Remembering the Future

Welcome to TestDriven.NET - "The Zero Friction Unit Testing Add-In for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET"

TestDriven.NET makes it easy to run unit tests with a single click, anywhere in your Visual Studio solutions. It supports all versions of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET meaning you don't have to worry about compatibility issues and fully integrates with all major unit testing frameworks including NUnit, MbUnit, csUnit & Visual Studio Team System.

Topics: Test Driven Programming

Thom Robbins is a great guy, but unfortunately for him he has bumped into one of my major pet peeves, Viral Coding Examples with his Introducing the XmlTextReader post. It really isn’t his fault, since the code he uses is very similar to the code example in the XmlTextReader.Read() documentation

. . .

So, what is a better example for an introduction to the XmlTextReader?  Explicitly control when a Read is executed.

XmlRead.WhitespaceHandling = WhitespaceHandling.None
Dim Continue as Boolean
If xmlRead.Read = False then
    Continue = False
End If
While Continue
    If xmlRead.IsStartElement then
        If xmlRead.Name = “level2” then
            MsgBox(xmlRead.ReadInnerXml())
        Else
            Continue = xmlRead.Read()
        End If
    Else
        Continue = xmlRead.Read()
    End If
End While

Now we have explicit control over when a Read is executed, and in the case of rogue methods that place your cursor to the next node (that you haven’t tested yet), you can skip the implicit Read.

Topics: XML

There aren’t any good ways to do this yet. Ideally, I would be able to use different languages for each specialized part of the program, all working together coherently. And the environment would fully support these languages with refactoring, code completion, navigation, and all the other productivity tools that are available for mainstream languages.

Topics: DSL | CodeGeneration

The latest is the term "design by contract(tm)". This is a term that Bertrand Meyer coined (and trademarked). He used it in the context of object oriented programming where the focus was on "pre- and post-conditions and class invariants". Don Box, Christian Weyer and others have favored the term "contract first" to describe a similar concept more suitable to web services.

Topics: DesignByContract

Model variation analysis is about pinpointing the variable parts of a generic model of the domain. It's a bit more formal, but yields more detail, and works better where there is more variability, where the DSL is expected to be more complex. Here's how it works:

Topics: Domain Specific Languages