ALT.NET Dublin

Quick reminder About Wednesday talk by Sebastian Lambla about Open Rasta.
Wednesday the 30th of September at 8pm in Seagrass . This event is free but please do
sign in using the form if you haven’t.

See you there

Hi all:

Our next meet up is the 20th at 7pm in Seagrass

Talks

- Vishal Vatsa and  Rory Geoghegan will introduce us to Python

- Edit: Ed Kenny will be talking about “SQL Server 2008 – What’s new, what’s hot and what’s not”

Other

It would be great if we can also discuss:

- The 3 ideas for Open Source projects that are floating around in the group ( alphabetically)

• Do Lean,
• Ideas Hub
• Open Source XMPP Client.

- Would love to hear some feedback on the talk by Sebastien Lambla ( its next Wednesday the  30th BTW)  and if we should try to do more of this kind of extra events

Please let us know if you are coming so we can organize accordingly by signing up here

Last week someone suggested to me the idea they would like to make a place where people could submit ideas to developers who would then create that idea. Very simple, and I almost said it would never work. Only I started thinking about it in terms of a stack overflow model to which I’ve become rather addicted and so I started going through how I would see something like that working.

• It would be a website
• All contributions to the website would be under some sort of general public licence.
• There would be a voting system which would indicate to developers which ideas are the most popular.
• There would need to be a community to build these projects but also to pick out ideas that already exist within the site and within the Internet as open source projects.
• As soon as the idea exists as an open source project, a link is created on the site from the idea to the project (in google code or similar)
• There would be a similar reputation system similar to stack overflow for both those who submit ideas and those that implement them on their contributions.
• There could be listings for open source projects in need of extra devs/testers/graphic designers

Let me know what you think.

Stephen Lacy

Really happy to announce the first dedicated meet up for Dublin Alt Net .

Sebastien Lambla is coming to Dublin and he is going to talk to us about Open Rasta on the 30th of September @ 8pm in Seagrass. It would be really cool if you can sign up using this form so we know how many people to expect.

The Talk

Everybody seems to rediscover the MVC model, and new frameworks seem to appear all the time. Most of those hide the richness of the web. Come discover OpenRasta, a very opinionated framework that help you write MVC-style web applications and data services, using a unified API.

The Speaker

Sebastien Lambla runs Caffeine IT, a .net consultancy / contracting company helping the good people of London adopt new technologies, new processes, new methodologies and in general anything that’s new and shiny. Specializing in cutting-edge tools, from REST architectures to occasionally connected rich clients, Sebastien has been developing with .net since 2000. An out and proud restafarian, Sebastien is the creator and maintainer of the OpenRasta project.

So we had our second meeting on Monday, this is a brief summary of what was discussed.

- Details on how Assert works, the fact that the methods are static.

- Testing Exceptions:  This led to a very interesting discussion on how most frameworks handle this.

We talked about the Assert.Throws from NUnit and how its really nice to be able to do something like this

Assert.Throws<NullReferenceException>(user.WillThrowAnnNullExecption);

or even something like this

var e= Assert.Throws<NullReferenceException>(e.WillThrowANullExecption);
Assert.AreEqual(”Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”, e.Message);

Ok the message in this case is not very valuable but you can see how you can get very specific, the fact that the exception is returned is really valuable. By the way I just tried this and it is true

- Test failures could lead us to write more tests. We discussed the ways we handle this: some people use todo lists ( as per TDD by Example by Kent Beck),  some people write test that are not implemented, some people use a combination of both.

- Liked the fact that it  mentioned that tests should be independent of each other at this early stage of the book.

-Test Initialization Setup and TearDown as well as FixtureSetUp and FixtureTearDown and how they work.

I thought this was a good place to mention this as it took me a while to know that they existed, also mentions the advantage of having one place to call the constructor of the class under test.

David showed us something a bit smarter, he uses a factory that creates a valid object with the required properties set up using lambdas. This is good because you can see what is that you need in your test and its in one line and still have all the constructor usage in one place.

- Ignore attribute. After discussing, this seemed like a bad idea unless you were very disciplined.

- Category. The consensus was that we really didn’t think it was a great idea  in general to use this feature, because you might not run all tests. Might be a “test smell”, good to know is there tho.

- Finally the book mentions Indirectly testing state, I think, as a way to give way to the next chapter.

Other things:

We keep mentioning these three books at all times ( no specific order)

xUnit : Test Patterns

TDD by Example

Working Effectively with Legacy Code

We were also talking about mbUnit versions and  actually today i saw this blog post about mbUnit being in version 3.1.

Jacob mentioned that the existence of a test support for Silverlight, which is great,  however he also mentioned that is possible to mark something as a bug so the test will pass, this didn’t seem so good.

Did I forget something?

We met last night for the first Book Club, I think It went pretty well. I know I really enjoyed it.

We  are reading The Art of Unit Testing  ( by Roy Osherove) this is the review for chapter one.

We talked about the importance of testing , the importance of differentiating between Integration Tests and Unit Tests and perhaps realised that there is a very important place for Integration tests in our process.

We were also talking about TDD by Example (K. Beck) and how both books together can help first to learn how to unit test and then to write better tests.

On Integration Test again we talked about Fit(nesse) StoryTeller, cucumber and we came to mention NDepend somehow (I cant remember how, but I can remember someone asking for links so here you go).

I think we are all in the right track seeing tests as a way to achieve quality , we know what is the purist approach but I think none of us were afraid to say well, actually that will take more time that doing something in a pragmatic way.

A typical example of this will be the XML Parser, a purist will have the xml in a string , a more pragmatic approach is to have a file close to the Test assembly, the drawback of this is that you are then creating a dependency on the IO operation and testing the IO which is not a good idea, also you are creating a dependency on the file .

Next Meetup

We also realised that one chapter was a bit to little, so next meetup its chapter 2 and 3. Another change we introduced is that we are meeting on Monday as it suits all the ones that were there a bit better.

(Apologies for the edit but the post was a bit unreadable had to edit)

Thanks again to Andrew for his talk on NHibernate, I really enjoyed it and I heard a lot of people really happy with it.

Anyway I m sure some of you would be interested to know that the code and slides for this presentation are in our google code repo .

The presentation is available also in slideshare

Cheers and sorry for delay in getting these links up.