July 2004 - Posts
That's right, two weeks after the release of NUnit 2.2 Beta 2, a fresh Beta has been released. This one can be used straight from within Visual Studio.Net 2005 and the Express downloads.
Other interesting tools I use for testing and daily build:
- NAnt -- at this time, still the most important build tool but a year from now it will likely be superseded by MSBuild;
- NAntContrib -- third-party contributions to NAnt, a great library of extra tasks;
- NDoc -- for generating MSDN-style Compiled Help files;
- VIL -- for calculating code metrics including Cyclomatic Complexity and Lack of Cohesion in Methods;
- FxCop -- as far as I know, still the best free tool for quick static analysis of assemblies;
- DevPartner Studio -- a great and very extensive static analysis tool, a must-have for doing serious code reviews. It also includes profiling and code coverage analysis.
What tools do you like and recommend?
This news is so hot that at the time of writing, NUnit's official site isn't even updated to reflect it yet :-)
Yes, Beta 2 of NUnit 2.2 is out now on SourceForge. NUnit is the most-used unit-testing tool for .Net available today, and it supports Mono too (although Beta 2 of 2.2 doesn't). It seems Microsoft agrees it's very good, because it has hired its main author, James Newkirk, to lead Visual Studio.Net 2005 ("Whidbey") 's unit-testing feature team.
In the meantime, my currently favorite build tool NAnt is almost into version 0.85, which will support .Net 2.0!
MSDN now features a Product Feedback page where you can suggest/request new features and where you can read, search and file bug reports. The URL is
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/
What a great feature! I think every software development team should have something like this. It should also be relatively easy to set up, for instance using the (free) Issue Tracker Starter Kit. It's not only great for internal use, but teams could expose this to their customers and/or functional testers to gather and prioritize feature lists.
There sure is a lot of great stuff coming from the Development Tools teams at Redmond lately...
Update: Scott Galloway informs us about the BugNet effort over at GotDotNet, which apparently evolved from the Issue Tracker Starter Kit (which is, itself, a Beta). It's currently in version 0.61. I haven't tried it out myself yet, but it's definitely on my To Do-list. Thanks Scott!
Update 2: David Boschmans further points to BugTracker.Net, another open-source bug tracking application, which he has used at customers' sites and which seems very interesting. Thanks David!
Today, my colleague Jurgen Postelmans talked about "SQL Server 2005 Web Services" while Pat Helland (Microsoft), Clemens Vasters (Newtelligence) and Rafal Lukawiecki (Botticelli) played "The Nerd, The Suit & The Fortuneteller", about service-orientation, business alignment and the difficulties of communication between businesspeople and development teams. It is hard for techies and non-techies to understand each other and get aligned... Anyone who can figure out an easy, cost-efficient and sure-fire way to align both parties can make a fortune!
The last session I followed was about architecting smart clients. Pretty cool stuff, involving the Offline Application Block and the Updater Application Block, threading issues (let your UI thread handle all UI and put the resource-intensive stuff on other threads, working asynchronously), integrated security etc.
Incidentally, my buddy Gunther B, a total .Net guy from Microsoft, started blogging recently. Subscribed!
I'm off now, heading back home...
During this Tech-Ed, Microsoft announced the freely-available downloads of the Betas of a new range of Express products.
Just as Outlook Express is a "downgraded" free version of Outlook, there are now free Express Editions of Visual Basic 2005, Visual C# 2005, Visual C++ 2005, Visual J# 2005, Visual Web Dev 2005 (the "sequel" to Web Matrix) and even SQL Server 2005. Each download is less than 100 MB. You can find them on MSDN Express.
Another day at Tech-Ed, so another day of having to choose between a bunch of interesting sessions.
I started the day co-presenting DEV 350, "Visual Studio: Programming Business Tier Logic" with my colleague Jurgen Postelmans for about 700 people. I must admit I wasn't too happy with the presentation, because it didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped or planned, but everyone I talked to afterward thought it was an interesting session, so what do I know? The presentation and its code will soon be posted on U2U's site. I'll keep you posted.
David Gristwood presented "21 Rules of Thumb -- How Microsoft Develops its Software", originally by the legendary Jim McCarthy. A great topic and well-presented (follow the link to get to a condensed version of the contents).
Unfortunately, I missed Alan Kipman's "Visual Studio 2005: Managing the Enterprise Build Process with MSBuild". I would have loved to go to that... MSBuild is very similar to NAnt, which I'm currently using to do automated builds. Basically, both tools break up the build process into a series of units called targets (subroutines, really), which are composed of single steps such as checking out code, or compiling it, or running unit tests. Such single steps are called tasks and you could compare them to method calls. Tasks can be parameterized, and you can add functionality to the build system by developing custom tasks in .Net. I'll come back to automated builds ad nauseam later.