Setting up .NET Development Trees in Visual Studio

I had the intention of talking about best practice ways of setting up a Visual Studio solution including which are the best tools followed by a step by step guide of how to do it. Well, it looks like someone beat me to it! This pdf from Mike Roberts does exactly that. What was interesting is that we set up our VS solutions very similarly and use most, if not all of the same tools. But then again, Mike Robert's is from ThoughtWorks and our Development Manager is ex ThoughtWorks - Amazing how the information flows between companies! ;)

Talking of development tree structures, there is a tool on CodePlex that generates your solution tree for you in line with how Mike Robert's document suggests. It's called Tree Surgeon. It's very simple but it provides a good start.

TechEd New Zealand is underway

TechEd 2007 started today starting witht the keynote speech given this year by Lou Carbone. It was brilliant! It is soon to be posted on the TechEd NZ site soon and I recommend that you watch it. It is very inspirational. Some more info on this on Darryl Burling's blog and Nigel Parker's blog

Intergen were dressed in their ususal "outstanding" outfits making our mark on the NZ community.


I went to the following events:

• DEV346 Next Generation Team Foundation Server
  Having already played with TFS quite a bit, I didn't learn a great deal from this session. However, what i did learn is that there is a way to gain access to TFS source control using a SVN client! So that means we could use TortoiseSVN from Windows Explorer to manage TFS source control - how cool!
  
• ARC304 Architecting Next Generation Business Applications
  This was heavily focussed on MOSS which wasn't for me so didn't take a lot away from this session
  
• ARC306 UX - Interface Design patterns
  This was an interesting session showing the possibilities of user interface design. It included a few video clips showing Photosynth, some multi-touch tabled demos from Jeff Han all giving us plenty of ideas for our next user interface.
  
• DAT304 The Next Release of Microsoft SQL Server: Overview
  There are a few cool additions to the next vesion of SQL Server codenamed "Katmai". I particularly liked the automatic page recovery feature of a mirrored database! Check out the rest of the features on the Microsoft site.
  The July CTP of SQL Server 2008 is now available for download

A great start to TechEd 2007. Hopefully tomorrow will continue to be as good...

Intergen setting up at TechEd 2007

Well, Tim and the rest of Tech Services did a great job of setting up the hand on labs room at TechEd this year. Well done guys!! The lab room looks cool and aparently everything is working just fine... fingers crossed!

Nothing of note has happened so far, but that's because Ben wasn't there to entertain us with a brooks-worthy cockup!! Still, 3 days left for that, eh Ben!

Shaun made a stellar effort of setting up the Intergen stand complete with an shot-em-up arcade machine. Tim and I had a game and got hooked in pretty quickly! If I'm not on lab duty or attending a session, you'll find me playing games at the Intergen stand.

As ever, the TechEd bag is quite funky and comes with a bundle of advertising inside, the most controversial of which was a brochure from Absolute IT doing a salary review. :) It's worth a read.
No free copies of Vista yet but I'm on the lookout.

To keep everything central, I've setup a Facebook group called Intergen TechEd 2007 for all the photos, videos, thoughts and new from this years event. It's an invite only group so if you're from Intergen, ping me an email and I'll add you in. There is a link to my Facebook public profile at the top of my blog and from there you can look at my groups to find the TechEd 2007 one.

Adding statistics to your blog

Add stats to your blog with Statcounter.

I've added some statistics to my blog so I can see who is looking at what. Nice to see the demographics of who visits your blog! It's very easy to sign up and there are loads of config options. Some of the stats are very interesting, especially the demographic map one!

A free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats. Insert a simple piece of our code on your web page or blog and you will be able to analyse and monitor all the visitors to your website in real-time!

Formatting your code for blogging

In my previous post, I was trying to insert XML into my blog entry. Blogger isn't very helpful and makes a mess of XML and any C# or VB code entrys.

However, there is a formatting tool which outputs 4.01 compliant HTML which you can paste directly into your blog! It parses c# vb, xml, t-sql and others and does it very nicely.

Here is a sample of c# output:

using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace Vulcan.Borat.WinApp.UserControls
{
    public partial class ProductPanel : UserControl
    {
        public ProductPanel()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }
    }
}

Using NUnitForms with NUnit Framework 2.2.9

NUnitForms has been compiled to work with NUnit framework library 2.2.7. However, NUnit have released a new framework which can be made to work with NUnit 2.2.9 quite easily.

By default, if you put NUnitForms and NUnit Framework 2.2.9 into the same project, you will get the error message

Could not load file or assembly 'nunit.framework, Version=2.2.7.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=96d09a1eb7f44a77' or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040)

along with a further error

WRN: Assembly binding logging is turned OFF. To enable assembly bind failure logging, set the registry value [HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion!EnableLog] (DWORD) to 1. Note: There is some performance penalty associated with assembly bind failure logging.
To turn this feature off, remove the registry value [HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion!EnableLog].

However, you can use NUnitForms with NUnit 2.2.9 if you get the test project to perform some assemble redirecting. In your test project, create an app.config file and add the following XML to redirect NUnitForms assemble to use the NUnit Framework 2.2.9 assembly:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
  <runtime>
      <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
          <dependentAssembly>
              <assemblyIdentity name="nunit.framework" publicKeyToken="96D09A1EB7F44A77" culture="neutral"/>
              <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-2.4.0.2" newVersion="2.4.0.2"/>
          </dependentAssembly>
      </assemblyBinding>
  </runtime>
</configuration>

Recompile and run your NUnitForms tests and your working :)

Mingle v1.0 Released

ThoughtWorks Studios have released Mingle v1.0 to the public.

You can download a 30 day trial version