Month: July 2009

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Roy Osherove’s TDD Code Review Videos

I’m going to be doing a talk on Practical TDD at the Inland Empire .Net Users’ Group in the near future.  We’ve had TDD talks in the past but they have been more overviews with only a little code.  I plan to take the group through craeting a simple blog engine from scratch completely using TDD.  I hope that this will give a real great example of how to develop a project using TDD.

The presentation was supposed to be in August, but as that lands directly on my 8 year wedding anniversary and our son’s 3rd birthday I had to postpone it.  I don’t like sleeping on the couch. 🙂  James Johnson, the president, is still working on where to put my talk, so I’ll post an update when that happens.

Anyway, in the spirit of getting ready for this talk I’ll be writing a few blog posts on some great TDD resources I’ve found.

Recently Roy Osherove, the author of the Art of Unit Testing, started doing actual TDD code reviews on his blog.  These are great!  It’s one thing to read a blogger’s posts with their thoughts and opinions on topics but seeing Roy go through a live code review in a video is just spectacular.  It’s like getting a chance to sit in on a session with Roy.

While he admits that he’s a little harsh on the Nerd Dinner review, having done it at 2am, I think he is spot on in his findings.  Of course, Roy is a very experienced veteran in this area so we’d think nothnig less.  However, the points Roy makes are great and he really brings to light what good and bad examlpes of TDD he sees in the app.

I can’t wait to check out the rest of the videos.

He offers to review code that is sent in.  I’m not sure I’ll be brave enough to do that, but if I’m not that would indicate a smell in my code, wouldn’t it? 🙂 Maybe when I get my talk together I’ll pass my code on to Roy to review prior to my presentation.  That would really give me a great resource to make sure my presentation is sound and a little more authority on this topic.

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Map IP Address to a Geographical Location

Here’s a great article on how to get a geographic location from an IP address within SQL Server:
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SQL+Server/67215/

The article is very easy to follow and gives great direction of setting up a user defined function in SQL to give you back a location based on the IP address.  Since SQL servers are very good at processing data quickly this seems like a natural way to get this information.  Once you have the function set up you can easily use it in asynchronous processes like analyzing logs, post processing of customer data, etc.  You can also set this up as a trigger within SQL or a service callable by outside apps, such as a webapp.

I’ve seen this used in a lot of ways that I don’t care for (thanks for letting me know about all the fictional hot girls that live in my area, but I don’t think my wife would approve :)) but there are some legitimate ideas coming around.  For instance, let me power up my iPhone and see what Nerd Dinners are available in my area (work in progress).

Another scenario is blocking spam.  For instance, at my work we service Riverside County in southern California, USA.  We have methods to stop unauthorized users from creating accounts and blocking spam to our Wiki’s and such.  But why not use location based blocks as well?  I know my users are all from Riverside County, so why not block everyone from, say, outside of southern California?  While a user or two may be blocked while attempting to access their work from their vacation in Maui, I don’t think I’d get that much flack from blocking these edge cases.