Saturday, March 28, 2009

Boise Code Camp

Attending the Boise Code camp today and thought I would blog about it

Please keep in mind that a lot of this was notes taken during the sessions so they may be a little disjointed, I tried to clean them up as much as I could.

Keynote: Bob Lokken
Bob talked about the global economy and the local economy and how it affects the software industry in the treasure Vally. The short version we need to further education, basically if you have software developers the jobs will come, or the software developers will create the jobs themselves.

Session one: Test Driven development using ICO and Mocks Part 1
Basically we Covered the importance of unit testing, why to use interfaces, and starting to cover Mocks, this was a really simple entry level explanation of TDD and why to use it.

Session two: Test Driven development using ICO and Mocks Part 2
We started with covering context specification, so basically creating test to verify your objects are following the specification requested by the customer using nunit.

So basically you have an E-Commerce site with the following requirements
  1. Returns a success or fail for each request
  2. Order status should be submitted
  3. credit card should be billed the total amount of the order
  4. Customer should be notified when they place an order

So for doing these test all we really care about is if the requirement is fulfilled, not if the logic is correct

  • For requirement 1 we are testing then when we make a request we are returned a pass or a fail
  • For requirement 2 we are testing that when we submit an order the status gets submitted as well.
  • For requirement 3 we Mock the credit card interface so we can tell if the credit card interface was called without billing the card.
  • For requirement 4 we Mock the Notify interface that the code calls the notify interface, just like we did for Requirement 3.

With all of these we are using a naming convention that describe what it is we are testing for, an example for requirement 1 is "When_request_return_pass_or_fail" this tests for exactly that and only that.

Next we talked about the "no time for testing Death spiral" so basically you don't have time to test, the less you testing you do the more bugs you have so the less time you have for testing.

Lunch:
Hung out with the guy's from The Network Group

Session 3: Introduction to Inversion of control
The first thing to do is follow the solid principals, basically the same stuff that Uncle Bob talks about like "Single responsibility Principal", "Dependency inversion Principal" etc.

We covered the IOC concepts using the Unity IOC. The IOC frameworks let you specify the type of lifespan, so you can create a Singleton or multiple instance, etc. with out having to alter your code to make it a Singleton.

Some points of interest where that constructors should not take domain objects, they should only take interfaces that allow them to talk to other layers. When using IOC for the most part you should really only have one constructor, if you have more then you need to set up hints in the code to specify what constructor to use.

An interesting thing we covered was that you can create an IOC in 15 min or 6 months depending on what features you want it to have.

Constructor injection vs configuration injection
Using Constructor inversion tightly couplings your code with an IOC container, in configuration inversion you can make this hot swappable.

An interesting comparison is that an IOC is basically like a super class factory, look into logging injection with castle Windsor

Session 4: Microsoft Extensibility Framework (MEF)
Extensibility allows your application to extend from the base functionality, like allowing 3rd party plug-ins, MEF allows you to add additional functionality after compilation in a standard way.

An example would be to add additional functionality like new features to a web service with out having to compile the web service. You simply add a plug-in dll and you get a new request option . MEF came about because there was no common plug-in framework in dot net, or Microsoft in general, MEF was created to solve this problem.

MEF plug-ins have imports and exports, this allows plug-ins to look for what they need and what this plug-in provides this is all done with the Catalog. The catalog manages what plug-ins are available, and what there requirements are.

You can set the default to handle passable conflicts, for example if there are multiple plug-ins that implement the same interface, and your code requests only one, it will explode because it doesn't know which one to use, unless you specify a default, in this case instead of blowing up it will use the default.

You can cache the meta data so you don't have to reload the assembly every time you want to look at the avalable plug-ins so you can lazy load the assembly only when it's requested.


Session 5: ASP.NET MVC in the real world
Started with a basic tutorial on how to create a MVC web app (a list of robots in a robot army) , covering creating a list view, routing between views, how to handle exceptions by doing redirection, etc. One of the nice things about ASP.NET MVC is it has templates for a fair amount of the basic code for you, like lists, edits, details, etc.

One of the short comings of mvc out of the box is it isn't type safe, keep that in mind for when you change routing, it will create magic strings, this can be fixed but you have to explicitly do it.
Something else you need to do is protract your self from spoofing http posts. One way to get around this is to create a view object that only contains information you want to have submitted and then validate that data map the view object to the real object and then saving the real object, there is also an anti-forgery option to prevent sending bad data.

The MVC pattern allows you to create a single responsibility witch allows testing of the code, you can do this with asp.net forms but it's really painful, where mvc makes it a lot easier.

Some things the presentor sugested we look at are
  1. MVC code from codeplex http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet
  2. S#arp Architecture http://www.codeplex.com/SharpArchitecture
  3. CodeCampServer.com http://code.google.com/p/codecampserver/
  4. FUBU MVC http://code.google.com/p/fubumvc/
  5. NEW MVC BOOK (Free Chapter)
  6. Scott Hanselman MIX - "NerdDinner"

Session 6: Event Driven Programing using Delegates
Basically this allows different parts of your application to know indirectly what is going on in different parts of your application by subscribing to events.

This allows for a decoupled design that allows you to spin off a thread when an event is raised, with out the object that raised the event knowing or caring about what is going on with the event handlers. A good example of this is the asp.net web forum when you create event handlers for the onPageload or onButton_Click, etc. The event raiser (web forum code) doesn't know or care if anything is subscribing to it, but if something is then it executes the subscriber


//Sudo Code
...
Button1.click += new ButtonHandler_Click(eventHandler);
...


then runs the ButtonHandler_Click method

Closing and Giveaways:
I won the DevExpress Refactor

All in all it was a really good experience

No comments: