DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by gojko

CloudCamp London 2: private clouds and standardisation

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:52:08 GMT

CloudCamp returned to London yesterday, organised with the help of Skills Matter at the Crypt on the Clarkenwell green. The main topics of this cloud/grid computing community meeting were service-level agreements, connecting private and public clouds and standardisation issues.

Dependency injection with Castle Windsor: Video

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:42:07 GMT

Here's the video from the talk on dependency injection with Castle Windsor that Mike Hadlow and Gojko Adzic did last month at Skills Matter.

Script#: the .NET response to the Google Web Toolkit

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:37:12 GMT

Script# is a free .NET tool that converts C# into JavaScript, allowing us to a lot of existing C# tool support to write and manage large JavaScript code bases easier. This presentation introduces Script#, explains when and how to use it and discusses some common pitfalls with this tool.

Alt.NET UK summer conference report

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 11:11:47 GMT

The second Alt.Net UK open conference took place on Saturday in London, with about 100 people attending and 16 sessions.

Really simple .NET remoting with Castle

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:56:55 GMT

Simplified calls to remote services are among the most useful features of the Java Spring framework. In .NET, I use Castle for the application framework wiring and I was looking for something similar - it turns out that the remote proxy calls are incredibly simple with Castle as well.

Clean your HTML inputs or the dog-eaters will get to you

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:02:36 GMT

Google sent quite a few people looking for underground Korean adult movies to my blog. I guess that you can find anything on Internet these days, but why were they looking for it on my web site? The answer to that question turned out to be another great example of why inputs should be cleaned up no matter how unimportant.

Unit testing Monorail Web sitest

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 10:17:14 GMT

One of the best things about Castle Monorail MVC engine is that it allows us to test controllers from the IDE, without actually deploying anything to the web server. A major problem with most web development environments, including classic ASP.NET, is that the workflow and session logic can only be tested through the UI. User interface testing is slow, pain to maintain and generally does not pay off as much as code unit tests do. Monorail's programming model allows us to test workflow and session logic from the code, leaving only the actual rendering outside the reach of unit tests. That is how Monorail empowers us to really apply agile principles to web development, and saves us even more time and effort.

Saving time and effort with advanced Monorail features

Mon, 26 May 2008 17:39:54 GMT

In the third part of the Castle tutorial, we look into the features of Monorail that allow us to save a lot of time and effort when developing web applications. We explore advanced Monorail concepts that help us delegate error processing and authentication to the framework and reuse templates. We also look into how Monorail integrates nicely with ActiveRecord to automatically load and modify database objects based on HTML forms.

Castle demo App #2: Monorail basics

Tue, 13 May 2008 21:41:45 GMT

In the second part of the Castle demo application tutorial, we look into the basic features of Castle's powerful Model-View-Controller system, called Monorail. Monorail is based on Ruby on Rails, and brings two very important features to .NET web development...

ActiveRecord basics and unit testing

Wed, 07 May 2008 15:01:13 GMT

I've decided to build a demo application with the Castle project for an internal training session, to show how easy it is to work with this framework and to demonstrate the best practices. I will post the tutorial in parts on this web site as I develop it. In the first post, we work on the object-relational mapping with ActiveRecord and write unit tests for the database mapping layer.

Put the web server on a diet and increase scalability

Mon, 05 May 2008 17:19:30 GMT

Misusing HTTP sessions is probably the number one obstacle to building scalable web sites today. Here are some tips how to consume HTTP sessions responsibly.

What makes a good application framework

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:09:28 GMT

I have been using the Castle Project for about two years now, and it is definitely one of my favourite tools. It is truly a great example of how a good application framework should be written. Although all the concepts that it provides have been around for a while and became popular with other frameworks like Spring for Java or Ruby on Rails, the Castle Project brings them together in a very effective way and makes enterprise .NET development significantly easier.

