Windows Live Writer

Not much to say in this blog post other than I am using Windows Live Writer to write this blog post.  Pretty neat piece of software, allowing you to create and save blog posts when not connected to the internet, and publish them when you are.  It even downloads the style of your blog so when you’re writing a new post, you have the theme of your blog right there.

Pretty cool stuff, I must say.  Not sure how much I’ll be using this, but I figured I haven’t blogged about anything in a while, so I might as well make a post since I have LW open.

James

“Unit tests just saved my ass!”

I recently attended the Twin Cities Code Camp this weekend and sat in on a session by Jason Bock on how to write better code.  It was an amazing session with tons of valuable information.  One of the topics he covered was unit tests and he told a funny little anecdote about a co-worker of his who had an epiphany on unit tests.  It went along the lines of this co-worker not being a fan of unit tests until he started writing them and had a test fail and discover a crucial error in his code.

That just happened to me!  We’re writing a new billing platform at work and unit testing in this department has been somewhat of a low-priority.  With this revamp, we’re taking the time to write unit tests on ALL of our classes, make sure they pass and have as much code-coverage as possible.

Now, until I started in this department (which is less than 6 months ago), I’d never heard of unit testing.  In fact, the unit test that failed on me was the first real unit test I’d written, and, like Jason’s co-worker, it uncovered a rather crucial error in my code and forced me to make some changes so the test would pass.  I now feel comfortable that at least that portion of my code works.

Unit tests indeed saved my ass today!

ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 is out!

linky

ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 has been released, and they’ve made some significant changes to the previous release. Scott Hanselman has a nice series of videos on the new features, and while it seems they have cleaned up the code quite a bit, they are still lacking the support for ViewState. I just can’t get over having to write all the inline C# code in my view. It’s ugly, it’s a maintenance nightmare, and I just plain don’t like it. I’m really hoping they remedy this before the final release.

I will post more details on the changes when I have some time to really dig into them. Until then, while MVC is a great technology, and one with a lot of promise, but there are still many details that need to be added if they want developers to really embrace this.

Microsoft Surface – COOLEST. FREAKING. THING. EVER.

I’m not usually one to praise Microsoft. I’ve been an Apple fanboy for far too long for that. But I gotta tell ya, this Microsoft Surface thing has got to be, hands down, one of the coolest inventions ever to hit the digital market. Check out this video I found at the MSDN Blogs.

How freaking cool is that?!?!? I’m an iPod user myself, but seeing the possibility of simply laying your mp3 player of choice down on the surface (pun intended) and drag and drop music visually, that’s freaking awesome in my book.

Microsoft Surface. Officially the coolest freaking thing ever.

F1 Web Challenge – It’s on!!!

(2 blog posts in one day??? Unheard of…)

The F1 Web Challenge is a charity event where programmers and developers from all over Central Minnesota come together to create a website for a non-profit organization. It’s a 24 hour geek-a-thon that happens every year, and it’s a pretty cool deal. I’m really looking forward to it, I’ve never really done anything like this before, so now I get to see how good I really am at this programming thing.

ASP.NET MVC – Not all it’s cracked up to be…

When I heard that Microsoft was coming out with an MVC framework, I was pretty excited. I remember learning about MVC when I was studying Java, and Objective-C/Cocoa on the Mac uses it quite a bit too, so I was happy that MS finally got on the bandwagon.

But after playing with it some, I really think the implementation is completely messed up. I get the whole URL routing thing for controller classes, but they overlooked something huge. ViewState. There is no support for ViewState, so any server controls that rely on ViewState (which is pretty much all of them) are useless. I tried to drop a Label control on my page and set its text value in the code-behind, and it wouldn’t even recognize it.

Maybe there’s a reason for it that I’m not understanding, but losing the ability to drop a control on my page and set its properties in the code-behind is a HUGE drawback.

Scott Guthrie wrote an excellent series of blog posts about MVC in his blog, and they do cover all the essentials, so if you’re interested in learning about the MVC framework, I suggest checking out his blog.

They are promising some new enhancements to the MVC framework soon, so I’ll be checking them out and reporting back. But until there is support for ViewState functionality, it’s still a long way off.

And so it begins…

So here it is, my tech blog. Allow me to preface with the fact that I’m still learning a lot of the stuff I’ll be blogging about, but I felt the need to talk about some of the things I deal with on any given day, and to comment on a lot of the new technologies that are coming out that I’m trying to wrap my head around.