Contents tagged with Cool Tools
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Tree Surgeon is Looking for a Logo
A new release of Tree Surgeon is forthcoming and I’m looking to the community to see if someone with some time and artistic skills on their hands would be interested in putting together a logo to kick things up a notch. Tree Surgeon is a .NET development tree generator. Just give it the name of your project, and it will set up a development tree for you in seconds.
The UI for Tree Surgeon is pretty simple and it doesn’t need to be extravagant (you run it once to create a new solution tree and you’re done, this generally doesn’t happen dozens of times a day unless you’re someone like me). However it would be nice to have something snappy as a splash screen and give the product a little branding.
The image will be used in the product itself (probably as a splash or something) and on the website (to replace the icky picture of logs I put there so long ago) so please size it accordingly.
Get your crayons out and thinking caps on and let’s see what you can come up with. The rewards? My undying gratitude, exposure on the blog (for the 10 readers that I have), and 15 minutes of fame (and I’ll toss in some XBox 360 games or something cool that I can dig up, Microsoft or .NET related of course; no Java swag here).
Any ideas are welcome and I’ll post the entries here on the blog (please provide your name, email (if desired), and a link to your website (if desired)). Please submit your entries to me via email.
Thanks!
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The First Spec You Should Write When Using Castle
Thought this might be useful. On a new project where you're using the Castle Windsor container for Dependency Injection, this is a handy spec to have:
[TestFixture]public class When_starting_the_application : Spec
{[Test]public void verify_Castle_Windsor_mappings_are_correct()
{IWindsorContainer container = new WindsorContainer("castle.xml");
foreach (IHandler handler in container.Kernel.GetAssignableHandlers(typeof(object)))
{container.Resolve(handler.ComponentModel.Service);
}
}
}
It doesn't guarantee that someone missed adding something to your configuration, but this way anytime someone adds a type to the configuration this will verify the mapping is right. Very often I move things around in the domain into different namespaces and forget to update Castle. I supposed you *could* use reflection on your assembly as another test and verify the mapping is there, but not every type in the system is going to be dependency injected so that's probably not feasible.
Thanks to the Castle guys for helping me get the simplest syntax going for this.
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Continuous Integration Feature Matrix
This is just a post to direct people to the CI Feature Matrix that ThoughtWorks maintains. If you're up in the air about choosing a CI system, then this is the page for you. They maintain an unbiased view (their words, not mine) of all the CI systems out there (and there are a lot of them). So if you're wondering or looking for something, check it out.
Note: TW says the page is unbiased and I believe them, however when anyone puts together a matrix like this sometimes they tend to include features that only *your* system has (so you can create a checkmark in that column) that no other system can measure up to. I don't feel TW did this here, but I do want to point out this for making your own unbiased comparison.
If anything, the matrix can be used as an idea generator. Wherever you see a red
and the project is open source, maybe it's time to sit down and write a plugin/patch/add-on and contribute! Think about it and give it some consideration, it would only make these projects even better with more capabilities. -
First Looks: Mingle 2.0
I have Mingle 2.0 upgraded in our test environment and have been going through the new features, upgrade woes, and some remarks from the peanut gallery. Here's the rundown on this Agile planning tool.
Upgrading
Upgrading was a bit of a pain. To do the test I backed up our Mingle db and restored it to sandbox database on the same MySQL instance and installed a clean copy of Mingle 1.1. Then upgraded 2.0 over top of it (once the 1.1 was working with the new db).
Mingle didn't know what port I originally installed on (my test install was on 888) and defaults to 8080. This can be confusing to a user who's installing an upgrade and didn't perform the original install or doesn't know what port was originally used.
I have unlocker running and it briefly kicked in on some .rb file (it flashed by so quickly you couldn't tell what it was). Didn't seem to be a problem but the Mingle upgrade killed off a whole bunch of processes running on my desktop. For example WinZip, Unlocker, and my anti-virus were all killed off (which might explain the brief flash of Unlocker as it went down) during the install. I know it's "traditional" to shut down all running processes during an install of something new, but I think it's a little over the top to shut them down for you (and especially since it did it without warning)
After the install browsing to localhost:888 failed. I checked the logs and found it had a problem trying to add a column to the db that was already there. After a 10 minute restore/reset (with a couple of well-placed reboots after each install) the install finally worked.
