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Archive for August, 2008

Best Codecamp Evar

31 Aug

Wow – just attended the best codecamp ever. It’s gotten me so excited about silverlight, wpf and asp mvc. Jonas, who’s girlfriend is a silverlight designer, has some really great insights into how to do some funky silverlight stuff, go read his blog. I was also pretty impressed by Scott’s speaking style – he was a LOT funnier than I expected.

The fact that I got to speak wasn’t what made the day so great for me. No – it was the content of the other speakers and having such interesting conversations with everyone else who came. The people that turn up to these community things are the ones who really care about what they do.

My slides & source will go up here very soon I promise! I just have one thing to ask you guys: If you came to my talk, I’d love to get some feedback about how my presentation went. One of my colleagues told me I need to walk around a lot more – so thats some good advice for me to take on board. But I want to grow up to be a fantastic presenter one day, so please, leave me a comment or send me an email. All criticism will be gratefully, gracefully received. Unless you weren’t actually there.

 
2 Comments

Posted in .Net, Me

 

Bridging Unit Test Frameworks with Gallio

23 Aug

Update: Jetbrains have just released Resharper 4.5, which contains native MSTest support. No need to read the rest of this article, then!

Read the rest of this entry »

 
6 Comments

Posted in Testing

 

Slides & Source from my Silverlight talk

08 Aug

My thanks to everyone who came to my talk… I promised I’d put my slides up on the interwebs. Here are the slides and here is the source code

If you do want to run the system, the first thing to do is browse to default.aspx, and then .net will create the membership database (10 megs) for you. I deleted this just before i uploaded the code. You can log in anonymously as well.

If anyone’s thought of some more questions, please post a comment right here or email me (rob@robfe.com).

To the software engineering student who wanted to embed her own silverlight app onto any old web page, I had a brainwave after I answered your question. You can probably use a bookmarklet (like firebug lite do) to insert your own content (div + silverlight loader) into whatever page the user is looking at. It’d definitely be easier than writing a plugin. If you don’t want the user to have to click the bookmarklet for every page they want your widget on, GreaseMonkey is a firefox plugin that you can configure to automatically run javascript on any web page. Feel free to email me for more details

 
7 Comments

Posted in .Net

 

Awesome Object to XML conversion

03 Aug

Microsoft are taking their sweet time releasing a production version of LINQ to XSD. I have played with both of the alphas, and they are seriously the most perfect way to deal with strongly typed XML. I hope you’ve played with the new System.Linq.XML bits, they make xml operations a lot easier. However, when you’ve got an XSD file, you know exactly what kinds of elements and attributes you should be generating, and it seems like hardcoding in those strings is error-prone.

Back in .net 2, I used to use xsd.exe to generate a class that was in effect a strongly typed map to the desired XML format. Then it’s totally easy to convert from that object to XML and back. Now, in .net 3.5, you can use vanilla LINQ to populate these data classes, which is certainly nicer to read. But it feels somehow low tech. Plus it feels cumbersome to have to generate the classes from the command prompt, I want visual studio to mollycoddle me (and stop anyone from making changes to the generated file in case I want to regenerate!)

The promise of LINQ to XSD, however, is slightly different. And awesome. You put your XSD file into your project. Change the build action (or maybe it’s the custom tool, it’s been a while since I checked). After that, as a precompile step in your build, visual studio will regenerate a set of classes that strongly type your XSD. What’s so cool about that (apart from the fact that you don’t have to drop to the command prompt?) Well now the new classes are already backed (ie, keep all their data in) by System.Linq.XML.XElements – no more mucking about with the XMLSerializer. And for two, the classes have been infused with some validation, so if you try to set a property with a value that the schema considers invalid, you’ll get an error immediately (ie: you can see which line of code caused the problem).

Awesome.

For further reading, check out what Scott Hanselman has to say about the “life” of the project. He explains Linq to XSD pretty well too. And if you get a chance, make some noise, I’d really like to see this released!

 
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Posted in .Net