You may have come across the GitHub JavaScript Styleguide, which tells us to: Preview Text:  The syntax of CoffeeScript is beautiful; but the syntax of Latin is beautiful too, and yet 'Amo Caesarem' is not very lovely in <i>style</i>. So what makes good CoffeeScript style? Sponsored:  ...

GitHub users rejoice!  Today CloudBees announced the release of BuildHive, a continuous integration tool that enables build/text jobs for existing GitHub repositories.  CloudBees is currently a leading "Java in the Cloud" service that should be well-known to avid DZone readers.   BuildHive is cloud-powered by Jenkins, the popular Java-based open source continuous integration tool. ...

Here is the new SilverlightShow content for Thursday, May 17th, 2012:

• Why Developers Should Care About Design, and How Metro Helps
• What Metro style app packages are installed?
• Registration error… Windows Phone with Windows Azure debugging problem!
• Getting an App in the Windows Store: What, Why, and How
• Google Analytics on your Windows Phone App in 1 minute
• Brian Noyes' VSLive! NYC Talks and Demos
• Making a cross-platform game in two weeks
• How to mimic the application bar of the game hub and to avoid the splash screen bug
• Keeping your family safer with Windows 8
• WP7 Launchers and Choosers - A WP7Dev should know
• Being productive when your Windows 8 app is offscreen

Missed yesterday's news digest? Check it out here!

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I spent some time recently playing around with gephi – an open source platform for creating visualisations of graphs – to get a bit more insight into the ThoughtWorks graph which I’ve created in neo4j. I followed Max De Marxi’s blog post to create a GEFX (Graph Exchange XML Format) file to use in gephi although I later learned that you can import directly from neo4j into gephi which...

As business leaders focus on growth during 2012, they are identifying business expansion and transformation opportunities.  The resulting IT mandate to rapidly evolve mobile and social interactions is forcing CIOs to re-invent their software delivery.  By following a straightforward four-step plan, CIOs can improve productivity, enhance agility, deliver timely solutions, and help fulfill...

Much has been said about the Node.js’s great performance so I wanted to test out how it compares to an Preview Text:  Much has been said about the Node.js’s great performance so I wanted to test out how it compares to an ASP.NET Web API backend. Here were my Benchmark's results... Sponsored:  ...

Background In many cases, we need to have two different set of configuration settings (let say: one for development environment and another one for production environment). What we normally do is to change the settings one by one before deploying to production server and change them back again to development. This is very annoying especially when you have many settings. Preview...

Read original post by Andrew Duthie at Devhammer's Den

I'm going to avoid casting aspersions on my fellow developers and instead simply own up to my own failings…I've been developing software since I was 10 years old (my first program was written in BASIC on a Commodore PET), and professionally for well over a decade, and for most of that time, I believed that design was someone else's job, and that it didn't matter whether I could design my way out of a paper bag.

WRONG!

Design is everyone's responsibility, at least to some degree. [...]

Summary:  Before selecting PaaS infrastructure, understand how sharing, location, and responsibility impact your public/private Cloud and internal/external Cloud decision. Preview Text:  Before selecting PaaS infrastructure, understand how sharing, location, and responsibility impact your public/private Cloud and internal/external Cloud...

Read original post at Mike Ormond's Blog

There comes a time when you’ll want to see a list of all the Metro style app packages installed on your Windows 8 machine. Occasionally you may need to do this in order to fix a registration issue – I’ve seen this happen occasionally in Consumer Preview – manually removing the app package can resolve it.

In addition, there’s a limit to the number of side-loaded apps you can have installed on the Consumer Preview. If you exceed the limit you wont be able to renew your developer licence. I hit this issue at one of our events last week and seeing a complete list of all the installed app packages was very useful.

Read original post at Betim Drenica's Blog

You just have started to trying out the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7, and created your first sample application. Then , when you launch the admin page, you get this error:

Sorry, an error occurred while processing your request.
WP7CloudApp1.Web.Infrastructure.RoleInWrongPortException: The Web role was started in a wrong port. For this sample application to work correctly, please make sure that it is running in port 443. Please review the Troubleshooting section of the sample documentation for instructions on how to do this.

