In my commute this morning I was listening to my weekly dose of DotNetRocks - Show 214 with guest Billy Hollis and Billy mentioned something on Agile to illustrate a point, and it has stuck with me all day.

He was referring to a presentation he attended where an advocate said he was writing 2 or 3 lines of unit test code for each line of production code.  Billy's objection to this is hardly a challenge to intuition: Are we getting 4x the value for 4x the code?

One of my metrics for the unit tests that I write is that they don't hurt.  Some can be a couple of lines long, some can be heavily copied-n-paste'd.  Customizing a CodeRush template is time well spent.  There are no wrong answers, however you get them in there is really OK.

It makes sense:  You're writing a unit test.  The aim is to isolate a gizmo of your choosing in your code and exercise it.  The cumulative weight of the unit tests should really function as an expression of your intent for the gizmo.  I outlined what I think of the high importance of naming your tests in a prior post.

I love finding little nice features.  I just discovered the following combination in CodeRush:

alt-UP/alt-DOWN - Change visiblility (public/private/protected/friend) of property, variable or class that the cursor is inside

I've got to hang around late tonight for a conference call with London (on a Friday night no less!) but finding that has made my day.

We should all try to remember the importance of little units of joy in the software we make.

Image courtesy Gary Costa Pereira

[?] After Blog Mint:  Juval Lowy was great at SDNUG last night.  Not a semi-colon in sight!  The presentation was mostly about architecture with the IDesign method.  Well worth it. 

Also, Justin, if you're reading this... sorry about spilling beer on you at the Paragon

with apologies and thanks to Sir Winston for giving me the courage to continue on with WiX

The two links that make my WiX world turn are:

• System Folder Properties at MSDN
• Gábor DEÁK JAHN's WiX Tutorial

Some of the problems a modern cow developer has to face... (thanks Brian - keep posting the funnies)

My contribution:

WATERFALL:  18 months ago, one cow went into the milking shead.  The method was sound, but you don't need milk any more.

AGILE:  Only milk when necessary. 

EXTREME PROGRAMMING:  You have two cows.  They milk each other.

TEST-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT:  Know the bucket before milking any cows.

OPEN SOURCE:  I have a cow, you and some other guy from Norway milk it on weekends or when ever you have some free time. 

CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION:  Your team of two cows checks-in to the milking sheads every day.  Everyone has access to the milk.  Everyone feels good.

SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE:  We agree a schema for a cow.  No one feels dependant on any breed of cow, but no one has actually seen a complete cow.

SCRUM:  There is a backlog of milk orders.  Cows decide how they are to be milked.  Every 30 days the cows, pigs and chickens agree on an amount of potentially shippable milk.  The pigs and chickens get to decide when no more milk is needed.

SaaS:  You don't own the cows.  You rent access to them and pay for it out of OpEx.  Owning cows is outside of core business - you just need some milk.

An easy one, but anyway... When building a target in NAnt that depends on a Web Service, the only change to your <vbc> or <csc> task is to make sure your sources include the Reference file that Visual Studio generated when you added/updated the Web Reference, as so:

<sources>
    <include name="MyProject\*.vb"/>
    <include name="MyProject\Web References\RemoteInterfaceWS\Reference.vb"/>
</sources>

I was also pleased to note that in cases where the wsdl imports a typed dataset (ie the remote Web Method takes or returns a typed dataset), Reference.[vb|cs] includes the dataset definition.  No need to add a step to execute xsd.exe!

Got Build?

(sprint pending ;)

I love a good coincidence   Couple of interesting expirations...

• One of my credit cards expired today.  Not your problem I know, just saying...
• The first Office 2007 betas expired today too.  If this stands between you and a productive morning in Outlook, grab the Beta 2 Technical Refresh and you will be able to the 31st of March.

*with apologies for the Dark Side of the Moon reference, I'm still on a buzz from seeing Roger Waters at the SuperdomeAcer Arena last week...

Don't get me wrong, I love Sharepoint.  Use it every day and sometimes even recommend it to others, but as no less an authority on the human condition as Ryan Adams put it, we hurt the ones we love :)

Sharepoint team:  please stop changing the names of things.  That will be all