.Net Jonesie - October, 2005

Home

A simple programmers blog

About Me

		Peter G Jones New Zealand

Blogroll

Contact

Email Me

Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway.

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Testing 1 2 3 by peter@jonesie.net.nz

I spent last week getting trained on Software Testing. The course was run by Software Education and led by Don Mills. I haven't yet decided if I liked this course or not. Don certainly knows the subject well - he has an amazing memory for dates, names, authors, standards codes etc. I picked up many useful techniques, tips and facts, e.g:

Inspection provides the biggest return of all other testing and QC techniques
Decision Tables are a great tool for creating specifications as well as tests.
Test early, test often
If you don't know how to test it then don't start building it
70% of software faults are the result of poor specification - only 7% are genuine code defects.
Half of all software project are delivered unfinished.

However, the course syllabus is very centered around the standards and passing the qualification exam and I would have preferred more practical examples.

The real problem with testing is the lack of management commitment to doing it. My current employer is much more aware of the need for this - they sent me on the course after all - but previous employers have been unwilling or unaware of how important proper testing is and my feeling is that this is a very common situation for most New Zealand companies doing software development. Given the clear cost savings that can be made by engaging in proper testing practices and the appalling rate of failure of software projects, this is a real concern for the future of software development in New Zealand.

So what as programmers can we do to make this situation better?

Sunday, October 30, 2005 9:43:21 AM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

Comments [0] General |

Friday, October 28, 2005

VS05 & SQL 05 RTM - Go get it! by peter@jonesie.net.nz

If your an MSDN Subscriber you can now download Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 RTM.

Expect a looooonnnnnnngggggg download!

Friday, October 28, 2005 6:42:41 AM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

Comments [0] Visual Studio |

Friday, October 21, 2005

DotNetNuke again by peter@jonesie.net.nz

I've been planning an upgrade to the NZ .Net site for the end of the year so I thought I should take a look at DotNetNuke 3 again. The last time I looked was about, oh, 5 months ago. It's now on version 3.1.1 and wow! It has progressed a lot in that time.

Installation

The installation doesn't appear to have altered very much. As usual, I tried a complex install and failed, then did the basic install - when will I ever learn! I was trying to get the ASP.Net membership database installed separately from DNN but the DNN installer runs all the scripts in the DNN database. I'm sure I can run the scripts manually and get this working.

I want to do this so I can test the integration with Community Server 1.2 when it's available but with some of the new modules now in DNN, I'm not sure how much of CS we will use.

Skins

There's a couple of new skins in the default package, but nothing much to write home about. I (or someone else) will still need to create a new skin.

Blogs

NewBlog is the new default blog module for DNN but you have to download this (and all other non core modules) separately. I suppose this makes the installation simpler.

NewBlog has most of the standard features you'd expect. You can create as many blogs as you like and categories them. You can create posts online but I'm not sure if there is an API for posting.

Forums

The new forum module is a vast improvement over the old discussions module. This looks and feels similar to CS forums, but without a lot of the advanced features. It's more than adequate for most purposes though.

The forums in CS still look a better option, mainly becuase of the new listserv functionality coming with CS 1.2, but also because it's a more focused application that will most likely handle the traffic better. But, skinning CS is a real pain.

That's as far as I've progressed today. My next step is to try and separate the ASP Membership schema so I can test the CS integration. In theory, it might be possible to integrate with CS 1.1 and if I'm feeling ambitious then I'll give that a spin but I suspect I'll need to wait a couple of weeks for CS 1.2.

To upgrade the NZ .Net site I'll need to figure out what to do with user accounts and permissions - I'm not sure I can upgrade these from DNN 212. A manual import of these may be possible. And then there's all the existing content. The last time I tried an automatic upgrade to DNN 3 from DNN 212 it was less than useful.

There's a couple of custom modules in the existing site and some 3rd party controls. I have XMod for DNN 3 so that covers a lot of the customisation, but there are a few things that will probably get thrown out and replaced with standard modules.

Friday, October 21, 2005 6:24:34 AM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

Comments [2] General |

Sunday, October 02, 2005

Summit Almost Over by peter@jonesie.net.nz

I thought yesterday was going to be boring, but, OMG, was I wrong! We had a whole day looking at upcoming and possible future features for Visual Studio - Orcas and beyond. Basically, some of the stuff they are thinking about for the next 5 years and more. We sat through scenario demonstrations and voted on the various elements.

Unfortunately, I can't tell you anything interesting about any of these new features so this is just a big teaser really, but I can say that life as a programmer over the next few years is likely to change radically.

The really impressive part of this day that I can talk about was the openness and trust shown to us by Microsoft. This is the first time they have solicited feedback at such an early stage in the design process from non-employees. They did have some worries about doing this of course - i.e., would we knock down something they thought was really cool - but overall, I couldn't find anything that was bad or wrong. There were a few things I didn't care about, but I'm sure others did.

We did have a look at some less secret tools and technologies too. For example Atlas. Tim: I'm sorry for not paying more attention to your Ajax blogverstation. I can now see how cool Ajax/Atlas will be. My impression is that I will finally be able to write web applications that behave as well as windows applications. If you didn't know, you can get Atlas now and it will be released soon (?) after VS2005.

One more thing, Workflow is EVERYWHERE. Get to know it now. Start thinking about how you can use it in ALL your applications. Download the beta from http://msdn.microsoft.om/workflow. Get Paul's book and read his blog for more links. I'm certain we will be seeing some demos of this in NZ soon and probably a user group session or two.

One more morning of sessions and then a barbecue and the summit is over. Half a day for shopping and then I'm on my way home. Hopefully, no more long trips this year!

Sunday, October 02, 2005 1:35:42 AM (New Zealand Standard Time, UTC+12:00)

Comments [0] General |