How I try to keep up to date

I have just added a page to the blog that lists some of the podcasts I try to listen to, in an attempt to keep up to date.

March 26, 2012 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Keeping up to date

Ours is a fast moving industry and as times goes on I find the need to specialise more and more. However, I believe there is a great value in at least having a passing knowledge of as much of our field as possible, IT pros can learn from developers and .NET team from Java and of course the other way around. I find the best way to try to keep abreast of new ideas is to listen to podcasts; I personally find it hard read enough blogs, but I can find time to listen to a podcast whist travelling or working around the house....

March 26, 2012 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Problems editing TFS11 build templates in VS11Beta

Whilst writing documentation for TFS community build extensions (just published the Zip activity documentation) I hit upon a problem working with TFS11. The TFS community build extensions support both TFS2010 and TFS11beta, unfortunately the two versions need to be built separately (once against TFS2010 DLLs and once against TFS11 ones). As of version 1.3 of the extensions both versions are shipped in the download. In the past in the past I have tended to work in TFS2010 on this community project, but since the VS/TFS11 beta release I am trying to move over to the new build....

March 24, 2012 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

More thoughts on Typemock Isolator, Microsoft Fakes and Sharepoint

I posted yesterday on using Typemock and Microsoft Fakes with SharePoint. After a bit more thought I realised the key thing in using Typemock I found easier was the construction of my SPListItem dataset. Typemock allowed me to fake SPListItems and put them in a generic List then just make this the return value for the Item collection using the magic .WillReturnCollectionValuesOf() method that converts my List to the required collection type....

March 24, 2012 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Now that VS11 has a fake library do I still need Typemock Isolator to fake out SharePoint?

Updated 5 May 2012 Also see my follow up post, this corrects some of the information of faking SharePoint I have done posts in the past about how you can use Typemock Isolator to fake out SharePoint to speed design and testing. The reason you need special tooling, beyond standard mocking frameworks like Rhino or MOQ, is that SharePoint has many sealed private classes with no public constructors. So in the past you only had two options: Typemock Isolator and Moles from Microsoft research....

March 23, 2012 · 5 min · Richard Fennell