Setting up TextMate to talk to DasBlog is fairly easy. Here are the steps I used to get them working together:

1. In TextMate go to Bundles->Blogging->Setup Blogs
2. Add a title for your blog name (mine is stevenrockarts) and add the URL to the metaweblog API that DasBlog exposes (mine is http://www.stevenrockarts.com/blog/blogger.aspx)
3. Go to Bundles->Blogging->Fetch Post you will be prompted for your blog username and password. If you are successful TextMate will retrieve your last post.

Check out this billboard that the Dallas Stars are using to advertise hockey. As a Canadian, I don't care if Americans watch hockey but it is nice to see hockey take a shot back at some of the other sports after all the shots taken at hockey from American "sports experts".

Registration for the Edmonton Code Camp on October 20th is now open! You can sign up here: http://tinyurl.com/2v9pe5 

One of the best things you can do for your career in software development is to invest time in learning new things. If you take 8 hours out of one weekend you will be rewarded when you go to work the following Monday. Most of the presenters that come to code camp try their best to give you something that you can use in the real world.

We are also still looking for some speakers, if you have never spoken in front of an audience before I encourage you to try it out at code camp. Personally I find it a lot easier to talk about something I am familiar with like software development in front of a crowd.  

There also seems to be the perception that code camps are centered entirely around Microsoft technologies, this perception is totally wrong! If you want to come talk about Ruby, Java, Python, Lisp, Erlang, or Haskell feel free to submit a session. We talked about Ruby and the RubyCLR last year and according to inside sources it was what inspired Microsoft to make IronRuby.

I have been using VSTSTest on my current project for around 6 months now and I find that it causes a lot of pain and it has a lot of hacky quirks. I'm not the only one the doesn't like it.

I have decided to see how much effort it would take to switch to an MbUnit/NCover combination here at work.

Using ReSharper I first analyze usages of the Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting namespace. 108 usages, it's everywhere! :(

The first step is going to be to change all of the attributes from the VSTS [TestClass] and [TestMethod]. If Microsoft would have named these according to all the other unit testing suites that came before it I could've skipped this step. Here are the attributes I had to change:

VSTS Attribute	MbUnit Attribute
[TestClass]	[TestFixture]
[TestInitialize]	[SetUp]
[TestCleanup]	[TearDown]
[TestMethod]	[Test]
[DeploymentItem]	Change the resource to copy to the output dir

 

The next problem that I came across was that our team had a bunch of tests that were testing private methods. For those that don't know VSTSTest generates a file called VSCodeGenAccessors in your test project when you (sigh) right click on a private method and select Create Private Accessor. MbUnit has the ability to test private methods so I had to change all of the tests that used the private method testing to use the MbUnit equivalent:

Reflector.Invoke(objectUnderTest, "PrivateMethod", "parameters");

Now, I am in a compiling state! I run the tests and they all pass. I am free of the shakles!

Did you know that using the File Open dialog in windows you can do a lot of the same things you can do on the command line? For example, to go up a directory type .. into the File name textbox:

If there are a lot of files inside of the directory you can filter it by typing in *.extension. Like this directory that has a lot of files if I want to quickly find the project file I can type in *.csproj and get a filtered view of all the files:

If you have any other obscure tips like this let me know in the comments.

Goals usually aren't worth doing unless you follow-up on them, so here is a quick update:

1: Learn more Boo.

This has been going fairly well and is a lot of fun. Some of the concepts are similar to Ruby and Python. I think a good approach to take is to rewrite a side project of mine in Boo so I can run into the problems that aren't covered in the tutorials.

2: Learn LISP.

I downloaded a screencast and watched it but I haven't spent a lot of time on this yet.

3: Code more at home without distractions. I also want to develop a couple of ideas I have in my head to make me faster setting up and developing .NET projects. Maybe this involves contributing to TreeSurgeon.

- I have thought about this a bit. I talked to Jonas who did something similar with NAnt that sounded cool.

4: Speaking of contributing, I would like to contribute more to OSS projects.

- I haven't contributed to any open source projects since writing the original blog post. I did notice that Ayende put out a call for help on his Reflector.BooLanguage tool which would be a great opportunity to learn Boo and help out the community.

5: I think the last thing on my list of becoming a better developer is to always try to be a pragmatic developer. If I find myself falling into a rut or believing the hype of the various communities then I am not being true to myself as a software developer. In my opinion the best thing a developer can do is keep an open mind.

- I subscribed to a ton of new blogs that aren't centered around .NET quite awhile ago and have been looking at concepts from other languages that aren't common place in .NET yet. This post on Higher-Order Functions was well worth the read.

This may be the final straw in switching over all of our tests to MbUnit or NUnit. I have also been experiencing problems with the vsmdi files not reporting the correct number of unit tests as well. Anyone else out there experiencing this with MSTest and have a workaround?

Update: Moments later...

When the tools that are supposed to make you more productive start doing crap like this it is probably time to stop using them!

In a earlier post I expressed my frustration about not being able to access the menu items of the front-most application in Mac OSX. In Windows, this is very easy to do by hitting the Alt key and using the underlined letters to access the menu items that you want. The good thing about owning a Mac is that if you are patient enough, you will soon discover a quicker way to accomplish the same goal.

Today I found the PragMactic OS-Xer (clever name), which showed how you can access the menu items of the front-most application by using QuickSilver. A common gotcha on this hint is to make sure QuickSilver is making use of the advanced features option.

Update: After reading through the blog a bit more Ctrl+F2 is the equivalent (superior?) to the Alt key in Windows.