Category: Development

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Testing Browser Compatibility Made Easier with Microsoft VHDs

When you are a website developer, hardly ever do you get to mandate what browsers your users will use.  At my last employment we built a lot of Intranet web applications for our users, who all used the same version of IE that was managed automatically on their work computers via Active Directory.  That was nice.

At my current position the websites I create are used by a variety of school districts and the public.  While the majority of users are browsing my sites with IE7 and IE8 there are a few Chrome, FireFox, Safari and, yes, IE6 users.

 

There is a great community of software applications and web services to help you test how your site will react with different browsers.  Most of them are fairly static showing you how a page will render, but with highly dynamic sites you just need to see how it will work on the actual browser.

Fortunately Microsoft makes this really easy by releasing VHDs with various operating systems and browsers loaded, from WinXP and IE6 up to Vista and IE8.  That’s not the whole Microsoft gamut but it is a good portion and easy to use.  Just load up Microsoft Virtual PC and you are set to go.

Take a look at Microsoft’s offerings here.

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Alternating Ordered List Item Styles

We have Policies and Procedures document that we are making available on our website.  This document in its entirety easily spans several hundred pages and has a pretty lengthy table of contents. 

To help make this easy to navigate and easier to consume we are posting several of the larger topics as individual documents and making them available from a linked table of contents that is created as a web page.

The requirement is that the table of contents uses different numbering styles at each indentation.  So, for instance, the outline below:

Topic A

   Sub-topic A.1

   Sub-topic A.2

      Sub-topic A.2.1

      Sub-topic A.2.2

Topic B

Topic C

would become:

1. Topic A

   a. Sub-topic A.1

   b. Sub-topic A.2

      i. Sub-topic A.2.1

      ii. Sub-topic A.2.2

2. Topic B

3. Topic C

This document isn’t maintained in a database yet so for now the table of contents is created in good old fashioned HTML.  Using a standard <ol> (ordered list) element in HTML looks initially like this:

  1. Topic A
    1. Sub-topic A.1
    2. Sub-topic A.2
      1. Sub-topic A.2.1
      2. Sub-topic A.2.2
  2. Topic B
  3. Topic C

The way to change the numbering style is by using the CSS list-style-type style on the <ol> element with various options such as decimal, lower-alpha and lower-roman.  You can find a great example of this at w3schools.  So, I could manually change the list style of each <ol> tag based on how much it was indented, but this would be a pain to maintain.  Anytime we changed the layout I would have to change the list-style-type styles and be sure to keep everything consistent.  I thought this would be a perfect place to use jQuery.

Using jQuery I was able to define an array of the types I wanted to use.  jQuery would then find all the <ol> and nested <ol> elements and change the style for each indentation.  Once done I could simply maintain the table of contents and jQuery would handle the styling. I couldn’t find any jQuery plug-ins that did this so here is the code I came up with.  If I end up using more than a couple of times I’ll probably create a plug-in for it.

1: function styleOutline() {
2: // List-item-styles we would like to use
3: var olStyles = [‘decimal’, ‘lower-alpha’, ‘lower-roman’];
4:
5: // Process the parent element.
6: styleOl($(‘ol:first’), 0);
7:
8: function styleOl(element, styleIndex) {
9: // Apply style
10: element.css(‘list-style-type’, olStyles[styleIndex % olStyles. length ]);
11:
12: // Call recursively for each nested ol
13: element.children().each(
14: function (i) {
15: var ol = $( this ).children();
16: if (ol) {
17: styleOl(ol, styleIndex + 1);
18: }
19: }
20: );
21: }
22: }
23:

This works great and took me only a couple of minutes to do. Definitely an improvement over the manually written way.  I hope this helps someone else out there!

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When Bad UI Sticks Around – JavaScript Alert Boxes

We recently migrated from one online IEP vendor to another.  This is a program for collecting and managing Special Ed information, but it is an enterprise app and worthy of critique and comment.  They do a great job, but there are some small UI issues I wish could be fixed.