It was painful and luckily I was working on a test database. For sure I recommend doing a backup and upgrade over a temporary working database. Then if all goes well, backup your production db and do the upgrade (backing out if it doesn't work). Don't get too torqued if the browse to the instance doesn't work after the upgrade, just reboot the server (I know, pretty severe) and it should be all fine when you get back.
All in all, the upgrade wasn't horrible. You'll probably want/need to go in and make some mass changes to cards and stories in play in order to leverage the new features but it's fairly quick and painless with the Web 2.0 UI they've built on.
For sure check out the Mingle forums on upgrading/installing as there are a few people trying it on different systems and experiencing various pain points.
New Project Creation
The new project creation screen is basically the same. They have upgraded the Agile hybrid, Scrum, and Xp templates to version 2.0 (but only left the Xp 1.1 template, not sure why here). A minor change in the UI in 2.0 is they added a header/footer with the "Create Project | Cancel | Back to project list" links which is handy.
Project Admin
There's some minor shifts in project admin that are both cosmetic and functional. The Project Settings screen now has the SVN repository info separated out and adds a new field, Numeric Precision. This lets you deal with precision in your numbers on cards, stories, etc. By default it's set to 2 but you can increase it if you need it. I don't recall seeing this as a high priority feature but whatever. It's there now.
Like I said, the Project Repository settings (for integration into source control) has been pulled out into it's own screen. This is for good reason. The first thing you do is pick the version control system you're using from a drop down. Only Subversion is supported in this release, but you can see where it's going (perhaps with support from 3rd party providers). Somewhere in my browsing today I saw TW announce a future release to incorpoate Clear Case or some other SCM so others won't be far behind.
They've introduced the notion of "Project variables". Think of NAnt properties or something that can be used in cards or views. For example you can create a project variable called "Current Release" and give it a value of "1" or "3.2 GA" or whatever (with various data types including numeric, text, date, etc.). Wherever you use this it'll just replace that value. Then you can change en-mass "3.2 GA" to "4.0 RC1" or something and anywhere it's being used it gets swapped out.
The new advanced admin feature is recaluating project aggregates. We'll talk about aggregates later but if you find the numbers might be out of whack, go to Advanced prroject admin to recalculate them.
In 1.1, any view could be saved. From the "Saved views & tabs option" you could take a view a make a tab out of it. Now the feature is called "Favorites & tabs". Favorites are saved views that have not been added as tabs and there's two tables here to show you tabs vs. views. Tomatoe, tomatoe.
Card trees are available to edit or delete so let's talk about this in-depth.
Card trees
Card trees let you define a heirachy that works for your system. You can check out a video here that explains it well. For example, tasks can roll up under stories that roll up into features that roll up in epics. This is the ultimate in flexibility and lets you move things around as sets. There's a new Card explorer that lets you drag and drop cards from the right hand flyout so you can quickly (and visually) move your cards around in the view.
This is great and how I work. I usually break a system down by epics which then might flow into features which are made up of stories (I personally don't like getting down to the task level but YMMV). Now I can lay my project out visually and see where everything fits in and this lets me do things like track stories against a feature or bugs against a story. The notion of Done, Done, Done gets much clearer with Mingle 2.0.
Aggregates
In addition to Card trees there are attributes in cards trees called Aggregates that will allow you to roll up information into swimlanes. For example I can sum up all the story points in a feature or functional areas and in the Grid display, show that value. At a glance I see how many points I can deliver for that group. This is great for say release planning where you create a plan showing the sum of all points for each story in the sprint. Knowing your velocity of say 12, you know you can't drag more than 12 points into a sprint. Nice.
The UI is improved and starts to border on a video game like approach to Agile planning. If you drag an aggregate root, all it's children will follow. This makes for easily positioning things on the screen and moving things around, and is pretty fun to watch. Also I would hope a future feature will be a PNG or JPEG export of the tree (much like the image export from Visual Studio's class designer) as you might need an image for documentation or discussion where you don't have online access to Mingle.
Configuration
There's a new option on the main screen, configure email settings. This allows you to change where you SMTP server is and who the email comes from and includes a test link. A huge improvement over having to hunt for the config file and edit it by hand. I know screens like this start bloating out the product which is very lean, but I feel it's better served to have configuration this way rather than 100 text files buried in the file system somewhere. And the test feature is nice as it helps you as you go.
