At the Seattle alt.net conference, I co-sponsored a session with Justin Angel. The topic was "Choosing Microsoft versus Mature Open Source Alternatives". We wanted to hear the rationale people were using when making choices, like: LINQ to SQL or Castle Active Record Entity Framework or NHibernate Subversion and assorted tools or Team Foundation Server Not once do I remember price being a factor. Most of the fishbowl conversation revolved around risk. There are risks that technical people don't like, and risks that business people don't like. I tried to take all the major topics mentioned and fit them into the following table. ...

At the last CMAP Code Camp I did a "code-only" presentation entitled "A Gentle Introduction to Mocking". We wrote down some requirements, opened Visual Studio, and started writing unit tests. Matt Podwysocki provided color commentary. Code download is here. I started "accepting" mock objects as one tool in my unit testing toolbox about three years ago (see "The 5 Stages Of Mocking"). Times have changed quite a bit since then, and the tools have improved dramatically. During the presentation we used the following: Rhino Mocks – the first mocking framework used in the presentation. Years ago, Oren and Rhino Mocks...

A dictionary definition of principle often uses the word "law", but principles in software development still require judgment. Sometimes the judgment requires some technical knowledge, like knowing the strengths and weaknesses of a particular technology. Other times the judgment requires some business knowledge, like the ability to anticipate where change is likely to occur. Asking someone to make a sensible judgment about a principle is difficult when all you see is a snippet of code in a blog. The code is outside of its context. Take Leroy's BankAccount class. We don't really know what sort of business Leroy works for,...

WWWTC #19 presented a BankAccount class from a developer named Leroy and garnered some great feedback. A couple people spotted an actual bug in the interest calculation, which was unintentional. If only Leroy had written some tests for the code… "Gee, if only I'd written some tests for this code", thought Leroy. Back when Leroy first wrote the code, he considered testing as a job for those irritating people on the other side of the office building. Now, Leroy was looking at changing the BankAccount class to add new features. He was wishing he'd discovered the joys of unit tests earlier...