Posts

I have a couple of new video’s on on the Typepmock Experts site, why not take a look, the titles are Using Typemock Isolator to enable rapid development Using Typemock Isolator and Ivonna for unit testing the UI

The VBug Autumn Conference is on the Wed 27th & Thurs 28th October at Holywell Park, Loughborough. The published agenda this far is **Day One (Wed 27th Oct):**Top of the Pops with Sharepoint 2010 – Dave McMahon Cache Out with Windows Server AppFabric – Phil Pursglove Mapping the Cloud – How far can we stretch it? Johannes Kebeck Silverlight Development on Windows Phone 7 – Andy Wigley **Day Two (Thurs 28th Oct): **TFS (actual title TBC) – Richard Fennell Silverlight 4 (actual title TBC) – Richard Costall Others to be confirmed…including Azure, Expression Blend & BI ...

I have posted in the past that I am not a huge fan of my phone, so I read Martin Hinshelwood’s experiences with putting Android on his HTC HD with interest. I have tended to leave my phone as a consumer device i.e. it does what it does, I tend to not fiddle too much as long as it will make calls, sync email and allow me to get the cricket scores on the BBC website, the essentials of life. However, I had a spare SD card and a bit of time. So it was off to the Diamond2(Topaz) XDADevelopers forums to see what I needed. ...

There is a noticeable omission form the tooling for StyleCop that you cannot integrate it into a TFS 2010 Build directly. There is a custom task to do it as part of MSBuild Extension pack, but this is designed for TFS 2008. So when I had to wire in StyleCop to our 2010 build process I hit a problem, I could Edit the .csproj files for each project to wire in StyleCop Use an MSBuild activity in my 2010 build Write my own custom activity. I decided to follow the final option, it did not look too bad as the source needed is provided in the StyleCop SDK. Well after a good deal of fiddling I have it basically working. Again I found the process of developing a custom activity a little irritating. ...

Recently Packt Publishing sent me a copy of ‘Refactoring with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010’ by Peter Ritchie, I have to say I have rather impressed by it. My only major issue with it is that of the title, this book covers much more than the refactoring features of 2010. It provides a very clear example driven discussion of the use and application of both refactoring patterns and design patterns. I think this would be an excellent book for a developer who want to start to apply design patterns to their C# code. The examples being more real world than Head First’s ‘Design Patterns’ (and the examples are in C# as opposed to Java) and the book being a far easier read than the classic ‘Design patterns : elements of reusable object-oriented software’ ...

There is a call for speaker for DDD in Dublin on the 9th of October, that is not that far away is it! [Updated 1 Sep 2010] The link would help http://developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/dddie10/

Test Professional, after the Lab Management update, now uses Expression Encoder 4.0 to create it video of screen activity. This means that when you run a test and record a video you end up with an attachment called ScreenCapture.xesc. Now my PC did not have the Expression Encoder 4.0 installed, so did not know what to do with an .xesc file created within our Lab Management environment. To address this the answer is simple. On any PC that might want to view the video either: ...

Interesting user too stupid error today whist adding some CodeUI tests to a Lab Management deployment scenario. I added the Test Case and associated it with Coded UI test in Visual Studio I made sure my deployment build had the tests selected I then ran my Lab Deployment build, but got the error Build directory of the test run is not specified or does not exist. This normally means the test VM cannot see the share containing the build. I checked the agent login on the test VM could view the drop location, that was OK, but when I looked for the assembly containing my coded UI tests was just not there. ...

I have been using the ExternalTestRunner 2010 Build activity I wrote. I realised that at least one of the parameters I need to set, the ProjectCollection used to publish the test results, was hard coded in my sample. It was set in the form http://myserver:8080/tfs/MyCollection This is not that sensible, as this value is available using the build API as BuildDetail.BuildServer.TeamProjectCollection.Uri.ToString() It makes no sense to hard code the name of the server if the build system already knows it. ...

Access MVP Ben Clothier has posted an article and video on Going beyond Web Macros: Using Event Receivers & .NET with Access Services. This takes some of the techniques I was proposing for .NET/Access integration and added to them using Ben’s extensive experience in the Access space. Well worth a look if you want to make Access a RAD front end to legacy systems.