Visual Studio

Resharper 4 in Two Weeks?

Matthew Podwysocki — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 03:17:20 GMT

The good folks at JetBrains have recently announced that Resharper 4.0 Early Access Program will be available in two weeks. It's like one of those long awaited things like Duke Nukem Forever, but it looks like R# will beat it to the punch, fortunately for me. For those like me, I can honestly say I haven't been as productive in Visual Studio 2008 as I can say I have been without it. Many people will use the workaround as stated many times around the blogs, but I've just stayed away until they can get it working just right. Instead, I've been happy using it with Visual Studio 2005 in the mean time.

The only thing now that keeps me with the Visual Studio 2005 sitting around continues to be BizTalk. I imagine the next Service Pack of BizTalk 2006 R2 will contain the right templates, but it's frustrating that they haven't come out yet. Either way, I can't wait until R# 4.0! Until next time...

Testing your internals inside out

Matthew Podwysocki — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:55:41 GMT

Recently among other places it was asked on the altdotnet list about the strategies of unit testing with regards to assemblies and naming This message here caught my eye regarding putting your NUnit tests in the same assembly as the code under test.

The message states about putting the tests in the same assembly :

There are a couple advantages to this approach:

The nearness of the files will make it easier (and therefore more likely) that developers will work on the test in tandem with the class under test (CUT).
One can make private methods on the CUT into internal methods and then write tests for them, if need be.
Will effectively halve the number of projects in the solution (My current solution has 40+ non test projects), making the solution explorer a little less unwieldy.
I'm thinking this will make it easier for devs unfamiliar with NUnit testing to gain experience with it faster. (I'm currently trying to introduce the concept to 10+ developers.)

And the only disadvantage I have thought of so far:

The production assemblies have a reference to NUnit and contain more types. Slower compilation and load time?

The DEBUG approach

I can say in the early days of my test driven development and others, I was doing this as were many others. We'd go ahead and create a Tests folder inside our project which in turn would create a .Tests namespace. In fact, most people were doing this with their test fixtures:

#if DEBUG

[TestFixture]
public class CustomerTestFixture
{
...
}

#endif

This would prevent of course it being compiled into your production build, had you of course used the release build type. Many shops I worked with never did that...

Early on, I realized that it clutters up your assemblies quite quickly. Throw on top of that any unit testing dll of choice (MbUnit, NUnit, xUnit.NET, MSTest) and any mocking framework as well (Rhino Mocks, TypeMock.NET). I was weary of including any references in my assemblies that I didn't absolutely need.

Testing Internals

One of the main reasons many advocate this approach is that they have access to the internals of your assembly to put them under test. I think the early versions of the Enterprise Library were this way, although I can't remember. I'm sure someone will correct me at some point.

By moving my unit tests to the outside in a separate .Tests assembly, I had to think long and hard about the public API I was willing to expose. In a way, that's a good thing as it made me very clear on the boundaries of my classes and the assembly as a whole. I also tend to have multiple tests fixtures per specification under tests as I want to test it under multiple aspects that may be cross-cutting. I'm moving more towards a BDD way of doing things, albeit I'm in a mixed environment now of TDD with BDD.

Ultimately, though if you need to expose some sort of internals, although should not be the case with 99% of what you do, you have the option of internals visible to attribute such as this:

[assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("Podwysocki.Contracts")]

But to do any more than that, well, brings up a testing code smell and a rant. I think a better approach is to use Dependency Injection and use that to set your expectations through mocks. Then you can test the internals quite easily, but of course testing one expectation at a time and using a double for the other dependencies. That's another lesson I've had to learn over time is the "When to use Mocks". Then again I could be blowing smoke...

Rant Time

I've noticed in MSTest that you can create private accessors for your given objects under test. This just to me screams of being a horrid idea. Very likely during a lot of my refactoring, the internals of my classes under test can and will change frequently. So, that means my unit tests will break quite quickly, then I'll have to right-click on my class again and generate my proxy methods again...

