Demystifying The Code

Acceptance Tests Don’t Replace Unit Tests

RobBagby — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 07:30:49 +0000

I read a post last week that was celebrating (among other things) one developers epiphany that unit tests were a waste of time. He focused on acceptance tests and that was all that mattered. His case was that his boss and customers only care about the end result and not the unit test suite. He [...]

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Helper Classes Are A Code Smell

RobBagby — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 07:45:37 +0000

I recently made one of those sweeping statements to some of my colleagues that almost always come back to bite you on the …: It was something to the effect of: "Having the word ‘Helper’ in a class name is a code smell." A pretty big debate ensued and I challenged them (and you) to [...]

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Books Every Programmer Should Read

RobBagby — Thu, 31 May 2012 06:14:49 +0000

I love reading technical books and I have read alot of them! A handful of these books have had a profound impact on the way in which I write code. I thought I would share these rare gems with you. I highly recommend each of the following books! Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship [...]

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

OpenDBDiff – OS tool for SQL Server Schema Comparisons

RobBagby — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 17:00:07 +0000

I can’t think of the last project I was involved in where I didn’t have to do schema comparisons between differing databases to generate diff scripts. Sometimes I have a local copy of the DB on my laptop that I need to synch with a dev database. Other times I have to create the scripts [...]

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Do You NCrunch Yet?

RobBagby — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:58:46 +0000

If you haven’t heard of NCrunch, you are in for a great surprise. Over the past few years, a friend and colleague of mine, Remco Mulder, has been slaving away on NCrunch. What is NCrunch? In my opinion, it is the most powerful Visual Studio plugin available. It is designed to help developers with TDD [...]

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Using the Builder Pattern in tests

RobBagby — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 16:48:02 +0000

One of the most painful parts of writing tests is creating test data. Whether you use mocking frameworks or write your own fakes, one thing is constant… you will find yourself creating object instances over and over. You have to create inputs to the methods you are testing, return values for stubs or mocks, data [...]

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Twas the Release Before Christmas

RobBagby — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:03:11 +0000

A geekier rendition of Twas the Night Before Christmas was just posted on the devEducate blog.

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Entity Framework Modeling: Table Splitting

RobBagby — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 16:31:22 +0000

I have released a new post in the Entity Framework series at deveducate.com. The post illustrates how to take advantage of Table Splitting in Entity Framework 4.

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

I’m Baaaaaack

RobBagby — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 06:35:05 +0000

You may be wondering where I have been lately and why I haven’t been posting. Well, I have great news. I’m back blogging, but at a new location: www.deveducate.com/blog.

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Beta 2 – Available Today

admin — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:31:38 +0000

Today is a big day for developers. We released Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Beta 2 to MSDN Subscribers (it will be available generally on Microsoft.com later in the week). Please visit the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 landing page here to download. Happy coding…

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Patterns-Based Silverlight Development Blog / Screencast Series Index

RobBagby — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:16:00 +0000

I am in the midst of putting together a blog / screencast series illustrating developing Silverlight 3 application, taking advantage of various design patterns. Some of the patterns we will cover are the Repository, the Pipeline, the Service Agent and Model View ViewModel. I will be building a Sample HelpDesk Application along the way (see below).

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Patterns-Based Silverlight Development – Part III – Pipeline Pattern

RobBagby — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:48:51 +0000

In yesterday’s post, I build our Repository interface and the implementation, as well as added some server-side validation, following a simple pattern. I also added a test project and wrote some tests to test the our validation logic. In this post I will implement the Pipeline pattern. I will then implement a fake repository and use it to test our Pipeline.

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Patterns-Based Silverlight Development – Part II – Repository and Validation

RobBagby — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:59:54 +0000

Introduction In this post I will provide a brief overview of the Repository pattern, implement a Repository in our sample application, establish our server-side validation and add our test project. Acknowledgements Most of what you will see in this post follows very closely with the code ScottGu implemented in his NerdDinner tutorial. In fact, I would highly [...]

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Patterns-Based Silverlight Development – Part I – Getting Started

RobBagby — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:35:00 +0000

Introduction During the summer I put together a session on Patterns-Based Silverlight Development that we delivered across the West Region as part of MSDN events. The session was structured around building a Silverlight application from the ground up that illustrated the use of the following design patterns: 1) Repository, 2) Pipeline, 3) Service Agent and 4) [...]

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Introducing Parallelism into your programs

RobBagby — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 23:16:12 +0000

Overview A little over a month ago, I volunteered to develop a session for the Windows 7 / Windows Server R2 launches that are being delivered across the country and beyond The session I worked on I affectionately call “An Introduction to Parallel Programming”. In that session I wanted to illustrate various approaches you can take when introducing parallelism to your applications: 1) Fine-grained parallelism, 2) Structured parallelism and 3) PLINQ. The approach I chose was to start with an a sequential application and parallelize it using each of the 3 approaches. The application I wrote simply creates a thumbnail image for every image in a specific directory. This post provides a link to a screencast I did on this subject, provides a brief overview of each approach and illustrates how my sample program looks with each approach.

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]