Read original post by Andrew Duthie at Devhammer's Den

Most of my readers are probably aware that Windows 8 is on the horizon. If you're a software developer, whether an experienced Windows dev, or one who works on other platform, chances are good that you've at least heard of it. What I propose to do in this post is argue for a simple proposition...every developer who would like to put some additional money in their pocket owes it to themselves to learn the What, Why, and How of the Windows Store.

So you went to work for the cool company that wooed you with promises of cutting edge technologies and techniques. In the interview, they told you that they are agile and unit test everything. You may or may not have been in an agile environment before, but the important thing you are enthusiastic about joining a team that truly gets software development. You tested on your previous job, even using JustMock to write better tests. You promise you can be agile yourself and quickly adopt their practices. You’re immediately hired.

Many of you have been there… maybe you’re there right now.

It takes a few days to receive your workstation, and you find most of the development software isn’t set up. A coworker gives you the instructions, and by the end of the day you find yourself still struggling to connect to the version control server.

The next day, you ask your manager about your problem. It turns out that the person in charge of the version control and build servers left a few months back; you’re the replacement. Further inquiries lead to a startling truth: no one has administrative access.

Remembering that you replaced the version control administrator, you find the user name and password taped under your desk!

You pull down the source code, and it quickly becomes apparent that you’re lost. It’s a large project, and the unit tests are completely unreadable, seemingly without logic or organization. “Something is better than nothing,” you think as you run all the tests.

It turns out that the vast majority of the tests are ignored; so much for that approach! You remove the Ignore attributes and try again. It seems to be taking a while, and it’s past time to go out. You decide to check on it in the morning even though it’s a Saturday.

When you arrive at work the next morning you see a fair number of cars. The company stressed having a healthy life/work balance, so you thought mandatory weekend work was rare. You make your way to the office and discover most of your team is here, frantically working.

“Hey, it’s good for you to finally join us. There was a catastrophe last night. Our primary data storage was corrupted beyond recovery and the backups aren’t restoring successfully. We suspect hackers.”

“Hackers?”

“Well, most likely some teenagers who are good at breaking into computers. They manipulated a lot of data, and what we were able to track down is obviously fake. I mean, who names a child Little Teapot.”

That is rather suspicious. At your workstation, you found that the unit tests took an hour to run… good thing you left the night before. You search the code base for “Little Teapot” and find that it’s used in one of the tests you re-enabled.

You must hate unit testing… I know I do.

What to Do

If your employment continues, you may want to apply best practices to the unit test projects. Here are three important aspects you should consider to get started.

Isolation

The reason the finale in my story happened as it did was quite simply due to a test not being isolated. The tests that were ignored were writing test data to a database – the production database! To isolate the test, you need to remove dependencies. If one subsystem calls another, a stand-in object must take the place of the dependent subsystem in the system-under-test. When you run the test, if a substitute was expected to be making calls to a database or other services, it can pretend to do the call then return results that you want the system-under-test to receive.

This is easy to do with Telerik JustMock. I wrote about using JustMock to get you started in From Legacy to Dependency Injection.

Fast Tests

Slow unit tests cause lost productivity. While you’re waiting on your tests to run, it may be difficult to get much else done. Worse still, you may find yourself reading blogs until well-after they finish running. Slow tests are typically caused by the lack of isolation, and the best way to handle this issue is to isolate any calls outside of the system.

Hard to Understand Test Code

There are many patterns in development, and the Arrange-Act-Assert pattern (also referred to the AAA pattern) will help clean up your tests. These steps were described by William C. Wake in 2003.

1. Arrange all necessary preconditions and inputs.
2. Act on the object or method under test.
3. Assert that the expected results have occurred.

When testing certain types of object, you may find that other patterns are more suitable. These are usually slight variations of the AAA pattern accounting for specific behaviors. Some mocking frameworks push you towards different pattern that ends up complicating the code. This is not the case with JustMock, which enables you to stick to the Arrange-Act-Assert pattern to maintain descriptive tests.

Don’t Hate the Game, Hate the Player

If you have entered a company with poor unit testing practices, you will likely encounter other problems. Many practices and methodologies follow each other, and improper implementation for one item may encourage improper implementation in another. Many companies are successful with different practices in place, and none of this is one-size-fits-all. Steve Forte and Joel Semeniuk have a great presentation on this called The Agile Buffet Table. The most important thing is to regularly analyze your practices and determine if revision is necessary or if everything is okay. And please, realize it’s bad if no one has administrative access to your source control system!

