'Almost' productive day - seeing how it works in reality is hilarious. TDD is not only allows testability,  but also to design better your code with regards to not 'what if', but 'what now'. Really powerful tool that would be great to have in my skills set. Script of the day:

10:00 Domain Model (Rich Domain)
- Domain object is more than just properties, it's also behavior
- 14 AA Points - URL will be coming later -> jpboodhoo.com -> search for "Getting Started Learning Some new Developer Habits"
- R# -> Autocompletion -> Letters and Digits
- DynamicMock<T> vs. CreateMock<T> (dynamic will always provide the default value when "created" mock has to be told everything)
11:15 Domain Driven Design
- Thin service layer & Transaction Script () patterns
- Use R#, don't accept naked Visual studio - naked it's really ugly.
- TestDriven.Net
- [Setup] is for the hard dependencies of the SUT (ie DynamicMock<T>)
- Book: xUnit Testing Patterns
- Department / Products: DB relationship is one to many, Domain Model is one to one (ie not Department.GetAllProducts(departmentId), but Catalog.GetAllProductsBelongingTo(departmentObject) )
14:15
- Service Layer
- interaction test can later involve into integration testing
- REQUIREMENT: Important to understand the RhinoMock in order to use it and learn TDD
- R# CTRL-Shift-E parse the exception from clipboard
- Hard dependencies should be be dynamic ones and defines for the whole test class
16:10 Container
- Principles that container helps to respect: DIP, OCP
- Container (our) should be a static gateway that also an adapter to allow with variety of different containers
- Concrete dependencies should be removed by using container to decouple from concrete implementation
- pair-programming / TDD ping-pong
23:50
- JP is SO tired that reads for a minute a result of breaking test :)
- Building rich domain model = building smarts with objects (example: ShoppihgCart with CartItem through Factory)
00:50
Toasted...

 For those who want to quickly learn Visual Studio 2008, don't miss the great resources at http://www.visualstudio2008.defyallchallenges.com/

The "modeling edition" of Service Factory was released yesterday on the Codeplex site:

The Web Service Software Factory: Modeling Edition (also known as the Service Factory) is an integrated collection of resources designed to help you quickly and consistently build WCF and ASMX Web services that adhere to well-known architecture and design patterns. These resources consist of models with code generation in the form of tools integrated with Visual Studio 2005 and patterns and architecture topics in the form of written guidance.

patterns & practices: Web Service Software Factory - View Release

If you are looking for a way to build several WCF based enterprise services in a fast, consistent way but with great flexibility, you should look at this package which plugs into VS2005. A VS2008 version shouldn't be far away.

I've been using the previous version of Service Factory since for almost a year, and it's been working just fine. One thing I was missing was a good modeling tool for designing our services, and now it's here.

Check out Don Smith's video of an earlier version of Service Factory if you want to get a hunch of what it is all about.

Did you know that there is an open contribution model for submitting new controls in the AJAX Control Toolkit ?

This document provides some guidelines on how you could get your custom ASP.NET AJAX control added to the toolkit and therefore used by developers around the world !

The document also contains pointers on how to submit fixes and feature additions for existing controls.

Contributing to the Toolkit

The AJAX Control Toolkit is a shared source project released under the Microsoft Permissive License and built on top of ASP.NET AJAX. It has a set of over 35 controls, many of which were written by members of the ASP.NET AJAX community. The Toolkit has matured into a stable and feature complete product through work with the community over the past year. We would like to continue our organic growth by defining a process for all Toolkit contributions.
Contributions should add sound value to the Toolkit and serve its customers' needs. Anyone wishing to contribute should be committed to a high quality bar and take responsibility for their code. There are two ways that our users can contribute to the Toolkit: use the Toolkit Patch Utility for bug fixes and new features for existing controls, or become a Toolkit contributor by adding new controls.

If you already have a great control and would like to share it with us or if you would like to write a new control from scratch this is a great opportunity to challenge yourself to write great reusable controls, show-off your technical and design skills, get plenty of visibility, learn more about Shared Source at Microsoft.

If your control goes into the AJAX Control Toolkit - email me, I'll do a video about it !

Thanks to Joe Stagner who helped me start up this blog. I have been working with .NET for almost six years,  and despite working as J2EE developer I still can’t get enough of it.  I have been always fan of Microsoft gurus such as Joe, Scatt, Andres and all Microsoft engineers who always impress me with their talents.

