Chris May

The VSSConverter tool which allows you to convert from VSS to TFS will attempt to utilize a local version of SQL Express.

This sucks, as I hate SQL Express.

After some searching/trials/errors, I found a way to get it to work against a SQL Server 2005 database.

Just add the SQL tag to your migration settings xml file like so:

<Source name="VSS">

      <VSSDatabase name="D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual SourceSafe\VSSHttp"></VSSDatabase>

      <UserMap name="D:\VSS2TeamFoundation\Usermap.xml"></UserMap>

      <SQL Server="name_of_your_SQL_Server" />

</Source>

I would love to speed up VS, and maybe get it to stop crashing, but in the short term, maybe some of these items can help speed it up.

I didn't notice that the Microsoft P&P team has released something they call "Software Factories" which are supposed to guide the developer in building different apps using best practices (at least that is what I think they do from the descriptions).

Specifically I am interested in the Web Client Software Factory:

... provides an integrated set of guidance that assists architects and developers in creating composite Web applications and page flow client applications.

These applications have one or more of the following characteristics:

• They have complex page flows and workflows.
• They are developed by multiple collaborating development teams.
• They are composite applications that present information from multiple sources through an integrated user interface.
• They support XCopy deployment of independently developed modules.
• They support online business transaction processing Web sites.

and the Web Service Software Factory, which as they put it is:

... an integrated collection of tools, patterns, source code and prescriptive guidance. It is designed to help you quickly and consistently construct Web services that adhere to well known architecture and design patterns.

The package covers:

TechEd is going on right now.

They have some webcasts, both on demand and live, as well as some virtual labs.

I am thinking of getting some flooring for my garage. 

These seem to be the places that sell them:

http://www.racedeck.com

http://www.swisstrax.com/

http://www.locktile-usa.com/

http://www.jnkproducts.com

http://www.garagefloor.com/

Over at TheServerSide they had a nice writeup of an example of how to use NUnitASP to test the UI of some pages.

I am not sure how valuable this would be to invest my time in, espically as it seems that there is now way to test repeaters or gridviews (there is a datagridtester however).

I will have to look some more and see if ther eis a way to do this.

This looks really cool. 

You can download it here for free.

Included Refactorings

		Add Validator			Create Overload			Encapsulate Field
		Extract ContentPlaceHolder			Extract ContentPlaceHolder (create master page)			Extract Method
		Extract Property			Extract Style (Class)			Extract Style (id)
		Extract to User Control			Flatten Conditional			Inline Temp
		Introduce Constant			Introduce Local			Introduce Local (replace all)
		Move Declaration Near Reference			Move Initialization to Declaration			Move Style Attributes to CSS
		Move to Code-behind			Rename			Reorder Parameters
		Replace Temp with Query			Reverse Conditional			Safe Rename
		Simplify Expression			Split Initialization from Declaration			Split Temporary Variable
		Surround with Update Panel

 

UPDATE:  It seems that installing this may have removed some of the features of the old Refactor! that I was frequently using (?).  I used to use the "Surround With-->Region" all the time.  Now that is gone.  I will have to investigate.

Sam Gentile thinks that MS is at a crossroads in terms of web development.

He thinks with all the cool, free, cutting edgs stuff out there, like Ruby on Rails, MS may soon lose out on all the "alpha geeks", who move on to newer and better things while MS stays locked in the past.

I'm not ready to crown RoR the winner of anything yet.  True, MS is usually not on the cutting edge, but they usually do a pretty good job adopting good ideas.  There are only a handful of serious RoR sites out there.  If that number grows a ton, then it will mean something. 

Martin Fowler has some similar concerns though, so maybe this will come to fruition.

This is awesome!

Wikipedia has a whole list of programming anti-patterns, and James Carr lists some TDD anti-patterns.

Some of these are pretty funny:

Magic numbers: Including unexplained numbers in algorithms

Superboolean logic: unnecessary comparison or abstraction of boolean arithmetic

Boat anchor: Retaining a part of a system that no longer has any use

Roy Osherove blogs that he was mistaken when he suggesting using mocks for data access code.  With the improved Rollback attributes that he helped create, along with people like Justin Burtch who created a similar attribute for VSTS, they are now thinking that this is the way to go: rolling back database changes.

Roy is no fan of VSTS testing, finding a few bugs and some questionable design decisions.  Those don't seem like deal breakers for me, but we will see.

The BindingList is very nice, but doens't support some things like sort and filter that a lot of people would like to have (see here for a short discussion on BindingList vs Datatable).

This project, in sourceforge, called BindingListView is supposed to allow you to get a sorted or filtered "view" of a bindinglist.

Might be worth checking out.

Here is an article from MS on how to od the upgrade.

Thankfully, it is a very easy process.

It looks like I have fallen victim to an asp.net no-no.

I have always used a label in my forms when I want to have some text that is updated by the code behind.  Turns out that I should probably be using literals.

Even more, I didn't even realize that the label object allows you to specify a text element that will gain focus when the label is clicked.  Nice.

This site looks really interesting.  They seem to have loads of video content, interviews and examples.

The one that got me looking at the site was their video on MVC/MVP pattern.

http://polymorphicpodcast.com/shows/mv-patterns/

I will be checking this out.

Rhino Mocks seems to be one of the most preferred mock frameworks out there.

Phil Haack, CodeBetter and Markitup have article showing how to test events on interfaces (x2) and objects in Rhino Mocks respectively.

They even have some videos up showing some Rhino Mocks stuff.

Haack also has a nice example of using MVP and Rhino Mocks to test some asp.net pages.

Here is an article by Haacked showing how one can create a test friendly httpcontext.

I modified his example some and started using it in some tests; works very nice!

Here is another implementation based on Haack's example that is supposed to also work with session.

I almost NEVER use session if I can avoid it, but still this could come in handy.

Here is a nice article on Null Object Refactoring, a process where you create a null representation of an object for use when you want to treat the object as null, rather than passing around a truely null object.

This is one of Fowlers refactoring suggestions from his book: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code and on his site: http://www.refactoring.com/catalog/introduceNullObject.html

There is virtually no information on the internet about how to use these tests.

This is one of the vew pages that actually shows a working example.

This discussion group seems to be mostly dealing with standard unit tests, and winform unit testing.

ScottGu has an article on using LINQ to SQL which is basically going to work like an ORM product shipping in the next version of .net / visual studio called Orca.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/05/19/using-linq-to-sql-part-1.aspx