June 2008 - Posts

• Come see me speak about Silverlight 2.0 at the Alamo Coders on Tuesday July 8th

  I am excited to have a chance to speak to the Alamo Coders user group about Silverlight 2.0.  I am planing on covering some general information about Silverlight and where if fits in the overall technology stack against some of the other technologies like AIR and FLEX.  I do plan on demonstrating the areas that I think makes it a legitimate Application platform which is it's built in support for testability and rich APIs.  The meeting will be at  Tuesday July 8th at 6:00pm at the New Horizons Learning Center .  If you are near San Antonio feel free to drop in and see me!   You can subscribe to this feed here http://feeds.feedburner.com/EricHexter See you next week.   Eric Posted Jun 29 2008, 08:26 PM by erichexter with 1 comment(s)

• Session materials posted for my Austin Code Camp 2008 Silverlight 2 Unit Testing session

  I have been really busy between starting as a Principal Consultant for Headspring Systems and a long awaited vacation.  I am just catching up on some blog posts. My Silverlight Unit Testing session at the Austin Code Camp 2008 went really well.   The source code and presentation is available for download here. I got some great feedback and look forward to being able to speak on the topic some more!   I wanted to formally thank John Teague for all of his hard work organizing the code camp.  With a new baby at home there was no way I could have organized it this year so I was happy to have John pull it together while I was able to focus on sponsorships and swag.  I think it was a great event and I will have a retrospective with John so that we can share all that we have learned about running a camp as well as how to successfully hand off the execution from one person to the next. I think there is more value in being able to grow a community where we have more leaders who can execute these types of events and I believe we have some great lessons to share. There is some great material for all of the code camp sessions on our code camp source repository.  Please check it out here.   Subscribe to my feed here http://feeds.feedburner.com/EricHexter Posted Jun 24 2008, 08:55 PM by erichexter with 1 comment(s)

• Silverlight Beta 2 Released and what that means for the Testing Framework.

  ok..  So Silverlight Beta 2 was released on and it has some great new features. But what is the story about testing...? 1 Jeff Willcox blogged about a small change you will need to make in order to use the existing testing framework. It is essentially adding a cast to the initial startup code for the testing framework.  He also posted new C# and VB.net project and item templates. He also hinted that there will be a new release of the test framework and some samples of integration with a Continuous Integration server.  I am excited about that.  I have some prototypes that were half baked to do this, I just have not had any time to make it usable.   2. The one feature that I am happy to see is the UI Automation (UIA) support. The UIA will make test driving the UI and producing a true end-to-end test possible with a well documented and supported API.  Accessibility is supported in WPF so there are some controls that implement these features in this latest release of silverlight. UI Automation has all the hooks to allow testing tools to drive an application through the U.  Reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_UI_Automation  The best part about silverlight supporting UIA is that a number of people have already paved the way by testing WPF using this  API... http://blogs.msdn.com/llobo/archive/2007/09/06/testing-using-wpf-ui-automation.aspx  Once again I think ThoughtWorks leads the way with their open source project http://www.codeplex.com/white.  Looking at the getting started page, I am excited to see how easier their helper "core" library integrates with nunit.... What more could I ask for?   As I upgrade my previous samples to the Beta 2 Framework and experiment with the White project I will have some posting coming soon.   Happily Testing Eric Hexter             Posted Jun 08 2008, 04:49 PM by erichexter with 3 comment(s) Filed under: c#, testing, silverlight