For instance, when you enter data onto a form and try to leave the form without saving they do a nice job of alerting you that you are about to lose the valuable data you just entered.  However, there is a catch:

SNAGHTML97e6ac4

Ouch, did you read that correctly?  “Hit CANCEL to Leave this page.”  The problem with that is I would say 99% of users are used to hitting Cancel when they realize they made a mistake and want to undo it.  Several times I’ve had to stop my knee-jerk reaction to hit cancel when I realized I updated something and didn’t hit Save.

Not only are the button actions inconsistent with what users are used to but I would go further and state they are actually opposite, which to me is one of the worst UI anti-patterns.  In addition the buttons are not very informative, OK and Cancel just don’t tell you what they are doing with your data.  Unfortunately I think it might be stuck as it is.  The software now boasts adoption of over half the state of California.  That’s a good sized client base and the current users are already conditioned to hitting OK to go back to the page and hit the Save button.  If the vendor were to reverse the impact of the buttons now I can just imagine the outcry there would be over users losing data because they are simply used to hitting OK.  You see, no matter how many emails, home page news alerts or training documents you give out half the users won’t even bother to read them.  They won’t know there is a change until they have already lost their data.  Not a good thing.

If I were to have to implement this change I would re-label the buttons all together.  This would not only alert the user that something functions differently then what they are used to but it would also make the dialog more usable, which is also a good UI pattern.  Unfortunately you cannot do this with plain JavaScript.  Since the vendor already makes use of jQuery the UI Dialog plug-in is a great tool to use.  It also standardizes the dialog boxes since JavaScript alerts are handled inconsistently between browsers.

Here’s a sample of what I would do using the jQuery UI Dialog plug-in.  I think it is easy to read and clear in informing the user on what they are about to do.  While this would be a change to what users are used to I think it would be one that is easily adapted to.

image

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Hacking your vendor’s product; sometimes good, sometimes not

We have a particular web product that we use for all of our clients.  It is a pretty incredible system and has several hundred clients.  We are one of their largest ones so, between our implementation, and their normal customer needs its understandable why they cannot accomodate every one of our requests right away.

That being said, there was one slight “feature” that went slightly against one of our policies.  So, what to do?  Well, I put on my curiously tipped white hat and go to work.  One of the cool features of the system is they allow us, the admins for our group for all intensive purposes, to update portions of the page for our users.  They don’t escape HTML so it turns out I’m able to inject my own JavaScript code.

Ooohhh, that’s bad.  😉 I let the company know but I proceed on.

Turns out they, being the creative bunch they are, make use of jQuery.  This is definitely turning into a possibility with my toolbox already stocked and ready to go.

The particular portion of the page I choose to launch my JavaScript from is ideal because it is on the navigation bar, ensuring that it will be displayed on almost every screen.  Because we can only change content for our users it ensures that my changes will only affect our users and not those of their other clients.  However, with 5,000 users I had better make sure my code is well tested and clean.  I still have the ability to disrupt my 5,000 users if I make a bad mistake.  Point noted.

The vendor puts a character limit on the particular area of the page I’m changing.  That means I have to inject JavaScript that tells the browser to load a larger script from elsewhere.  No big, I put the script on our department website.  Hmmm, not so good.  The system is now throwing a warning that I’m loading JavaScript from a non-secure source.  Hmm.  Sure would be nice if I could load the script directly on my vendor’s server.

Well, I can. 🙂  The vendor also allows us to upload documents to a library that our users can download from.  So, I upload the script.  Uh, oh, didn’t work.  Turns out they block all but a few extensions.  So, instead of calling it myscript.js I change it to a text file called myscript.txt.  That uploads great and, guess what, the browser is happy to execute it.  Great!  On my way.

After a few tests it turns out I’m able to quite nicely make our little “issue” a thing of the past.  First I check to make sure the page in question is the one being viewed.  That way the bulk of the code (all 6 lines of it) runs only when necessary.  Then it cleans up after itself by removing my injected code from the page DOM.  Nice!

It’s not foolproof of course.  If the user isn’t running JavaScript then my trick won’t work, however,  half the system won’t work for them anyway since JavaScript it is required.  Also, if someone is sneaky enough they can load the original source and see where I injected my code.  But, if they are going to do that we have bigger problems then them simply disabling my script.

