Archive for the ‘Agile’ Category
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009



One of my favourite tools Typemock has just been released in a fantastic ASP.Net bundle and have once again offered this up to the blogging community to get for free.

Unit Testing ASP.NET? ASP.NET unit testing has never been this easy.
Typemock is launching a new product for ASP.NET developers – the ASP.NET Bundle – and for the launch will be giving out FREE licenses to bloggers and their readers.
The ASP.NET Bundle is the ultimate ASP.NET unit testing solution, and offers both Typemock Isolator, a unit test tool and Ivonna, the Isolator add-on for ASP.NET unit testing, for a bargain price.
Typemock Isolator is a leading .NET unit testing tool (C# and VB.NET) for many ‘hard to test’ technologies such as SharePoint, ASP.NET, MVC, WCF, WPF, Silverlight and more. Note that for unit testing Silverlight there is an open source Isolator add-on called SilverUnit.
The first 60 bloggers who will blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Free Isolator ASP.NET Bundle license (Typemock Isolator + Ivonna). If you post this in an ASP.NET dedicated blog, you’ll get a license automatically (even if more than 60 submit) during the first week of this announcement.
Also 8 bloggers will get an additional 2 licenses (each) to give away to their readers / friends.
Go ahead, click the following link for more information on how to get your free license.

I’ve not had the chance to try out the Ivonna or SilverUnit add-ons to the framework yet, but will be looking at these in the near future and they can help you test more of your SharePoint solutions.

Friday, May 15th, 2009



If your the only member of the team is it really worth going through the same agile development process that you would in a team of eight?

Isn’t it quicker to just crack open Visual Studio and start coding?   After all your the customer so you know what you want right?   You not going to have to deal with any of the social complexities that conspire against you. You’re going have the hottest of communication with the dev team,  the dev and test roles will have an interment knowledge and the scrum master won’t really have to do anything as there is not going to be any blockers on this project.

Right?

So I started down this path and before I knew it I had some weird project created with bits of code and SharePoint artefacts but not really seeming to make any progress.   I was easily distracted by other things and didn’t really have a feel for how long it would take and when I could say I was done.

STOP!

What was I doing!  I spend my time trying to help people develop better, to take small steps and sometimes big steps to help produce better software..   why was I not practicing what I preached?

I stopped!

Deep breath, deleted all the rubbish I can previously created and got back to basics.

The Team

I have a team,  the fact that some (in this case all) of the roles were done by the same person was ok; that happens often in agile teams.

Design

Yes, you heard me right here.  Eric Shupps would be proud of me :) .   I’m not going to jump into Visual Studio and crank out code starting [TestFixture] I need to do some design work first, even though this application is going to be small I still need to put in the time on the upfront design.  I need to think through the solution at a high level.

Here I used the opportunity to try out the great Balsamiq application,  which I stumped up the $79 license fee for and download the desktop version.

Blurred out Balsamiq Design

I’ve deliberately blurred the image but you get the idea of what the mock ups look like, and these take only a matter of minutes to produce.  Definately something you should consider if your currently trying to do this in Visio or heaven forbid cranking out HTML mockups.

The few UI based mockups actually helped me to understand how the application would work for the end user, which in turn provided a clear vision for the way the solution would be developed.

User Stories

I didn’t need to do any remote collaboration on the User Stories so I was able to get back to basics and use one of the white boards in my office as the task board.   I wrote the user stories out on post-it notes and added them to the board along with rough estimates for each one.

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Here you can see I’m using a very common step of status on my task board

Backlog - This is where I add all stories that came out of the design,  they are all user focused with nothing specific about the implementation.  No stories like ‘Use jQuery to make it nice’  these are user stories.  If I think of something while i’m coding or testing, or even having a beer I can just write it to a post-it and stick it on the backlog.

Sprint – I like Scrum so adopt a Scrum Esq. style to my process.  The sprint will be where I put the stories I plan to do next.  The amount is based on the estimate and also the sprint length.   In this project I’m doing stupily short sprints of 2 days each.

In Progress – When I pick off a story to work on it goes in here,  if you’ve ever looked at the Kanban approaches your looking to keep this ‘In Progress’ to a defined level.  I like to try and move things through to ‘Done’ before picking off new stories.

