The ASPSmith's Blog

I completed my Regular Expression Cheat sheet a couple of days ago, so that I can hand it out this week at my session on regular expressions at ASP.NET Connections in New Orleans.  It's intended to be printable (thus it's not a complete reference - only the simple beginner stuff that fits on one page), so that someone could tack it up to the wall of their cubicle or tape it next to their monitor if they were new to regular expressions, didn't necessarily care to memorize all the little characters, but had to work with regular expressions nonetheless.

I gave my second presentation to a user group for INETA this evening (well, last evening - it's late).  I spoke to about 70 members of the Philadelphia .NET user group, Philly .NET, about ASP.NET Performance Tips and Tricks and the Caching support in ASP.NET.  While I was discussing callbacks and the CacheItemRemovedCallback delegate that can be specified when an object is inserted into the cache, one of the users asked me a question that I wasn't sure of the answer to.  In my example, I was doing something like this:

Eric Gunnerson at Microsoft has published an article on Unit Testing and Test Driven Development (he calls it Test First Development).  It does a good job of introdcuing the concept of TDD and showing how to use NUnit to perform unit testing of a class before and during its construction.  Another good resource I've found for TDD is the TDD Yahoo Group.  I'm hoping to write a few articles on the use of NUnit for data access component testing as soon as I'm finished with the redesign of ASPAlliance.com's article management system (which was to have been done last week).

I set up Win2K3 Server on a box at home a few days ago and here are some of the things I've learned.  The first thing I'd like to point out is that there is a pretty good Unofficial FAQ maintained by Windows XP MVP Larry Samuels.

I just responded to a discussion on this topic on the ASP.NET Forums...

Well, I'm out in San Francisco this week to teach ASP.NET with C# to half a dozen students, and that's going quite well.  I had the opportunity to see Alan Shalloway speak at the Bay Area User Group on Tuesday night, and met up with ASPAlliance columnist Steve Sharrock there for the first time as well.  We had dinner the next night, and he mentioned something he had used for a solution for a client that I was unaware of.

I'm really getting more and more into unit testing and testing frameworks.  At the moment I'm using NUnit 2.0 for my test purposes as I redesign ASPAlliance.com's content management system for integration into the Microsoft Codewise Community standard specification for Federated Search.  I'm working with a friend and fellow columnist, Jonathan Cogley, who suggested a this resource on Unit Testing Database Code.

Microsoft has a Team Development Build Tool called BuildIt which you can download here.