OK, that covers the techy issues, what about the people ones?  Well, as you may have guessed, no matter how many times we alerted our users to the changes we made, some users started calling the vendor’s Help Desk asking what happened to the report they were used to.  The vendor then called me after spending two days trying to solve the issue they weren’t seeing.  They didn’t really care for the changes.  They understood the necessity and gave me props for how I handled it but now their Help Desk had no idea if a problem call was because of their system or my code.  Granted, this totally makes sense.

So, they gave us a choice.  We can continue to develop our own “customizations” but we have to take over all Help Desk calls for our users for the entire system.  I understand that, but directly supporting 5,000 users is not something we are capable of doing.  I have to note also that the Help Desk is absolutely outstanding, one of the best  Ihave ever worked with.

So, after the vendor agreed to look into implementing our change we are allowed to keep the code and support the Help Desk for any questions regarding this one issue.  Once the vendor has solved the problem we will remove it and go on our way.

So, here is the moral of the story: Hacking your vendor’s site open doors to lots and lots of capabilities, however, it may aggravate your vendor a little or, quite possibly, cause an early termination to your contract.  I suggest you keep this little tool in your developer’s pocket for extreme cases.

It was fun and our vendor is great.  Once I put the change in place we started to come up with lists of additional “nice to have” features I could implement, but, in the end, we’ll just hand those over to our vendor and see if they make it in someday.

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A Great Resource for Different Strategies on Concatenating SQL Results

In every DBA’s career I think having to concatenate results happens at least a few times.  Probably more than we like to admit because we tend to live in table-land.  :)  However, there are those occasions, which are usually driven by some downstream requirement to format output.  Now, I know that formatting should be handled by whatever data viewing method you are using, but sometimes that just isn’t possible or practical.  Other times it may just be that we need to transform data from one system to another and that other system is not as normalized as the tables you are working with.

Like I said, I do it fairly infrequently, so I never remember the best way in my head.  I usually end up looking at how I’ve done it in the past.  I started thinking that there may be better ways then some of the convoluted strategies I’ve found in previous solutions.

Trusty Google sent me here:

http://www.projectdmx.com/tsql/rowconcatenate.aspx

It’s an incredible (though certainly not exhaustive) list of ways to deal with this depending on your need.  I like XML and chose to go with simplicity so, for this particular task, I went with Eugene Kogan’s “blackbox XML” method.  It’s only a few lines and if you are familiar with XML and SQL then it’s not that hard to understand.

I’ve definitely bookmarked this for later reference!

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Building a .Net 3.5 Web App on Windows Server 2000 with only .Net 2.0

I am upgrading an older web app of ours as I referenced in my last blog post.  This was originally a straight html app with no dynamic content at all.  I created a .Net ASPX web app out of it and used LINQ to quickly and easily create a survey form that our users could fill out.  It worked great on my machine.

Unfortunately the happy ending got derailed when I deployed it to our web server.  Our web server is an ancient Windows 2000 server box with IIS 5.  this is because it’s where all our main apps our housed, everything works and there is great fear in changing it.  <sigh>

So, I either had to figure out how to get my .Net 3.5 app running on IIS5 with .Net 2 or I had to abandon LINQ and go back to data readers (yuck!).  I first tried to install .Net 3.5 on the web server but quickly found out that it requires Windows XP or Server 2003 as a minimum.  OK, so that’s ruled out.

I knew that the asp.net framework has always been 2.0 (until the new release of 4.0 that is) and .Net 3.0 and 3.5 just added extra features on top of 2.0 but never changed the underlying base classes.  So you can easily use .Net 3.5 apps on a .Net 2.0 web server.  In fact, this has caused a lot of confusion because there simply is no 3.0 or 3.5 selection in IIS for the .Net framework.

I knew if I could just reference the required .Net 3.5 dlls then this shoudl work.  Doing a quick search on Google lead me to this great article.  I was wondering if something like this was possible and, sure enough, it pointed me in the right direction.

 

Here is what I did and it worked like a charm.

I first set my build target for the web app in Visual Studio 2008 to .Net 2.0.  This caused VS 2008 to instantly remove any non-.Net 3.5 compatible references such as LINQ.  I did a build and received numerous errors, most pertaining to my code that made use of LINQ.

