I’ve been a big fan of test-driven development (and unit testing) since I first learned about it a few years ago. It wasn’t until this month that I learned about NDbUnit. This little library is a great value-add for unit tests that involve databases. The creation of test data is tedious if done manually (NDbUnit uses XML for data files), but that’s the only real drawback I’ve found so far in my limited experience with it. It plays very nicely with NUnit, MbUnit, and TestDriven.NET.
You can get binaries and source code for NDbUnit from Quality Labs. I also put together a (very) small sample project with Visual Studio 2005 that you can try out.
Month: October 2006
Home computer backups
Some friends of mine in California have been discussing backup strategies over the past few days. They came across a post by Jeremy Zawodny on using Amazon S3 in addition to his existing backup strategies.
I’m still only using an external hard drive for my backups. I don’t backup my machines regularly enough either. Before Seagate bought them (and before I joined the cult of the Mac), I had a lot of interest in a Mirra Personal Server. At the time it was Windows-only, but now it supports Mac OS X as well. Recently, I started using Deja Vu for backing up the Mac mini. So far, it’s been completely painless.
Continuous Integration
The practice is well-defined in a couple of articles on Wikipedia and on Martin Fowler’s website. But as long as I’ve been reading about this best practice, I’ve never seen it implemented at any of my past jobs (or my current one for that matter). Fortunately, one of the consultants I’m currently working with not only has it implemented, but has the necessary software and test projects on a USB key that he carries with him from job-to-job.
Before I demonstrate it to the broader software team as a practice, I’m trying to get it working on my own machine. Because he uses MbUnit instead of NUnit as part of his implementation, it took me a little longer to get the second of his six test projects working. A little googling for Nant and MbUnit yielded an article that listed 5 files to be copied to the bin directory of Nant. Once I did that, the second test project worked fine.
Strangely, I only saw 4 of the 5 files in this list:
- MbUnit.Core.dll
- MbUnit.Framework.dll
- MbUnit.Tasks.dll
- Quickgraph.dll
- QuickGraph.Algorithms.dll
The core dll was missing, but copying the other 4 dlls did the trick.
Stop users from double-clicking Submit buttons
I came across this tip via 4GuysFromRolla.com. It’s some JavaScript to disable a form’s Submit button once it’s pressed.
This extended post talks about changing the text value of the Submit button to “Submitted” (or something equivalent) to further communicate that the button has been pressed (and prevent it from being clicked again).
While not a terribly sophisticated tip, it does a great job of preventing certain user errors.