Oh, and generating your unit tests by right clicking on your class just doesn't seem very TDD to me. I'm sure most will agree with me on this, and you wonder why there is xUnit.NET coming from Microsoft guys when MSTest already exists.

Conclusion

So, at the end of the day, I'm more for testing the publicly facing API of your given assembly. That makes you think long and hard about what you want to expose and how granular you make your specifications under test. It's been a long road since I've started TDD and even BDD and I'll admit I still have much to learn..

Continuous Integration: From Theory to Practice 2nd Edition Released

Matthew Podwysocki — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 05:55:35 GMT

Carel Lotz last year released a guide on Continuous Integration (CI) for .NET 2.0 last year and was made available for download via PDF for free. Carel took the series of posts on CI and rolled them into one guide.

The guide included CI with the following tools:

Flash forward to today. Carel spent the last two weeks and has updated the guide for Continuous Integration (CI) for .NET 3.5. Some of the improvements for Visual Studio 2008 include:

Update to Visual Studio 2008, MSBuild
Changed InstallShield to Windows Installer XML
Add support for MbUnit
Removed QuickTest Professional integration

You can find the downloads on the site for this. I'm going to give this a go in the next couple of days. I'm more familiar with CI Factory, which just had another release...

Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 & Windows Server 2008 Launch Event Coming to a City Near You!

Matthew Podwysocki — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 23:22:41 GMT

As noted today, you can now register for the Launch of Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008. You can find the closest event to you from here. For all you DC folks like me, our event is March 25th and you can find that registration information here.

Here is the basic information:

Take a test drive
Come to an event and test drive Windows Server® 2008 operating system, Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008, and Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008.

Meet the experts
Enjoy hands-on labs, face-to-face Q&A sessions with software experts, and other opportunities to interact with development team members.

Bring the products home
Want more? To say thanks for taking part of this exciting launch, you’ll take home a promotional kit with versions of all three products.

I was fortunate to be a part of the Washington DC Vista launch last year, help some of my DP&E give their presentations and even help with "Meet the Experts", so it's a great time. I was just tired by the end of the day directing people where to register and where lunch was. The lines were amazing and just outside in the freezing cold. A good time was had by all!

Not switching to 2008 exclusively yet

Matthew Podwysocki — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 20:37:01 GMT

Greetings from snowy, beautiful Washington, DC where it takes the average person three hours to get into work. Seems that when people come across frozen bridges, the first idea people get is to step on the brakes. WHY??? Anyhow, that's a rant for another day. The here and now focus is Visual Studio 2005 and 2008.

With the projects I've been doing lately, I haven't had the luxury to completely switch over to Visual Studio 2008 just yet. There are a few things holding me back:

BizTalk 2006 R2 integration
SharePoint 2007 Web Part Projects
Resharper .NET 3.5 C# intellisense doesn't work
Performance concerns about some tests with WF workflow performance using while loops

That's just enough to keep all my legacy projects from moving over. R# is a wonderful tool that I can't live without and not having Intellisense pick up properly is driving me nuts and giving me withdrawals.

In the mean time, I'll have VIsual Studio 2005 and 2008 on the same box which of course takes up a lot of space.

So, what's the plan, when are they moving over? Who knows? Probably the next service pack? Anyone move to 2008 with SharePoint yet?

Visual Studio 2008 Released

Matthew Podwysocki — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 14:52:50 GMT

Today Visual Studio 2008 went RTM and made available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads. Most of the morning, MSDN had problems keeping up with demand and was down until around 10AM EST. I finally got mine installed around 10:30 or so this morning and so far so good. It was just frustrating while I was getting ASP.NET server errors exposed to me while I am trying.

Scott Guthrie has a pretty good post on the release.

