ASP.NET Extensions 3.5 is here and I'm slowly talking a look at it. You can read some considerations about the History feature on DotNetSlackers.

Visit the Podcasts page to learn from well-known .NET developers in the community. Listen to hours of radio shows from .NET Rocks!, Hanselminutes, ASP.NET Podcast, and more.

The KB945757 article detailing fixes in .NET Framework 2.0 SP1 The KB945826 article detailing fixes in .NET Framework 3.0 SP1...(read more)

An article explain different ways of validations by Shahed Khan explains :

• ASP.NET Validation Controls
• ASP.NET AJAX ValidatorCallout
• ASP.NET AJAX Futures: Validators
• Subsonic Validation
• Validation Everywhere (CodePlex)
• Web Client Validation Bundle
• Enterprise Library 3.0 Validation Block
• .NetTier Validation Rule Engine

Read more here http://geekswithblogs.net/shahed/archive/2007/12/16/117760.aspx

Case 1 :
When NASA began the launch of astronauts into space, they found out that the pens wouldn't work at zero gravity (ink won't flow down to the writing surface). To solve this problem, it took them one decade and $12 million. They developed a pen that worked at zero gravity, upside down, underwater, in practically any surface including crystal and in a temperature range from below freezing to over 300 degrees C. And what did the Russians do...?? They used a pencil.
 
Case 2 :
One of the most memorable case studies on Japanese management was the case of the empty soapbox, which happened in one of Japan's biggest cosmetics companies. The company received a complaint that a consumer had bought a soapbox that was empty. Immediately the authorities isolated the problem to the assembly line, which transported all the packaged boxes of soap to the delivery department. For some reason, one soapbox went through the assembly line empty. Management asked its engineers to solve the problem. Post-haste, the engineers worked hard to devise an X-ray machine with
high-resolution monitors manned by two people to watch all the soapboxes that passed through the line to make sure they were not empty. No doubt, they worked hard and they worked fast but they spent a whoopee amount to do so. 

But when a rank-and-file employee in a small company was posed with the same problem, he did not get into complications of X-rays, etc., but instead came out with another solution. He bought a strong industrial electric fan and pointed it at the assembly line. He switched the fan on, and as each soapbox passed the fan, it simply blew the empty boxes out of the line.
 
The above 2 cases might be good examples for Root Cause Analysis(Find & remediate the root cause instead of addressing the symptoms)

A couple of great posts from Aaron Ruckman detailing the .NET Framework 3.5 installation. Some good overview details about the .NET 3.0 SP1 and .NET 3.5 installers: http://blogs.msdn.com/aaronru/archive/2007/12/13/net-framework-3-0-sp1-3-5-download-managers.aspx...(read more)

Chris Pels will show how to create event handlers for ASP.NET web pages and web server controls, as well as how to extend the standard health monitoring events in ASP.NET to create custom events.

Imagine cup is the world’s premier technology competition for students. Each year, students are provided with a theme – this year, the theme is extremely topical and relevant – “Imagine A World Where Technology Enables a Sustainable Environment”. Last year, we had over 100,000 students enter worldwide... think about that – that’s 100,000 bright young minds working to solve the world’s biggest problems.

 

This year, students can go in the draw to win internships, trips to France, cash prizes, xbox 360’s, HTC touch mobile phones and internships at Readify Consulting. This marks the biggest prize pool for Imagine Cup Australia to date, and provides a compelling reason for students to enter. There are 9 categories students can enter:

Software Design – Games Development – IT Challenge – Algorithm – Project Hoshimi Programming Challenge – Photography – Short Film – Interface Design – Embedded Development.

 

The Software Design category is particularly important, so if you know any young coders out there, please get them to visit http://www.microsoft.com/australia/imaginecup.

 

Cheers,

 

~Jen

The ALT.NET mailing list is pretty overwhelming. A week or so ago David Laribee proposed splitting it into various groups but that thread seems to have gone by the wayside. The list is the proverbial firehose of babble around ALT.NET (and everything else you can think of). Even longer ago was the notion of summing up the threads and pulling out the choice information into a digestable form. Of course this would mean work and well, it's much better to yap about it then do it.