Verify – When I think it’s been coded properly and dev tested I move the story here.   Verify is where I would validate the code on another environment – i.e. a non-dev box,  one with multiple web front ends.  At this point I also look at introducing some form of automation for both the build/deployment and also the acceptance testing.

Done – This is when it is really really done,  there is nothing left to do, no documentation, no tests or tweaks,  the code is production ready.

Sprint 1 – Day 1

Having selected the user stories for the sprint it was time to setup my dev project and get some of the foundations in place.   If you follow me on twitter you will know that I previously spent time producing a decent SharePoint development Virtual Machine so it was very quick for me to roll out the few things I needed to get going.   A SharePoint team site in which I could spike and test my code,  a VS2008 solution and class library project in which to start cranking out some code.

At the end of Day 1 my board looked like this:

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One of the stories I felt was ready for verification and another I was making good progress on.   At this point I had nothing ‘Done’ my burndown in the morning would look a bit sad,  but that’s OK that is often the case at the start of a project or sprint.  I also don’t at this point have a verification setup so this is going to slow me down a bit on Day 2.

Day 1 has been good,  I have the basic project structure defined.   I was able to build a WSP with the SharePoint features I needed to complete the first story and was able to deploy and test this on my dev machine.

People that have read my blog or seen me talk at conferences and user groups know that I am very keen on doing things right; I like to see Unit Tests and better still I want to see people at least trying Test Driven Development.   However at the end of Day 1 I was yet to write a single line of C# code, neither in test form or production code.   So did I really do development on day one?

Well I think I did, only the language used was XML and a little bit of CAML and for these items I do not know of any way, that makes sense, to unit test.  I often think that the XML we define as part of SharePoint projects are more inline with doing configuration,  we are just setting up SharePoint using a specific configuration and the testing for this should naturally falls into the integration space and will be picked up during verification.   That is not to say as a developer I do not validate it,  I need to ensure that it works as expected in my environment before I can move it over to the Verify column and it’ is the job of the tester to make sure this happens.  For this project the tester (me) was adamant that it all worked as they didn’t want to have to waste time on silly errors.

Interesting Test

One thing that I will be having to do with this project is fit it around real work, the sort that helps to keep food on the table sort of work.   This means that the sprints although 2 days in length the elapsed time may be significantly longer.  I know that this will impact on the velocity as I will lose some of the momentum during these breaks, however the benefit I have from adopting a more defined process is that it will be significantly easier for me to pick up the project.   Imaging if I had to go back to the mess of code I had originally created after a weeks break!

I’m really interested to see if my agile development with a team of one really does make a significant impact on the way I develop the code, on the time it takes to complete it and on the quality of the solution created at the end.

Find out what happens on Day 2.

Monday, May 4th, 2009



Being an advocate of SharePoint as an application platform I looked long and hard for a decent implementation of a Scrum and have always been found wanting.  I have seen simple examples where any power user could set things up but found the lack of any Burndown charts meant you lost probably the most important part of Scrum – the visibility.

I have found that VersionOne is one of the best products on the market, although it has a lot of options which tends to put off new teams.

For those that use Team Foundation Server your probably going to head towards the Scrum for Team System developed by Conchango.  I’ve not used this in anger so am unable to comment on how well it works however this solution is not really a SharePoint specific solution as it requires you to make the commitment to using Team Foundation Server.

Bil Simser did a good post on scrum tools,  although its nearly 3 years old still has some good links.   Again however the tools are not specifically SharePoint.

Why the SharePoint Obsession?

SharePoint is the collaboration tool of choice, companies have deployed it and it is being used with varying degrees of success.  People have become familiar with the how to add items to a list, how to upload documents into a document library and for the more advanced how to build engaging dashboards.

What is the biggest thing you get from adopting scrum?  ‘Visibility’

What do you need to encourage to make Scrum work?  ‘Collaboration’

SharePoint is the natural platform choice on which to build a Scrum tool.

Introducing Project Aberdovey

As with all good development teams I think it is right that your development project should have a name,  and in keeping with some big companies in the Seattle area 21apps uses place names.   Aberdovey, or as it’s spelt in Welsh Aberdyfi, has probably one of the best beaches in the UK and is located 50 miles west of the office.

Put simply, Project Aberdovey is a Scrum tool for SharePoint.

