I was really looking forward to having Cloud as its own project type in VS2010 Beta 2, but apparently it didn’t make it in for the beta. So now I have to wait until the November drop of Azure for the tools for VS2010 to be released. Bummer…

I came across this awsome song just now and wanted to share it with you (there is a little PHP rant in there that makes the icing on the cake )

By the way, according to ScottGu’s series of blog posts about VS2010 and .Net 4, Beta 2 isn’t too far away.

I am torn. For a while now, I thought that I had settled on the decision to use Azure as our cloud provider. But now that the pricing is ready, I see that the “large” offering they have is for 10 GB of database storage. 10 GB!! That means that I have to spend time, effort and guesswork on partitioning my databases even for my small projects!

So I need to figure out how Azure is better than Amazon EC2 where the smallest you can start with has 160 GB of storage, which should leave well over 100 GB of space available for database storage after installing Windows Server and SQL Server.

Anybody who can shine some light on this for me is welcome to post a comment.

PS: Azure is not off to a good start for me for one more reason. I need my cloud “package” to scale up and down dynamically. Azure doesn’t have that and won’t have that when they go live at PDC this year. Amazon does!

TypeMock is holding another live webinar on 11/AUG/2009. In this webinar they will show how to unit test legacy code (or existing code). As in previous webinars, there are 2 sessions. Click the link to register and secure a place for your preferred time:

8am GMT – https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/781368771

And again at 2pm EDT: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/987464714

Here you can see the official announcement for this event

Typemock is working hard these days, and are now releasing a new unit testing product called Racer. This will test your code for deadlock conditions very easily.

Unfortunately I haven’t had the time to try out my Racer yet, but if you are interested, Typemock are giving away free licenses to bloggers who want to review the product.

Get the full details on Typemock’s blog.

Happy racing!

Being a TypeMock MVP, I have been given a license of the newly released TypeMock and Ivonna bundle to give away to a reader of my blog. The first one to say nice things in the comments of this post will receive a free license!

I have been using TypeMock for several years and it has become an extremely valuable tool for creating my tests. Especially since I started to tuck away all my data access stuff into Entity Framework. I must honestly say that I haven’t used Ivonna in a real project yet, but playing around with it shows that it has a lot of power. Lightning fast testing of my ASP.Net stuff is really great. And since it is just a plugin to TypeMock, it is really easy to get started with.

Here is the official marketing about the two bundled products:

Typemock Isolator
Typemock Isolator is a .NET unit testing tool that enables developers to write simpler and maintainable unit tests. With Isolator, developers can create fake objects and test against them, instead of testing against external code. This helps developers to eliminate dependencies, test their code in isolation and achieve better code coverage, ultimately saving time and money, and delivering their code in a shorter period of time. Typemock Isolator gives .NET developers the power to unit test their code, by making unit tests easy to write and automate.
Typemock Ltd is an agile software development company founded in 2004 that creates solutions for simple and easy unit testing.

Ivonna
Ivonna creates and runs ASP.NET requests. Ivonna enables you to examine the intrinsic objects such as the Page object, execute in-process ASP.NET requests (no Web server required), to execute multiple requests in one test method, including postbacks and more. Ivonna 2.0, due to launch soon, includes brand-new features such as:

• test Web controls without adding them to a page
• add, remove, or replace HttpModules
• use a separate configuration file for your tests
• extend the framework by adding custom CThru aspects

Ivonna 2 will provide full support for ASP.NET MVC.

 The race is on! 

[EDIT]
The race is off. Frode was quick with the first comment, and will receive a TypeMock with Ivonna bundle license.

Tech-Ed 2008 Barcelona

It has been a while since my last post, mostly due to work and family (bah – who am I kidding, it was all work…), but I managed to find time to go to Tech-Ed 2008 in Barcelona. And any blogger with any self-respect have to put up at least one blog about this.