I copied the System.core and Linq.Data DLLs into my web app’s bin folder and referenced them.  After another attempt to build the solution the LINQ errors went away but it still didn’t understand my lambda expressions or my auto-properties.  This makes perfect sense.  These are compiler features and not referenced code.  Since, by default, asp.net compiles on the server it had better understand these.  I could change the autoproperties back to normal properties but there is no lambda equivalent for .Net 2.0.

So, I created a new project and moved all LINQ code into it and had it target .Net 3.5.  Having my data access classes in a separate project felt much cleaner and probably would having been an eventual refactoring later.  I removed this code from the web app and created a reference to the new project.

Ran a build and received the welcome success message.

I then deployed the web app to the web server.  Upon opening one of the new pages, which runs a LINQ query to obtain some data to populate a drop down list, I received the following error:
Could not load type ‘System.ComponentModel.INotifyPropertyChanging’ from assembly ‘System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089’

After some googling it turns out that INotifyPropertyChanging wasn’t introduced until .Net 2.0 SP1.  Sure enough, our web server had 2.0 but no service packs.

I installed .Net 2.0 SP2 and everything worked great!

 

I am in the process of redesigning our entire department’s website and that is all built on MVC and several other current technologies.  I have another web server that is running 2003 for that.  I might miss out on some of the newer IIS 7 features but .Net 4 runs on it just fine so at least this is a major step forward.

Take care!

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ReSharper destabilizing my runtime? Huh?

I’m adding some new features to an older ASP.Net Web Forms app we have.  Fortunately I can take advantage of .Net 3.5, though not MVC because it’s on a Windows 2000 server with IIS 5.  Anyway, this allows me to use LINQ, which has been incredible.  Creating the mapping and using LINQ queries is leaps and bounds more convenient and less prone to error than our older data readers and such we used in the past.

I am more in the TDD camp and like to manage my own data bindings so I don’t like to use the LINQ model designer.  Instead of dragging and dropping tables onto the designer and letting LINQ create the classes for me in the background I create my own concrete classes and then put attributes on the classes themselves.  I know, some may not like putting attributes in their code because they argue that it makes their objects dependent on the database framework rather than being completely database agnostic.  However, 100% of our apps make use of Microsoft SQL and I don’t see that ever changing in the near future.  So, rather than go through the overhead and complexity of a truly database agnostic ORM setup I’ll happily add a few attributes to my code that plainly show exactly what’s going on.

In this particular case we have parents and students that will be filling out a survey based on when they graduated from our programs.  Because we serve multiple districts, each with multiple schools, I ask the user to select which district and school they graduated from.  Thus, I have a SchoolDistrict class which contains a List of School classes.  In LINQ you can map a relationship using the Association attribute.  I got the details and examples from Microsoft’s MSDN article here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386950.aspx

Here was my initial code for SchoolDistrict:

1: using System.Collections.Generic;
2: using System.Data.Linq;
3: using System.Data.Linq.Mapping;
4:
5: namespace App_Code.Entities
6: {
7: [Table(Name = " vw_Table_D_Current_SchoolDistricts ")]
8: public class SchoolDistrict
9: {
10: private EntitySet<School> Schools;
11:
12: [Column(IsPrimaryKey = true )]
13: public string districtCdsCode { get ; set ; }
14:
15: [Column]
16: public string name { get ; set ; }
17:
18: [Association(Storage = " Schools ", OtherKey = " districtCdsCode ")]
19: public List<School> schools
20: {
21: get { return new List<School>(Schools); }
22: set { Schools.Assign( value ); }
23: }
24: }
25: }

 

Here was my initial code for School:

1: usingSystem.Data.Linq.Mapping;
2:
3: namespaceApp_Code.Entities
4: {
5: [Table(Name = " vw_Table_D_Current_Schools")]
6: public classSchool
7: {
8: [Column(IsPrimaryKey = true)]
9: public string schoolCdsCode { get ; set ; }
10:
11: [Column]
12: public string name { get ; set ; }
13:
14: [Column]
15: public string districtCdsCode { get ; set ; }
16: }
17: }

 

Everything worked great and I was rolling.  Then I had ReSharper clean up a few things and I took some of its suggestions on optimizing my code.  I made a few other changes and, then all of a sudden, I got this when I ran the code:

System.Security.VerificationException: Operation could destabilize the runtime.

