Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP]

May 2004 - Posts

• Random Observation #4

  "Who would ever trust a journalist about technology or law anyway?" N. Alex Rupp Posted May 28 2004, 04:52 PM by darrell with no comments

• NUnit and environment variable troubles

  Lance Ahlberg was running into an Argument Exception when using NUnit. See how he fixed it: I have been getting an argument exception with details “Absolute path information required”, this exception was happening when I was running Tests with Nunit. After almost pulling my hair out the problem was found, Environment variables.... Nunit caches the assemblies that are being tested in the temp directory, and uses the TEMP environment variable.  Of course my TEMP environment variable was a relative path. So the moral is, if you see Absolute path information is required take a look at your environment variables and ensure that they are absolute. Posted May 28 2004, 06:29 AM by darrell with no comments

• Another TDD Sucess story

  It’s so easy to work with Test Driven Development. For example, I recently had to go in and debug a data access method. Well, I was supposed to just add tests for it, but I ended up having to debug it. Hehe. There were 3 DataTables, so instead of testing all three at once and trying to figure out the error I was getting, I commented out two and just returned the first one in the DataSet. Green! Ok, then I enabled the call to the database for the second one. Red! So I looked at the stored proc and typed dataset, quickly figured out it was a mapping issue, and fixed the stored proc. Run NUnit again. Green! Finally I re-added the last DataTable code and ran NUnit. Green! All done and no debugger was necessary (sorry John Robbins!). And this only took a couple of minutes. All it takes is for you to start using TDD where you can. Just start by writing some tests around some code that you work with every day. I guarantee it will help. Posted May 27 2004, 09:05 AM by darrell with 9 comment(s)

• Zip up solutions inside Visual Studio

  Someone else pointed this out code on CodeProject. It's pretty useful when you want to share a project or solution via email. Now if only someone would add "Email to..." functionality. ZipStudio - A versatile Visual Studio add-in to zip up Visual Studio solutions and projects. Zip up a Visual Studio solution, project(s), or all selected project items directly from the Visual Studio Solution Explorer window. Posted May 27 2004, 07:40 AM by darrell with 2 comment(s)

• Random Observation #3

  Hilarious quote about "experienced" software developers: "Having many years of experience only establishes that one is old, not that one is correct." [courtesy of Hacknot] I can't tell you how many times people have argued with me saying "I've been doing this for 15 years!" So you're not only arrogant, but ignorant as well? What a worthless argument. Posted May 25 2004, 05:18 AM by darrell with 10 comment(s)

• Dave Donaldson on .NET and J2EE

  Dave Donaldson has an interesting series of posts on .NET and J2EE. Definitely worth checking out. Posted May 25 2004, 05:08 AM by darrell with no comments

• View in Firefox, courtesy of Raymond Chen

  Raymond Chen wrote up a post on extending the IE context menu in response to a comment I left on Brendan’s blog post of useful IE features. Reading Raymond’s post, it definitely is not hard to do, and I appreciate the fact that he didn’t nuke me. When I originally searched around with the “View in Firefox” idea in mind, I never found the article he links to. I think I had a problem with figuring out the right search terms, because it seems pretty obvious now. Be sure to check out the comments, there’s more cool tweaks there. Anyway, thanks Raymond. Posted May 24 2004, 02:17 PM by darrell with 1 comment(s)

• Test Driven Development webcast today with Ron Jeffries

  The 400 level designation is defined by Microsoft as advanced/expert level content (see content level definitions). This should be a good one! Test Driven Development as a Practice – Level 400 Products: Visual Studio. Recommended Audience: Developer. Date:  Monday, May 24, 2004 Time: 9:00AM-10:30AM Pacific Time (GMT-7, US & Canada) Description:  Microsoft® Press author Ron Jeffries, author of the recently released Extreme Programming Adventures in C# will discuss the application of Extreme Programming design and development techniques using Visual C#® and and the Microsoft .NET Framework. Topics include "Spikes", unit-testing, and your questions regarding the fundamental techniques of simple design, test-driven development, and refactoring to create practical, .NET-ready applications.One registered webcast attendee will be randomly selected to win a free autographed copy of Ron Jeffries’ new book, one title in the new Microsoft Professional Series of books. The Microsoft Professional Series titles are focused on agile programming methods and underlying architectural design concepts and patterns, representing the cutting edge of new or changing technologies. Presenter: Ron Jeffries, Software Development Consultant, Ronald E Jeffries Associates Ron Jeffries is an industry leading voice and practitioner in the extreme programming movement. He was the on-site coach for the original eXtreme programming (XP) project. An independent consultant who has been involved in XP for more than five years, he has presented numerous talks and published several papers on the topic. He and his teams have built operating systems, compilers, relational database systems, and a wide range of applications. He is the most prolific on-line author by far in eXtreme Programming and related topics. UPDATE:  Changed the link to point to the OnDemand webcast (permanent link). Posted May 24 2004, 07:06 AM by darrell with 11 comment(s)