Even without the presentations and contents of the conference itself, it was a good trip. On Wednesday, Microsoft Norway had closed down Hard Rock Cafe and had free drinks and food for Norwegian delegates. What was cool about this was that they also hooked in a lot of the speakers and staff of the conference and had them over for drinks at Hard Rock. So my friend and I had a long and prosperous talk (at least it seemed OK but considering the amount of alcohol I had consumed, maybe it wasn’t all that prosperous) with Rockford Lothka (the author of CSLA and and excellent speaker) and his wife Theresa. Rocky, if you read this, I promise to put a little more effort into writing my novel

Another cool thing about the gathering at Hard Rock was that I met someone who had delivered newspapers to my house when I was a kid, and another guy there had lived next door to me in another city when I was even younger. And I had to come all the way from Norway to meet these guys in Barcelona. It’s a small world after all…

Back to the conference, here is a list of the things I learned at Tech-Ed that I am most likely to pursue either directly in current projects or at least to dig around in by myself:

• The keynote presented Visual Studio 2010. AWSOME!! I can hardly wait until the next CTP to get my hands on it. The WPF based editor and consume first friendly approach was kicking ass! Not to mention the extremely powerful documentation features where you could just point to a solution and you get the interaction diagrams and sequence diagrams, and you could have the diagrams directly as comments in your code! Briliant!!
• I will definitely check out ASP.Net Data Services now that I got a little insight into how to tighten down the security, access plans etc. I must admit that I have kind of dismissed RESTful services as something that only hard-core agile “I-don’t-have-to-use-real-tools-because-I-am-a-coding-guru-and-can-do-what-I-want-or-I-am-not-working-in-real-life-projects” geeks used, but combined with the interceptors and stuff you can do with Data Services it is a really powerful tool. And maybe my PHP customers can finally consume my services
• Another ASP.Net addition is the Dynamic Data stuff that I really like. Finally, a lagger like me have an easy way to really disconnect my model from my presentation. The presentation showed how to put Dynamic Data extensions and scaffolding into existing ASP.Net web applications as opposed to most of the demos out there that starts from scratch. Really useful stuff.
• I got some valuable input regarding the future of unit testing from Roy Osherove (who also stopped by Hard Rock Cafe), which was valuable. I will be exciting to see what a mix of using a dynamic language such as Boo in unit tests for C# 4.0 with support for dynamic types can do for the ease of test creation.
• I will also definitely try out Silverlight as a potential client for a part of our system. The 2.0 version where you can program C# for almost anything you need to do (you can even call DOM objects or javascript methods direcly from your C# code), makes life bearable even for a non-designer like me.
• Even SDL (Security Development Lifecycle) will be adopted now, boring as it is, using the new Threat Modeling tool as a guide for development. The new version of the modeling tool even integrates with Team Foundation System to make sure that bugs and new features are kept in sync with the model.

I’ll round this up by sharing the single most embarrassing moment of the conference; I was approached by Rune Grothaug in Microsoft Norge and was asked if I wanted to be on TV. I reluctantly agreed, believing that, being approached by a Norwegian in Norwegian, I would be on a Norwegian TV clip. But it turned out that it was an interview that will be used in the promotion of next year’s Tech-Ed, and I had to do the interview in English. And they even had the nerve to ask questions that required more than a nod back…

Anywho, look for me in the promo for next year’s Tech-Ed (which will be in Berlin, by the way).

DimeCasts.net is a new website that publishes ten minute video tutorials in subjects related to programming. The site is brand new, but it has the potential to be a great resource for developers having to learn something new. It currently has an excellent series on the use of NUnit, but when word gets around and the community starts to pitch in, I have a feeling this could be big.

(Found via Roy at ISerializable)

This is a silver bullet that can end all debate on whether or not the global climate change is human-made or not and whether to take action or not.

The essence of the argument is a simple worst case/best case matrix that shows the consequences of action vs no action on the climate changes being real or not.

See this video and then forward it to everyone you know. Me – I am no gambler so I am betting on column A to minimize my risk…

Paul Stovell has created a LINQ library that can be used to simplify the maintenance of state in complex (and even not so complex) applications. It is called SyncLINQ, and consists of a few extension methods that can be used to very easily take advantage of INotifyPropertyChanged and INotifyCollectionChanged events for keeping your state in sync. It also has an Asynchronous() extension method that uses the same event processing to allow for the easiest asynchronous data retrieval I have ever seen! KUDOS Paul!

There are a few good examples on his website, and I recommend you take the time to go through them. There are also a couple of videos, but be warned: Paul is very much an Aussie so you might need to concentrate to understand what he is talking about

I haven’t had the time to try this out yet, but I am doing a CAB spike right now so I will probably try this out to see how it can handle the state management in a modular UI over the next couple of days. And from the information on his website and his demos it looks very promising.