Ugh!  What’s that???!!

After a lot of Googling I had come up with nothing.  Most of the fixes I saw related to mapping IEnumerables to IQueryables, covariance vs contravariance, etc.  Nothing seemed to fit my particular scenario and none of the fixes worked.  I went over my code with a fine tooth comb making sure my mappings were still correct, making sure the capitalization in my attributes were not fouling things up, etc.  I came up with nothing.

 

So, I went back to square one.  I looked at the Microsoft example again and I found one modifier that was different.  ReSharper had noted that I could mark my Schools EntitySet in my SchoolDistrict class as readonly.  I removed this modifier and, voila, everything worked.  Sure enough, ReSharper again started suggesting that I mark this as readonly.  I did and my code broke again.  I had found the culprit.

I had not seen this mentioned anywhere on Google and I guess, in hindsight, most people wouldn’t mark this as readonly. 

I don’t always take ReSharper’s suggestions but this is the first time that ReSharper actually broke my code.  :(  Truth be told, ReSharper is a tool and it’s only as good as the one wielding it.  If I let ReSharper perform invalid operations that’s not ReSharper’s fault but my own.  However, I still didn’t like that I may not remember this key piece of information in the future.

So, I told ReSharper to ignore this in the future and wrote a comment as to why.  That cluttered up my code and it now looks like this:

1: // ReSharper disable FieldCanBeMadeReadOnly.Local
2: // If set to read only this causes an "Operation could destabilize the runtime" exception when the query is evaluated
3: privateEntitySet<School> Schools;
4: // ReSharper restore FieldCanBeMadeReadOnly.Local
5:

Wow, that is ugly!  I hate having to put comments in my code that are because of dependencies to frameworks.  Now I have a comment in my code that’s dependent on an IDE tool, not even something required for the app itself!!!  That’s just plain ugly and a major code smell if you ask me.  However, that’s just the way it is for now.  The app works and I’ll go on with my life.  It’s not perfect but I don’t want to spend a day figuring out a better way.  If someone posts a better suggestion or I find something in the future then I’ll revamp it, but for now, I’ll get the app out the door and life will go on.

I hope that this helps someone else out there that may run into this issue.

In the end ReSharper is one of the best tools I have in my toolbox, number 2 right behind Visual Studio itself.  It’s incredible and I can’t imagine coding without it.  It truly has helped make me a better developer than any other tool I’ve used to date (again, after VS).

Take care all and happy developing!

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MVC Bug with Default DropDownList or ListBox HTML Helpers

There are a lot of examples out there on how to pass a SelectList or MultiSelectList object to an Html.DropDownList or Html.ListBox helper.  However, I couldn’t find anything that was explaining the problem I was having.

In my app we have a Show object that represents a podcast.  Each show may have multiple Guest objects, which are accessed by the Show.Guests member.

In the Admin controller I have the following Action method:

public ActionResult EditShow(int id)
{
var show = _repository.Get<Show>(id);
show.Guests.Load();
var guestList = new MultiSelectList(_repository.List<Guest>().OrderBy(g => g.Name), "Id", "Name", show.Guests.Select(g => g.Id));
ViewData["GuestsSelectList"] = guestList;
return View(show);
}

In the Edit View I display the fields for the Show and a ListBox for the Guests.  You can select multiple Guests for a show.  Ideally, when you edit a Show the Guests that are already associated with the Show are pre-selected.  Makes sense, right?

Here is the code called in the View:

<%= Html.ListBox(" GuestListBox ", (MultiSelectList)ViewData[" GuestsSelectList "])%>

If you follow this you’ll notice that I am adding to the ViewData a MultiSelectList object, which contains an IEnumerable collection of all the Guests, that “Id” is the value field, “Name” is the text field, and an IEnumerable collection of the guest.Id values that are already associated with the show.  However, this never caused the ListBox to select the values upon rendering the page.

I used the debugger and, sure enough, my MultiSelectList object was successfully populated with the properly selected items.  What was the deal?  The breakdown must be happening with the Html.ListBox helper.  I spent a couple of hours scouring this myself and scouring the Internet.  I went home determined to re-write the Html.ListBox helper myself and just be done with it. 

