Exploration of Thought

Cool event coming up next week! Details below ...  Join us for a special event co-sponsored by the .NET User Group & Silverlight User Group. This month we’re bringing highlights from the MIX09 conference to you!! You’ll get detailed information and in-depth demonstrations on the upcoming release of Silverlight 3 and Expression Blend 3 as…

Our main build broke today. We have about 53 projects in our solution (yes, its huge) and all of a sudden … pow … NAnt started timing out. Upon further investigation I noticed that the build was timing out at the following instance:   Coverage Log: Coverage.Log Waiting for profiled application to connect...Connected Configuring Profiler...…

It has been moved to November 14th and 15th of 2009. Why? Get the inside scoop here.

While writing some code I needed to be able to access the the App_Data directory in my ASPNET MVC app. Doing this usually involves a Server.MapPath, but this wont work for my unit test. Here’s how you can get around it:   var appDataPath = (string)AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetData("DataDirectory") ?? AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ApplicationBase;   Now I have my data directory…

This post might be useful if you perform auto-registration of your components through an interface. Like this: AllTypes.Of<IController>().FromAssembly(typeof(Application).Assembly).Configure(reg =>reg.Named(reg.Implementation.Namespace.Split('.').Last().ToLowerInvariant() + "." +reg.Implementation.Name.ToLowerInvariant()).LifeStyle.Transient), This snippet of code finds all types that implement the IController interface. This would be any controller in your MVC App that implements the Controller base class (Controller implements IController). In this instance the…

This an oldie, but a goodie. Not many people use this tool, much less know about it or where it exists. By default when you install VS2008 (I’m not sure if its part of 2005 or not) you have a tool at your disposal in the Visual Studio install path: My Path: c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual…

Lately I’ve been doing some vocal recording in my home studio for a friend of mine. His producers/mixers/collaborators/etc that perform the final mix downs of the tracks live in either New York, Chicago, LA, or pretty much everywhere else other than where I live (Minneapolis). As you may know, PCM Wav files can run very…

The coordinator of the Twin Cities Code Camp Jason Bock interviewed me at the Twin Cities Code Camp this last weekend with his video camera. The video has recently been posted and can be viewed below:   … and we have a very small snippet of my session below too …

I was recently interviewed on the Spaghetti Code Podcast, hosted by Microsoft’s Jeff Brand. Jeff and I talked about Mocking and how it relates to the development process, testing process and your day to day coding. You can download the files from the SlickThought website here or from ITunes here. * I’m not sure if…

As I stated in the session “Testing with Mocks”, I would post the code and presentation to this blog. Download the code and the presentation as a zip file below. Thank you for coming to the talk! If you have any questions please let me know. *NOTE* You will need to install TypeMock Isolator for…

Unfortunately most presenters do not think about font size until about 10 _after_ they show code to an audience. Its usually followed by the confirmation question from the presenter that goes something like this: “Hey, can you guys see the code?” Most of the time the answer is… “No, bigger font please … ”. 2…

At times in the testing process you want to make sure that a certain method on a mocked object _does_not_ get called. For example, perhaps you’re performing some validation on a object and the object fails the validation rules. At this point you’d want the call to pop back up the stack to the caller…