Pierre-Emmanuel Dautreppe

Merry Christmas, Joyeuses Fêtes y Feliz Navidad !

Just a quick post before taking the road for my holidays to wish you a merry christmas and an happy new year 2008 !

I leave this blog for a few weeks and I will come in January with plenty new articles. What I'm preparing ?

• A new page describing my book shelf and so good reading references ! :-)
  • I will add there the books I have already read and for the new ones, I will try to always add a "criticism"
• A criticism about the book "Extreme.NET"
• A serie of articles about AOP in .NET and about PostSharp
• A very long article about MsBuild and Continuous Integration in Visual Studio 2005 / 2008. This will be the whitepaper of my next training I will give in Brussels

Not such a bad planning I hope ;-)

My wish for next year ? To continue having a great private life with my wife and my friends ! Plenty of good moments to come !

And professionaly ? I can only hope further technical discoveries, learnings and challenges. And I hope I will be able to have more contacts with the last .NET guys I have been shortly in contact with like Didier Danse, Roy Osherove or Scott Hanselman. And of course continuing and increasing my technical exchanges with Loic Bar and Thierry Thoua and all people of my company like we are already doing via training and discussions !

 Merry Christmas and see you soon !

As an architect, I like to regularly go back to the "basis" of development and to ask myself and others, again and again, the same architecture and conceptions questions. And each time, I discover new aspects and I succeed to understand better or deeper such or such domain.

In a previous post, I have spoken about my experience at the CITCON and my discovery of Open Space Discussions. I have found this concept very interesting and I have decided to use this concept for our architecture meetings. This concept will evolve about during our meetings.

This time, we'll meet on Monday December 17th at the Kaii Theater in Brussels to speak about nTiers development. This discussion will be led by Didier Pieroux, Dario Garcia Coder, Ronan Guillamet and myself. All topic can be aborded, but here are some ideas we were thinking to speak of :

• Encapsulation
• Separation of concerns
• Data Access Layers, Persistence Layer and Stored Procedures
• Value Objects and Business Objects
  • Inheritance
  • Composition
  • Conversion
  • What to expose and when

You would like to join ? Leave a comment and I will contact you !

EDIT: The meeting will start at 18h30 in "Les Halles St-Géry"

Two years ago, I have started to work with the TFS and so with MsBuild and Continuous Integration. I have soon seen that I was missing some automation tasks and so I turned to SDC (.NET SDC Solution Build & Deployment Process & Tools) that was adding more or less 100 new tasks. More than enough !

Yes but in the end I was still missing some specific task and so I have started to create my owns. Here is how Jarod.Sdc.Extensions project is born ! I have decided to create a package around .NET SDC (migrated after a while to SBF - Solution Build Framework) and to create my tasks.

Here is the latest version of this library including a new task : MsTest. Redundant with the Microsoft's TestToolTask or SBF's MsTest task ?

No not really. First it allow you to work more low-level by playing directly with command lines MsTest launching, and then it allows you to "ignore Inconclusive tests".

The reason why ? In our environment, business analysts are describing or coding tests weeks or months in advance specifying for which version they will have to bi in application. To avoid loosing them or having difficulties to find them back, we don't want to use the Ignore attribute. So what ? We say they are inconclusive. (Note that we have "only" the Team Edition For Software Developpers, and so in the 2005 version, no test list manager is available).

What is the consequence, we have "ad vitam eternam" a red build because we always have some inconclusive tests. In our specific case, this is the only case we have inconclusive tests.

So this new task allow to consider that all the inconclusive tests will be passed. You will still see the good result in the test run (seeing passed and inconclusive tests) but your global build will turn green if it contains only passed tests or passed and inconclusive tests.

This task supports Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008.

Want to have a try ? Find it here !

Note that this version has been released almost one month ago but I didn't got time to communicate sooner...