Roy Osherove

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Some news from the wild

 

- Udi shares his thoughs on maintaining legacy code without unit tests and about Mock objects (here and here). Interesting stuff. Nothing too new here, but some great concepts one needs to keep in mind at all times when dealing with these issues.

- Generics are cool. But this is a very interesting argument on why they are not as powerful as they should be because you can't use them as late bound types . If you're not sure what I mean, read the explanation in the blog post. (via LarkWare)

- Also from larkware: XP StoryStudio - Free agile project management ASP.NET application.

- I downloaded and installed Microsoft's Anti spyware tool today. Looks pretty darn good. Here's a direct download link for ya . I suggest you install it on all your parents' computers as well.

- My currently favorite VS.net addin- Resharper, is out with a new version 1.05. It adds several new refactorings, making it even more valuable to the developer in vs 2003. My wish - add so many refactorings that it would be worth to buyg even if you have vs 2005.  new refactorings include:

* Extract Interface
* Extract Superclass
* Introduce Field
* Encapsulate Field
* Copy Type
* Introduce Parameter
* Convert Interface to Abstract Class
* Convert Abstract Class to Interface

- Here’s a bunch of freeware tools and components for Visual Studio and ASP.NET from Morrison Schwartz. Some include source code, others you can purchase the source for what looks to be a relatively small fee. (via Darrell)

- Martin fowler talks about what to do when you think you *have* to design something up front instead of using the incremental (agile) approach to its design.  You should definitely read "Is Design Dead?" on the issue of incremental vs. up-front design. I keep getting questions regarding this issue a lot. I hope I'll get some time to address them. meanwhile, that article is a great start.

- Peli shows off a little of the powerful stuff that mbUnit can do such as RowFixtures and Combinatorial tests. Powerful stuff.

- Scott Hanselman explains how he writes unit tests for code generators 

- Microsoft: Testing .NET Application Blocks: "Describes how to test .NET application blocks during their development, while customizing them, or during their integration with an application. Provides information on all phases of the testing lifecycle, as well as test driven development."

- Microsoft: Team Foundation installation guide (for the latest CTP) for you brave souls out there..

- 30 minutes regular expression tutorial. This one is using Expresso for the examples. Expresso is the first tool I used to learn regex. I then created Regulator to make up for stuff I was missing. Looks like a nice intro article anyway. You can also read the two articles I've written on the subject (here , here and here).

- Looks like IronPython is what I'll be learning too. That's the buzz, anyway. Leanr a new language every year, remember?

- Snippet Compiler version 2.0!

- Sirsha has a great review on Mike Gunderloy's "Coder To Developer" book. And I agreee completely.

- "The Clemens" writes about XmlSerializer and TimeSpan issues you might want to be aware of.

- Thinstall sounds really really cool. Deploy your .Net apps with no dependencies and no runtime needed.

- Introducing The ManagedThreadPool. Looks interesting!