There are a few aims for the project:

  1. Produce a fantastic Scrum tool built on SharePoint
  2. Develop the solution using agile techniques including TDD
  3. Dogfood the solution as soon as possible – what better way to develop the right solution
  4. Open development – I want to give feedback on the challenges but also welcome your input

I will be looking for ways to give people visibility,  I am looking at codeplex as an option but welcome any suggestions.

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009



Great to see that more people are publishing their experiences with unit testing SharePoint.   Here are some of examples I have found that are really worth looking at:

Richard Fennell – Testing SharePoint Workflows using TypeMock Isolator (part 1, part 2 and part 3) – Richard is also going to be talking at a few NextGen meetings on the subject.

SharePoint Dev Wiki is really starting to get some good content not just on unit testing but on the whole development field.

Jeremy Thake (creator of SharePoint Dev Wiki) did a great usergroup meeting web cast on SharePoint Development with Unit Testing

I’ve previously mentioned the Patterns and Practices work and they have started to do some great Channel 9 videos which really do make this so much more accessible.  Brilliant Job!

If you have any links or posts on the subject please share by adding a link in the comments, and if you’ve done something new and exciting help the SharePoint Dev Wiki by posting details.

Looks like my predictions are starting to come true,  people really are doing SharePoint development better :)

Sunday, March 15th, 2009



How many times have you added an additional parameter or bit of logic to your code because you thought it could be useful and it’s easier to add whilst your already changing the code?   If you are your introducing Future Creep!  and should stop doing it.

What does Future Creep mean?

If your from from an XP (Extreme Programming) background you would know this better as YAGNIYou Aren’t Gonna Need It!   I actually prefer the term Future Creep I first saw on the post, beware of future creep by Jamis of 37 signal.   Everyone understands the terms Scope Creep and Feature Creep and its easy to spot these, although often ignored.  Future creep is the adding of additional code by the developer because they can see a possible future requirements.

DONT DO IT!

You may think, hey it’s only gonna take me a couple of minutes to add this additional parameter which I can see being really useful in the future.  You add the code and then move on,  from that point forward that additional code needs to be maintained, every time a developer interacts with your code they need to read it and understand it – often taking more time as that bit of the code is never actually used, which leads to uncertainty about the code.

It happened to me

The reason I wrote this blog post was an example of future creep on a recent project that had a measurable impact on time and effort. The future creep was was simple, the developer was writing a light weight logging library and decided as part of the Logging.Log() method that if the code had a HTTPContext they would also initialise the current web using SPContext.Current.   None of the code within the internal methods made use of this it was just setup and passed into the method.  This in itself does not sound to bad and for most scenarios the code did run with a valid SPContext h0wever this future creep caused a number of issues which forced developers trying work around it

  1. The logging library could not be used in code that had elevated privileges as SPContext.Current throws an error if accessed under a different security context
  2. The logging library could not be used where a HTTPContext existed but no SPContext, as was the case for some of the Exchange integration code

Having battled with solutions to the second scenario and getting comments about not wanting to make changes to the Logging Library because the dev was not comfortable with the way it had been implemented I challenged the original author of the code as to the requirement for SPContext.

The answer:  Future Creep

A few minutes later the extra code was refactored out, and the library could be used.

Lessons Learnt and how to prevent it?

Don’t do it,  resist the temptation, remember:

The best way to implement code quickly is to implement less of it.

The best way to have fewer bugs is to implement less code.

And adopting techniques like Test Driven Development force you down a path that doesn’t allow it.

Thursday, March 5th, 2009



A short and to the point post by Dror Helper at Typemock looks at industry findings on the cost benefits of doing TDD.

The Cost of Test Driven Development

..the research proved two points:

  1. Using TDD reduce the amount of bugs in the code significantly
  2. Using TDD takes more time then not using TDD

This is in line with what was expected, the question is does the extra time doing TDD reduce the quality or is it the unit testing.  Could doing Test Last unit testing give similar results?

There is also the unquantifiable part to the numbers in the quality of the developers in each team.  This has a significant impact on the code quality.  Using processes like TDD help to raise the bar for all of the developers and the cost benefit will improve over time.  It would be a very interesting exercise to see how these numbers work out in a typical SharePoint project.

On the same lines Phil Haack (great name) has a post on Bug Driven Development where he quotes Robert Glass and Steve McConnell on the costs not doing some form of automated testing which reinforces the value in getting the right processes in place.

