What is the best way to do this? I want to get this working with nCover.
I made a run at this and came close... but in the end it didn't really work out for me.
The guy from Test Driven made a template for testing silverlight in nunit. I upgraded this to Silverlight 4.0 then I ran nCover.
The proof of concept worked great... but when I tried it on our actual product things fell apart pretty quick.
Many of our unit tests reference AGcore and others referent GUI objects, which is why I think I kept getting some sort of cross threading error.
I read that SilverUnit may be able to do this sort of thing... but you have to pay 700+ dollars per developer. I wish the guy who wrote that would consider selling it separately.
Oh well... someday maybe I'll see code coverage numbers... not today though :-)
zachary,
Can you provide more detail on "the proof of concept worked great"? NCover is not able to profile Silverlight because it does not support the CLR.
Related
I'm considering using the Agile Toolkit, ATK4 to upgrade a number of web projects that I'm working on. I really like the idea/paradigm that the Agile Toolkit presents, but I'm worried about documentation.
The agile website's documentation is sparse, in broken English, and seems to 'paraphrase' the symfony documentation.
The agile toolkit alleges to have been in development/production since 1999, yet there are only a handful of StackOverflow.com posts regarding agile, and next to nothing comes up in Google searches...
In short is it worth spending time learning the Agile toolkit, or would my time be better spent on a framework that has more of an active support community? I've tried a few other frameworks, but ATK's implementation really stands out...
Initially ATK was born as an internal tool from Agile Technologies (.ie) so that has been conceived in 1999 but it was recently launched as dual licensed framework.
That's why it lacks some documentation and has not a huge community nor appears Googling.
I was amazed at first sight by its working way proposal so that I engaged it. The documentation has been already improved and over the time it will keep getting better and community will grow.
I had the chance to get in touch with the lead developer and trust me, it will get better and better.
Even, as an example all the ATK4's site is developed with the toolkit and the code is short and pretty easy to read.
Good luck!
ATK4 does have many examples, and code is concise and clear. It accomplishes the goal of wrapping server-side and client-side into one comprehensive framework via php. Plus it looks nice. It does appear that documentation is improving.
Yep - agree with what the others are saying - Romans is doing a great job of getting the documentation updated. I started writing an application in straight php but realised i was going to need to use jquery to get a nice, cross browser compatible front end and wanted a php framework that would support that.
I looked at Yii, Cake and CodeIgniter but ATK4 really seems to do what i wanted. Like anything, it takes a bit of getting used to and i'm still relatively new to both php and ATK4 but i've rewritten what i already had for my application in the framework and the code is so clean - all the html and css are separate and the page code is really compact. The integration with Jquery is great and i've just written a plugin that i needed to get jqplot working for nice looking graphs.
Years ago (pre-web) I used to be a Fortran developer (yes it was a very long time ago!) but these days I run a small non-IT business. I would like to develop a database application for my clients to access via a browser (or maybe down the line via a mobile phone). I haven't done any programming for a while apart from some VB macros in Microsoft Excel. I would be grateful if anyone could suggest the best language/technology to learn to get me heading in the right direction.
As Neil said in his comments there are dozens of different, valid answers to this.
Usually I would suggest going with a language you already know, but neither Fortran or VBA are really suited for this task, as far as I know.
Personally I would suggest Django, which is a web framework written in Python. It simplifies many common tasks and it is very well documented.
But there are many more possible solutions.
Before I started with a framework I'd break the problem into pieces. If you've never done anything with a database before you'll find that challenging enough without piling web or mobile on top of it.
Model your problem and get a good object or data model in place. Test that thoroughly without thinking about UI. Once you have that, perhaps you can expose it as services that any UI can call.
You'll quickly become overwhelmed if you try to do it all at once.
Here's another thought: If these are paying customers, why not do yourself and them a favor and hire someone that knows how to do this? It's great that you used to write Fortran, but if you haven't kept up you won't be doing your business any good by putting out a bad first effort for customers to see.
Do it right - get a professional. Do your learning on your own time.
You can use ASP.NET and SQL Server to get something online that will allow users to edit a database table fairly easily. They've simplified it to the point where you can drag and drop the necessary controls (GridView and a SqlDataSource for instance) and define your datasource in a wizard for most simple table CRUD functionality. Basically give users the ability to edit a table without writing any code.
If you need to do something a little more difficult it's easy to write code that will add functionality to the original drag/drop stuff you did.
There are lots of good resources out there for asp.net and C# also, so it will help you get up to speed quickly.
Keep in mind that I work almost entirely with .NET/SQL Server so my opinion will be slanted towards them...
Got a Win7 box with VS2010 Premium installed on it.
