Extreme .Net

On Friday I attended another Microsoft event presented by Dr Neil Roodyn, on the subject of Extreme .Net. Dr Neil is an entertaining presenter, very laid back. I was so impressed I even bought his book.

It was a packed day, and the slides should be available for download soon. Here are some of my rough notes:-

XP puts people first, then practices then technology, as it says on the Agile Manifesto people are more important than processes.

One book he recommended was "Software for your head" by Jim McCarthy. I remember hearing Jim McCarthy speak at VBits in 1996/7, he was fun too. His ideas seem to have been quite influential in the Agile movement. Certainly I remember him saying something about building early and often. Dr Neil suggests having a machine dedicated to doing automated builds continuously. And, rather like NUnit it should display red if it fails or green if it succeeds. He demonstrated a simple batch file that he uses for this. Simple things work. In a project the first things you should sort out are the build process and intallation. This is iteration zero.

I liked the idea of killing bugs as soon as you find them, rather than putting them in a database where they can reproduce.

He also talked about promoting XP within organisations, you need to sell it as being faster and cheaper. I would honestly never have thought of that, but apparently it helps.

A recommended tool was SSW Code Auditor which is a flexible rule checking engine.

He described using MSBuild from the command line and calling custom processes from the build process.

User stories should not take more than 2-3 days to implement. Break them down into tasks of less than 4 hours, and don't spend too long on planning, maybe a couple of hours a week.
Creating tests before code is building quality in up front. It makes you think as a user of the class rather than an implementor. Changes the way you write code.

There were some good demo's of refactoring support in VS Team System. Also Team System supports a TestProject type and a nice test coverage tool.
He also showed us code for testing GUI's, it seems to take more code, but using reflection you can automate GUI testing. Another demo was of testing ASP.NET and load testing a web server.

He talked about the MS Solutions Framework and it seems there may be an XP version of this on the way.

Mehra Nikoo has blogged on his experience of the event.