From the bag-o-goodies that the 2010 NDC conference agenda provides, it’s been a real challenge to pick sessions.

I hope for post conference video release of all sessions like they did last year. It will certainly bring some piece of mind thinking of all the sessions i’ll miss out on.

I´ve already posted my first day and second day agenda and it´s now time to pick my top selection for the third day. Day three will mostly be filled with the hotshots of software development and agility

9:00 – 10:00: The three laws of TDD with Robert C. Martin Continue Reading

Friday and time to do some browsing for interesting news.

I´ve been browsing for a long time now, looking for a mocking or isolation framework  to aid me with my unit tests. So far, i have not found anything.

Both NUnit and MSTest work with the compact framework. but none of the available mocking/isolation frameworks does so we are stuck with manually creating stubs and mocks. This is very time consuming and in a larger project you ´re going to have a hard time convincing anyone that there is time and money enough to replicate everything as mocks.

So, what to do? for the better part of a year i have from time to time been “nagging” Typemock about this, unfortunately with no luck yet. Today i posted a feature request to their forum with a poll and i would like everyone that are interested in compact framework development to keep hitting that yes button :)

The reason for targeting Typemock is that i totally likes their full framework version, it is _the_ best mock/isolation framework available. Continue Reading

In this post i share what is my experience, and what i have found to work for me as a best practice for setting up my projects and software structure when developing windows phone applications in Visual Studio 2008.

Basically I am  applying some Model-View-Presenter principles tweaked for simplicity and dividing the different parts into separate projects.

The Model-View-Presenter software design pattern is in my opinion the easiest pattern to use. It is also easy to get going with if you`re not familiar with the jungle of three or four letter acronym patterns and support frameworks available.

Patterns are important and you should use them! By applying, in this case a MVP pattern we can easily handle the rapid changes in new hardware, screen form factors, UX requirements and connectivity requirements to back-end systems. Continue Reading

Morning glory

Day two of NDC begins as a rainy day, but i am looking forward to getting out to Telenor Arena, Today the topics starts with issues i really care about – Test Driven Development and Unit Testing of code.

It´s a proven, working concept that increases code quality and it saves you a whole lot of money. Something that should make the TDD argument extremely easy to sell to your manager. Added benefit here is that your customer will find less errors and bugs, this makes them happy and more prone to ask for more functionality and upgrades. 

Understanding Test Driven Development with Roy Osherove

This was a level 100 session so it was a basic intro to unit testing and TDD. If you are new to unit testing and TDD principles you should have been there. Some advice on your way as a happier coder; You should learn unit testing first, and when you know how to write tests and use unit testing frameworks you start using Test Driven Development as a development method. This makes it a lot easier for you as a developer. Also, only write tests for public methods that contain logic. Code that has public accessors and contains if statements, switches and loops etc, there is no value in testing the rest in a unit test. Continue Reading

NDC looks very promising this year, but as always.. i’ll be whining about the lack of mobility content on arrival.

Bit  sad since with the release of WM 6.5 Microsoft have the opportunity to present the new development features like gestures, touch and widgets to developers eager to get a glimpse into newTech. And also with the launch of Microsoft Marketplace for mobile, independent and commercial developers have a centralized distribution channel making it easier than ever to finally be able to get some hard earned return for the effort.

So far i’ve pinned these sessions:

• Tim Huckaby – Jump into WPF! … and become immediately effective.
• Michael Feathers – Working Effectively with legacy code
• Ayende Rahien – Producing production quality software
• Ian Griffiths – Writing custom WPF pixel shader effects
• Phil Haack – The Haacked and Hanselman show (this might be fun :) )
• Glenn Block – Framework design guidelines
• Ayende Rahien – Building scalable systems
• Roy Osherove – Introducing CTHRU
• Robert C. Martin – Clean Code
• Robert C. Martin – Clean Design
• Ted Neward – XML Messaging in .NET using WCF
• Mary Poppendieck – The lean frame
• Mike Cohn – User stories
• Mike Cohn – Agile estimating
• Mike Cohn – Agile Planning

Continue Reading