I've had a couple of days out of the rigours of sprinting and developing code, a chance to wind down and do other things for a while. "Other things" has so far been bug fixing and planning for the next sprint. Now ordinarily, bug fixing isn't a great love of mine, I don't think it's a passion for many developers I've come across, but I think I'm learning to love it, and here's why.

In the process of fixing bugs, I've had a healthy reminder that there are real users at the end of our processes, that these people don't get to communicate with us geeks nearly enough, and of course it is good to be fixing stuff that causes people pain.

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A nice quick post this morning, something I spotted in a code snippet from the Castle Windsor folks over at http://docs.castleproject.org/Windsor.Windsor-tutorial-part-three-a-testing-your-first-installer.ashx and thought was nice. This post will show you how to pass a lambda into a method, and then invoke that lambda as part of a Where clause. It may not warrant a full blog post, but it's been a quiet few weeks, so there.

Also, check out the first part of this series, Cooking with .Net Lambdas Part 1 - Covering Up Them Code Smells for a more generic example of lambda goodness.

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A few weeks ago I was fortunate to watch a presentation given by Dan Moore, at the Thoughtworks office over in Manchester. The guy giving the talk was my sort of geek - I got the impression that he wasn't a lover of giving presentaitons, but he did love the tech enough that he just had to share it. I've been there! There were a few good little nuggets I took from the talk, that looking on my to-do list I really wanted to blog about, for example page objects, the "mysery guest", making test fail elegantly, etc, so without furher ado, here we go.

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Having spent some time working with Moq, I've found that understanding the argument matchers bundled up in the "It" class is pretty useful stuff. The "It" class is a static class with a few methods on it that are used to tell Moq about the arguments it should expect to receive from your code.

This post is going to be a fairly in depth run through of the core two It methods - It.IsAny<T> and It.Is<T>(a => a....) - followed by a quick skim through the less used It.IsInRange and It.IsRegex methods.

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Hi all,

Just a quick post to share some learnings I've had around a good ol' NHibernate "Object references an unsaved transient instance" error message. In essence, this message is telling you that you're trying to save an object which has a reference to another unsaved object, and NHibernate for one reason or another is unable to work out which object to save first so that it can work out the ID to apply to the other end of the reference. What went wrong and how did I fix it?

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.Net Lambas are awesome. I know a few folks who maybe don't share the sentiment, but to me they thoroughly kick ass. I just need to look at projects such as Fluent NHIbernate, or Moq, and it's pretty clear that Lambas have been one of the most rewarding language extensions ever, period. But I'm going to hazard a guess that if you're a C# developer and you're reading this, you've used lambas many times in things like a "List<T>.Where(...)", but you haven't got a clue what the heck that "Func<T, string>" stuff is all about.

I'm not going to give you a nitty-gritty low level explanation - there are plenty of those already knocking around, so instead I'm going to just going to give a nice step-by-step example.

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Here's a nice punchy one - so short a post, it might even warrant now't more than a tweet, but the blog's been a bit barren of late so here I am.

When you're debugging code (of course that's a rare thing now I'm living the TDD dream ;), if you frequently find yourself digging around in the Visual Studio Watch or Quickwatch windows investigating properties on objects, sub-objects, sub-sub objects, etc, then here's a good 'un. The quickwatch window becomes massively more useful with one simple addition - override the ToString() method on every class in your system so that it summarises the key properties, without you having to expand that object and hunt down those properties.

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As some of you may know, for some months now I've been digging into automated testing. Unit testing, Selenium testing, coverage tools, specification testing, I'm lovin' it. But the tools aside, I have come across one problem which I've both seen first hand and heard plenty about second hand. Testers are not developers, nor are developers testers! You can't sit your testers in front of a blank visual studio solution and expect them to fly, and on the other hand your devs don't want to test, they want to be off building cool stuff! So what's the solution?

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In possibly the shortest blog post known to man, I'm going to share a problem and a possible solution. I'm a rail commuter, so during the week my open-source dev life is broken into three chunks.  I get a 30 minute chunk on the way into work, a 30 minute chunk on the way home, and then an hour or so in the evening. But working in these little fragments is not great for productivity! I really struggle to keep focused, to maintain a flow and keep "in the zone".

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Hi all,

Anyone who's following the FhemDotNet twitter account (at the time of writing that will be... me) may have noticed a flurry of tweets the last few days.  I've been experimenting with ways to improve the build feedback and performance I'm getting from Jenkins, using multiple build jobs and the "Copy Build Artifacts" plugin. I've now got the ability to check in a code change, Jenkins will run a build job, and then fire off two test jobs simultaneously (unit tests and integration tests), tweeting passes and fails for each of the three jobs, and giving me quicker and more detailed feedback along the way.

It took a fair few stabs to get it right, so best I share my learnings.

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