Posts

Gil at Typemock has been posting about some ideas we discussed over breakfast at the Typemock Partner conference a while ago, I have been a bit slow at commenting, so I though I better add to the conversation. Though Typemock is an excellent mocking framework, for me basic mocking is not its biggest win. All the ‘classic auto mocking’ of interfaces to speed TDD style working is great, but I can do that with any of the .NET mocking frameworks. All they do is mean I don’t have to write my own test stubs and mocks, so saving me time, which is good but not the keep win I was looking for. ...

What a great event the Norwegian Developers conference is. It is a nice size so there is a good selection of tracks, but no so big you feel lost, also the speakers and attendees were all mixing freely which I think always makes for a good atmosphere. This was all enhanced by the excellent organisation of the event, what can I say the wifi worked faultlessly, the food was good and the overflow screens (so from one place you could view the video and audio of any current sessions) was a brilliant idea, so much I know some people took to using this in preference to going to the actual session. You can see the overflow screens at the top of the photo below. ...

When travelling aboard what I hate most about Windows Mobile 6 is that I have no idea if the phone is going to trying to use a local WiFi or 3G. Mobile Outlook seems the worst culprit, it loves 3G over everything else!. On mobile 6.5 there are just too many places where you might need set which data connection to use. This means, for fear if a nightmare phone bill, I tend not use us my phone for data. And just just don’t realise how much you use it at home until you are away. ...

I have sorted all the bits for my presentations so am ready for my trip to NDC 2010 in Olso tomorrow. Really looking forward to it, the agenda looks great.

I had not checked the site for a while, but my Microsoft Techdays session on Lab Management is now available as a video I cannt make it embed here, some Community Server issue I assume, so look for it on the developer track on the second day. It is called ‘Putting some testing in your TFS build process"

As do many people I have a good number of TFS2008 style builds for legacy applications. I will, in the end, move these over to VS2010 and hence upgrade their build formats to the new 2010 workflow based one, but for now it would be nice to be able to run them with the minimum of effort. To this end I have done some work to see the minimum I can get away with to allow these builds to run, the aim being to leave the build box as close to a virgin TFS2010 one as possible. ...

The Web Client for TFS 2010 (what was called Team System Web Access TSWA) is now installed as a core part of the Application Tier. It is no longer a separate install as it was in previous versions. This means it is easy to implement, it is just there by default. However, this can raise some problems if intend to expose to TFS AT via a firewall to the Internet, or use an alias for your TFS AT. This is because, by default, the Web Client uses it’s host server name as the AT name to connect to, it assumes the AT is local. ...

I got the paperwork for the British Computer Society EGM this week. This EGA raises some interesting issues, the best overview of the issue I have found seems to be on the Computer Weekly site. So has supporters of the EGM motion argument, led by former BCS trustee Len Keighley, any merit? Yes, it does. Enough to vote out the current BCS management and trustees? Well I am not so sure. I was a student member of the BCS in the late 80s, when I was working for a small PC and LAN dealership. It was not good experience, I left the BCS with a feeling they did not care for anything bar old mainframe style IT and had no interest in anything newer than the late 70’s. ...

Recently my Humax PVT9200T has started to hang. When I started it up, within a minute or two (usually much less) the picture froze. Prior to this it had been working fine for the six months I had owned it. This seems to be a common problem for the PVT9200T of late, there is much talk of a patch on the way. For me the immediate solution seems to have been simpler; I just reset it to factory defaults and let it rescan the channels. It has now been working fine for a couple of days. Maybe this simple solution will help other owners of the PVT9200T ...

In Kevin Jones’ session at today’s DDD South West on ‘Testing ASP.NET MVC Applications’ the question was asked it it was possible to mock out .NET extension methods using any mocking frameworks. Kevin said did not think it could be done with Rhino Mocks, but thought it might be possible with Typemock. Given my experience with Typemock I could see no reason why you would not be able to fake an extension method with Typemock, though I had never had need to do it. A quick search when I got home provided this post by Dennis van der Stelt which explains how to do it. t is just as easy as you would expect. ...