FIT/FitNesse Fixture Gallery

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:17:40 GMT

Fixture Gallery is a cookbook for FIT/FitNesse tests. It provides developers with a quick overview of the most important fixture types and concepts for agile acceptance testing using the FIT framework. For each fixture type, this document explains the table format and fixture class structure and provides advice when to use and when not to use it. Each example is accompanied by the source code for Java and .NET FIT implementations, in a form that can be easily copied and used as a template for similar fixtures.

When TDD goes bad

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 03:46:03 GMT

Last week, at the London .NET User Group meeting, Ian Cooper talked about Test-driven development, focusing on both good and bad practices. I'm a big fan of learning from anti-patterns and mistakes of other people, so the second part of his session was very interesting to me. Here is a short list of things that Ian identified as symptoms that TDD has gone bad in a project, along with my comments...

The wrong way to do a shopping cart

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:47:42 GMT

The print-on-demand service that I've chosen for my book has a fairly nice web user interface with lots of Ajax code. Generally, that web application is one of the best aspects of doing business with them. That's why I was surprised to find a rather amateurish flaw in their shopping cart.

How to test AJAX sites with FitNesse and Selenium RC

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 19:27:46 GMT

It's been almost a year since I wrote Automating web tests with FitNesse and Selenium, offering an idea how FitNesse can be used to implement a nice customer-friendly mini-language for user interface testing. Since then, that article has been one of the most popular, if not the single most popular, article on this web site. I have helped several clients improve and integrate their UI testing based on the ideas in that article, expanding and improving the mini-language, especially for AJAX testing. Here is what I've learned about that in the last year.

FitNesse resources - blogs, books, articles and video presentations

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 18:20:26 GMT

A list of FitNesse related articles, blogs, video presentations...

How to avoid getting lost in translation

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:50:10 GMT

I have stumbled upon a few very interesting conclusions about the language and how important it is to choose good metaphors and names in Douglas Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach. Although the book deals with something completely unrelated to software projects, it contains some very interesting ideas that we can apply to improve software development.

Test Driven .NET Development with FitNesse now available

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:50:54 GMT

Test Driven .NET Development with FitNesse is now available in print and PDF. The book is a summary of my experiences with FitNesse in a .NET environment on several large projects. It covers the following topics: - Applying test-driven development principles and practices to guide projects and improve the quality of code - Writing FIT/FitNesse tests for .NET code effectively - Getting customers involved in testing - Building a shared understanding between business people and developers using acceptance tests - Setting up and managing FitNesse in a team environment - Using FitNesse and Selenium for Web interface testing - Testing legacy code and databases - Extending FIT to meet particular project needs - How FIT and FitNesse work under the hood

IIS7: Component architecture and better diagnostics

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:28:21 GMT

Martin Parry from Microsoft's Developer and platform group presented the upcoming server version of IIS 7 last week in Reading. The new version has some really interesting features that will make life easier for developers.

Returning the favour for on-site customers

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:24:06 GMT

n November, I attended a workshop on improving the understanding between customers and software development teams. The attendees were split into seven or eight groups, and there was an exercise at the end asking the members of each group to come up with a practice that could significantly improve the shared understanding with their customers. Five groups independently came to the same conclusion: "Spend some time working at the customer's location."

How to sell TDD to non-technical stakeholders?

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 17:59:35 GMT

How do we sell the test-driven approach on a wider scale to business analysts and customers? How do we get them involved in that process? It seems that a lot of the problems and confusion obstructing that effort come out of the misleading name of the term "acceptance tests".

The waterfall trap for "agile" projects

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:03:44 GMT

Jeff Patton from Thoughtworks held a very interesting session at XpDay last month in London, focusing on a common misconception that causes "agile" projects to fall into the same trap that the waterfall ones typically do.

Golden Rule of Web Caching

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 17:43:12 GMT

Effective content caching is one of the key features of scalable web sites. Although there are several out-of-the-box options for caching with modern web technologies, a custom built cache still provides the best performance.

Speed up database code with result caching

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 15:40:19 GMT

One of the most interesting new features of Oracle 11 for me is the new function result caching mechanism. Until now, making sure that a PL/SQL function gets executed only as many times as necessary was a black art. The new caching system makes that quite easy - here is how it works.