Playing with Partial Classes in C#

I was reading a Partial Class Definition on MSDN and thought it looked simple enough and decided to take Partial Classes for a C# run.

Here it is.

Web UI Developers, for now, use the Firefox Browser

I am primarily a Microsoft platform developer. Microsoft makes a great IDE in the form of Visual Studio.Net and has a great language in C#, which is getting better with C# 2.0.

However, I must say, at least until IE 7 becomes more visible and out of beta, that Mozilla’s Firefox browser provides better tools for web developers through Firefox’s extensions for developers.

I especially like the Web Developer extension. Sure beats the Alt+Tab dance between the browser you are viewing your changes with and your CSS editor!

How can we be sure we are singing from the same page of music? – Fit in the key of C#

To build on an earlier posting on the use of Fit with C#, here are examples of Fit fixtures implemented in C#. The fixtures I demonstrate are the ActionFixture, ColumnFixture and RowFixture.

I also briefly discuss the desire to test properties in addition to fields and methods with Fit. I have "tweaked" the source code to provide this. My initial tests work but I would like to further test the code and submit it to other Fit developers as I am sure this has already been considered. My guess is that I may not be implementing the RowFixture subclass correctly. I will provide my source code on this later following more tests and discussion.

UPDATE 7-10-2006: After posting the above info, I submitted a proposed patch to source forge, artifact 1255429, which deals with using properties instead of member variables. The patch was submitted to source forge in August of 2005. Nothing as of this update has been done, that I am aware of, so I thought I would put it out for public consumption and comment.

In more detail, fixtures deriving from RowFixture have instantiated classes with public variables, instead of exposing the instantiated object’s members via public properties. With these modifications you can write fixtures directly against objects under test, which are typically the actual application classes, exposing properties instead of variables to the RowFixtures. This enables the .Net developer to avoid writing additional code beyond the fixture and the actual application objects under test.

The new post: Testing .Net Properties with FIT

Resharper: Sharper indeed

ReSharper provides some needed editing features for Visual Studio.Net.

For example, if you have private local variables and you want to expose those guys via public properties just Alt+Insert (ReSharper > Code > Generate... via the ReSharper menu) in Visual Studio and you get:

As you can see you can also easily generate a constructor, implement interface members, or override members from base classes.

There are many more “niceties” from ReSharper such as automatic indentation within bracket blocks {}. I got real tired of typing the brackets, separating them via hard return, and then tabbing to indent the first line in the block of code.

public void SomeMethod()
{
     //indented code here
}

Instead, when you enter a set of brackets for a block of code, ReSharper will insert your cursor between the brackets. Then, when you hit the Enter key the new line is indented for you! These are just a few of the great features of ReSharper.

I did not mention the Refactoring it provides. ReSharper rocks!!

101 Samples for Visual Studio 2005, in VB.Net and C# -- Nice!

Via a post on the ServerSide.Net site from Paul Ballard, Microsoft has released a compilation of 101 code samples in both Visual Basic.Net and C# for Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0.

Samples include base class library samples, data access samples, web development samples, and windows forms samples.

Nice!

I love Virtual PC!!!!

I love Virtual PC! Now I can do something more unique with my older workstations, one with Redhat and the other with Windows 2003 Server, since I now have Virtual PC where I can have several "virtual installs" of operating systems that run on my Windows XP Pro SP2 system!

I have 2 Windows 2003 server virtual installs (one with Fitnesse, PHP5 and the Netbeans IDE running on it and the other with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2) and am installing SUSE Linux 9.3 in a separate install next!

This is most useful when doing development R & D on various OS/platform applications. Did I already say that I love Virtual PC?