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 ...

After Alt.net I had thought getting an ultra light notebook was a good idea. At most conference I need to browser, blog and read email; I don’t need to carry around a full development desktop replacement laptop. Whilst at ReMix I had enough of the old battery in my Acer laptop, so just before it ran out of juice again I ordered a Dell Mini 9, which was actually cheaper than my HTC phone! Today it arrived, a lot sooner than I was expecting, Dell has said it would be next month. ...

Brian Harry has published an interesting post on the platform decisions for ‘Rosario’. The most interesting item is it will only support SQL 2008; so get planning a migration for that central enterprise SQL server!

So how was ReMix? well a bit like last year not earth shattering, but what can you expect. We have PDC in a month so there is going to be no major announcements, also this is a rerun event from the US MIX conference, again reducing the chances of anything new. So if you are a developer and been to TechEd or just to local community events (and as Andy Westgarth said we are very lucky at the quality and number of community events and speakers in the UK) you will have heard nothing new about Silverlight etal. Though it is far to say that this may not be true for designers, and I felt the development track was pitched at this level. ...

I have eventually got round to rebuilding my GUITester on Codeplex for VS2008. I must get round to looking to see if a similar declarative test markup system has any mileage for XAML. Something was talking about at Alt.net in the spring - how time flies.

I have been asked a couple of times whist at the Alt.net and ReMix conferences about the local user groups around Leeds. Well these are the regular free community events I know about: Black Marble community events - my company runs free community events at a hotel between Leeds and Bradford roughly monthly from autumn to spring. We invite a variety of leading .NET community speakers. The Yorkshire Extreme Programming and Agile Methods Club (XPClub) - meets the 2nd Wednesday of the month in the centre of Leeds. This is a group of .NET and Java developers interested in agile development bast practice. ...