nEvill

Colleagues who have to endure my sense of humour also have to enjoy my appreciation of Nant, the .net developer’s best friend.  Recently I’ve been using it to build databases during CruiseControl.net builds to enable a very complicated upgrade project to progress with some degree of order. Nanting the database build using Ruby on Rails style migrations is a great way to tie code builds to database builds.  I’ll dig out the generic nant script for reference as it’s a very handy technique. So what can’t you Nant?  Well, not a lot and that’s my point… if it moves, automate it.  The only thing distracting me from my enjoyment of Nant is Watir, another cracking product which I’m using all day every day to drive my web application testing… now if I can only hook up Watir with Nant. 

I really like TFS and the way it integrates work items, bugs, source code etc into the Visual Studio 2005 interface.  However, one slightly naff aspect is the speed at which you can zip round TFS work items.. especially if you can’t quite remember the exact error message or work item id.  You can create queries to the nth degree but I much prefer a simple search option, something the winform interface doesn’t provide.

 After a very informative recent DotNetDevNet meeting where Richard Fennell presented I was directed to the VSTS Web Access application which incorporates such a thing as a search box!  This enabled me recently to track down all previous bugs with the same error message and thus save wasting time debugging already fixed bugs.

This was an interesting gotcha when using vs2005 which is ‘probably by design’ as MS like to say. When you right click on a private method in a class and create a private accessor make sure to reattach any project references in your target unit test project. For some reason vs2005 removes said references… to see it in action expand the project so you can see the references then add the accessor. Watch in amazement as vs removes your project references leaving your build broken, nice!

Stylus studio is my favourite xml/xsd editor and has come to rescue again by escaping my xml attribute values when editing in grid mode. A simple feature you might think but important when you’re wrestling with siteMapNode urls in .Net.

Recently I was given a messy looking file url to link to, this included spaces and ampersands… escaping by hand was ok but simply pasting the value into stylus studio was much better and worked for IE.