DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by NotMyself

Fast Add Reference Dialog for VS 2010

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:00:00 GMT

I have spent a couple of days on implementing a fast add reference dialog box for Visual Studio. The time of adding a reference has been a great time to have some coffee, to have lunch, or even a way to save economy (remember, developer time costs money!).

NBuilder website launched - Rapid generation of test objects for .NET

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:23:07 GMT

NBuilder now has a website which will serve as the home for all its documentation. http://nbuilder.org About NBuilder - Through a fluent, extensible interface, NBuilder allows you to rapidly create test data, automatically assigning values to properties and public fields that are of type of the built in .NET data types (e.g. ints and strings). NBuilder allows you to override for properties you are interested in using lambda expressions. Example usage: Builder<Product> .CreateListOfSize(10) .WhereTheFirst(2) .Have(x => x.Title = "special title") .And(x => x.Price = 15.24m) .Build(); NBuilder is an open source project, hosted on google code.

Getting Started With Selenium For ASP.NET Developers

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:23:21 GMT

During the Olympia Software Craftsmanship Workshop last weekend, Jeff Olsen (@olsonjeffery) demonstrated the use of the web testing framework Selenium. I was really impressed with the Selenium IDE and how easy it was to use in Firefox. One of the menu items of the IDE is to export a test as C#. I wanted to find out exactly what it takes for a .NET developer to get started using Selenium. This post is intended to help others get started.

Announcing the Olympia Software Craftsmanship Workshop

Thu, 07 May 2009 23:03:18 GMT

You're at work and you catch yourself writing another 100 line method that you can't test and really can't even understand. You scour the internet for ideas but there are so many ideas. Some say don't test, others says don't test anything, still others say test every keystroke! You just let your head drop to your desk with a solid thud. You think to yourself, "Is this really the best I can do?"

How To Be Awesome: Enforcing ToDos With Specification Tests

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 05:30:20 GMT

Using specification tests to document bugs in the system and flag hacks in the code to get around the bugs. The hope being that when the bug is fixed, a test will fail and you know where to go to remove all your nasty hacks.

Alt.Net Podcast Episode 17: The State of Alt.Net

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 22:01:04 GMT

Mike Moore talks with Scott Bellware about the state of Alt.Net

ALT.NET Podcast 14: Object Databases

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:16:10 GMT

Rob Conery and James Avery discuss object databases.

A Challenge to the VB.Net Community at Large on OSS

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:46:03 GMT

Title pretty much says it...

ALT.NET Seattle 2009 is Happening

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 01:02:17 GMT

If you attended ALT.NET Seattle least year, you might be wondering whether or not it's happening this year. I am excited to announce that we are actually going to host an ALT.NET Seattle conference this year. What: ALT.NET Seattle 2009. (The site is still being worked on. Thanks to Justin Bonozier and Shoshanah Bain for getting the site up). Where: Digipen (thanks to Jeff Tucker for lining up the space) When: Evening February 27th through March 1st. Registration: Opens this tuesday evening at 6PM. We're holding on registration to allow the word to spread. There will be a max of 150 attendees. Check the wiki on Tuesday for details.

16 steps to write flexible business validation in C# using validation

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:51:30 GMT

Validation is one of the most important parts in any software project. Building flexible business validation is every one's dream. Rather than writing frameworks from scratch to do these things, Microsoft validation blocks makes it a breeze. In this article we will discuss how validation application blocks help us to build flexible validations using validation application blocks. Its just a simple sixteen step process to put our business validation in action using validation blocks.

Dear Alt.Net Developers: Stop blaming Microsoft and WebForms for crea

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 22:46:02 GMT

I am responsible for every website I create. If I create a site or application that is unmaintainable or that has poorly formed HTML or doesn't render well in all browsers, that is my fault. I chose my development tools/framework, or my employer, who I choose to work for, chose the development tools/framework. Either way, it is my responsibility, as a professional, to do my utmost to create the best possible application that is within my capability to create.