Unit testing is great when done right, and it’s even good when done in a lax manner. However, it’s better to have no unit tests than terrible unit tests.

I hate unit testing done poorly.

 

About the author Chris Eargle

Chris originally wrote this article to be tongue-in-cheek, but then he realized he had created a composite of many wonderful experiences. With well over a decade in software development, you are bound to see some things.

@kodefuguru

CodeProject

Hello Everyone,

From time to time, I sit down and write out all the events that I will be speaking at or attending in hopes of connecting with other developers who may be attending these events. I’ll be at these events representing Telerik, so feel free to stop by the booth and ask say Hi.  I have several different talks lined-up from Windows 8, Silverlight, OData and Windows Phone 7! That’s a lot of XAML if you ask me!

[Click below for more information including registration links]

All About XAML [May Meetup] – Alabama – May 15th, 2012. 

 

Rocky Mountain Trifecta – Colorado - May 19th, 2012

I have two sessions at this event:

Get Started Buliding Metro Applications for Windows 8 using XAML/C#

10 Things a Silverlight Developer Should Know when Building A Metro Application

Windows Developer Camp – Georgia – May 23rd, 2012 [Sold Out]

The only speakers at this event are Microsoft employees, so I will only be attending. If you want to talk Telerik products then send me a tweet/email and we will link up.

TechEd – Florida – June 11th – 14th, 2012

I will not be speaking at this event, but will be in the Telerik booth showing off all of our XAML products.

CodeStock – Tennessee – June 15/16, 2012

I have two sessions at this event:

Getting your Feet Wet with OData in Silverlight 5 and WP7 Mango

Get Started Buliding Metro Applications for Windows 8 using XAML/C#

That Conference – Wisconsin – August 13th-15th 2012

I have one sessions at this event:

Get Started Buliding Metro Applications for Windows 8 using XAML/C#

 

DevLink – Tennessee – August 29th-31st 2012

I have two sessions at this event:

Buliding Metro Applications for Windows 8 using XAML/C#

Silverlight - Not Dead Yet!

Wrap-up

If you are attending any of the events then please come up and introduce yourself. I really enjoy meeting new people and hopefully we can sit down and talk tech!

Read original post at Mark Monster's Blog

Yes 1 minute. So let’s start immediately.
1 - Open the NuGet Package Manager Console and type:
Install-Package MSAF.GoogleAnalytics
2 - Next, register a new application / web property inside Google Analytics. [....]

Read original post at Brian Noyes' Blog

I presented 4 sessions at VSLive NYC over the last two days and had a great time. I love the set up of this conference – not too spread out, good sized rooms, great attendees, and lots of great speakers.

Below are the slides and demos for those interested, enjoy! [...]

Read original post by Toni Sala at Indie Dev Stories Blog

In today’s post I would like to share with you my experience working on my first cross-platform game. Although it is intended to be available for Windows Phone, iOS and Android, currently I’m focused on the Windows Phone version.

The game is called Muster my Monsters (MmM). It is a two-player fighting monsters action game. It is a casual game, so game mechanics need to be simple and art appealing to most of people.

Read original post by Sebastien Lachance at .NET App

With the release of the Mango update, having a minimized application bar with an application using the panorama control is now part of the Metro experience. The best example is the games hub. The minimized application bar uses the Opacity property as you can see in the following picture.

Read original post by Phil Sohn at Building Windows 8 Blog

One of the intrinsic capabilities of Windows 8 is the ability to use multiple accounts on any PC. This makes it much easier for parents to use tools that can help protect their children from content on the Internet as they see fit. It is also a great way for each family member to maintain their own unique online identity while still sharing a single PC. Microsoft has been a leader in creating tools to help maintain a safe computing environment for all users as well as for parents in particular. With Windows 8 we have substantially improved the family safety features and services available. Phil Sohn, the senior program manager lead for Family Safety, describes how Family Safety features will work in Windows 8.

Read original post at Kunal's Blog

Windows Phone 7 launchers and choosers enable users to perform common tasks in WP7 device by providing a consistent user experience throughout the Windows Phone application development platform. I already covered many of the Launchers and Choosers in my blog. On popular demand, I am sharing them in this single page post. I hope, this will be helpful for you to get started with the Windows Phone 7 launchers and choosers very quickly.