Joe starts polling to see what people want to talk about. Most seem to be interest the libraries for Mono (being that they also work on Windows/.NET. So, Joe starts talking about libraries for/from Mono. Mono.Cecil. For all your reflecting and assembly modification needs. Mono.Addins. I've been looking at this off and on today, and I have to admit it looks pretty intriguing Mono.Rocks: Handy extension methods. Mono.
Well, this month EDMUG was hard up for speakers, so out of desperation they asked if I had anything to say. I figured I could talk for about 30 minutes on MonoRail, and then read the newspaper out loud for the next 90 minutes. Oddly, the EDMUG executive was okay with that. This morning they sent out their notice to the membership:
Thursday, April 24th will not just be one of the greatest EDMUG evenings of all time, but it will also be the opportunity of a lifetime.
Yesterday myself, Don, D'Arcy, and Eric were wandering around Seattle, just checking out the sights after the MVP Summit. We took a break from the usual "run down D'Arcy and Manitoba" shtick, and actually had a serious conversation on the relevance of stored procedures for your typical database development/line of business app. D'Arcy blogged take on it already. I was going to reply in his comments, but as the comments grew, I figured my own post was in order.
Thanks to Phil Haack's online poll, there is a bit of controversy over where one's unit tests should reside: should the unit tests be housed in a separate project and assembly, or do they shack up in the same project as the code that they are testing? Like Bil, I figured that rather than a big long blog comment, I'd be better of with my post.
Way back when I started out with TDD, I used to put the test fixtures in the same file as the class under test, sort of like:
In my last post, I described how easy jQuery makes it to call an ASP.NET Web Service via AJAX.
Currently, I'm developing on Windows XP (SP2), Resharper 4 (running inside Visual Studio 2008), and using the Visual Studio Web Server. We deploy to Windows 2003 R2/IIS6. When I pushed the code described in my last post to the development server to test it out there, the web service call kept failing with an HTTP Status of 500 (internal error).
Just figured I point out ConnectionStrings.com. I find this site rather handy because it shows you the syntax for the connection strings of pretty much every database you'd want to use in .NET.
Last night I spent some quality time looking at vincent-vega, aka Continuous Database Integration for SQL Server. This is a pretty simple and handy task for Nant that helps bring continous integration to your databases. I use updateSqlDatabase like as part of my integration tests like so:
Drop the database Create a new database Run some SQL scripts to bring my database up to date Run various database integration tests, repeating steps 1 -3 as necessary.
For those getting into .NET 3.5, you might find Mono.Rocks of interest. I first saw this on Jean-Baptiste Evain blog. Basically, this is a collection of extension methods for the class libraries. They are covered under the MIT licence, so you can pretty much use it anywhere.
Once again, appealling to the niche (non-existant?) market, I give you a quick run down on using db4o, and the Castle Windsor db4o facility. Yes, I know the link for the db4o facility link doesn't work. That is what prompted me to do this blog post. This is because, a while ago, the db4o facility was pulled from the Castle Project. Apparently there was a licencing concern. It's my understanding that this has since been resolved, and I seen now that there is again the db4o facility.
As most Resharpies know, when you're using Resharper you can reformat your code. A nice feature is that you can use this reformat code to also organize and layout your code files the way you like it.
For example, Kyle Baley did post on how to how to use the format code to get rid of regions. His techique is a bit unrefined - his revolutionary, dogmatic zeal he will clobber all regions and do nothing else - but still handy.