Top 10 Things That Annoy Programmers

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 04:46:03 GMT

Programmers all have their personal pet peeves. Whether it's scope creep, Hungarian notation, or smelly coworkers, there are certain nuisances that we must put up with in our line of work. The following is a list of the top 10 things that annoy programmers, compiled from the results of my recent question on StackOverflow along with some of my own experiences as a programmer:

Dear Asp.Net Developers: Stop Making Our Technology Look Bad

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 04:01:11 GMT

Have you ever tried to use one browser and one browser only? This article outlines how impossible it can be even in 2008 to do. There are countless public facing Asp.Net web sites that require Internet Explorer. The perception and impact this has on the non Asp.Net community is something developers need to think about. It is an interesting read that provides a lot of insight into the problem and some ways to fix it.

No GoLive required to use ASP.NET MVC in production

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 23:31:03 GMT

ASP.NET MVC EULA allows its usage in live operating environment, so it can be used in production

Convenience Kills, or the Case Against RAD Tools

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 02:31:09 GMT

A rather heated discussion erupted last week on Twitter and IRC concerning so-called "drag-and-drop demos" - point-and-click demonstrations of "software development" that just involve dragging controls around on a graphical designer without a lot of actual coding involved. Being entirely unable to resist joining in on debates, I had to chime in and give my two cents.

Automagic Tooling and the Dumbing-Down of Developers

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 01:02:16 GMT

Summer of NHibernate's Stephen Bohlen discusses the primary difference between software automation tools and the developers who use them. The post is a nice corollary to the recently popular "Why I am Unimpressed with Rawness of Skillz" post.

Fluent NHibernate and those sweet LINQ repositories

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:16:02 GMT

Hidden gems in this cool open source library.

Introducing Fluent NHibernate

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 01:16:47 GMT

I've adopted a project from Jeremy Miller that I think has the potential to be a really useful tool. It's called Fluent NHibernate, and it's primarily a fluent API for mapping classes with NHibernate.

Skinning the Cat with Fluent NHibernate

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 07:01:02 GMT

As you may have noticed, I have become interested in the concept of Object Relational Mapping and the NHibernate framework. One of the more painful/tedious aspects of using NHibernate is hand writing the xml mapping files. That is why I got excited when I heard that Jeremy Miller was open sourcing his mapping generation libraries.

Specification Pattern and Lambdas

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:46:03 GMT

While working on my current project I decided that I had a need to use the Specification Pattern . After finding a clean implementation by Jeff Perrin I set to work creating the specifications that I needed. I quickly realized that we were going to end up having a ton of specifications and sometimes they would only apply to very special cases. Other times they would be very broad cases and they needed to be even more composable than even the fluid interface implemented in Jeff's implementation wasn't going to be enough. It after all still required me to create a concrete implementation for each specification, no matter how minuscule it might be. This is the part where I thought to my self that since i was really only creating implementations for a single method that I could just write a LambdaSpecification and be able to use this for all the special cases I had.

jQuery for ASP.NET MVC unleashed!

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 01:46:05 GMT

jQuery plugins for the ASP.NET MVC framework

nHibernate performance against stored procedures

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 22:01:15 GMT

A 5 part blogpost about the performance of a select statement done with ADO.Net using inline sql, and stored procedures (even some dynamic sql) and then nHibernate to get the same results. But this one has an alternate ending.

Some best practices for NHibernate by Ayende

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 01:01:11 GMT

A few hours ago I completed a code review of an application using NHibernate. This is not the first time I am doing such a thing, of course, and I noticed that there are quite a few areas where I tend to have comments in such code reviews. The following is based on several such code bases that I went through, and contains a partial list of things that you need to watch for.

What a C# Coder Should Know Before They Write VB

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 02:31:12 GMT

"I just had an e-mail exchange with someone looking for a VB lead in Colorado Springs. I think they are going to have trouble filling it with an existing VB expert, and it occurred to me that someone who had led a successful VB 6 -> C# project could fit the bill, if they knew some key things about VB. I told the recruiter I thought the right person with a C# background and the right (respectful) attitude could be a good fit with two weeks work."

MVC Storefront Part 17: Checkout With Jeff Atwood

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:01:04 GMT

Checkout With Jeff Atwood