Templates
I didn't get a chance to look at all the templates but the updates to the include some new transitions. Transitions are one of the lesser-known features of Mingle and lets you set up a pseudo-workflow for Cards. In the new Scrum 2.0 template for example there are transitions that let you do a single click "Complete Development" or "Soft Delete". Transitions have filters and constraints (for example you can only invoke a transition if the card type is a Story and was created Today) and just make it easier to use Mingle. Check out the ones in the new templates and create your own. The new Scrum template includes a new dashboard (the Overview page) with story metrics (project status by points) and new graphs like a burndown chart and % of completed tasks per story. These use the new aggregate functions and quite useful to get a quick overview of the project.
Overall
Overall I'm happy with the upgrade. Even though it was a little painful and didn't work initially, in the end it's for the better. The heirachial cards feature is great and there are lots of nice little improvements everywhere (for example the consistent command bar on forms) that make this product even more useful for Agile planning. They spoke of better documentation and I'm looking to integrate Mingle with LDAP. I see there's a new LDAP configuration page but like most Mingle documenation, it's just a rehash of what you might see on the screen or lines in a config file with no real explanation of what is valid and what isn't.
I guess it's part trial-and-error, part knowledge, but I had hoped for more detailed documentation. Perhaps in the future they'll provide something like a wiki interface to the documentation and allow contributions from users to improve the readability of topics and additions of scenarios. To me, that's of the best things with projects like MySQL and PHP (and to a lesser extent the MSDN documentation). Hopefully TW will follow in these footsteps.
With the short release cycles ThoughtWorks employs I don't have to wait a year to see new improvements to a overall good product. Well done guys!
For a list of the top 10 new features in Mingle 2.0, check out this page by ThoughtWorks. Happy upgrading!
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searchme beta
My better half turned me on tonight on a new search engine in beta.
searchme.com is an interesting twist on an old thing. When you log in you get the main screen. Lots of black and kind of retro looking. Enter a search term and it dynamically fetches the results and shows you where your hits are in a category fashion. For example here's my results:
Pretty good as it shows Software, Web Development, Computer Programming, Architecture, and Blogs. All relevant.
When you go further into results you get a Web 2.0 look and feel that resembles something like the Windows Vista task switcher, but done for the web. It's Flash rather than (what I thought was Silverlight) but it's still pretty cool.
You can page through the results like flipping through your iTouch and see previews of the pages in your search results. Clicking on a page takes you to it. There's also a text description below that lets you navigate that way and the title of these items scroll and attach themselves to the search result page as you flip through them (you can also maximize the search results and only see the graphical navigator if you prefer). If you click on one of the categories the engine puts the search results into (how it decides what goes where is black magic) the results will filter down to only that category. Also if you prefer night over day, you can change this in the minimal settings dialog in the top right corner:
The big advantage to this is you can not only see the result page (and decide visually if you want to go there) but also if you hover over the bottom of the preview it pops up the text of the page and highlights your search term. Again, this will help you decide if it's worth going to the page or not without loading it up. Form and functionality, now that's a first!
I seriously feel like my web browser turned into an iPod or iTouch and the it makes vanity searching that much more fun now. Me likes Web 2.0 (some days).
If you're interested checkout searchme.com but you'll have to hurry. When I signed up there were only a few hundred beta slots left and by the time I finished this blog entry (about 15 minutes with screen caps) 50 of them were gone!
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Omea Open Source, finally... but where?
I've been using Omea Pro as my primary news reader for a long time now. It's one of the better ones IMHO as it let's me track RSS feeds and newsgroups (I don't use the mail integration). It's not as bloated as I found with RSS Bandit, chewing up memory all over the place, but it has its share of bulge and it tends to bog the system down a bit. Still, I like it and it's from one of my favourite software publishers, JetBrains.A few months ago Omea (and Omea Pro) went free and they announced they would release the product as open source at some point in the future. It's been a long time coming and now it appears to be available, or at least the announcement was made:
Dear JetBrains Omea Users,
We are pleased to finally come to you with these news.
We know that many of you were waiting for this news for so long, and we would like to thank you for your patience.