I do have my Arabic site www.mostasharok.net where I used to post some articles about asp.net and other technologies, but now with this blog I hope to post more entries about  asp.net in particular and .NET in general to join my ASP.NET fellows,

Happy Coding and Blogging everyone,

I got this recently in an email from a developer friend.

“Is Microsoft committed to Ajax? If so, why is development so slow? (Yeah I know, Silverlight, that means nothing until it is at least version 2 and wide spread.)

I am seriously disappointed, and I think others are too. After the 1.0 excitement, there is nothing to get excited about. (What's up with ASP.NET Futures anyway, how about right now?)”

I guess that it's hard to keep up with all the new stuff in our profession, so I thought I would hi-light some of the new AJAX related stuff that we've been building, especially in ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 (currently in Beta) as an illustration our investments in AJAX enabling technologies.

• Core Integration of ASP.NET AJAX - ASP.NET AJAX is no longer an add-on to ASP.NET. It is now a first class concept like XML Web Services or Data Access. This means full support, full feature lifecycle, etc.
• Full and Dynamic JavaScript Intellisense support in Visual Studio 2008. This includes the JavaScript language and all the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions as well as dynamic support for the code that you write.
• First Class JavaScript Debugging Support in Visual Studio 2008, complete with Break Points, Watch, Immediates, Call Stack, everything you would expect from a first class debugger PLUS, both design time and run time code images so you can drill down into your applications exact JavaScript state and collection at runtime no matter how much dynamic JavaScript is involved in your application.
• JSON, RSS, and POX support for WCF so that all your WCF services can me AJAX Callable.
• The AJAX Controls Toolkit has grown to 34 controls.
• 64 ASP.NET AJAX  How Do I Videos offering tutorial and prescriptive guidance on how to use the features of ASP.NET AJAX
• Forthcoming soon....new ASP.NET AJAX controls like the history control, selector support, and other improvements on both the client and server side.

To me that seems like allot of work in a fairly short time (since ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 was released.)

What's with the "Futures" ???

The current "Futures" include ....

• History support for the Safari browser, inclusion of “titles”, encoding and encrypting of server-side history state and the ability to handle history in the client without a server requirement.
• CSS Selectors APIs have been modified to be applicable to W3C recommendations.
• A script resource extraction tool that allows you to create script files on disk that originate from embedded resources in assemblies.

The reason the Futures are not "Right Now" is simple.

Developers have asked to be more involved in defining the end products we create. "Futures" releases gives folks the chance to get their hands on VERY early bits of the new stuff that we're working on, and that means you can provide feedback early enough in the process to effect the final outcome.

Most folks tell me that they LOVE the fact that we're being so transparent in much of our development process.

So in short - YES :) We're very serious about AJAX !

Two things I learned this morning and it's not even 7AM yet.

1. You can open up an image in Paint.NET in the File Open dialog by specifying a URL to an image on the internet. I'm assuming this is nothing new and maybe any File Open dialog can do this (not sure) but it works in Paint.NET. I was opening a file that I though I had copied the local path name in the clipboard. Instead I had the URL to it on a website. So I let it go and do it's thing and lo and behold it had brought the image down and opened it up for me in Paint.NET. Cool.
2. Visual Studio (2005) holds a reference to your solution files even if you select File | Close Solution. This has bugged me for awhile but I was re-syncing my local folder with what was in TFS and needed to blow away my local directory. I selected File | Close Solution and waited a bit, then proceeded to delete the files. Up until recently, I just installed SysInternals file locker unlocker tool and up it popped telling me that msdev.exe had a hold on the files. No matter what I did I couldn't tell Visual Studio to let my files go (even opening another solution). So the only way to delete a directory of a project you've opened is to shut Visual Studio down. Very annoying to say the least.

Wonder what the rest of the day holds?

Problem:

If you have a server control like Label or Image with a long name ID attribute when it's render as html the attribute ID is render on HTML output. If you have a lot of this controls on a web page this can introduce an overhead.

Solution: 

The first solution is to remove the ID on control. Like this :

<asp:Label  runat="server" Text="Salvo" ></asp:Label>

It work...but you can't use designer with visual studio because visual studio don't know the name of your label.

Then...this is not a good solution .

The second solution is to set ID with nothing (or null for C# programmers) at PreRender stage. Like this :

<script runat="server">

    Protected Sub DeleteID(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs)
        If TypeOf sender Is Label Then
            Dim l As Label = sender
            l.ID = Nothing
        End If
    End Sub
</script>

<asp:Label ID="MyLongIDLabelForName" runat="server" Text="Salvo" OnPreRender="DeleteID"></asp:Label>

This is a good solution. :-)