Daniel Cazzulino's Blog

You probably know already that the Reactive Framework Extensions (Rx) is a new library on top of .NET 4.0 and Silverlight that allows developers to leverage the expressiveness and power of LINQ for .NET events. It brings an entirely new paradigm for doing event-driven apps, and therefore shines in WPF/Silverlight scenarios. 

Read more about Rx at the team blog, the project home page and Matthew excelent blog series.

 

Even with the general availability of the bits for VS2010 beta2 at DevLabs, there's still quite a bit of work you need to do in order to leverage the extensions. Specifically, you need to turn your events into IObservables that can then use the Rx extensions for querying and subscribing. This is a lot of repetitive and boring code that can be easily automated. ...

I'm sad to say it, but it is true. It slows you down. But not everytime, and not for everything. So let's be more specific on the cases where it DOES slow you down noticeably:

Over the years I've come to realize that the one-fixture-per-class approach to unit testing just doesn't scale. As the amount of variations in state and interactions increases, that file starts becoming a big soup of "Should" methods that are increasingly difficult to traverse and find later on. Essentially, since every test is doing the first "A" in AAA (Arrange-Act-Assert) too, that means the context is also part of the test method.

Ayende wrote a controversial post titled I'm so smart I don't need TDD Even tests has got to justify themselves ;-). It's important to read it, because it reinforces many of the reasons why "regular developers" (i.e. NOT *you* if you're even reading blogs as you are) continue to see "us" as some kind of unreachable and infallible elite of "hero programmers" who will eventually show up (i.e. be hired for big bucks, which we surely do want :)) and save the day....

The new VSIX projects contain a manifest that is by default opened with a designer. No matter how many times you specify that you want to open it with the XML editor by default, VS will continue to open it with the designer.

Last time I announced Linq to Mocks, some said Moq didn't actually have anything to do with Linq. Despite the heavy usage of lambda expressions and expression trees, the "q" in Linq is for "query" after all. And they were right, of course, but it was fun anyway, and the name is definitely cool IMO :).

Compile-time safety is always important, as it reduces the chances that a refactoring can break existing code that compiles successfully. This benefit took me previously to the path of using expression trees to achieve strong-typed reflection.

If you have used more than one unit test framework (i.e. xUnit.NET, NUnit, MSTest/VSTS, etc.), chances are that you’ll miss features from one when using another.