So, after several months of thorough work on polishing the software itself and its API, we are happily ready to announce the full availability of our "Omea" line of products in their open-source incarnation.
We hope that this step will allow us to rise the development of this great product to a new level and to attract energy and talents of everybody who likes to participate in this "adventure".Omea - both source and companion files - is now distributed under GNU GPL v2 License (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html).
Problem is, I can't find it? The regular page still offers the 2.2 version and I've combed the Confluence site but can't seem to find a download or the name of the subversion repository to get the code from. I must be blind.
Anyone know where it is?
Update: Michael left a comment that the SVN repository is here.
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To ReSharper or Not To ReSharper, that is the question...
The Moth, aka Daniel Moth, a former MVP and now Microsoft UK dude posted a blog entry The ABCDEFGHI of setting up Visual Studio for Demos. In it he makes some good points about setting up Visual Studio when you're on the road to present. I totally agree with him on look and feel. I still use a white-on-black theme (a modified version of Jeff Attwoods look and feel) for my own day to day development because at 1600x1200 IJW. When I'm presenting though I flip over to a secondary computer account (called DemoBoy) that has all the settings for the colours and themes in Visual Studio set to default (along with a toned down desktop, bigger fonts, etc.). The font size in the IDE is set at Consolas 14 (imagine coding at that all the time) and I favour using ZoomIt for zooming in on code as it lets me do markup and such which is mucho better than changing font size (although you can get the VS Power Toys which has a font mouse wheel scroller in it).However I was taken aback from his point on leaving the 3rd party addins at home. I'm a ReSharper and keyboard junkie and won't work without my R#. I stumble through Visual Studio when it's not installed or activated, hitting all kinds of crazy keystrokes that get me nowhere. Now grant you, when you're on the demo scene (either live or screencasting) 9 times out of 10 I've been asked "What's that little red/green thing on the side" or "How did you create that class so quickly?"
So it's a toss up. I'm guilty of using R# in my IDE but can't fathom not using it, even for demos. I mean, I'm going to stumble through a demo looking pretty silly when I pound on my keyboard hitting Ctrl+N and not getting the list I expect. It's unnatural to me. Like not writing unit tests.
Are you presenting code somewhere? Do you suffer from the same fate as I? Do you suck it up and learn the dreaded default Visual Studio keystrokes or do you factor in the interruption you're going to get explaining R# to someone. What say you peeps? R# or no, when it comes to presenting?
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Automated UI Testing with Project White
A co-worker turned me onto Project White, an automated UI testing framework by ThoughtWorks. This along the same lines as NUnitForms and other automated systems. It's basically Selenium for WinForms (which rocks in its own right) so I thought I would dig more into White (it has support for WPF as well, but I haven't tried that out yet). It was good timing as we've been talking and coming up with strategies for testing and UI testing is a big problem (and it is everywhere else based on people I've talked to).The White library is nice and simple. All you really need to do is add in the Core.dll from White and your unit test framework and write some tests. I tested it with MbUnit but any framework seems to work. Ben Hall posted a blog entry about White along with some sample code. This, combined with the library got me started.
As Ben did, I created a simple application with a single form and started to write some tests. I couldn't use Ben's complete sample as it was written for VS2008 and I only had VS2005 for my testing. No problem. You can use White with VS2005, but you'll need the 3.0 framework installed.
I came across the intial problem with testing though. The first test that failed left the window up on the screen. This was an issue. I also wrote the same test Ben did, looking for a non-existant form, which appropriately threw a UIActionException. The test passed as it threw the exception I was looking for, but again the form was up on the screen. The Application.Kill() method wasn't being called if the test would fail or an exception was thrown. Ben's method was to put a call to Application.Kill in the [TearDown] method on the test fixture. This is great but I'm not a big fan of [SetUp] and [TearDown] methods. Another option was to surround each test with a try/catch/finally and in the finally code call out to the Application.Kill() method. This was ugly as I would have to do this on every test.
Following Ben's example I created a WhiteWrapper class which would handle the White library features for me. I made it implement IDisposable so I could do something like this:
1 using(WhiteWrapper wrapper = new WhiteWrapper(_path)) 2 { 3 ... 4 } 5
I also added a method to fetch me a control from the main window (using a Generic) so I could grab a control, execute a method on it (like .Click()) and check the result of another control (like a Label). Note that these are not WinForm controls but rather a White wrapper around them called UIItem. This provides general features for any control like a .Click method or a .Text property or items in a listbox.