• How to test ASP.NET without IIS

  Steven Padfield has a good article on Server-Side Unit Testing in ASP.NET: How to create an HttpContext outside of IIS. It shows how to get NUnit associated with an HttpContext without sending HTTP requests to the web server in a manner similar to NUnitAsp. [via The Daily Grind] Posted May 23 2004, 06:47 PM by darrell with no comments

• TDD presentations and code using csUnit

  Here are a couple new Test Driven Development presentations: An Introduction to Test-Driven Development (TDD) – code examples are in C# and Delphi using csUnit. Download the PowerPoint (1043K) Download the source code (90K) An Introduction to Test-Driven Development (TDD) using Visual Basic.net – code examples in VB.NET using csUnit. Download the PowerPoint (1046K) Download the source code for the demonstrations (211K) Posted May 21 2004, 07:26 AM by darrell with no comments

• NUnit v2.2 Beta 1 Released

  From the release notes: This is the fourth major release of NUnit and the third since it was rewritten to take advantage of .NET custom attributes. Highlights of this release include support for Mono, multiple-test selection in the GUI interface, a built-in lightweight mock object facility, new command line switches for both GUI and Console runners, and new Category and Explicit attributes. Get the full details on the NUnit SourceForge forums. Posted May 20 2004, 06:25 PM by darrell with no comments

• All 12 TechNet Security Briefing slide decks in one place

  Microsoft has consolidated all of the TechNet Security Briefings slides onto one page. Included are: Advanced Server and Client Security Applied Security Strategies Essentials of Application Security Essentials of Security Implementing Application Security Using the .NET Framework Implementing Application Security Implementing Client Security Implementing Network Security Implementing Security Patch Management Implementing Server Security Writing Secure Code -- Best Practices Writing Secure Code - Threat Defense Posted May 19 2004, 11:53 AM by darrell with 1 comment(s)

• You know you've been programming too long when...

  You know you've been programming too long when you hit Ctrl+Shift+B to "run" your Word document. Posted May 19 2004, 06:03 AM by darrell with 15 comment(s)

• BizTalk Server 2004 CM Reports using SQL Server Reporting Services

  The BizTalk Server 2004 Configuration Management Report Generator supports all of these scenarios and more by saving BizTalk Server configuration information to XML and more importantly making it visible in SQL Server Reporting Services through a custom data extension component. Check out an example report here. With SQL Reporting Services you get hosted reports, export to a variety of formats such as pdf and excel, and lots of built in design capabilities. Of course every BizTalk Server 2004 requires SQL Server 2000 so you already have access to SQL Reporting Services. The BizTalk Server 2004 Configuration Management Report Generator is a sample and includes the full-source code to all components. Thanks to Jonathan Moons for his work on this sample.  Download it here.  [via Scott Woodgate’s blog] Posted May 18 2004, 04:00 PM by darrell with no comments

• Making database names friendly (or at least readable)

  Most DBAs want to name each column something ridiculous (to developers, anyway) like A_PrdCdPct for a period code percentage amount. And the table is named AbcPrdCd; obviously that’s the Period Code table for the Abc application. Duh. Recently I’ve come to the conclusion that database column and table names should be made “developer-friendly” in the database. If database access is solely through stored procs, it is easy to alias each column and table name, like this within the proc: SELECT I_PrdCdId as PeriodCodeID, A_PrdCdPct as PeriodCodePercent FROM AbcPrdCd as PeriodCode If direct SQL access is needed, then views work well, although there may be a performance penalty when using views (although indexed views can help). Views are also useful when you want to transparently control user access to tables. I usually don’t like to add additional layers of abstraction unless absolutely necessary, however I think the return for this small amount of work is big. I can’t count how many times the DBA group said, “Oh, we named that wrong so we changed it yesterday” as I sat there trying to figure out why stuff I checked in yesterday doesn’t work today. Yes communication would help, but better yet, let’s get rid of the whole problem! This would allow the DBAs to change column names to their hearts' content and our applications can remain blissfully unaware. Posted May 18 2004, 10:02 AM by darrell with 5 comment(s)