Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day: 12/07/2008

Thursday, December 11, 2008

thumbtack – A new link, bookmark, note, photo sharing, thing. Think virtual pushpin board you can share with select people or the world at large

use thumbtack to

collect a list of your favorite restaurants and share them with your friends

plan a trip- collect information about places to stay and things to do

research your next purchase- store, analyze and sift through your options in thumbtack

take notes and share them with your team…”

A kind of fun little new site/service from Microsoft Live Labs to play with. A simple way to save and share web “stuff.” Here’s an example board where I’ve created a list of sites I’m building for a series of future posts called “A Feed You Should Read.”

Nice to see that Feed support is already baked in (A Feed You Should Read RSS) and of course there’s an embed

I’d like to see an API so I can easily access, add, manage my stuff from external sources, such as maybe a Windows Live Writer plugin… ;)

(via Microsoft Live Labs Blog - Introducing Thumbtack)

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Isolation Framework, are you Mocking me?

Derik Whittaker - Changing Terms from Mocking Framework to Isolation Framework

“The other day on Twitter Roy Osherove made the statement that he was teaching a class on TDD and he was showing how to use the various Isolation Frameworks. When I read this I had to ask if he talking about Mocking frameworks when he said Isolation frameworks. And indeed he was.

As I sat back to reflect on the semantic differences between the terms Mocking and Isolation I had an 'ah-ha' moment.

…

However, when you tell someone you are working with an isolation framework the idea should click in their head as to what is going to take place and how it is going to be used. By using the term isolation framework we are telling our end users (developers) that what we are really trying to do with the framework is remove external dependencies from our test in order to make them more granular and reliable.

…”

Yes! Perfect! Names have power. Names mean and convey a great deal. “Isolation Framework” is a name that, in my mind, makes so much more sense. No Mocking for me anymore, now it’s Isolating!

I’ve been talking about Mocking with my team and others in the building and they give me that blank, deer in the head lights, stare. I explain that mocking is important to unit testing in that it will help isolate the code from its external dependences (which in our case is 99% of the time databases). But they can’t seem to get beyond the name, “mock”. And in my mind, “mock” has a negative cogitation (maybe because of childhood memories and being mocked as a “News Nerd” even today… ;)

Isolation Framework, IMHO, seems to be a great name and like Derik I think if start using it instead of “Mocking” we might great broader understanding and adoption…

Monday, December 08, 2008

WiX 3 is now officially in “Beta”

Aaron Stebner's WebLog - WiX v3.0.4805.0 build is declared an official beta build

“Last week, Rob Mensching and Bob Arnson posted some information on their blogs about the upcoming declaration of a beta build of WiX v3.0 in preparation for locking down WiX v3.0 to get it ready to ship in Visual Studio 2010 (an older 3.0 build is currently available in the CTP).

This morning, the WiX 3.0.4805.0 build was published to the SourceForge release page (in addition to the normal weekly release page) and declared an official beta build. Here are links to more information about this build:

Release notes for WiX 3.0.4805.0

Download location for WiX 3.0.4805.0 on the SourceForge releases page

If you're using a build of WiX v3.0 to create your installers, you should upgrade to the 3.0.4805.0 build if possible in order to help validate the fixes that have been made over the past few months and help the WiX development team determine how close WiX v3.0 is to being done and ready to ship.

…”

I’m a fan of WiX and it’s really nice to see it progress into official beta status… Don’t know about WiX? It’s going to be in VSTS2010, so now is probably a good time to add it to your mental “look into this” keyword list.

Related Past Post XRef:
WiX Resources – Some help up the learning curve

The VSTS 2010 CTP, 1/1/2009 and you Hyper-V conversion nuts (myself included ;)

Skinner's Blog - VSTS 2010 CTP, Hyper-V, and January 1st, 2009

“For those of you folks who have converted the VSTS 2010 CTP ( see Grant's post ) to take advantage of the performance improvements in hyper-v, here's a manual way to get around the fact that VSTS will expire Jan. 1st 2009. ( If you're using the CTP with VPC, see Brian's post for a similar workaround ).

1) The first thing to do is snapshot your current image ( if you followed Grant's steps, that should have been the last thing you did while you converted your image to hyper-v ). You'll need this to rollback as needed.

…”

Skinner provides a step by step “going backward in time on Hyper-V” guide for everyone who converted their VSTS2010 VHD over to Hyper-V and are facing the CTP expiration deadline.

Happy Two Year Birthday to IE7Pro

IE7pro for Internet Explorer 7 - IE7Pro 2 years

“It’s very glad that IE7Pro is 2 years! Thank all the people who help and support for us. …”

Wow, IE7Pro is only two years old? Seems like I’ve been using it for forever (if you’re an IE user and not using IE7Pro, stop reading this now and get this must have IE addin…)

Congrats to the IE7Pro team for providing such a essential utility!

Excel Financial functions for .NET, implemented with F#

MSDN Code Gallery - Excel Financial functions for .NET

“What is it?
This is a .NET library that provides the full set of financial functions from Excel. The main goal for the library is compatibility with Excel, by providing the same functions, with the same behaviour. Note though that this is not a wrapper over the Excel library; the functions have been re-implemented in managed code so that you do not need to have Excel installed to use this library.

Where I can find documentation on these functions?
Just open Excel and click on Formulas/Financial or go to this link: http://office.microsoft.com/client/helppreview.aspx?AssetID=HP100791841033&ns=EXCEL&lcid=1033&CTT=3&Origin=HP100623561033

I don't think one of the function is right. Excel produces the wrong results! Why don't you do it right?
My goal is to replicate Excel results (right and wrong). Feel free to contribute to the effort by coding what you think is the right solution and I'll add an ExcelCompliant flag to the function to conditionally invoke your code.

How do I use the library?
Just add Financial.dll to the references in your project. The functions are provided as static methods on a Financial class in the System.Numeric namespace.

I see the library was implemented with F#. But I don’t want to redistribute F# along with my application. What should I do?
There are two versions of the library. One of them statically links the F# libraries so that there is no dependency on F#. However, this assembly larger, so if you have F# installed, you can use the FinancialNotStandalone.dll instead.

…”

I found this project interesting in a number of different ways;

Getting the Excel Financial functions in a .Net assembly is pretty darn cool
The fact it was written in F#
The source was included
There are 201,349 test cases
That F# can be statically linked (meaning you can use this assembly without having F# installed)

(via less than dot - Financial Functions for .NET released)