Greg McKinley

Regurgitated build stuff and more

gmckinley — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 09:29:00 GMT

Lately, I have been spending a some spare time working on automated builds. I currently use Nant, NUnit, NDoc, TestDriven.NET, and DotNetMock. Now I am working on tying it all together into a complete process. And adding some more on to the pile of course...

The more I think about it I want this entry to be placeholder for all this info:

Gordon Weakliem: Supporting VS.NET and NAnt (XSLT and NAnt, standard format, etc)

Andrew Stopford: Creating a build system

Arne Vandamme: .NET: NUnit testing private fields and methods

Stewart Baird: More NUnit and Nant Tricks, Tips and Examples

Michael Swanson: CruiseControl.NET and MSBuild (for 2.0)

Test Driven .NET Blog: Introducing MutantBuild

Kris Syverstad: Setting up Nunit w/CC.Net &/! Nant

Other Stuff:

NCover

CruiseControl.NET

NHibernate

Andrew Stopford: Sourcecontrol, VS, CVS and Subversion

Cool

gmckinley — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 10:23:00 GMT

Cool channel9 clip with JP talking about his car pc. For the geek/performance driving enthusiast the OBDII potential is the real cool factor of a car pc. Oh, that would be awesome! This is something that I would not expect car manufacturers to implement any time soon.

OOP Sprinkles

gmckinley — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 23:13:00 GMT

It's funny how MSFT knows its typical customer. They knew it would be a progressive transition to .NET starting with any new development. Then convert some core legacy code and interop with the rest of the code base. What a crap fest this amounts to!

Today there are thousands of lines of procedural code with sprinkles of OOP on top (more like hamster turds). Most of this rewritten code looks as it did before moving it to .NET but now you have these damn sprinkles making it even worse... You would hope that people would have realized how procedural the legacy code was and spent time refactoring. Nah, no time for that got to write .NET code. So this code was crammed inside a .NET app and deployed. Now when it comes time to build off this code base it is next to impossible to implement the new functionality. Fun stuff.

Daily Fix

gmckinley — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 15:12:00 GMT

A year ago this consisted of reading 40 or so blogs, online articles, and books.

Today I read over 70 blogs (hasn't grown that much purposely), listen to Channel9 clips, .NETRocks clips, webcasts, online articles, and good old books.

I am very much enjoying all this input. Let me know the different ways you are getting your fix.

Code Camp II

gmckinley — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 12:59:00 GMT

I just got a little excited... It has been awhile since I looked at the list of talks for Code Camp II. The number of talks has tripled!

Code Camp II chatter here (Robert), here (Scott), here (Sam), here (Jason)

Bug Fixes

gmckinley — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 09:42:00 GMT

I have been at my new job for about 2 months. Aside from some small projects I have been primarily working on bugs fixes for a recent release of one of our products (paying my dues). I was not part of the development of the release but I have battled countless bugs and surprisingly I am not tweaking out yet... Recently I have been refactoring a lot of code (something near and dear to my heart). The down side is that I have been cramming to unit test and ensure I got all the pieces back in :-) Unit testing is a bitch when the asp.net pages have some logic (or a lot) in them...

Steve's Repositories & Factories post

gmckinley — Mon, 16 Aug 2004 10:19:00 GMT

http://dotnetjunkies.com/weblog/seichert/archive/2004/08/08/21456.aspx

Car rant

gmckinley — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 10:00:00 GMT

Well, I spent most of the weekend under the car and its still not done... Ahh, it is like any project they always run over. I really need to get the E30 running since I started my new gig last week and have to drive to work. The wife is not to happy about only having one car. Either am I. I have not driven my car in seven months. It was stored away for the winter and I spent the Spring in 'Geekland' and looking for a new job.

I feel a little guilty for not getting any work or studying done but that sense of accomplishment from working with my hands all weekend is pretty sweet. This week I need to replace the driver's side tie rod, front sway bar links, and drop it off for an alignment.

SOA

gmckinley — Tue, 25 May 2004 10:47:00 GMT

Without a doubt the message I heard yesterday was Service Oriented Architecture. Granted 3 out of 4 sessions I attended were part of the Connected Services Track. Although even the Developer Session (Software Reuse with .NET: Best Practices) hyped it up the whole talk too. It makes me think how much my shop needs to adapt.

Clemens Vaster takes my vote for the best session of the day with his presentation on Best Practices for Dealing with State at Multiple Layers within Your .NET Applications.

Other Highlights:
1. WSE 2.0 is available. WS-Policy, WS-SecureConversation, WS-ReliableMessage, etc.
2. MTOM is the future of DIME.
3. ASMX
4. System.Messaging
5. JITA Proxy Pooling --> See Clemens Vasters blog

Cool things about San Diego...

gmckinley — Tue, 25 May 2004 10:40:00 GMT

1. My favorite --> cement patches on on/off ramps (traction sweet spot)
2. Every time I turn on the radio Metallica is playing.
3. Highway Patrol rides BMW motorcycles.
4. There are sprinklers on the freeway to water the lawn. I think this is only on route 163...

Geeks are pouring in...

gmckinley — Mon, 24 May 2004 12:11:00 GMT

So I am here at TechEd still getting a feel for where everything is in the convention center. Curious how the first day is going to go.

Yesterday, I registered, spent the afternoon at the San Diego Zoo, and then went to the Architect Road Rally over at the San Diego Car Museum. The zoo was great. I was impressed at how well they create each animals habitat. The Road Rally was a blast. Met some nice people. Turns out one of the guys is moving to Boston from San Diego. His wife is going to MIT's Business School this fall. The other two guys are from Sweden. It just so happens one of them is into performance driving and racing. Needless to say we all had lots to talk about.

Swiss Memory

gmckinley — Fri, 21 May 2004 11:01:00 GMT

Not a match in my opinion...

TechEd

gmckinley — Fri, 21 May 2004 10:34:00 GMT

Tomorrow I leave for San Diego. I am getting excited for a week of “geek over stimulation” and meeting people. From the sounds of it RIO is not being fully utilized by participants. The only real plans I have is the Architect Road Rally on Sunday night. I am real curious to hear about what other folks have planned in their spare time.

Anyone that wants to take a break during lunch and talk CARS should contact me.

Great info

gmckinley — Wed, 19 May 2004 00:02:00 GMT

Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability is full of great info. I definite reference to keep handy.

Nant

gmckinley — Tue, 18 May 2004 23:32:00 GMT

Need to spend a little time and check out Nant.
What has been your experience with it?