Building software with .NET dependencies in 2010

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Martin Harris

I come from a Java background. So over the last decade I have moved away from managing dependencies on projects using jars in shared folders. Most professional java programmers have used Maven or Ivy. Recently I looked at Groovy and Gradle. All well and good. What do programmers use for .NET, WPF and Silverlite? I have been trying to find out and there are mixed opinions. Some write scripts to copy .dll files, others rely on the Visual Studio solutions. None of these solutions are scalable. I found this project: npanday Has anyone used it on a large project? I would love to hear your views or review. What does microsoft do? What do you do?

Please comment here I am very interested in hearing what other programmers do for .NET dependency management.

Links for the Java world of dependency management

http://maven.apache.org/

http://ant.apache.org/ivy/

http://www.gradle.org/

How to link unitils to a spring wired datasource

Posted on May 31, 2010 by Martin Harris

Unitils provides its own DataSource. This causes problems if you want to use Spring IOC to inject your own. There is a way around this but its not elegant. In future versions of unitils I believe the team is going to provide better support for less intrusive methods. This post documents a way to use your own spring defined DataSource.
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Unit Testing with a GigaSpaceFactoryBean

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Martin Harris

I was talking to Shay Banon (Gigaspace Software Architect) he mentioned using GigaSpaceFactoryBean for writing gigaspace unit tests. I could find no examples on their site, although I concede it may be there somewhere. This shows post shows a simple example.

He also mentioned using the admin api to do full end to end integration testing. The admin api has huge potential as its able to control gigaspace containers, deploy into them and collect statistics. Its a powerful api.

This is documented on their site: http://www.gigaspaces.com/wiki/display/XAP7/Administration+and+Monitoring+API
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Tumble dried BDD from Studio Pragmatists

Posted on May 21, 2010 by Martin Harris

On the 18th of May, 2010, the very new tumbler-glass project by Studio Pragmatists uploaded Tumbler 0.2.1 to Maven. Having recently written about JBehave I found myself really liking the concept of behavior driven development. So I decided to write a similar article about Tumbler. If you want the project code its available in my example project.

4 hour time box in 20 minutes!

Once again I decided to time box the work to 4 hours. This time though the whole process only took about 20 minutes. The product owner and testers produce a story file. The Tumbler format allows for multiple stories each containing scenarios, so its possible to cover a complex set of requirements in one file. This allows for flexibility when breaking down the work into tasks. As per the usual behavior driven approach, a scenario contains the Given, When and Then sections which describe the behavior. Continue reading →

Transient Technology

Next time you look it might be gone

Category Archives: software development