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009



As development practices around the SharePoint platform mature the demands for better quality and better performing solutions are being made.  Gone are the days when Enterprises will accept that the Roll-Up Web Part they purchased will not scale beyond a few site collections.  A knowledge of the platform and defensive coding alone will not cut the mustard, the need for a holistic approach to your development practices will be the only way to achieve success.  In this blog post I am focusing on one specific technique, code profiling, and using the excellent Red Gate ANTS Profiler.

Disclaimer:  Red Gate ANTS Profiler is a paid for application.  There are other products on the market that do code profiling including Visual Studio.  The reason for using ANTS in this post is due to the ease with which you can get up an running and the quality of the user experience.  I recommend you set aside a day to look at the profiling in Visual Studio and then a few hours to get that much further with ANTS.

Software Performance Analysis – Wikipedia

In software engineering, performance analysis, more commonly today known as profiling, is the investigation of a program’s behavior using information gathered as the program executes (i.e. it is a form of dynamic program analysis, as opposed to static code analysis). The usual goal of performance analysis is to determine which sections of a program to optimize – usually either to increase its speed or decrease its memory requirement (or sometimes both).

As the quote says this technique is specifically aimed at the optimization of code; the tools enable the developer to quickly target the areas of code that need optimization and lead to an improved return for the effort. (seems strange saying ROI when talking about dev techniques, but this is really what it is).

Getting started

Red Gate provide a 14 day trial, so you can try before you buy.  The latest release, version 4.3 as at the time of writing, has made some great improvements over the 4.1 version – most notably the removal of the need to stop all the IIS web sites listening on port 80 :) .

As you would expect this post will focus on profiling SharePoint code, I’m going to use the Magic 8 ball application developed for my TDD session at the Best Practices SharePoint Conference in San Diego.

More details on Test Driven SharePoint development can be in the Agile section of this site.

Environment

The environment that I will do the testing is a typical SharePoint developers Virtual Machine.

  1. Windows 2008 Server (32bit)
  2. Visual Studio 2008
  3. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
  4. SQL Server 2005

As this is running on Windows 2008 I will be testing against IIS7.   The requirements are identical for Windows 2003 and IIS 6.0

Installation

Download ANTS Profiler and install, not too many options to worry about here.

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Luckily for my first run through the team have provided a technical paper on installing, using and getting ANTS Profiler to work with SharePoint, How to profile a SharePoint 2007 Site Collection.  There were a few things in here that I prefer not to do,  I will document what I do below and will pass this back – I’m not criticizing, there’s no way I would even attempt to write a Profiler so mucho respect from me to the Red Gate team

Configuration

We are looking for the ability to profile any site collection within a Web Application.  This involves getting the account used for the associated application pool, giving it some additional rights and then configuring the ANTS services to use this account.

Web Application

Depending on your development machine configuration you will have a number of web applications configured in SharePoint, the configuration below should be reasonably familiar to most of you.

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The key here is to identify the web application (IIS Website) as we need to get the account name from the associated Application Pool.

Load IIS Manager, select the web application and chose Basic Settings from the Actions menu on the right.  This will show the associated application pool as below.

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Select the Application Pools from the connections menu, choose the application pool identified in the previous step and click advanced settings.  This will give you a properties screen showing the account we need to work with.

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In this case 21apps\svc-intranet-ap – if you have a local installation this may be set to Local System in which case the steps below may not be required.   I recommend that dev’s don’t have a default install as you really need to understand how SharePoint is setup to undertake any large scale developments.

Web.Config

In IIS 6 days you would need to edit the web.config file to set the application into debug mode.   In IIS 7 the common ASP.NET configuration options have been promoted to the IIS console.  With the web application still selected click on the .NET Compilation option and change the Debug behaviour to True and click Apply.

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Like all good SharePoint developers you will be working with WSS_Minimal trust settings or a custom policy file.  To do profiling however you will need to set the Trust level to Full.  Again IIS 7 provides a UI or you can edit it manually.

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It is possible to run the code without setting a Full trust level, but you need to remove the .pdb files and will lose the ability to profile the lines of code.  Which is sort of the point of profiling!  If you don’t set Full trust you will get an error like the one below when loading a web part

Web Part Error: An error has occurred.

