Posts

I raised a question on the Typemock forum concerning a problem I was having mocking Sharepoint SPFarm objects. It was all down to which way to fake items using the various techniques in Isolator. It was interesting enough, I thought, to repeat here as a blog post. I had written some tests for a method that got a list of SiteCollections that a user had rights to access. The key point being the need to access the static property SPFarm.Local to get a list of Sharepoint services to iterate across. If I ran each test by itself it worked; but if run as a batch in TestDriven.Net or MSTest the first passed and the rest failed. ...

The voting process has opened for Developer Day Scotland being held on the 2nd of May. I would like to draw you attention to my proposed session on testing for Sharepoint developers where I will show what can be done with Typemock and good use of design patterns to allow the building of complex tests that can be run of build servers that do not require Sharepoint to be installed. But even if you don’t fancy this session please still vote, and when it opens sign up to attend DDS. In my opinion DDS was the best of the DDD events I went to last year. A great venue and atmosphere. ...

I have been having a problem with a new automated CI build under Team Build that I have added to an old Visual Studio solution. The solution is fairly big, but in essence it contains a shared data type assembly, a web site front end and a back end web service. The problem was on the Team Build drop share in the _PublishedWebsitesproduced by team build I was finding a old version of the shared data type assembly. However in the release directory of the same build I found the correct newly built version of the assembly. ...

I have been struggling today with a problem that a PostBuild event on a C# project works fine on my development PC but failed on a Team Build box. The project is based on the Codeplex SharePoint Visual Studio Project Template that uses post build scripts to create a deployment WSP. It turns out the problem was an unwanted condition on the PostBuildEvent in the projects .csproj file. It was like this: ...

Interested in finding out more about Microsoft’s Cloud computing strategy and the technology behind Azure? Yes - well you are in luck there are more UK Microsoft road show events in February. They are in Cambridge, Edinburgh and the one we are hosting in Bradford on the 13th. For more details and links to registration see http://blogs.msdn.com/ukisvdev/archive/2009/01/14/new-dates-for-azure-technical-briefing-announced.aspx

I have posted in the past on porting our ASP.NET bug tracking systems into Sharepoint and also linking it to TFS. The idea being that the initial customer support contact is tracked in the call tracking system e.g. is it switched on, is there paper in it….., and then escalated to TFS when development effort is required. To do this escalation my webpart calls a WCF service to access the TFS API - why you ask? The TFS API is 32bit only and you cannot call it directly inside a Sharepoint 64bit server farm. ...

The details of the February meeting of the Agile Yorkshire User Group (new name, and new web site is on the way, watch out for posts) The session is on developers experiences of TDD, another view from the coal face. See you there, 2nd Wednesday of the month as usual….

DDD community events are getting another venue this year, Queen’s College in Taunton on the 23rd of May. It has been decided that some of the speaker will be regulars from other DDD events; including myself speaking on Scrum. However all the other slots will be filled in the usual submission and voting manner, with the added rule the speaker should be new to the conference circuit (speaking to user groups is allowed and encouraged). So is this you? do you fancy speaking? if it is then submit a session. ...

You can vote for sessions at SQLBit IV as of today at http://www.sqlbits.com/information/PublicSessions.aspx, you do need to join the site first. Note joining the site is not the same as registering to attend the event which has not opened yet.

I have been working on an internal legacy application at our place that is being slowly moved from ASMX to WCF services. At present the services are a mixture of the two and there is a new WCF based client making connections to both types as needed. This work has been going on for a while on Vista development boxes without any problems. However when I opened the solution on a Windows 7 box (Beta 7000 build) I found I could not access the WCF services hosted locally using Visual Studio 2008’s WebDev.Webserver.exe (Cassini) server. ...