To some, “unit testing” is a four letter word.  While it’s unfortunate, the feeling is justified by poor experiences, lack of knowledge, and so on.  Personally, I’ve had mixed experiences with unit tests.  I’m sure many of you have encountered similar situations.  After reading The Art of Unit Testing by Roy Osherove, I feel far more confident in not only understanding unit tests, but also the best practices for implementation.  If this book had only been written years ago, maybe all those poor unit testing experiences would have never happened. 

The fundamental thing that I think is most misunderstood about unit testing is simply not understanding what a unit test is.  In fact, Roy just recently posted an updated definition of how he would classify a unit test on his blog.  Of course a definition isn’t always enough, and in his book, Roy starts off by fully explaining all the aspects of what a unit test should be and the basic outline for how to succeed.  I would highly recommend that you visit his book’s webpage (http://manning.com/osherove/) and download the sample first chapter. 

This seriously may be the best book ever written on unit testing.  I understand that “the best” is a strong statement, but this book is really the perfect package.  Let’s look at what makes this such a winner… More...

Working primarily on web applications, I’ve focused most of my time on ASP.NET Web Forms since the very early betas.  Web Forms were truly a great revolution in the web world.  Once I saw the functionality when it first came out (when I was using ::shudder::  “classic” ASP), I couldn’t wait to start using it.  I began right away with ASP+, as it was called back in 2000, abandoning Visual Interdev and ASP, yippee.  The release of Version 1.0 came out January 16, 2002, changing the way we work with the web.

Flash-forward 7 years (9 from the early betas), and the programming world has changed.  With things like TDD (Test Driven Development), AJAX, JSON, jQuery, etc, and the complexity of web applications growing, sometimes Web Forms would get in the way.  To be fair, the Web Form framework is very robust and tries to be helpful, but sometimes we developers like to shoot ourselves in the foot.  One example that I’m sure many of you have experienced is trying to interface with a server-rendered element on the page.  Performing something like a document.getElementById(‘UserName’) in JavaScript doesn’t exactly work as expected when the ID of your textbox is now something along the lines of “ctl00_mainContent_LoginCtrl_UserName,” does it?  On this particular topic, ASP.NET 4.0 has a solution for this problem, but that isn’t the focus of this post.  The Client Id problem, is just one example of the framework “getting in your way.”  This is one of the many reasons behind the advent of ASP.NET MVC.  Having just finished Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 from Wrox, I’m a convert. More...

Christmas is fast approaching, and often I'm asked what to get a fellow tech geek.  There is an infinite amount of things I could write about, but I'll pick a few items from some popular categories.  In this post, we'll look at three categories, books ("serious" gifts), Office Space gear ("fun" gifts), and USB gadgets ("quirky" gifts).  For the book and Office Space category, I own the items that I've listed.  The USB gadgets are funny things I've found on the web, and don't personally have them, so I can't give detailed reviews of them like the other items.  These gifts range in price from around $10 to $40 and are all available on the web.  If you are looking for something more expensive, you can always check out my past post: Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Review.

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I have been using what can only be described as a wonder in the quest for a paperless office.   Here was my problem, I have countless documents that I consume/produce, for example, bills, invoices, receipts, contracts, etc.  All of these documents end up in various file folders, and things are impossible to find.  For example, let's say I need to find an invoice for a book I ordered.  So starts the fun... "Let's see, I think I bought that last year," off to the 2007 Receipts folder.  "Now when did I get that, maybe Q4 or so?"  Flipping through various size receipts, I would look for the receipt.  Of course, if this flipping weren't bad enough, often times these things get out of order where perhaps a receipt from March is mixed in with the Q3 files.  Even if the files were organized perfectly, it would still be hard to find something specific in just a few seconds. 

There are just so many disadvantages to paper beyond just finding information.  What about a fire?  Now you need to store the file folders in a fireproof cabinet.  Then there is water damage, spills, rips, etc.  Storing documents on a server with backups seemed like the obvious choice to solve all of these problems.  Of course, I don't want something time consuming or super expensive.  I found my answer with the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner

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