Joe Shirey, Microsoft Regional Director, and Nick VanMatre, Interlink consultant since 2003, will give a peresentation on SQL Server Integration Services and XML Data Type during the Boulder .NET  User Group monthly meeting, beginning at 5:30 p.m. April 25th. The meeting will be at th

The Code Trip is a 22-city tour being done by the evangelism team at Microsoft. Come join the Boulder .NET user group for a discussion on some of the newest Microsoft technologies. Meeting page for more info http://www.boulderug.com/meetings/MeetingMarch2008.htm

Check back later for the description.

vsTODOlist is a Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 language extension that allows you to
implement to-do lists for your development projects using color coding and
Intellisense.

A TODO list file is still
- text based
- partially unstructured

vsTODOlist is
- Free
- Customizable.

Screen cast and download at http://www.InCisif.net/vsTODOlist

Free Podcast: Featuring Frank Cohen on Unit Testing in Java & SOA

Java developers have widely adopted test first software development strategies. Unit test frameworks for Java, Web services, Ajax, REST, Service Oriented Architecture, and Flash/Action Script show the diversity of adoption among Java developers. In this podcast, Frank takes Java developers through the advanced topics in unit testing: turning unit tests into functional tests, running unit tests on a scalable grid of unit testing nodes, leveraging unit tests build by developers in the software testing effort, correlating unit test results to frameworks that observe hot spots of performance and providing operational data to unit tests at test runtime. Frank also talks about TestMaker and Selenium.

Original Software launches TestDrive-Assist and community site with free downloads


Chicago, April 8, 2008 – Original Software, a leader in next-generation software test automation, today announced the launch of ManualTesting.com and the latest version of TestDrive-Assist, its unique solution aimed at streamlining the manual testing process without taking away any control from the tester. ManualTesting.com is a community site for software quality professionals containing numerous free resources designed to alleviate the headaches caused by the burden of time-consuming manual testing on QA departments. The site also features a free trial download of the newly-launched product, which can reduce the time spent on manual testing by over a third.

Just got back from CITCON 2008, Denver. This was my second CITCON and I am very happy I went. David.

CITCON, the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, is a world-wide series of free Open Spaces events for developer-testers, tester-developers and anyone else with an interest in Continuous Integration and the type of Testing that goes along with it.

CITCON provides a forum to connect with other people on topics you care about, to learn from their experience and share your own. Past topics include:

* What is Continuous Integration?
* What CI Tools can learn from the Rubber Chicken
* What Is The One True Language For Writing Tests?
* The Future of Build Languages
* BDD is not TDD
* How Far is End-to-End?
* Fit for Fun and Profit
* Overcoming Barriers to Adoption

Its a sign of the times that no self-respecting source-level library vendor ships without tests. Read more on Brad Abrams' blog.

Fixture Gallery is a cookbook for FIT/FitNesse tests. It provides developers with a quick overview of the most important fixture types and concepts for agile acceptance testing using the FIT framework. For each fixture type, this document explains the table format and fixture class structure and provides advice when to use and when not to use it. Each example is accompanied by the source code for Java and .NET FIT implementations, in a form that can be easily copied and used as a template for similar fixtures.

See http://gojko.net/fitnesse/fixturegallery/ for more information and download links.

SevenMock v1.1 has now been released - extending the light-weight mock object implementation with a class extension sub-project. This allows generated mock objects to be cast directly to classes as well as interfaces - which will prove useful for anyone who wants to mock classes that don't implement defined interfaces.

I am pleased to finally announce version 1.0 of DbFit. DbFit is a set of FIT fixtures which enables FIT/FitNesse tests to execute directly against a database. This enables developers to manipulate database objects in a relational tabular form, making database testing and management much easier than with xUnit-style tools. The library is free to use, released under GNU GPL.

The Good News: there are now 3 projects that do selective testing in java - Testar, JTestMe, Infinitest
The Bad News: each is in various stages of incompleteness.

Yet I am encouraged and hope that progress will be swift in this area.

I see three major use cases for selective testing:

* Running tests while editing your code just as modern IDEs compile your code on the fly. The best example of this approach is Infinitest.
* Making the smoke test build fast. (Often the smoke test is run as a pre-submit test for the code to be committed to the repository)
* Quick feedback from acceptance/integration/QA tests. This is best achieved with a build grid to run these tests in parallel.

A few days ago I had a session at a .NET conference in Germany (BASTA Spring 2008). I talked about software quality assurance and especially test driven development. Because of many people asking me about the details and the source code of my talk I wrote an article about TDD (including TDD of Web-UIs) with Visual Studio 2008 and WatiN: Bug Busters - Test Driven Development in .NET.