The Sherpa Project

I attended the Launch Tour today and participated in the Ask The Experts booth for the developer track. I must say that I had a great time talking with everyone and that I was extremely impressed with the quality of the event. The sessions were wonderful, the turnout was great, and the discussions were very engaging. I appreciate everyone who turned out for the event and who stopped by the booth.

If the Launch Tour is close to you, I hightly recommend attending.

I’ve been working with ASP.Net 2.0 for a while now and overall I’ve been pleased with the functionality that exists in 2.0. There has been a bit of a learning curve and there are a few things that have really driven me close to the brink of insanity.

One of those things is the ASP.Net 2.0 integration with VSS. For some reason, the add to source control functionality source controls the bin directory of your site. When you have a project reference that is modified, ASP.Net will grab the new assembly and update the bin directory (as it should). The problem here is that the bin directory is now source controlled. When you build your solution ASP.Net will automatically check out the file from VSS by default. This obviously creates a massive amount of contention (because it happens for everyone working on the solution and every time the solution is built) and this has been extremely frustrating for our team. The workaround that the team has used has been to make all of the files in the bin directory read-only, but this is obviously a pretty big (and tedious) hack for the default integration behavior.

I haven’t been able to find much out there on an elegant way to work around this issue. Am I just missing something blatantly obvious here? Is this really the default behavior of VS.Net 2005 and the VSS integration? If you’ve faced this issue, what was your approach to avoid these issues?

Thanks to the outcry from the community, Microsoft is in the process of changing the Guidelines for TDD page. I applaud Microsoft for listening to the community and quickly taking the proper steps to rectify the faulty guidance. You can read more in this post from Rob Caron.

Looking for the “Open from Source Control

… are wrong. The guidelines are an extreme disapointment in my opinion. This topic has been brought up lately on the xp mailing list and there is starting to be an outcry from the tdd community. TDD (by definition) means test-driven.

I hate the fact that you can generate tests from code with the new testing tools. I think there is probably value with the “generate test

I’ve done three projects within the past couple of years where I have built the same server components for asp.net-based applications. It seems like everyone is using custom phone controls, date controls, calendar controls, credit card controls, zip code controls, etc. It’s always the same thing over and over.

Every time that I’ve done this, I’ve always felt that it wasn’t worth the effort. The requirements always change for the interaction of these controls and when you look at the final price of the man-hours to build these things it ends up being ridiculous. When you look at it on the surface, these are simple things. For some reason, it just always seems to take forever to get these things built and tested.

Here’s my advice… don’t build them if you can avoid it. Take a look at the controls that are for sale and evaluate them first. These are common problems with common solutions and there is no reason to re-invent the wheel over and over. If anyone has any control recommendations, feel free to leave them in the comments. I’ve never seen a really good control comparison for what is out there, but if you know of one then I’d love to see it.

James has finally announced the release of his book Visual Studio Hacks.

I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy.  This is going to be a long couple of months
Congratulations James!

I wanted to say thanks to everyone that was able to attend the Day of .Net event in Columbus.  The event was a lot of fun and I had a blast presenting.  The slides will be up on the site soon.  For everyone that didn’t make it (the event sold out in 36 hours), we will likely be doing the same session and format within the next month to allow for everyone who wasn’t able to register to get a chance to attend.

Thanks to Drew and Dave for doing a great job of pulling this together and to Alex for helping with the promotion.  Everyone had great sessions and it was refreshing to see more code than slides.  The code will also be posted on the site if anyone is interested in downloading the content from the presentations.

For anyone in the Ohio area, be sure to stop by at the .NET Development Best Practices/Tips-Tricks event on Friday January 21st. I’ll be giving a session on Test Driven Development and the lineup for the event looks great.

The event is free and open to the public. You can register at the Microsoft Events site.

The lineup is…

1. Implement a Service Gateway with COM Interop and Web Services – Dave Donaldson, Arcware
2. Building Web Services – Drew Robbins
3. Test-Driven Development in .NET – Ben Carey, NuSoft Solutions
4. Pimp Your IDE – James Avery, Infozerk
5. Client-Side Scripting with ASP.NET – Steve Caravajal, MAX Technical Training
6. What’s New in the Visual Studio 2005 IDE, ADO.NET 2.0, and WinForms 2.0 – Alex Lowe, Microsoft

I just downloaded GhostDoc and I am extremely impressed. GhostDoc is a great step towards providing consistency in comments. I was amazed to see how wonderful a little bit of intelligence and automation can help with readability of the code and the resulting documentation.

When you right click in the following code block and choose “Document This“ from the context menu…

1:     public bool CanRestart()
2:     {
3:         return false;
4:     }

You get this…

1:     ///
2:     /// Determines whether this instance can restart.
3:     ///
4:     ///
5:     ///     true if this instance can restart; otherwise, false.
6:     ///
7:     public bool CanRestart()
8:     {
9:         return false;
10:    }

Ghostdoc also provides configurable rules that you can use to customize the behavior and the resulting comments.

I’m a big fan of automating documentation and I’ve seen a lot of momentum in this space lately. In a perfect world we would either write code or write documentation, not maintain the two side-by-side. The generation could obviously go either way, but until I see a solid MDA product I think I’ll continue to have the code generate the documentation. NAnt and NDoc do a wonderful job of generating documentation during a build and the setup is quick and easy. I have also used NAnt and the BizTalk Server Documenter to generate documentation for BizTalk projects lately.

It puts a big smile on my face when I can provide everyone with technical documentation that I know is up-to-date.