James Newkirk

The CodePlex Team and the patterns & practices Summit

The CodePlex team will be well represented again at the patterns & practices Summit in Redmond, WA - November 5-9, 2007 . We will be presenting or co-presenting the following sessions:

• "Yet Another Talk on Agility" - Brad Wilson and Peter Provost
• Dependency Injection Frameworks - Brad Wilson and Scott Densmore
• EntLib Devolved - Scott Densmore
• Make It Your Own - Scott Densmore
• Lessons Learned in Programmer Testing - Jim Newkirk
• CodePlex is sponsoring an evening event on Tuesday titled "Open Source in the Enterprise".

Peter's not on the CodePlex team but we like him just the same. For additonal information on the summit and all of the sessions please click here.

It's not just about the tool...!

In the past I have used the quote by James Carville "The economy, stupid" who was a strategist on Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992. This quote helped the team focus on one of the core issues in the campaign. I bring this up again because it relates to one of the tenants of the Agile Manifesto. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.  The focus of this statement was to make it clear that you should prefer individuals and how they interact instead of relying on any specific process or tool. It also says to me that a tool should play a supporting role on a project, not the lead.    With that said, I wanted to introduce a book that I co-wrote with Will Stott. The book is titled, "Visual Studio Team System: Better Software Development for Agile Teams". On the surface you might be saying isn't the title of this post "It's not just about the tool..."? The book does happen to use Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) but the focus of the book is how you do Agile Development on a project from start to finish. In fact, one of the quotes we received from Scott W. Ambler (one of the reviewers of the book) is as follows: "This book provides practical advice for real-world Agile software development. It goes beyond programming to address modeling, deployment, database, and management issues (to name a few) that most Agile development books fail to address. I wish I'd written it." The book contains a large number of examples and hands-on exercises. For more details please see the companion web-sites: http://www.bettersoftwaredevelopment.org/ http://www.codeplex.com/VSTSCode If you have any questions please let me know. Will and I look forward to your feedback.

xUnit Test Patterns

The xUnit architecture has become the deFacto standard for unit testing tools. There is a great quote from Martin Fowler in which he states: Never in the field of software development have so many owed so much to so few lines of code. It's true you could build the core of xUnit in the language of your choice in a short period of time. In fact, since I wrote NUnit 2.0 that is the way that I learn a new programming language. Over the past few years the xUnit tools and unit testing itself have become more widely used when developing software. I believe this is a very positive step for software development. What has been missing is a collection of what it takes to write really good test code. The book "xUnit Test Patterns" by Gerard Meszaros captures this skilled knowledge and documents it in the form of patterns. In addition there are also sections on how to identify bad smells which can make your test code difficult to maintain. You can get a detailed introduction to the books content at Gerard's web-site here. I am hoping that this book does for xUnit and test code in general what the Design Patterns book has done for obect-oriented design.

Test-Driven Development in Microsoft .NET supplemental content

Due to the shutdown of GotDotNet I have moved the supplemental content for the book to here. If you have comments or questions please let me know.