Winform Programming

Test Driven Development - a tough nut to crack?

Eric G. Harrison — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 09:17:00 GMT

First, the blog entry that reminded me that I've been meaning to write about this: TDD Is Great... Except When It Isn't

We've been playing around with nUnit, and we are now thinking seriously about how to implement TDD in our application development efforts. It's pretty easy to test simple methods that don't hit a database or have major dependencies, but after that it starts to look a bit hairy.

For example, it's pretty easy to write a test to make sure that your email validator method works. Run two tests - one that passes in a valid email address and make sure you get a True back, and one that passes an invalid address and make sure you get a False back.

From those basic foundations, you can create some great stuff, but the areas where we are getting stuck are when it comes to testing the entire product. Which means you not only have to test that trying to retreive Record X actually returns it, but that you can change values in it and get them back after saving and retrieving again. And that you can create new records. And that you can create affiliated child records, and be able to retrieve them. And that you can take an action on a WinForms form, which does stuff in multiple threads, and make sure all the responses come back properly.

So we are headed towards using nUnit (and TDD) for the basic stuff, which will still require a ton of code to tear down an existing database and start with a new one, but we are also going to use tools designed for testing user interfaces. I'm playing with Testcomplete 3 from AutomatedQA and it seems pretty powerful at a relatively low price (around $500 compared to $5000 for their competitors). Another option appears to be NunitForms, which I heard about through Haacked, which would be at an even better price.

A site containing some good looking icons...

Eric G. Harrison — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 08:21:00 GMT

I'm sure someday I'll have a use for these so I'm throwing the link up here for future use...

Continuous Integration and the Ambient Orb

Eric G. Harrison — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 17:17:00 GMT

Not only is this cool, but it's something we're going to be doing. Right now we're working on getting Cruise Control.NET and NAnt to build our system cleanly. Apparently either we do things in a way no one else is doing (unlikely) or we just don't know what we're doing (likely).

Now we have to get this Cruise Control.NET / NAnt process working completely quickly because I ordered the Orb a few days ago from ThinkGeek.com...

Natuarally, this is a complete waste of money, because we never break our builds.... yeah.... that's the ticket...

Hungarian notation wars...

Eric G. Harrison — Wed, 16 Jun 2004 06:09:00 GMT

Secret Geek does a much better job than I could disassembling the move away from Hungarian notation. I, for one, think the move away from Hungarian is a mistake. Go read this and you'll know pretty much exactly how I feel about it. Not that you'd care, but it's a good read anyway!

All our code uses Hungarian, and I'm proud of it!

Paul Vick has a good little posting on the 'native' language of .NET

Eric G. Harrison — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 07:03:00 GMT

http://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2004/05/31/1100.aspx

Need some FTP code to embed in your application?

Eric G. Harrison — Mon, 24 May 2004 10:52:00 GMT

Eric Bachtal pointed me to this library. It's LGPL so you can use it in your own apps without cost, and you can even distribute it. Read their license agreement and FAQ for the important points.

I haven't used this code myself yet, but it looks like it could be valuable, and save you the cost of buying (a more full featured library) from someone like Dart.

PS: Sorry for the blizzard of posts - I'm doing some cleanup of my 'flagged for follow up' folder...

All you ever wanted to know about the GAC but were afraid to ask...

Eric G. Harrison — Mon, 24 May 2004 10:38:00 GMT

I started to read through this but my eyes started to glaze over, then I passed out and awoke in a field full of Java dreams. Or something like that. Maybe they were just dandelions.

I prefer to stick with xcopy deployment. Stick with that and GAC just sounds like something that Bill The Cat from Bloom County would say...

Everyone already knows about ConnectionStrings.com, right?

Eric G. Harrison — Mon, 24 May 2004 10:03:00 GMT

I learned about it a few days ago from Mike Schinkel's blog. If you need a connection string, this is the place to go...

Blogged so I don't forget about it...

Avoiding work with the DirectX 9 SDK and VB.Net

Eric G. Harrison — Mon, 24 May 2004 07:01:00 GMT

Microsoft does have a way of providing very cool technology in for us developers. I downloaded the DirectX 9 SDK and installed it this morning. With just two lines of code, I was playing audio files, and with a few more lines I was playing video files. If you are looking for a distraction away from real work, go get the SDK and then in your favorite language do something similar to the following:

Dim objMusic as New Microsoft.DirectX.AudioVideoPlayback.Audio(”pathtomusic.mp3”)
objMusic.Play()

That's it. You're listening to music. For a video, do this:

Dim objVideo as New Microsoft.DirectX.AudioVideoPlayback.Video(”pathtovideo.mpg”)
objVideo.Play()

Ta-da! Obviously you can do much more, but this is a nice sample of how simple it is to get things working. Not to pick on Linux (given that I can barely get Mahjongg to work in it), but this is why Windows is such a successful platform.

Now I'm off to figure out how to create Space Invaders or something... Or at least draw a circle...

Take a look at w3schools.com sometime...

Eric G. Harrison — Wed, 12 May 2004 07:14:00 GMT

I had used the W3Schools.com website a long time ago to learn some HTML stuff. Today, I saw a reference to them on Channel9.msdn.com and I popped over there to scope things out. There's a lot of stuff on there, and it's all free. While the lessons are not too in depth usually, it's a cool and simple resource for the quick education we all sometimes need.