Chris May

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

This is good news for those of us who were kinda pissed that Team Foundation Server didn't come with this type of interface to begin with:

http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/03/26/microsoft-acquires-teamplain.aspx

Here is a nice article on creating a test (bogus) SSL certificate for your local develoment machine.

ScottGu has a nice article on how to do something similar with IIS7, which is going to be the webserver on Vista machines.

Here is an interesting article on codeproject about creating "drill through" reports.

Here are some pages that I have been reading on the subject.

http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/mscompression.asp

http://bistrica.usask.ca/madmuc/Grads/Adnan/cmpt898/Project.pdf

http://www.codeproject.com/vb/net/MhtBuilder.asp

There internet is filled with places to do reverse phone lookups (who called me 5 minutes ago).

But, most of them now ask you to pay for the name of the person or business.

I happened to find one that didn't:

http://www.whitepages.com/10001/reverse_phone

I found this list of the top secondary market ticket resellers:

http://www.ticketnews.com/view/TopSecondarySellers

Thu, 04/26/2007 - 11:12am — TicketScoop