There is no tooth fairy

I don't claim to have a normal house.  We don't strive to be different, but normal just doesn't always happen in our place.

One such oddity is the tooth fairy.  Our kids don't believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or Halloween...but the tooth fairy is another matter.  You don't just mess with the tooth fairy.

This has now come to a head with our six year old Lily loosing teeth faster than an old school hockey player at a triple header.  She just lost one tooth yesterday, and three others are currently loose and ready to go at any time.  Should make for a fun Christmas this year.

Now combine that with two parents that are a bit frazzled right now.  The wife is due in a month, and dad is busy dealing with mom being due in a month -- plus Thanksgiving, plus Christmas (minus Santa Claus) -- the Tooth Fairy has fallen behind in its duties.

At this point, Lily figured it out.  Luckily she is a good sport, and still willing to play along.  For the third night in a row, her tooth will be in a zip lock bag, underneath her pillow.

Hopefully the tooth fairy doesn't need further directions than that.

Joining Elegant Code

After three years on my own domain (going strong since Aug 2004), I'm moving my technical content to ElegantCode.com, joining my friends David Starr, Jason Grundy, and David Betts.

Note: I'm only moving my technical content to ElegantCode, which gives me four blogs to keep up to date.  I need to do some content separation just to keep things straight.  So here it goes:

• ElegantCode: Software development related posts
• BSDG.org: Industry news, user group updates
• BoiseCodeCamp: code camp news (yes, that does happen)
• ChrisBrandsma.com: updates and musing from family Chris Brandsma.

Actually, I do think this is a good thing, put in a little bit of virtual separation for all of my mental parts.  Plus, as a side benefit, it will make my blog a whole lot less confusing to the rest of my family.

Also, for the of my friends and family: join FaceBook and find me there.

Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5 due this month

This has been making the rounds for about a week now, but Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.4 is expected to be released this month (November 2007).
More info below:
http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2007/11/05/teched-developer-in-europe.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/default.aspx
Also there is a rumor that the Microsoft ASP.Net MVC framework will also be released REAL SOON (meaning: when they feel like it, but probably after the Visual Studio 2008 launch -- and they will probably change the name).
For those of you who don't know: the Asp.Net MVC Framework is a MonoRail/Ruby On Rails-esk web development framework for Asp.Net. It does not use WinForms at all. This actually has a lot of people really excited right now. Phil Haack and Rob Conery both left their current jobs for Microsoft just so they could help work on this.
Haack must be the single greatest last name for a developer....
Scott Hanselman (now a blue badge Microsofty) has two videos from the ALT.NET conference last month with Scott Guthrie and himself.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottGuMVCPresentationAndScottHaScreencastFromALTNETConference.aspx

Kids pictures

I don't post persona stuff too often so forgive me on this one.  But we just got my kids school pictures done.  (that and I interested to see how Windows Live Writer hands pictures).

Best Practices Discussions and Debates

I think I have learned something today that I was previously unaware.

Starting a discussion about software development best practices is akin to talking about parenting techniques with a group of mothers.  Most will patiently listen, but at least one will get super defensive and tell you in detail about why that wouldn't work with their baby.

I have relatives who are also very argumentative, in that they just love to argue.  The funny part is that they will argue about things THEY AGREE WITH!  Unfortunately, they are too bent on arguing that they don't care that they agree.

I see this happen on blogs all the time.  And while I think that blogs are great ways to spur discussion, they are not great ways to HAVE a discussion.  User groups, phone calls, and hallways are all vastly superior environments for a discussion.

In my case, I have a commenter on my blog post about best practices that is doing a wonderful job of arguing some of my points, all while telling me I'm wrong.  We disagree on one point: Developers should have their own copy of the database they are developing against, and developers should have access to all source code and software need to do their job.

I think the reason the anonymous poster and I are not able to agree is because we really aren't able to talk to each other about the ideas.  Plus, I have a strong feeling we are separated by a common language (we have different definitions of the same words).    More than likely we agree on the software, we just don't agree on the terminology.

As far as the database part: there are a ton of ideas hidden in that statement that are not easily expressed.  There are scripts that extract the meta-data out of a database, source control that houses that script, continuous integration for verifying all of the changes work to both code and database scripts, creation of development data, etc.  

Then the kicker: 90% of that is automated.  I really don't thing the anonymous submitter saw that point.  In fact that should be a blog post in itself.  He/she saw it as another backbreaking task the developer would have to maintain by hand.  But if you do it right, it isn't.  Updating the database scripts is as simple as running a batch file.   And not updating the batch file and then running it, no -- just run it.  The batch file creates the scripts for creating the entire database.  This should take 5-30 seconds.  Then you are ready to go.

As I said, there are a lot of aspect to this that were not mentioned in this post or the previous post.  But blogs are there to START discussions, not to have them.

Elegant Code expands

I'm hoping this is the start of a new vibrant community, as is it is comprised of some of the best and brightest that I know anyway.

ElegantCode.com is expanding beyond a one man blog. Now included is a group of managers, Scrum Lords, coding architects, non-coding architects (the most dangerous type of architect), and top notch developers.

I'm excited to see if this takes off.

Rob Conery (SubSonic) is joining Microsoft

This is great news, Rob Conery has been hired by Microsoft.

Even better news: Microsoft hired him to work on SubSonic. 

Better news still: SubSonic is staying open source.

I'm trying to find a negative here...and failing at it.

Cheers.