15 Working with Data in ASP.NET 2.0 Tutorials

Matthew Podwysocki — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 18:10:00 GMT

Scott Guthrie has posted a good link with 15 ASP.NET Data Tutorials that were created by Scott Mitchell. These tutorials found here, cover the following:

Introduction Articles

Creating a Data Access Layer using Typed DataSets
Creating a Business Logic Layer
Using Master Pages and Site Navigation for Consistent Look and Feel of the Data Samples

Basic ASP.NET Data Reporting

Displaying Data with the ObjectDataSource
Using ObjectDataSource Declarative Parmeters
Programmatically Setting ObjectDataSource Parameter Values

Master/Detail Reporting

Master/Detail Filtering with a DropDownList Control
Master/Detail Filtering with two DropDownList Controls
Master/Detail Filtering across two pages
Master/Detail Using a Selectable Master GridView with a Details DetailView

Custom Formatting

Custom Formatting Based Upon Data
Using TemplateFields in a Gridview Control
Using TemplateFields in a DetailsView Control
Using the FormView's templates
Displaying Summary Information in a GridView's Footer

As always, these tutorials are great

Webcast - Model-Driven Development in Visual Studio 2005

Matthew Podwysocki — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 17:27:00 GMT

Microsoft has introduced very powerful tools for architects with Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Architects. Among these is the ability to define, generate and customize your own set of visual modeling tools that are built upon the same infrastructure as those provided with Visual Studio. There is an MSDN Webcast available entitled Domain-Specific Language Tools for Model-Driven Development in Visual Studio 2005 which goes over this in detail.

This webcast covers the following:

* Visual domain-specific languages (DSL)s and designers

* Modeling platform architecture

* Building designers

* Building a workflow demo

* Generating artifacts demo

* A business entity with code generation demo

* What's next?

Very cool stuff here especially with code generation!

C++ - Where is STL/CLR???

Matthew Podwysocki — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 01:36:00 GMT

When Visual Studio 2005 was still in Beta, Visual C++ had a concept of STL .NET (now called STL/CLR), which in short is a porting of the STL to the CLR. One may ask, so why STL/CLR? As you may or may not have noticed, C++ will not accept managed types inside of an STL container. Nikola Dudar explains more about the differences in his post "What is STL/CLR".

Stan Lippman had a great introduction of this great library in an article on MSDN called STL .NET Primer. Nick Weinholt also had a good introduction to this in his article on developer.com called STL: Combining Generics and Templates. I was rather excited when I had the Beta version of Visual Studio and I was digging around the new STL and getting a good feel of what it can do.

The ability to do port over legacy code is important in the C++ world, and creating a migration plan is a good thing to be able to do things little by little. STL also gives a little more power and a little more extensibility.

To be able to do this is a welcome sight:

vector<String^> ^svec = gcnew vector<String^>;

svec->push_back("Hello");

IEnumerator<String^> ^is = svec->GetEnumerator();
while ( is->MoveNext() )
Console::WriteLine( is->Current );

As you can see, it interoperates with existing System.Collections.Generics implementations.

So, what happened?

This post entitled Hello from the trenches of Orcas from Martyn Lovell sums it up nicely:

One of my biggest disappointments from Visual Studio 8 is that we didn’t have the resources to complete and ship STL/CLR, our managed, verifiable implementation of the C++ Standard Template Library. Those of you on the beta for that product will have seen an early version of the technology in Beta 2. We worked with Dinkumware on this project for most of that product cycle, and they did some great work. But in the end we simply didn’t have enough people and time to keep working on it with them while finishing the other features we were building. Retrospectively, it was very ambitious of us to attempt to build this library at the same time as the C++/CLI dialect was still evolving.

So, where does this leave us? Nikola Dudar gives an update entitled "Where is STL/CLR?" which states that it will be available in the July/August CTP of Orcas. I'm definitely looking forward to it.

Stay tuned to the Visual C++ Blog for more information!

Reminder - June 10th Reston Code Camp

Matthew Podwysocki — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 21:46:00 GMT

Just as a reminder that the Reston Code Camp is on June 10th. The Code Camp Schedule has been posted which looks to be a full day of good stuff. I, unfortunately, cannot attend the whole day as I have a concert to go to that night, but I'll try to catch what I can.

If you missed signing up, you missed out! They have a wait list, and they will try to do their best to get you in...

Hope to see a good crowd there!