I am off to Oslo, for the first time, for the Typemock Academy this week. The event has managed to survive the disruption of the Icelandic volcano. A great chance to meet a pile of people I have only spoken toon the phone or via email in the past. Looking forward to it.
In my previous post I talked about using Isolator to mock Sharepoint to aid the speed of the development process. I find this a productive way of working, but it does not really help in the realm of automated testing. You need a way to programmatically explore a webpart, preferably outside of SharePoint to check its correctness. You could use the methods in my previous post and some form of automated web test, but this does mean you need to spin up a web server of some descriptions (IIS, Cassini etc....
I have found the most productive use of Typemock Isolator with SharePoint is to use it to reduce the time of the F5 cycle (build/deploy/use). If you are using a VPC of some type to do your SharePoint development, as many do, this process can easily take a couple minutes, and these minutes add up. In my experience webparts usually make fairly simple use of the underlying SharePoint site, by this I mean that they get some data from an SPList(s) or remote data source and render in some way....
I am on the way home from my whistle stop visit to the SharePoint Evolution conference. I must say congratulations to the organisers for putting on such a successful event given all the problems they have had related to speakers and air travel, well done. My slides, on Testing Webparts with Typemock, will appear on the conference site soon, but I thought it a good idea to link here to previous posts I have done on the subject....
I have just heard I will be speaking at Developer Day South West on June the 5th. My subject is Using the new Developer and Test features of VS 2010 to track down and fix bugs, this is basically the same session as I have at our TechDays fringe event yesterday. Hope to see you there
Thanks to everyone who turned up for Matt Nunn’s and my sessions in Leeds today. All seemed to go well and were well received. As my slide stack consisted of a a welcome screen and an agenda I don’t really see the point of posting them on web. If you want to see the end to end story of VS2010 ALM I would suggest looking at the video’s on Channel 9....
Whist at the the UK Techdays I did a video with Rob Miles. You an see the results here, we are near the end. A full video of my session should be available on the Microsoft UK Techdays site soon
When you are moving TFS contents around between servers, as many people will be doing as they implement new 2010 servers and want to make use of Team Project Collections; you often have to move Reporting Services reports. In many cases you find people have lost their customised .RDL files they uploaded in the first place, and don’t want to restore the whole Reporting Services DB. So how to extract an RDL file from a Reporting Services instance and moving it to a new Reporting Services instance?...
I am really pleased to say I will be speaking at the first Typemock Partner Academy in Olso the week after next. I will be talking about using how we at Black Marble have used Isolator to improve the speed and quality of our SharePoint development.
I have seen a few tweets after my Techdays session on Lab Management that it sounded expensive. It is true that Lab Management is an extra license to purchase over and above Visual Studio. However under the new licensing model for VS you have to remember that as an MSDN subscriber you are already licensed for a TFS CAL and Server and if you have VS2010 Ultimate you are licensed for the Test Professional tools....