Tuesday 31 March 2009

SnippetDesigner

There is a free plugin for Visual Studio 2008 that helps being more productive by providing a tool to manage snippets easier.
You can download it from here.
There are many available codesnippets which can be downloaded from here.
Creating code snippets is very easy, click here to learn.

Sunday 15 March 2009

Daily Stand-up Meeting - Daily Scrum

What?
It's a stand-up meeting that every one in the team attends to answer these major questions:
  1. What did you accomplish yesterday?
  2. What is your goal for today?
  3. What is preventing you from accomplishing your goals?
It's called "Daily Stand-up Meeting" in Agile XP and in Scrum it's called "Daily Scrum".

Design discussions should be differed until after the meeting.

Why?
  • Communicate status
  • Share commitment
  • Identify Obstacles
  • Set direction and focus
  • Build a team
Preparation?
Like any other meeting, the team members are responsible to prepare in advance to answer those 3 questions.

Who to report?
Team members should report to the peers and the team as a whole not to the team leader or manager only.

How long?
Up to 15 minutes, therefore for a team of 5 each member will have 2-3 minutes to talk.

Who attends?
Anyone who is directly involved in or wants to know about the day-to-day operation of the project should attend the single daily stand-up meeting. Typically at most 10 people.

When?
Not too early, not too late e.g. between 11:45 and 12:00

Who runs the meeting?
The team runs the meeting, not the manager nor the team leader.

Challenges:
  • You will be accounted for what you say in the meeting; so other people who attend the meeting will judge you about how much you do work or not so gossips will be more at the office perhaps

More Info:

Wednesday 4 March 2009

MSBuild

MSBuild files are those that can be used to build a project or series of projects. For example, YourProject.csproj in visual studio contains msbuild codes. Alternatively, you can create your own custom msbuild so that you can build more than one project or customize it further e.g. build the project also using Resharper or FxCop tools.

Can be found here:
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\MSBuild.exe
Examples:
  • msbuild.exe project-file-name.vcproj /t:Rebuild/p:Configuration=Release
  • msbuild.exe mybuildfile.xml
Articles to read:
Ways to run MSBuild:
  • a) Create a bat file (.bat) or a msbuild file (.msbuild) b) put the MSBuild commands there c) Run the file using MSBuild.exe tool
  • Use CruiseControl.NET or TeamCity
Other Links:

Tuesday 3 March 2009

TypeMock

Using TypeMock you can even mock static classes; something which is not possible with NMock.


There are some manual ways to mock static classes some of which are described here.