Jonathan Cogley's Blog

I will be presenting “Test Driven Development with ASP.NET” tonight at the WinProVienna .NET User Group in Virginia (near Tyson's Corner).  This is going to be an updated ASP.NET version of my other TDD presentation which has a very heavy “hands on” approach by pairing with the audience.  Some of the feedback that I have had in the past is that my TODO list (building a custom array/collection sorter using reflection in .NET) was a little tough to follow while seeing TDD for the first time.  I chose the sorter since it felt like a real world problem and I didn't want to pick something too simple and have the comment “oh sure, TDD works on this easy stuff but what about ... “

I will be assisting other developers and meeting the community during Microsoft TechEd 2004 this year.  The Developer Tools and Technologies Cabana lounge will be the place to meet developers, trainers and speakers from far and wide.

The email arrived today!  I have been recognized with the MVP award for C#.  Many thanks to all those in the community who I have met and who have made my forays into .NET as interesting as they continue to be.  I am very pleased and humbled to be counted amongst the ranks of other MVP holders!

It has finally arrived - a personalized license plate (or tag in DMV jargon) from the DMV.  After them first issuing the plate which never arrived - then refusing to do anything about it when called, then the kind souls at AAA issued a new plate so we could complete this years registration for the car and issued a request to the DMV to reissue the plate which they finally did!

http://thycotic.com/devdays_2004.html

After the Microsoft DevDays rehearsal this evening we all had dinner at Pittsburgh's FishMarket.  It was great to share war stories of tough projects and encountered .NET challenges.  The crowd was really interesting and you could feel the brain power at the table right up until the conversation turned to programming with punch cards and all was lost! :-)  The crowd included - John McClelland, Mike Snell, Craig Oaks, Chris Mazzanti, Pat Santry, Stan Spotts, and Terry Weiss stopped by for a minute.

In preparation for my presentation at Microsoft DevDays 2004 in Pittsburgh,  I have been reading “Writing Secure Code” by Michael Howard and David LeBlanc (which a past colleague, David Williams, pointed me towards).  For those of us living in the business application and web application realm, a buffer overrun is something we read about on security bulletins.  It was fascinating to read how it all works and how to overcome it.  Some great code examples - thoroughly interesting.  But don't leave thinking that this book is only for those dealing with unmanaged code ... !

My current project (which I am very excited about!) is building an internet facing ASP.NET application for a high profile function.  It involves building business objects to map to the database and general functions of the system and then mapping those into the UI.  And now the fun part ... the entire application has been built using TestDrivenDevelopment (TDD)!