SharpDeveloper

What can I say.. I am impressed.. Very impressed.  Try it out now - Resharper.  Commercial license is only $349.00
What did I achieve?  Few small things at the moment, improved “extract this into a method” functionality, suggesting when to use “const” for strings, site-wide analysis for problems, convert method to static.  Very cool..
Here’s a list of features

Add parameters easily with Resharper

I was able to take a piece of code inside the function, say AccountsReceivable.GetReferenceNumber(”abc001″) and convert that to a parameter of my helper function just by highlighting it and selecting “introduce parameter”.  It then went ahead and updated all references to this function to pass the AccountsReceivable.GetReferenceNumber(”abc001″) as if it was a variable

Create variables to replace common values

Here’s another case.  Imagine you have some reference to something like dr["status"].ToString(), you can “Introduce Parameter” and it will ask you if you want to update just that one line, or update ALL references inside that function wtih the new variable name…  pretty neat!

Also have you encountered the situation where some variable is declared near the top of a function and then its used somewhere in the middle… and you are stuck wondering whether you can get rid of it or you can modify the code without breaking it ?  Well Resharper will allow you to join the declaration with the intiialization, so its re-partnered to its vaue

Easily worth the $350 price tag.

You will get the most bang for your buck in the first month or so anyway, use it to clean up and spiffy your app, and then try not to let it descend back into chaos.

This software is super cool.  WatiN - Automated Web Application Testing!

Here’s how you can use it.  Download it.  Download the test recorder (it’s not perfect, but its pretty good).  Create a trivial test case so you know it’s working.  Then build on that test case.    It will output code for NUnit, MBUnit, or even VS2005Test

Load up your VS IDE, then execute it from Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 Test Runner.    It will give you the results right there!  Super cool or what??

With this framework I was able to create some pretty simple test SUPER fast.  - Login test, check for correct page loaded.   Then I tested some shopping cart logic (adding items, removing items, clearing cart.)

In conclusion you can effectively create tests with WatiN.  Give it a try.  It’s compatible with practically every testing framework (including Fitnesse) that you probably use.

1. Appoint a Leader
2. Leader makes council with the team
3. Leader makes a decision
4. Team supports leader in his or her decision

To management, the idea of outsourcing sounds very sexy…. The idea of producing the same content (code, or what not) at 1/2 or 1/3^rd the cost is almost a wet dream for management, if I may be so bold. Even though it sounds great in theory, it’s actually a very tricky function to master. Here are some things I have learned with my outsourcing experience.

Keep in mind I am not discussing the outsourcing style of passing requirements and getting the end product complete. I am discussing the style of hiring outsiders and working with them on a daily basis.

You have to start by looking at what is the purpose of outsourcing. Is it to save money? Or is it to improve quality? Or is it so that your team can focus on other things? Get this straight first before going any further. My points below are in the context that you are a software company (or at least do some software development) and you are considering outsourcing to save money and cut costs.

From friends, I know that some very popular companies outsource, such as E-Trade Canada, Accenture, and recently the new online T.V. web site Hulu which outsourced its development to China.

