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:

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.