Here's my WhiteWrapper code:
1 class WhiteWrapper : IDisposable 2 { 3 private readonly Application _host = null; 4 private readonly Window _mainWindow = null; 5 6 public WhiteWrapper(string path) 7 { 8 _host = Application.Launch(path); 9 } 10 11 public WhiteWrapper(string path, string mainWindowTitle) : this(path) 12 { 13 _mainWindow = GetWindow(mainWindowTitle); 14 } 15 16 public void Dispose() 17 { 18 if(_host != null) 19 _host.Kill(); 20 } 21 22 public Window GetWindow(string title) 23 { 24 return _host.GetWindow(title, InitializeOption.NoCache); 25 } 26 27 public TControl GetControl<TControl>(string controlName) where TControl : UIItem 28 { 29 return _mainWindow.Get<TControl>(controlName); 30 } 31 } 32
And here are the refactored tests to use the wrapper (implemented via a using statement which makes using the library fairly clean in my test code):
1 public class Form1Test 2 { 3 private readonly string _path = Path.Combine(Directory.GetCurrentDirectory(), "WhiteLibSpike.WinForm.exe"); 4 5 [Test] 6 public void ShouldDisplayMainForm() 7 { 8 using(WhiteWrapper wrapper = new WhiteWrapper(_path)) 9 { 10 Window win = wrapper.GetWindow("Form1"); 11 Assert.IsNotNull(win); 12 Assert.IsTrue(win.DisplayState == DisplayState.Restored); 13 } 14 } 15 16 [Test] 17 public void ShouldDisplayCorrectTitleForMainForm() 18 { 19 using (WhiteWrapper wrapper = new WhiteWrapper(_path)) 20 { 21 Window win = wrapper.GetWindow("Form1"); 22 Assert.AreEqual("Form1", win.Title); 23 } 24 } 25 26 [Test] 27 [ExpectedException(typeof(UIActionException))] 28 public void ShouldThrowExceptionIfInvalidFormCalled() 29 { 30 using (WhiteWrapper wrapper = new WhiteWrapper(_path)) 31 { 32 wrapper.GetWindow("Form99"); 33 } 34 } 35 36 [Test] 37 public void ShouldUpdateLabelWhenButtonIsClicked() 38 { 39 using (WhiteWrapper wrapper = new WhiteWrapper(_path, "Form1")) 40 { 41 Label label = wrapper.GetControl<Label>("label1"); 42 Button button = wrapper.GetControl<Button>("button1"); 43 button.Click(); 44 Assert.AreEqual("Hello World", label.Text); 45 } 46 } 47 48 [Test] 49 public void ShouldContainListOfItemsInDropDownOnLoadOfForm() 50 { 51 using (WhiteWrapper wrapper = new WhiteWrapper(_path, "Form1")) 52 { 53 ListBox listbox = wrapper.GetControl<ListBox>("listBox1"); 54 Assert.AreEqual(3, listbox.Items.Count); 55 Assert.AreEqual("Red", listbox.Items[0].Text); 56 Assert.AreEqual("Versus", listbox.Items[1].Text); 57 Assert.AreEqual("Blue", listbox.Items[2].Text); 58 } 59 } 60 }
The advantage I found here was handling exceptions and unknown states. For example in the last test, ShouldUpdateLabelWhenButtonIsClicked I ran the test before I even had the controls on the form. The test failed but it didn't hang or crash the system. That's what the IDisposable gave me, a nice way to always clean up without having to remember to create a [TearDown] method.
One of the philosophical questions we have to ask here is when is this kind of testing appropriate? For example, if I have good presenters I can test these kind of things with mocked out views and presenter/model tests. So am I duplicating effort here by testing the UI directly? Should I get my QA people to write these kind of tests? There's a long discussion to have in your organization around this so it's not just a "tool problem". You need to dig deep into what you're testing and how. At some point, you begin to divorce yourself from behaviour driven development and you end up testing UI edge cases and integration from a UI perspective. If your UI doesn't line up with your domain, how do you reconcile this? There are probably more questions than answers for this type of thing and software design is more art than science. The answer "it depends" goes a long way, but don't try to solve your business or design problems with a tool. There is no silver bullet here, just a few goodies to help you along the way. It's you who needs to decide what's appropriate for the situation and how much time, money, and resources you're going to invest in something.
