Thanks to all those who came out for the Colorado Springs User Group.  The slides and code can be downloaded here. There were a few complaints about the black background in Visual Studio making the code harder to read.  I'm sorry about that.  Next time, I'll use the default Visual Studio settings.

The MVC team loves their rec center, but an evil real estate developer wants to bulldoze it to build a hipster bar named Ruby's.  The team has been coding their butts off with MVC 2, but will the new features be enough to save the rec center?  Will the cynical real estate developer cackle and complain that it's still not enough?  Will the MVC team get areas right?  Will the new templated HtmlHelpers strike the right balance of rapid development and fine control?  Will ... [More]

I prefer using MVC over Web Forms for ASP.NET development, but the reasons are getting narrower as Web Forms is improving.  Here's my "Why should I use MVC" list from a recent presentation: To get separation of concerns right from the start To avoid ViewState page bloat To avoid messy HTML To avoid messy URLs But a lot of this is changing in Web Forms with ASP.NET 4. ViewState Improvements In previous Web Forms versions, you could disable ViewState for the page with EnableViewS... [More]

The problem I ran into a snag testing some code today with Rhino Mocks.  I was mocking calls to a repository and inspecting the repository method calls and arguments passed. Everything started off pretty normal with the repository dependency injected into the class under test: // Arrange var repository = MockRepository.GenerateMock<ICustomerRepository>(); var passenger = new Passenger(repository); // Act passenger.CallTheMethodUnderTest(arg1, arg2); In my Assert section, I... [More]

Thanks to all those who came out for the Denver Visual Studio User Group lab.  The slides, labs, and code can be downloaded here.  I've also included some cheat-sheets as handouts.

I've got a work laptop with a VMware virtual machine.  But I wanted to move it to my slightly faster personal rig, with the nicer keyboard, mouse, dual monitors, etc. So I shut down the VM on the work laptop and copied it over to the personal machine.  Then I downloaded and installed the VMware Player to the new machine, copied the VM to it, and opened it up.  I got a prompt asking if I "moved" or "copied" the VM.  I chose "copied". The VM spun for a little while, and then ... [More]

I installed Windows 7 Ultimate x64 on my machine the other day.  Here's where the road was smooth and where I hit some bumps.  For reference, this is a Dell Latitude D630 on a docking station.  It's maybe 2 years old or so? Smooth Before I started, I added more RAM to go up to 4GB.  I had 2GB already, so it wasn't like I was low on RAM, but more RAM = better experience.  The laptop has two slots, so it was already full with two, 1GB sticks.  Buying the two, 2GB... [More]

I just started a new project using Typemock Isolator.  It's a new tool for me, and since I've mostly used Rhino Mocks, my learning is from the perspective of "how do you do this with Rhino Mocks".  These are the differences I see so far. General Typemock Isolator is a commercial product.  Rhino Mocks is free and open source.  Here's the Typemock pricing. Typemock Isolator can mock just about anything, including not normally mockable things like private meth... [More]

I was proud when I got married, when my kids were born, and when I accomplished stuff in my career. But this may be the topper.  My submission to the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks was posted! It's good to be famous, even if it's little "f" famous.

There are plenty of validation frameworks out there.  I've worked with NHibernate Validators, Microsoft's Enterprise Application Blocks, and now Data Annotations.  They primarily work by adding attributes to the properties in the class you want to validate.  How are they different? Not very.  The biggest difference between them is their syntax.  I guess the Validation Blocks from Microsoft's P&P group have a lot of configuration options, but I haven't needed that ... [More]