Jonathan Cogley's Blog

I presented “Remote Scripting in .NET” for the first time last Wednesday (1/28/2004).  The event was held at Microsoft's offices in Findlay, Ohio.  There were about 30 people with quite a few Microsoft employees.  The presentation digs deep into how Remote Scripting works and gets rather technical in places - this knowledge is not necessary to use Remote Scripting but it is often useful to really understand what is happening.  It also looks at how the landscape has changed with .NET and Microsoft phasing out support for their JVM.  I was worried that I may have lost the audience in places but was very pleasantly surprised by the number of probing and interesting questions I received.

Many thanks to Greg Huber for carting me around during my stay in Toledo last week.  It was a fun time and I even got to visit Tony Packo's - a Toledo tradition.

I will be flying into Toledo from Washington DC on Tuesday the 27th January to speak at the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group on Test Driven Development with NUnit and C# (event details here).  Greg Huber from the group has been drumming up excitement on the AspAdvice lists so hopefully we will get a good turnout and have another mass TDD session - thanks Greg!

I have finally checked in my code for unit tests and MySQL support to the nGallery project (a great .NET open source photo gallery implementation).  Not everything passes but it is tough when playing catch up to a team of devoted developers who keep adding features! :-)  A nice feature of this unit test implementation is the use of inheritance in the test fixtures to test all the different implementations of the data layer with a single suite of tests (XML, Sql Server, AnsiSql).  If you are interested in the unit test implementation or nGallery's new support for MySQL then grab a copy of the development code (these features aren't near release quality yet though).

Today I discovered a wonderful tool while adding some features to the Remote Scripting Client (msrsclient.js).  It is a Javascript unit testing framework called JsUnit which is developed by Edward Hieatt.  It allows for you to build your features in the usual Test Driven manner even though your code is clientside Javascript! 

I just returned from a long vacation weekend in the DC area.  Just before leaving, I managed to get a last minute presentation slot at the Vienna .NET User Group - many thanks to Chris Hynes and Gary Pupurs for making it happen and the whole group for their hospitality!

Last night I presented on the above topic at the Pittsburgh .NET User Group.  I had been having trouble in my preparation trying to figure out the best way to not only explain the concepts but to win over the audience to the TDD process.  Looking at the two wonderful books (Beck,  Astels) available on TDD made me realise something - they both explain by example!  The more I thought about it, I realised that this was the XP/TDD way - “pair with the new guy“.

Martin Fowler has a great article on EnterpriseArchitecture in response to some criticism on his book.  He highlights that enterprise architecture is all too often an initiative championed by IS rather than the business areas.  It then has to take a backseat as an infrastructure project over other projects directly related to business value.  I think this idea is key and really makes the point to identify business value and communicate it to the business areas if any project is to succeed.