The library works pretty good and I'm happy with the test code so far. We'll have to see now how it deals with far more complex UIs (we have things like crazy 40-column grids with all kinds of functionality). Back later on how that goes. In the meantime, check out Project White here on CodePlex to help you with your automated UI testing.
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Scrumming with the Trac Project
I got an email from ScrumMaster Andrea about an update I should do to my Scrum Tools Roundup post. Andrea drew my attention to the Agilo for Scrum tool, an open source add-on for the Trac Project. The Trac project is a wiki/issue tracking system (written in Python, my #2 favourite language next to C# these days) which has been around for ages and quite successful in it's own right. Agilo for Scrum is an add-on that sits on top of Trac and provides features to support the Scrum process.
I tried Agilo out this morning with a few projects. I always keep some data in Excel of some past projects with things like user stories, releases, iteration lengths, tasks, etc. that can be plugged into some tool for testing. It's my reference data for doing evaluations of tools like this.
The tool looks great. It has all the basics you need in a tool to support your use of the Scrum process (daily stand-up, burndown charts, etc.). A nice feature is the ability to link items together. This also has the capability of copying information from parent to child. Being able to do this, you can create some useful relationships with tasks relating to features, features relating to iterations or sprints, and all of these rolling up to releases (or whatever way you want to organize your projects). A key thing missing from tracking tools is the ability to link these items together easily. This facilitates creating a dashboard view of the project so you know at a glance where things are. Not something easily accomplished with an Excel spreadsheet. An added bonus with Agilo for Scrum is the ability to navigate back and forth between the relationships. Neat.
Something that I've come to realize over the years, it's not the tool that fixes the problem. Taking a more lean approach to things, if you need a tool to fix some problem you have a real problem on your hands. For example if you *need* a tool to manage your Scrum process, it might be an indicator that your Scrum process is too complicated. While I'm happy to see all of these tools out there evolving (and more new ones popping up), I'm a strong advocate of "fix the problem" rather than "get a tool" mentality. YMMV.
One note I wanted to mention. Being a blogger you make posts of course (well, duh!). These are sometimes series, or popular individual posts but they come back. 6 or 12 months later that original post might need some update love. That's the cool thing is that you can go back, look at what you've done and apply some new knowledge to it creating something interesting for everyone out there. I have a large backlog in my blog queue of just posts I've written that need updating like this, this, and this. Nothing like keeping yourself busy with your own work eh?
Anywho, check out the Agilo for Scrum tool here if you have Trac and if you're looking for a good bug tracking tool, you can't go wrong with Trac so check it out here.
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Lack of Coverage Tools for .NET
For the longest time, I've been using NCover for coverage. It was free, gave good results and with NCoverExplorer and CI integration it was the perfect tool. Easy to use, easy to setup, and worth the typical hassle of new tools (setup, learning, configuration, etc.)
NCover has since gone commercial and the old versions won't run properly against 3.0/3.5 code. I'm ditching NCover support in TreeSurgeon because of this. TS nees to be friction free and something anyone can just grab and run and not have to deal with buying or obtaining licenses for products the generated code depends on. I looked at Clover.NET as an alternative (last time I checked it was free?) but it's $600 just for an "academic" version.
So what's with coverage and .NET these days? Are these the only options? Have all the open source/free tools gone the way of the Dodo for coverage and .NET 3.0 projects? My quick Google checks this freezing morning (it was minus 38 as I drove in this morning, that's -36 in Fahrenheit kids) don't show anything.
To be friction-free a code coverage tool needs to be:
- Command line driven (have to be able to integrate into continuous integration process)
- Xml report output (again, CI ready)
- Usable with any unit testing framework
- Support 3.0/3.5 .NET framework
- Somewhat stable (i.e. non-alpha/beta versions)
Nice to haves:
- Free (or relatively cheap)
- HTML or Text output
- Ability to set thresholds and get failures back (for example, break the build if the coverage falls below 80%)
Looking for some feedback on your experience here. Thanks!
