An excellent turnout for tonights XP Club meeting. As I write Nick McKenna is talking about his experiences in adopting agile processes.

Are you seeing the error “Cannot play media. You do not have the correct version of the flash player. Download the correct version” on the BBC web site or on YouTube “Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Macromedia’s Flash Player. Get the latest Flash player”? I have been on my Dell Mini; I suspect the problem was the upgrade route I took from XP-Home -> IE8 Beta ->XP Prof meant the registry was a mess. Repeated re-installation of Flash and Shockwave had no effect. ...

I posted a while ago on wiring in Fitness.Net into a unit test framework using HTML files to hold the tests. Well I have been using the technique for some workflow acceptance testing and hit a couple of gotta’s that are easy to forget: Make sure the HTML files containing the user story tests are set to copy to the project output directory in the IDE – if they are not then the framework cannot find the tests, so obviously none are run. The danger is you think the problem is an incorrect class or method name, when it is a simple missing file problem. If you edit the user story HTML file make sure you rebuild the solution. If you don’t do this the copy to the output directory might not be triggered as a simple build maybe skipped as the IDE will not see any changes to source files it needs to compile the project. This is especially easy to forget if you are using a test add-in such as Testdriven.net as opposed to clicking on build yourself. Be careful with the HTML editor you use to create user story file in case it reformats the page. This is important for parameters (but it seems not for the method name fields). You need to make they are formatted My Value ...

It is getting to that conference time of year again; I can’t believe the PDC is only 3 weeks away, then VBug the next week and DDD7 just after that. A bit closer to home there are some free events coming up this month: XPClub - October Meeting: “Agile Narrative” by Nick McKenna, Wednesday, 8th October, 7pm for 7:30pm at the Victoria Hotel in the centre of Leeds (free event inc. free beer!), no need to register just turn up Black Marble community events – [Silverlight, XNA and Gaming](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Silverlight, XNA and Gaming) Pete Mcgann (XNA) and Richard Costall (Silverlight) talk about XNA, Gaming and Silverlight in their own unique style. 22nd October 6pm for 6:15pm at The Holiday Inn, Tong (between Leeds and Bradford). This free event also provides free food, you can just turn up, but really helps if you register online. Look forward to seeing you at one of the events in Yorkshire ...

I posted about the problems of using Blend with source control, specifically TFS. Well the next version of TFS Power tools gives a partial answer. They are to include Windows Shell Extensions so at least the check-in/out process can be managed would having another application open other than an explorer windows. Well it is step forward, until Blend 3 appears

As we move into the SOA world workflows will become more common and so the need to test them will increase. If we take the most simplistic view these are a sets if statements and loops so should be amenable to automated testing and TDD. However you have to careful how you try to do this, it is too easy to forget that your workflow will run the the WF thread. Why is this problem? ...

The one major thing that I did not like with my Dell Mini was the fact it had installed XP Home. My main grip with this was the fact my main user account had to be an admin user, and I could not login as a user called administrator unless in safe mode. So I decided to do an in place upgrade to XP Professional (which also meant i could join the company domain). This seemed straight forward, I attached an external USB DVD and got the XP Professional SP3 slipstream media. The process continued as you would expect until the final reboot where it sat on the splash screen saying ‘please wait’ for a hour or two. ...

I posted on the problems I had had mocking out an SMTP server, well I have moved on a bit. As I said in the update note in the last post, I had given up on nDumbster and moved over to LumiSoft’s freeware mail server. The Lumisoft server is a far better starting point as it is a ‘real’ server that supports all the major mail protocols. As all the source (and binaries if you can’t be bothered to build it yourself) are shipped it is easy to create a wrapper class for unit testing purposes that can do whatever you need. ...

It was announced overnight by Microsoft that the Database Professional SKU for Visual Studio will be made available to all people who have a licensed copy of Team Developer. This is great news as it addresses the problem of where to put the expensive copy of DataDude (which I think has been a barrier to it’s uptake), in most companies there is not the clear distinction between code and DB devs. ...

I am currently looking at automation of acceptance testing for workflows and a common task is to make sure an email has been sent. To do this in a TDD style I have been using the mock SMTP server nDumbster. Now this was a port from Java in the the days of .NET 1.1 and does not seem to have had any development since. This can be seen because the following test using the .Net 1.1 System.Web.Mail call works beautifully, returning in a second or so ...