:48:02 -0600

This chapter is a simple but realistic case study of using Open Source tools in everyday development. In particular, this chapter uses ASpell, a commercial-caliber spell checking component that supports twenty-some different language dictionaries, as an example.Author: Brian NantzPublished: Jan 7, 2005(Sample chapter extracted from Open Source .NET Development: Programming

Advanced Techniques with NUnitAsp

Sat, 29 Jan 2005 03:45:19 -0600

Keeping bugs out of existing code during new development has always been a huge problem. However a new methodology, Test Driven Development (TDD), is helping to change that. The two main principles of this methodology are: 1) Never write a single line of code unless you have a failing automated test, and 2) Eliminate duplication.In principle this makes sense - we'd all love to have a thousand automated tests, running at the click of a button or command line, which guarantees that our application works. There's even a popular open source tool, NUnit, which provides a framework for running automated unit tests. While this is very popular with class libraries that just manipulate data structures, it is much more difficult with GUIs.

Test Driven Development Using NUnit in C#

Sat, 29 Jan 2005 03:44:37 -0600

When sitting down to create an application, many developers start by writing the code. Test Driven Development emphasizes the opposite, stressing the need to prepare test scenarios or test cases before writing the code itself. This seemingly backwards approach has some benefits. First of all, it requires that the programmer be very clear about what tests the program should pass and what test it should fail, bringing such concerns to the forefront of the software design process. Furthermore, by meticulously detailing what tests a system should pass and fail we can use tools to automate most of our tests. An automated job is one that's always very, very easy to do. These automated tests are meant to be run every time there's a code change and are referred to as unit tests.

Data Input Validation Using ASP.NET Forms

Sat, 29 Jan 2005 04:08:42 -0600

Kirk Miller (another Consultants Guild member) has a great introductory post on data input validation for ASP.NET forms.

SharpDevelop develops NUnit integration

Sat, 29 Jan 2005 03:57:23 -0600

Oh this is cool. SharpDevelop, the open source .NET editor, has built in NUnit integration. I'm still not sure what that really means, but I intend to find out. Hopefully it will be just like the JUnit integration found in similar Java projects.