Show Error Details
Hide Error Details 

[TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.]
  at System.RuntimeTypeHandle.CreateInstance(RuntimeType type, Boolean publicOnly, Boolean noCheck, Boolean& canBeCached, RuntimeMethodHandle& ctor, Boolean& bNeedSecurityCheck)
  at System.RuntimeType.CreateInstanceSlow(Boolean publicOnly, Boolean fillCache)
  at System.RuntimeType.CreateInstanceImpl(Boolean publicOnly, Boolean skipVisibilityChecks, Boolean fillCache)
  at System.RuntimeType.CreateInstanceImpl(Boolean publicOnly)
  at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type, Boolean nonPublic)
  at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type)
  at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.SPWebPartSerializer.get_DefaultControl()
  at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.BinaryWebPartSerializer.SerializedWebPart..ctor(SPWebPartManager webPartManager, XmlNamespaceManager xmlnsManager, Byte[] sharedData, Byte[] userData, String[] links, Type type, SPWeb spWeb)
  at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.BinaryWebPartSerializer.Deserialize(SPWebPartManager webPartManager, XmlNamespaceManager xmlnsManager, Byte[] userData, Byte[] sharedData, String[] links, Type type, SPWeb spWeb)
  at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.SPWebPartManager.CreateWebPartsFromRowSetData(Boolean onlyInitializeClosedWebParts)

[VerificationException: Operation could destabilize the runtime.]

Services

ANTS runs as two services

  1. ANTS Memory Profiler 4 Service
  2. ANTS Performance Profiler 4 Service

Change the accounts on these two services to the same accounts used in the web application we identified above.

If this is the first time the account has been associated with a service it will be automatically granted the ‘Log On As A Service’ right.

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Local Security Policy

From the Administrators menu choose Local Security Policy and grant the application pool account the following rights

  1. Act as Part of the Operating System
  2. Impersonate Client after authentication

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Open a command prompt and run gpupdate /force.

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Profiling your code

Your environment is now configured, we can start profiling.  As this is SharePoint I tend to just hit the bit i’m planning to profile first to make sure this is working before I start profiling.  Many hours can be lost trying to solve a configuration issue with a profiler that is not at fault.

Start Red Gate ANTS Performance Profiler.  It knows we’re running on a system a system that has UAC, it offers to make our life easy and always run as an Administrator.  I normally click yes here.

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ANTS loads the Profile Settings window is automatically.

There are only a few things to set.

  1. Choose the ASP.Net web application (hosted in IIS)
  2. The URL to the SharePoint site
  3. Use the original port

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Further profiling counters can be set, but we just want to get our first run going for now.  Click on Start Profiling.  (In this example I have added a long running process to show how ANTS can identify this as a hotspot).

Profile Results

Profiling will start and a new browser will open at the location specified.  As this is SharePoint the profiler restarts the service so you will always have a small delay while SharePoint is JIT compiled. The profile timeline will show this impact on the processor.

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Once the processor has levelled out its time to start profiling your code.   Navigate and interact with the bit of the application you are interested in.  If it is a  web part or navigation load you are interested in then you can refresh the page.

Once you are happy you have performed enough tasks,  I recommend keeping these focused, stop the profiling. ANTS will present you with the HOT code, the bit of code that is the worst performing. You can focus the analysis on any part of the profile graph to show poor performing code around a specific spike in the processor or memory.

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In the example above I am focused on the code that runs (including my long running process) when I ask the magic 8 ball a question.

Viewing source code when you have enabled Line level profiling shows every line, the hit count and the % of time taken to perform that operation.

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The really cool thing is you can click through the methods to follow the slow running process through the code!

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Showing the method grid allows you to open up a call graph for any method to see how the processing is broken down in a dynamic tree view.  This really is just brilliant!  The image below does not do it justice you really do need to see this for yourself to appreciate it.

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Conclusion

The long running process I added for the demonstration was picked up and allowed me to drill down into the lines of code that were the slowest.  It even showed how the internal calls within the base classes performed.

Red Gate ANTS Profiler is easy to setup and proves to be an invaluable tool in your software development tool kit.  I suspect profiling will not be something that you do every day, however with the speed and ease of use I would like to think that you will consider the inclusion of profiling a must have rather than a nice to have.

