GenXJamerican

I came across this excellent post on the problems with Sandcastle, the Microsoft offering for generating help documentation for .NET 2.0 assemblies.  In addition to pointing out the problems with Sandcastle, the author (Grant Drake) brings us up to date on the status of other successors to NDoc. As someone who used NDoc 1.3 a lot on projects in the last couple of years, I was very disappointed that the author decided to discontinue work on NDoc 2 (especially since we have mailbombers to thank for the loss).

A bit of “googling” turned up these links:

• An MSDN entry on the subject
• This link to a Power Toy for automating the creation of VSI files

I came across this blog post earlier today via Mike Gunderloy’s Larkware.com.  One of the comments requested .VSI files (the templates are for NUnit and MbUnit and are made available as zip files).  That probably would be a nicer way to package this.  Even without it, I’m glad to see anything that encourages test-driven development.  I’ll definitely use this with my development team soon.  I should probably learn how to create VSIs anyway.

I inherited some classic ASP code not long ago that needed some enhancement.  The look-and-feel of the site is pretty nice, but under the covers there’s tons of the inline SQL I hate so much.  But worse than that is the previous developer’s use of the SHAPE command.  I’d never used it, even when I last wrote classic ASP with my own hands (around 2003).  Once this project is over, I hope never to see it or use it again.  I’m really struggling to understand how it works (and why things were done this way).  I’m hoping this article will help me figure it out.  I’m grateful that someone took the time to actually develop a formal grammar for this command.  It reminds me a lot of the BNF notation we learned as 1st year computer science majors in college.

This particular entry in the “forever war” of whether to use object-relational mapping or stored procedures does a better job than most in these ways:

• It changes the argument from "either-or" to a situational one.
• It broadens the scope of database objects in the discussion beyond stored procedures to include functions, triggers, views, constraints, and referential integrity.
• It rates the suitability of each database object to a particular task.

I found the article especially relevant to my current job because of how many projects I'm responsible for that have huge amounts of business logic captured in stored procedures hundreds of lines long.  As far as I can tell, much of the reason for the length of these stored procedures is that they're being used to represent workflows.  SQL doesn't look like the best way to implement those to me, so I suspect I'll be looking at Windows Workflow Foundation a lot more closely in the very near future.

I came across this post from Joel Spolsky last week (though I’m just now getting around to blogging about it). We’re using Team Foundation Server for source code control at work, and we’ve managed to have the problems of check-ins breaking the build and too few check-ins to have a good delta of changes at the same time.  While the applications we build at APS Healthcare aren’t the size of an operating system as far as lines of code, the branching-and-merging idea Spolsky describes would probably be useful to us.

I’ve been a big fan of test-driven development (and unit testing) since I first learned about it a few years ago. It wasn’t until this month that I learned about NDbUnit. This little library is a great value-add for unit tests that involve databases. The creation of test data is tedious if done manually (NDbUnit uses XML for data files), but that’s the only real drawback I’ve found so far in my limited experience with it.  It plays very nicely with NUnit, MbUnit, and TestDriven.NET. You can get binaries and source code for NDbUnit from Quality Labs.  I also put together a (very) small sample project with Visual Studio 2005 that you can try out.

I came across a great post on unit testing today that provided not just why to unit test, but what to unit test. Differentiating software into “infrastructure” and “end user application” really highlights what sort of code will benefit the most from the approach. Another really useful bit of this article talks about turning bug reports into unit tests. It’s a very smart idea that I’ll try to use on my own code whenever it’s appropriate.

After last week’s post about the stored procs vs. ad-hoc SQL debate, I decided I’d take a look at MyGeneration and Gentle.NET if I could think of the right project. I decided to start with a simple contact form.

Anytime a form has dropdowns, I try to use database tables to populate them.  So I started by copying data for the dropdowns from an existing database to a new one for the project. Once I created a business logic assembly for the new classes to belong to, I fired up MyGeneration and ran the Gentle.NET business entity template. Creating the classes was very easy. the real challenge turned out to be referring to the right Gentle assemblies in my projects. Because I’d included references to Gentle.Common, Gentle.Framework, Gentle.Provider.SQLServer and log4net in the business logic assembly, I thought that was all I needed to do. But the web project wouldn’t compile. In order to get the page working, I had to add Gentle.Common and Gentle.Framework references to web project.

Once I sorted out my reference issues (and added a Gentle.config file), finishing the contact form went very quickly. I developed this bit of code for loading any dropdown list:

private void LoadDropDown(ref DropDownList ddl, IList dropDownItems, string textField, string valueField) { ddl.DataSource = dropDownItems; ddl.DataTextField = textField; ddl.DataValueField = valueField; ddl.DataBind(); }

Here’s how it’s called:

if (!Page.IsPostBack) { this.LoadDropDown(ref ContactTypeList,BLL.ContactType.ListAll(),“Name”,“ContactTypeId”); this.LoadDropDown(ref SubjectList,BLL.InformationType.ListAll(),“Name”,“InformationTypeId”); this.LoadDropDown(ref OrgTypeList,BLL.Audience.ListAll(),“Name”,“AudienceId”); }