October 2006 Entries

I just noticed that Jamie Cansdale has released v2.0 of TestDriven.NET.  The screenshot are of the new functionality are looking pretty damn cool.  I'm downloading as we speak.

Today I found this new set of addins for VS 2k5 thanks to a post by Greg Duncan.  According to the official Microsoft download page, these "...are a set of Visual Studio extensions provides tools to effectively use Visual Studio resources."  To tell you the truth, I'm really not sure what the hell this is supposed to mean so, as a public service, I'm going to translate that for you.  Visual Studio 2005 IDE Enhancements are addins that provide new functionality that developers can use to increase the capabilities of the development environment. I can hear you saying...

Sometimes I get scared of myself when I start drinking and posting.  Today I felt a little better when I saw that Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble did the same thing.  Even better is that they drink the same bevy as I do when posting.

First let me say that I am not a tester, let alone a test manager or a testing guru.   What I'm writing here is the out-of-scope ramblings of a developer. I've been on my new project for about a month now and I'm seeing some shocking trends.  The most egregious is that past releases of the code have gone straight from the hands of developers to UAT (business users in our case).  Now, towards the end of the first major phase (not the first iteration by any stretch) of the application's development, management on the project and from the client is quite...

I have no idea where I managed to find this tool.  Regardless, I finally got around to having a go with it. Tree Surgeon is a .NET development tree generator.  Just give it the name of your project, and it will set up a development tree for you in seconds.  More than that, your new tree has years worth of accumulated build engineering experience build right in. Like the quote from the website says, all you need to do is name your project and the tree gets created. As you can see from the image it creates a...

Here in Alberta (and one could also say all of Canada) there has been one amazing constant in the MS developer world, Dan Sellers.  I have never had the privilege to have met or be taught by Dan, but I've heard about him from a number of different people who have done both.  Dan was a stalwart in the MS Security community here and when people said we need help with security, the name Dan Sellers invariably was mentioned in the next breath. Dan announced today that it was his last day with Microsoft.  Thanks Dan for all the things...

One of the things that I'm working on as part of my new job is the creation of a Coding Standards document.  This is an interesting prospect as the software has already been developed for a significant number of months, resulting in a sizable existing codebase.  Writing a coding standards document in this situation is not about creating a fresh new way of doing things, but instead it involves a lot of code review and deciding what have the unwritten defacto standards been thus far. Part of the reason for creating this document is to empower the developers to enforce their...