Thursday, February 19th, 2009



My friend and fellow SharePoint MVP Eric Shupps has been promising to enter the conversation, started a number of years ago by Spence Harbar, and provide his wisdom and views on why he thinks TDD in SharePoint is just wrong!  It has been debated over email and over a SharePint for many many months.   Finally Eric has put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and joined the conversation.

SPTDD: SharePoint and Test Driven Development, Part One

I now know why it took Eric so long to get his post out,  it’s taken me an hour to even read it.   As with any good debate Eric managed to get me pondering his views, what I see as misconceptions and ideas and I will be coming back with a number of posts in response.  Sorry I just can’t write that much in one blog post :)

I will start by countering a specific part of the of Erics post for the moment;   TDD has it’s origins in Extreme Programming but it is not intrinsically linked to pair programming.  I think Eric has been mislead by some more zealot supported of TDD on this.  He did however miss one of the main benefits of pair programming in his complete dismissal of the approach which is Shared Knowledge.   Later in the post he talks about lack of knowledge, poor quality developers, and also the ability to be able to actually code against SharePoint before you try something so difficult as unit testing.   Pair programming can help in this regard – but it’s something you really need to have a desire to make work.   I have used it,  it’s not for everyone and you will always have personality clashes!  I have found it to be very useful in specific areas and in small chunks.  If you do get a few really good pair programmers I think you can see improved productivity – the reality however is most people never give it long enough to see the benefits.

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009



In contrast to the Agile SharePoint development with Scrum session this was very light on the slides.  In good Agile tradition I adopted a Pair Programming approach with me at the keyboard and the audience been my code buddy.  Everyone was provided with a copy of Uncle Bobs Three rules of TDD to help with during the pairing process.  The rules state:

  1. You are not allowed to write any production code unless it is to make a failing unit test pass.
  2. You are not allowed to write any more of a unit test than is sufficient to fail; and compilation failures are failures.
  3. You are not allowed to write any more production code than is sufficient to pass the one failing unit test.

I did have some slides to set the scene (see below), to give some background to TDD and raise the issues around the use of the word TEST.  We also looked at 10 reasons TDD sucks, with a slight SharePoint slant,  and quickly got into Visual Studio where the real learning was to happen.

The user story was to develop a Magic 8 Ball web part that could have custom answers defined in a SharePoint list.  The finished code is available on CodePlex and it is planned to extend this solution over time to expand on the ideas.  My main issue with just getting the finished code is the learning is in the process and it can be hard to see how the design was driven by the code.   I am planning to do a web cast on this to show this process.

CodePlex project now available  http://www.codeplex.com/sp8ball

Winners

The guys at Typemock we very generous in donating 3 copies of Isolator for SharePoint which is an essential component for anyone doing unit testing in a SharePoint environment.  The lucky winners were

Mark Freeman
Shahar Tamari
Kennedy Duncan

Each of you will receive a free license for Isolator for SharePoint,  for those that did not win Typemock are running a special discount.

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009



This post is part of a series on Test Driven Development – Using Dependency Injection

In this 5 part series we refactored the solution developed in our white paper Unit Testing SharePoint – Getting into the Object Model to make the code more testable, and enable us to work within the available features of TypeMock Isolator for SharePoint.

We started with a review of the code and the specific line of test code that was not supported,  reviewed the options available to us including upgrading to the Full version of TypeMock but decided to refactor the code and introduce a pattern called Dependency Injection.

Before digging into the code we introduced some of the common TDD vocabulary including Loosely Coupled, Dependency Inversion, Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control.   The aim not being to scare people off with fancy terms but to help understand what these mean and the affect they have on your code.

The refactoring of the code began in Step 1. where we started to implement Dependency Inversion to give more control to our calling code, in this case our tests.  We introduced abstract classes and the use of an Interface to support this.

Step 2 Implemented dependency into the GetRandomMessage method and also the concept of creating Fake classes that can be passed in to support the tests we wish to perform.  At the end of this step we were able to refactor our initial failing test and all the tests passed.

The code for this refactor can be downloaded from here.

This blog series proved a valid exercise in refactoring existing code to make it more testable and also demonstrated that the reduced features of Isolator for SharePoint, at a reduced price point, do allow you to do TDD in SharePoint.

Whats next?

Andrew Woodward, follow him on twitter, will be speaking at the Best Practices SharePoint Conference in San Diego on in Feb 2009 looking at agile SharePoint development with Scrum and Test Driven SharePoint Development.