Building desktop apps works just fine.
But we got this solution with 15 SL4 and 21 desktop projects... Building the SL part of it takes too long. This is very irritating and encourages to drop TDD since every time I run a test it takes ~3 seconds for msbuild to find out that nothing changed and the project should be skipped. The projects are very small and there's nothing fancy in them and we hadn't any problems before we switched from VS2008+SL3.
I've heard people complaining abound VS2010 speed in general, but nothing about SL4 build time.
Is anyone experiencing same problems and is there any workaround for this?
Do you need that many projects? As a rule of thumb, less is better. You say that the projects are very small, that would be an indication to me that you probably don't need that many.
Don't use it for managing dependencies (cycle avoidance). If you're trying to manage 'units of development' or logical groupings, use namespaces instead.
Physical/project separation is good for keeping test code out of production code, and managing units of deployment, but don't separate it until you're getting something out of it.
Patricks Smaccia wrote a good article on when and when not to create assemblies.
Another way to tackle the problem is to break your solution up into multiple solutions, and
use references to the dlls produced by the other solutions. That way, you only build part of it at a time. If you need to work across many dlls at the same time, this is inconvenient, but it's a sign that something is likely to be wrong with the design of your code.
This post on speeding vs.net up with many projects may also help.
I'm going to write a rather big/complex WinForm application such as Paint.NET, SharpDevelop, etc. I think one of the most important things to build such an application is to structure the project properly to increase maintainability and control the complexity.
So what kind of patterns or practices show I use? Any blog posts, papers, open source projects are welcomed. I'm trying to learn something from SharpDevelop but it's rather huge for me to step into.
PS: I'm an experienced programmer formerly targeting to web developement(asp.net, rails, etc.). So I know some design principles and how to use them when implement business logics. Maybe I really need now is a sample to get started with a WinForm application so that I can realize how to handle the menus, controls and others. I've learnt something about the MVP pattern but still unconfident to start a large/complex application.
For big projects the methodology and the tools you are using are equally as important as the architectural design. You need to set up a source control system (like SVN) from day one. Also, it is very good to have a standard build procedure and perform builds in a daily basis. The build procedure should include running all tests, which you should also put some effort in implementing from the start.
Regarding the structure, I believe the single most important thing is to divide your project into building blocks with mimimal dependecies on each other. This way you will be able to think about one small part of the system at the same time and not have to face the full complexity of it. It will also help delegate some work to a fellow programmer, if you have this chance.
In order to get started, I recommend that you implement first something minimal as quick as possible. Then work to make it better and add functionality. This will keep you motivated as you will have something concrete to work with. It will also help you identify major design flaws and important issues early enough to correct them.
This is a good beginners guide from Microsoft itself:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/default.aspx
check the Windows track there.
After mastering basics - and since you are an experienced developer - you can check this book "patterns & practices Application Architecture Guide 2.0" from Microsoft also.
I would imagine that many of the techniques that make for successful web projects will translate to Winforms projects. Start small and grow the application incrementally. Try to keep the entire application building/working while you add features one at a time.
I'm getting ready to develop my first Silverlight app. It is going to be primarily used by my church for data input but also will need to generate at least one report, ideally in Excel but XML/XSLT is not outside the realm...
It will be Internet facing and will talk to a SQL Server 2008 db for which I will be creating a web service hosted at the ISP (db is also hosted at the ISP). The clients will be a mix of Windows and Mac.
My question specifically relates to the interface architecture. I know MVVM is big for this right now and I'm comfortable with that. I want to get this up fairly quickly (ie- next 3-4 weeks). I've also seen mention of Prism (Composite Application Guidance) and Caliburn. What are anyone's thoughts on these two? The initial version of the app is not going to be huge so I don't imagine it would be overly difficult to refactor a framework into it at a later date.
You are right, if it's your first development on SL, adding the complexity of MVVM won't help you much.
I think a good approach could be to go for something simple (e.g.: the good old Document/View could be just a good start http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/4x1xy43a(VS.80).aspx, or just breaking in standard layers, UI / BS / DL).
After that development you will have learnt a lot of good stuff, and then you will be able to throw your app and start new bigger challenges using more advanced architectures (about MVVM, a very good web cast: http://blog.lab49.com/archives/2650 it's WPF based most of the concepts can be ported to SL).
Good luck and enjoy for SL development.
Cheers
Braulio
Start with something you are very comfortable with especially if you need to get this up quickly. Follow good coding standards and should not be a problem to refactor later into other frameworks if you get a bigger team.
This is a useful pdf.
I haven't read it in detail yet myself, but this article looks rather useful:
RIA Architecture with Silverlight in mind