Rhino Mocks 3.3 Released

Straight from Ayende, Rhino Mocks 3.3 has been released.  The peasants rejoiced.  Well, I rejoiced anyway.

New features:

• Adding support for calling void methods using Expect.Call
• Adding remoting proxies.
• Made IMethodOptions generic. Allows compile time type safety on Return. 
• Adding a PublicFieldConstraint

The biggest change for the day to day developer: you can now use Expect.Call on methods that return void.  This wasn't a big problem per-say, but it did cause a lot of confusion.  You would see code mocking a function call like this:

Expect.Call(mockObject.MyFunction()).Return(1);

Then your method returning void would look like this:

mockObject.MyMethod();

Not the most consistent API.  Now that should be fixed.  So mocking a method will now look like this:

Expect.Call(mockObject.MyMethod());

Ayende's post

Download here

Rhino mocks is on my list of source code to read as soon as I'm finished going through SubSonic.

Have you thanked Ayende today?

Software Development Essential Practices

I was in an interesting discussion last night: what software development practices do you consider essential? 

While opinions varied, I think there was some consensus on a few items.  In my list I also include some tools.  Some of these were mentioned by the group, but consider them my own additions.  Also, I am making this list specific to .NET, but the list applies to just about every language.

Universally agreed Practices

• Source Control (1)
• Subversion
• VSTS ($)
• Vault ($)
• Local Development -- Every developer should have everything on their computer to run the system.  This includes all of the software and all of the source code.
• Bug Tracking - nuf said.  There are to many tools available to list here.
• TDD - Test Driven Development.  There was a little bit of back and forth, but the general consensus was that this should be done.
• NUnit
• MBUnit
• Rhino Mocks (2)
• TypeMock ($) (2)
• NMock (2)
• ORM - Object-Relational Mapping
• NHibernate 
• SubSonic - My person favorite
• LINQ to SQL - not yet, but I feel this should be on the list.
• LLBLGen ($) - Not free, but I've heard many good things about it.
• More
• Continuous Integration - Simple process that sits on a server and waits for things to get checked into your source control system.  When it sees something new, it gets all of the latest source code, compiles it, and runs all of the unit tests.  If there are any problems anywhere in that process it alerts the users (email, desktop icon, wave red flag, etc). (3)
• CI Factory
• CruiseControl.Net
• One Step Build - it is unbelievably cool to be able to click one button and have your entire project compile, run all tests, and possibly create an install in one step.  Personally, I do like it, but with the current set of tools this is one of the hardest parts to setup.
• MSBuild
• Nant
• BooBS/Bake (Ayende please, please, please change the name to Bake.  As cool as a project named BooBs could be -- I don't want to start an HR nightmare)
• FinalBuilder ($)
• Visual Build Pro ($)

Highly thought of but non-essential practices

• IOC - Inversion of Control - Everyone seemed to agree it was a good idea...but not actually essential.
• Castle Windsor - DotNetSlackers has a nice series on using this.
• Spring.Net
• StructureMap
• ReSharper ($) - Not a best practice per say, but it sure does make life easier. (4)

I'm sure I have missed some tools in the list, but it is the practices that are more important anyway.  But if you put a comment about any tool that I missed I will add it to the list.

(1) Source Safe was notably not in the list.  While I don't like it either, it is better than nothing.  But if your team is greater than 5 people or you have multiple people working on the same project you really should look at one of the other products on the list.

(2) Not a unit testing library, but a Mock Object library.  Pick a unit testing libarary (NUnit, MBUnit, XUnit), then pick a mock object library (Rhino Mocks, TypeMock, NMock) to use with it.

(3) I really need to talk about continuous integration more.  But it is one of those things that leads you down a path.  First you add source control, then you start adhering to separation of concerns, then you start unit testing and mocking more, then you add continuous integration, and then one step builds are all part of the mix.  One best practice leads to another, but they don't make a bit of sense without some of the prior pieces.

(4) If you are a Code Rush person instead of a ReSharper person -- carry on, you are in good company.

($) The cost money - not just beer, but may have free version versions as well.

Testing for Exceptions with NUnit

I came across a testing situation where I had to:
a. Make sure an exception was thrown
b. After it was thrown, make sure nothing else happened.

This is what happens when you throw exceptions from SQL Stored Procedures.

The Problem

The standard way of checking for exceptions in NUnit are thus:
1. ExpectedException attribute on the test method
2. Have your own try/catch block in your test method.

The problem with option 1 is that no assertions can be checked after the exception. The code runs until the exception is thrown, then you are done. That isn't what I need.

The problem with option 2 is that it is ugly. Yes, I'm being a cry baby here. I think the try catch throws more code in the test than I think should be there.

My Solution

So I created a new method called ExpectException. Here is the code:

   1:  public T ExpectException<T>(MyMethod method) where T : Exception

   2:  {

   3:      try

   4:      {

   5:          method.Invoke();

   6:      }

   7:      catch(T e)

   8:      {

   9:          return e;

  10:      }

  11:      return null;

  12:  }

So now in my case, I have a stored procedure that throws an SqlException. I want to call the method and return the exception so I can check the exception for specific values (make sure the message is correct). Also, if any other exception is thrown, say a Exception -- not a SqlException, the test will fail.

Here is my new code:

   1:  SqlException e = ExpectException<SqlException>(delegate { ReplaceUnitCall(oldUnit, newUnit); });

   2:  Assert.IsNotNull(e);

So as long as you are familiar with anonymous delegates, this is a pretty nice solution -- to me.