Whilst doing my weekly ego surf, I came across a fairly new site, Alt.Net Pursefight! Of course it's anonymous, but it's a brilliant no-nonsense wrap-up on the goings on in the list. No thread is left unturned and no person is left without exposure. So hey, if you're looking for an unbiased opinion of what's going on check it out. It's like the Mini-Microsoft of the ALT.NET world.

Brilliant!

TestDriven.Net has always supported parameterized test methods when used with the MbUnit testing framework. When using MbUnit, it is common for a single test method to execute multiple tests with different parameter inputs. The most famous of these test types is the MbUnit RowTest.

Until now there has been little reason to add support for executing parameterized tests using NUnit (historically NUnit has only supported parameterless test methods). However Andreas Schlapsi has recently written an implementation of MbUnit's RowTest using NUnit 2.4's Addin extensibility mechanism.

I've updated TestDriven.Net 2.11 to better support NUnit add-ins and enable the targeting of RowTests and other parameterized test types. This version also includes a workaround for a log4net related issue that was causing a noticeable delay when launching the NUnit 2.4 GUI. You can find the release notes for TestDriven.Net 2.11 here.

To install the RowTest Extension for NUnit you will need to do the following:

1. Download and install TestDriven.Net 2.11.
2. Download the RowTest Extension for NUnit 2.4.5 (Binary).
3. Create a directory called 'addins' in '%ProgramFiles%\TestDriven.NET 2.0\NUnit\2.4'.
4. Copy the 'NUnitExtension.RowTest.AddIn.dll' file into the 'addins' directory (don't put any non-assembly files there).
5. Add a reference to 'NUnitExtension.RowTest.dll' from your NUnit test project.

 

You can then start writing and executing MbUnit style RowTests inside your NUnit projects! You can find Peli's original RowTest example here.

To view your RowTests inside the NUnit GUI you will need to use 'Test With > NUnit 2.4'. You will find this option on the 'Solution Explorer' project context menu.

Thanks to Wayne Brantley for letting me know about the RowTest Extension for NUnit.

If you're interested in learning more about B.I., you should take a look at the B.I. VPC:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8f3d12ea-0dd1-4b22-b530-156e90a2616e&displaylang=en

 

Sometime ago we were talking about file wrappers and testing these things on the ALT.NET mailing list. It's a rather boring task to test say a file system without actually writing files (which you might not want to do). Wouldn't it be nice to have a wrapper around a file system so a) you could forget about writing one yourself and b) you could throw something at Rhino mocks because you really don't want to test writing files.

I've put together a project implementing this and it's now released on CodePlex. It's composed of interfaces (IFile and IFileContainer) that provide abstractions over whatever kind of file or file container you want. This allows you to wrap up a file system (indivdual files or containers of files like folders) and test them accordingly. Concrete implementations can be injected via a Dependency Injection tool and you can sit back and forget about the rigors of testing file access.

There are 3 concrete implementations (found in FileStrategyLib.dll) that implement a file system (IFile), folders (IFileContainer), and zip files (IFileContainer using SharpZipLib). There's also a test project with a whopping 10 unit tests (providing 97% coverage, darn) included. More documentation and sample code is available on the CodePlex site.

You can check out the project here on CodePlex:
http://www.codeplex.com/ifilecontainer

1.0 is available and released under the MIT License. It contains the binary and source distributions. I'll check the code into the source repository later tonight.

Note that this is a very simple library concisting of 2 interfaces and about 50 lines of code. Of course being an open source project I encourage you to check it out and enhance it if you want. It's not the be-all system to get all kinds of information out but should get you started. It was originally written just for a simple system to create and add files to a folder and zip file but can be extended. Otherwise, consider it an example of having to wrap and test a system like a file system which you may run into from time to time.

Enjoy!

Update: Source code tree is checked in and posted now.