However, the next morning I decided to download the MVC source.  Here’s a great and simple article from Steve Sanderson on how to attach it to your project so that you can step through it with the Visual Studio debugger.

One nice thing about Html.ListBox and Html.DropDownList helpers is that you don’t have to provide a collection of SelectItems explicitly.  If you have an item in the Model or ViewData that has the same name as the ListBox or DropDownList then it will find it automatically.  If you do explicitly provide the SelectItem collection you can opt to not provide the default values explicitly.  Again, as long as you have a object (or member of an object) that has the same name as the ListBox or DropDownList it will find it and use it.

Here’s the rub though.  If you explicitly define the SelectList collection and the default values (as I did in my code) the Html helper looks to the Model and ViewData first before your default items.  This normally never causes a problem, until you name your ListBox or DropDownBox the same name as one of your objects or members.

Notice that I called my DropDownList “Guests”? Notice how the Model is a Show object, which has a Guests member variable?  It turns out that the Html helper was grabbing this collection, rather than my values.  Technically these are the guests I want to default to, however, the Html helper was getting a collection of Guest objects not a collection of Guest Id values.  When it compared each guest Id in the full list with the actual Guest objects in the default list it never found a match.  Thus, nothing was ever selected.

What’s the fix?  Simply change the name of your ListBox or DropDownList.  When I changed the name value to “GuestListBox” all worked well, because, as you would expect there is no object or member in the Model or ViewData called “GuestListBox”.  Once it couldn’t find one it dropped through that code and used the default values I provided.

To find exactly where MVC is doing this check out the SelectInternal member in the SelectExtensions.cs file.  This is the internal method that both ListBox and DropDownList eventually call.  You can see commented code that states:

// If we haven’t already used ViewData to get the entire list of items then we need to
// use the ViewData-supplied value before using the parameter-supplied value.

In my opinion this is a bug.  It shouldn’t even check the ViewData or Model if you have already explicitely provided the default values.

So, I added my vote to the bug that was already submitted for this on CodePlex.  I haven’t check to see if this has been resolved in MVC v2.

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Converting my entire production environment to VHDs

Ever since virtual PC type systems have been out, long has been the dream to run any type of operating system you want, multiple operating systems at the same time, all working independently of each other.

However, only in the last year or two has this really become a reality with the latest hardware supporting virtual environments natively.  Now Windows 7 lets you boot off of a VHD as if it was a standard hard drive making full use of your actual hardware devices.

After attending Stephen Rose’s presentation on Virtualization 101 for Developers my eyes were suddenly open to the possibilities of what could be done.  I could move my entire development environment to a virtual PC image.  This would allow me to copy that image at any time allowing me to test beta products, new upgrades, etc without worrying about damaging my current environment.  Many times I have upgraded to new releases (or betas) that caused previous programs to stop running, Dlls required in legacy projects to be removed, etc.  In some rare cases (SQL Server 2008 RC2) I had to reload my entire environment because I could never get my machine back to its original state.

Now that Windows 7 allows you to boot from a VHD my wheels are suddenly turning.  I could move my entire computer use (not just development) to VHDs.  This would allow me to have a base image for general tasks like email, MS Office, etc that my wife and I could use for general day to day tasks.  I could have another environment for all my video editing work, which is especially useful since video compression codecs can sometimes cause havoc.  I could have a production development environment and as many beta environments as I want.  If I want to download a 30 day trial of any product I just create a copy of the appropriate VHD, boot off of that and try out the product.  After 30 days if I don’t like it I just delete the testing VHD and it will have never touched my production VHD.  If I do like the product I just delete the testing VHD, purchase the full copy and install it to my production VHD.  Very nice and clean.

I just purchased a new HP dv7 laptop with the Intel core i7.  So, this is the perfect time to get started.  While it is possible to wipe the drive clean and use VHDs without any core operating system at all I’ll leave the HP environment intact.  That way I can always fall back to that just in case.  If for some reason my sound stops working I doubt HP will be willing to care if I can’t reproduce it in the standard OS.

So, I’ll document how I set this up and how it works out in future blog posts.  Enjoy the ride!

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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.