build for test != build for release

This might seem obvious to a lot of people - the people who actually do testing, but to everyone who doesn't or just waves a derogatory hand in the general direction it isn't...

The differences manifests it's self in how the codebase is structured in your source control system. A codebase setup for test will have all the dependencies in the correct structure so when you pull the codebase, build the code and execute the tests you don't have to know what or how it's installed when the application is released - seems obvious right!

I've just attempted to do this and low and behold a missing dependency, I don't know the application and I don't particularly want to right now but I'm going to have to spend sometime just to get the code to build - I suspect I need to install some application on the system before I can build let alone test - WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!

Shite developers and there are a few, seem to think this job is about friction - friction pulling the code, friction building the code, no testing and friction deploying the code. These are the default parts of the job - we all have to do this so it should be automated and frictionless.

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Integrating jasmine into Visual Studio 2010/2011 beta

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This is a technique we use at work to lock the UI whilst some long running process is happening - preventing the user clicking on stuff whilst it's retrieving or rendering data. Now we could have done this by launching a child dialog window but that feels rather out of date and clumsy, we wanted a more modern pattern similar to the way <div> overlays are done on the web. Imagine we have the following simple WPF app and when 'Click' is pressed a busy waiting overlay is shown for the duration entered into the text box. What I'm interested in here is not the actual UI element of the busy indicator but how I go about getting this to show & hide from when using MVVM. The actual UI elements are the standard Busy Indicator coming from the WPF Toolkit : The XAML behind this window is very simple, the important part is the ViewHost. As you can see the ViewHost uses a ContentPresenter element which is bound to the view model, IMainViewModel, it contains 3 child v...

Showing a message box from a ViewModel in MVVM

I was doing a code review with a client last week for a WPF app using MVVM and they asked ' How can I show a message from the ViewModel? '. What follows is how I would (and have) solved the problem in the past. When I hear the words ' show a message... ' I instantly think you mean show a transient modal message box that requires the user input before continuing ' with something else ' - once the user has interacted with the message box it will disappear. The following solution only applies to this scenario. The first solution is the easiest but is very wrong from a separation perspective. It violates the ideas behind the Model-View-Controller pattern because it places View concerns inside the ViewModel - the ViewModel now knows about the type of the View and specifically it knows how to show a message box window: The second approach addresses this concern by introducing the idea of messaging\events between the ViewModel and the View. In the example ...

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