Paul Laudeman and Darrell Norton did a fine job on their hands-on WeProgram.Net presentation last evening. They covered some of the “N” family of tools like:
- NUnit
- Darrel did this, of course, as he's the 4th resource (out of 6, I think) listed on the NUnit.org website (http://www.nunit.org/resources.html). He's really earned a reputation as an NUnit authority, so we were fortunate to have him!
- NCover
- Darrel did this one too; I messed around with NCover a while back, but I think it was the sourceforge NCover. The GotDotNet Workspaces NCover tool is preferred, they tell me, so I think I'll revisit the code coverage tool with this NCover instance. I think NCover is a great tool and will impress the pants off the customer when we deliver the coverage analysis along with our bill! Seriously, it's analysis like that can be a sign of professionalism and real craftsmanship.
- On a side note, I don't think the presentation mentioned NCoverViewer that, as advertised, ties into Visual Studio .Net.
- NAnt
- Paul handled this area as he's the NAnt expert on his project team. We had minor trouble with the version of NAnt (we installed a newer release than Paul was expecting), but everyone got the gist of it.
In a 1-2 hour presentation, it's tough to do everything justice but I think they did great. They left us wanting more (like NDoc, NMock, the list goes on . . .). These hands-on sessions are very popular and everyone seems to get a lot out of them . . . it takes more effort from the presenter(s), but the audience appreciates it. To sum up:
PowerPoint = OK
but
PowerPoint + Samples + Hands_on_time = GREAT
On a final note, I should point out that I paired up with local Bridge sensation Brian Lamprecht during the hands-on exercises and we played with FxCop during the NUnit material (we already have NUnit in the blood). FxCop was on the agenda, but we didn't have time to cover it so maybe next time. Anyway, FxCop could've done itself a favor by making extensibility a tad easier -- maybe with an FxCop project template included with the install or a more terse API. You see, we were messing around with creating our own FxCop rules and realized it's a bit of a pain to implement the interfaces because of how many methods there are; the future of FxCop shows some promise in this regard, and there are some sample rules on line, but it's still more difficult than it needs to be.
Anyway, thanks Paul and Darrel for a great session!