Woodbase

Architectural descisions is a part of the software development process that often gets lost over time - at least most of them do. Yes we do make diagrams and solution description, but what about the descisions that were just natural to make? The desciosions that were just obvious? What happens to those in the future - try to ask yourself why you chose a decorator pattern over a facade five years ago - can you remember?

We all make descisions everyday - some are small and some are big. A lot of the descisions we make as software developers or architects are implicit and small. Others are fundemental for the architecture that we are developing.

I've often seen code that were mades just a few years ago (some of it my own), and I've thought to myself:" What were they thinking!?! Did they never learn anything about software architecture or programming?" I might have been right, I might ave learned things along the way - but eventhough the code I'm rewieving is wrong or out of date - there might have been a reason to do so. It just might be that it was the best performing solution back then. So it might have been an active choice and not just some stupid kid that made it.

The point is that if you make a descision that you find important, then why not document it? It will almost certainly help you or others in the future, if anyone ever thinks of changing something in your architecture. So should you document all of your descisions? Well - that would be a waste of time, because a lot of small descisions are made along the way. You probably won't even need to document all of your large descisions either.

The general rules around architectural descisions must be to follow your instinct and experience. If you feel that the descion you've made is important to the system and not documented elsewhere, then it would probably be a good idea to do so. But how do you describe a descision? Well basicly you could just write it on a piece of paper. This would help others understand why you did this and that.

I've read a few articles on the subject and I've found great inspiration in one written by Jeff Tyree and Art Akerman in March 2005:" Architecture Descisions: Demystifing Architecture". See this is what I think that archtectural descisions can do - they can remove some of the "magic" in the understanding of architecture. Tyree and Akerman suggest a descion description template. Their templates covers a lot of areas related to a descision- like the actual descision, the issue (why was this descision made), arguments, related descisions and so on. It can be pretty time consuming to follow all of these steps, but the point is that descions are a like. You can put them into a template and describe them.

It is upto you and your organisation to descide on a template that fits you. This can be done from scratch or by looking at Tyree & Akerman (or the more extensive template [Kruchten et al., 2006]) It's all up to you! The point is that you get the tacit descisions documented.

One of the advantages of following a template, when describing a descision, is that they are easy to overlook and other developers can use the same template and describe their descisions in a simular way, so that they are easy for you to read!

The benefit of documenting architectural descisions is that you and others - in the future - will know why you did it, but choose carefully! You do not want to overdo it! That could lead to more confusion and obscurity than good.

If you want to use my advice for anything is your descision to make :-)

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I was writting an article on web technologies and needed an image of the ASP.NET page structure. So I went online and searched for "ASP.NET page structure", but all I got was results on page life-cycle, relationship between aspx and aspx.cs files and so on.

Know since the image I needed would be very simple to do, I didn't spent a long time searching for it, instead I decided to just do it myself and share it with you here:

Now in case you don't understand this drawing, I'll give a brief description here:

The outer element is called a master page. In ASP.NET we can combine our pages (called WebForms) with a master page. This gives us the possibility of setting up our general layout in a master page - illustrated in the drawing above by the "Header", "Menu" and "Footer" parts.

These parts will probably stay the same on all content pages, so we define them in one "global" file. However you can have multiple master pages on your web site if you need.

Now the WebForm is where we put our content, but since we might like to use the same content on multiple pages, we can insert usercontrols.

So leaving WebForms for a while, let's look at UserControls. A UserControl is a content part of a page. For example if we like to have a newsletter sign up on several pages, we can make a newsletter signup control and include it on the pages where we'd like it to be.

Once we've create our UserControl we can place it on our page like any other tag (ignoring some configuration facts here).

So our page might look something like this:

...
<h2>Welcome to my page</h2>
<div>Please sign up for my newsletter:<br />
<my:usercontrol id="newslettersignup" runat="server" />
</div>
...

This is an example on how we combine normal XHTML content with our usercontrol.

Now this was a VERY brief introduction on the structure of an ASP.NET webpage, but hopefully you can make some sence of it even if you didn't know ASP.NET before - if You knew ASP.NET before reading this - well you probably just wasted a few minutes ;-)

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Hi all!

I just posted my first article here: http://geekswithblogs.net/woodbase/archive/2010/08/26/getting-started-embedding-video-in-dynamicweb-cms-again.aspx

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Most people can agree that testing your software is a good thing. Most developers will agree that unit testing is a great thing to have.

But how about testing your web site? Fair enough you can run unit tests on your code behind, but unit testing a GUI can be problematic.

If you struggled with this problem, don't worry - you're not the first!

I've recently become aware of Selenium. Selenium is a very powerfull tool for testing web applications. It gives you a lot of nice features to help you test your web site.

There's even a plug-in for Firefox to let you record your test and then simply play them, whenever you need to test your site. The plugin can also translate the recorded test into ordinary unit tests, so that you can integrate it with your other unit tests.

A simple case:
You wish to test if your page shows a specific link:

Page markup:

<html>
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
    <title>Sample Selenium Test Suite</title>
</head>
<body>
    <table cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" border="1">
        <thead>
            <tr><td>Test Cases for De Anza A-Z Directory Links</td></tr>
        </thead>
    <tbody>
        <tr><td><a href="./a.html">A Links</a></td></tr>
        <tr><td><a href="./b.html">B Links</a></td></tr>
        <tr><td><a href="./c.html">C Links</a></td></tr>
        <tr><td><a href="./d.html">D Links</a></td></tr>
    </tbody>
    </table>
</body>
</html>

Now in order to test this we need to write some test code:

First we need to import NUnit and the Selenium framework:

using NUnit.Framework;
using Selenium;

Then we need to set the class up to be a TestFixture

[TestFixture]
public class MyLinkTester{

.......

}

Then we need our set up method in order to instanciate a selenium server instance.

Selenium client;
StringBuilder verificationErrors;

[SetUp]
        public void TestSetup()
        {
            client = new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 4444, "*iexplore", 
                                                 "http://www.mydomain.org");
            client.Start();            
            verificationErrors = new StringBuilder();
        }

[Test]

        public void TestForLinkB()

        {

                client.Open("http://www.mydomain.org/Default.aspx");

                bool result = client.IsTextPresent("B Links");

                Assert.IsTrue(result, "Testing B Links");

        }

[TearDown]

        public void TestTearDown()

        {

            try

            {

                client.Close();

            }

            catch (Exception ex)

            {

                verificationErrors.AppendLine("Failed to close client\n" + ex.Message);

            }

            Assert.AreEqual("", verificationErrors.ToString(), 
                                         "Checking if any errors occured");

        }

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I accidently stumbled upon the geekswithblogs website. The domain name ment that I HAD to become a member.

Since being a geek is what defines me, I had to apply. So here I am!

Hopefully I will sometime in the future make a more meaningful post than this, but eventhough we're geeks, we always start with the first line first.

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