Whinge: Windows Application Project templates vs Website Templates

<whinge>

I’m sure you’ve all noticed this but the ASP.NET website application template doesn’t let you run the website application and make on the fly code changes, save them and refresh the page and watch it take effect while the website template does. There are a few advantages and disadvantages of both the templates but from my experience the trend with more involved and complex websites the trend is to have an asp.net web application template. This can get tedious when it takes you 1 minute to hit play and build the database project, data layer project, LINQ classes etc and finally the asp.net website, then another 2 minutes of creating some dummy data to get to where you want in the application to finally execute the piece of code for unit testing and bang, it fails because you forgot to check for null, or what ever the case may be. With the Website templates it’s so much easier to just make the changes, hit save, refresh and wallah hey presto you’re done, rather than pressing stop, waiting for another 15 seconds for that to work (this is on a fast laptop mind you, and not even in a virtual pc! native!) then make the changes and hit play and go through it again. 

I hope the asp.net program manager hears this whinge and includes that nice “save and compile per page” feature the website template has and include it into the website application template.

</whinge>

**Updated the next day **

 <embarrassed>

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/05/08/445742.aspx

</embarrassed>

=]

My day at work…

Yesterday at work I did two really cool things.
1) I had a live one note session with my colleague. It was a brain dump on what we should be testing in the project for our stabilization phase. See, as we reach christmas we decided to make the final week of the scrum sprint to be a stablization phase to make sure we weren’t starting off a sprint and leaving it half done over christmas.
I am really pleased with the session we had, it was extremely efficient beacuse we would see what each was writing then and there and would either say ‘Oh yes, good point I didn’t think of that!’ or ‘Hey, there’s no need to test that because I already implemented that fix’ or even ‘That scenario could be tested better by doing this’
This kind of rapid response/feedback I felt was worth a lot of time

2) We then went away and started wiring up the test harnesses. We are using visual stuidio unit tests and currently have no mockery architecture in place. We have about 20 unit tests so far and because they all touch the database it is starting to get slow to run the unit tests. I suspect the need for a mockery unit test solution will show its head shortly.

That’s all folks.