1. Before you start outsourcing, have your process solid - i.e. have regular scrum, know how much code you are generating each week, and so on. It’s very important that you have some idea of costs for developing software for your local team. If you have no idea, you won’t be able to see if you are really saving money or wasting it.
2. Know velocities of individual team members so you can measure cost effectiveness of your outsourced work.
3. Build your estimation skills. Read Joel’s article on estimation and his second article on estimation (which is really a promo for his bug tracking software but still worth reading) and Steve McConnell’s book on Software Estimation (highly recommended, very easy to understand).
4. Get smart/able/competent guys. This can make or break your outsourcing project. If you are going to get developers that need baby sitting, then hire a baby sitter on their end to clean up their code, otherwise you are going to waste your valuable resources fixing and re-fixing and re-fixing their code. In this case you might not be actually saving money.
5. Review their code. Someone on your side is going to have to review their code to make sure that they aren’t purposely obfuscating it in order to secure their jobs in the future. I have seen a Flash application that was built in this manner, the team overseas purposely messed up the code in such a way that it would be difficult for others to continue where they left off.
6. Learn from those who have done it before. If not, you are going to mess up big time, in many ways. Might be worth getting a consultant who has been successful with such projects. Another idea is to find someone who has connections "back home", and go there to see how some of the shops work.
7. Turnover is really high in India/Bangladesh/ and so on. This is because jobs start at really low salaries (like $200 a month) and go upwards to like $3000 a month (comparable to working in Canada or USA). You will need to find a way to solve this problem. Somehow you will need to get them to commit that guys will not drop like flies. This is so important because there is always an upfront cost to learn an application, and it becomes more as the complexity and lines of code increase.
8. Consider a cross-cultural learning program, you send some people there for a while, they come over here for a while. A lot of big companies do this. It’s almost a must.
9. For the team overseas, its important to spend your valuable time together in the beginning to ask lots of questions and understand the requirements as much as possible, in case there is a task that you run into questions, then leave it and work on something else.

Hamid, Axosoft CEO claims that Outsourcing is for Dummies. I think this isn’t true in all cases, as I have been able to apply outsourcing successfully on some small projects. However, it all depends on the case, and for building complicated software with a (geographically) fragmented team, you may just end up proving his point.

<exec>
<!-- Auto increment web.config build number -->
<executable>E:\Userdata\CruiseControl\Tools\MergeWebConfigValues.exe (my custom tool)</executable>
<buildArgs>"E:\Program Files (x86)\CruiseControl.NET\server\Main.state" e:\userdata\cruisecontrol\Dev_Main\Web.config</buildArgs>
<baseDirectory>e:\userdata\cruisecontrol\Dev_Main</baseDirectory>
<buildTimeoutSeconds>15</buildTimeoutSeconds>
</exec>

When unit testing on your database, you will run into a common problem.

Rolling back.

So you want to do some unit tests, and then you want to reset your database back to the nice squeaky clean version that doesn’t have half failed unit tests.

So how can you do this?

There are many ways to achieve this.

The best way I found (requires Win XP SP2 or Windows Server 2003) is to use Roy’s Unit Testing Rollback Attribute.  Simply inherit his class, add a "DataRollback" attribute, and you are good to go.  Using some complicated Interception logic and Enterprise Services (COM+) it rolls back all the database work that was done.  It’s super easy to implement.  Here is some sample code that shows you just how easy it is.  You just have to download XtUnit (an extension to NUnit) to do this. (Full source code available)

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using TeamAgile.ApplicationBlocks.Interception.UnitTestExtensions;
using NUnit.Framework;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
using Microsoft.ApplicationBlocks.Data;

namespace DBTest
{
    ///<summary>
    /// Test roll back functionality.
    ///</summary>
    [TestFixture]
    public class RollbackTest : ExtensibleFixture
    {
        [Test, DataRollBack]
        [Category("Database")]
        public void TestInsert()
        {
            //this method will be performed inside a COM+ transaction
            //this requires windows XP SP2 or better
            //Windows Server 2003 works as well.

            string strCnn = "your_conn_string";
            Guid random = Guid.NewGuid();
            string sqlI = string.Format(@"insert into log4net (message,date,thread,level,logger) values ('{0}',getdate(),'{1}','Debug','Test')", random.ToString(), System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.GetHashCode());
            SqlHelper.ExecuteNonQuery(strCnn, CommandType.Text, sqlI);

            string sqlS = string.Format(@"select count(*) from log4net where message='{0}'", random.ToString());
            int rowcount = (int)SqlHelper.ExecuteScalar(strCnn, CommandType.Text, sqlS);
            Assert.That(rowcount > 0, "Cannot find {0}", random.ToString());
        }
    }
}

byte[] salt = new byte[8];
RNGCryptoServiceProvider rng = new RNGCryptoServiceProvider();
rng.GetBytes(salt);

 

More to come soon. In summary – CruiseControl makes a world of difference. Get it now.

As Jeff Atwood wrote, "The F5 key is not a build process"