Meeting Date: March 29, 2007
Philly.Net has expanded. We now host meetings in the Philly Suburbs, Philadelphia (Center City), and now…South Jersey. Thanks to Travis Laborde for getting the new South Jersey branch going. Tonight’s meeting was a huge success. It was standing room only with about 50 attendees which is pretty impressive for a first meeting. Pizza and location provide by New Horizons Training Center. Plus, Travis’ wife Jessica treated us to a cake to celebrate the start of Philly.Net in NJ. It was a great meeting. Please read on…
Presenter: Travis Laborde, Data Deluxe
Topic: Developer Testing
Not only did we learn a lot from Travis’ presentation but we laughed a lot too. Travis always does a great job to make sure his presentations are fun. Tonight he talked all about developer testing. And typically for Travis, he included bunch of great tools. He demo’d the basics of NUnit, a FREE tool that assists with executing test classes. He also showed MBUnit which he dubbed “NUnit on steroids”. This tool allows you to execute similar tests as NUnit, but introduces the RowTest attribute so you can run the same test in multiple iterations, passing in different parameters each time. Next he went through testing for “Code Coverage” via TestDriven.Net and NCover. He ended up with some quick demos of SeleniumIDE, a very cool FireFox add-on that allows you to record steps in the Browser so you can play them back. This gives you the ability to test an ASP.Net UI over and over again automatically.
If you are into free tools and tips for .Net development, check out Travis’ clipmarks site where you can read about all kinds of cool stuff.
Presenter: Scott Watermasysk, Telligent Systems
Topic: ASP.NET Tips & Tricks
Scott has been posting ASP.Net tips and tricks on his blog for a while. Tonight he went through a bunch of them for us.
It is hard to summarize Scott’s talk because he talked about so many items. The good news is that most of the content is up on the web, check out the links included in my text. He provided us with a ton of tips for everyday use. Some tips provided for controls: Try to use <asp:Literal> control instead of <asp:label> and use <asp:Repeater> instead of <asp:GridView> where possible. Some general ASP.Net tips included: use Page.IsValid from button event handlers, use the AppOffline.htm page when you are doing “construction”, use the new VirtualPath class to convert relative paths to absolute ones. And Scott also spent a lot of time talking about State Management and Caching tips. He also recommended a few articles: one by Fritz Onion on Control State and “A Matter of Context” by Susan Warren. I’ll update this blog post and include his slides as soon as I can.
As a special bonus, Scott provided free copies of CodeSmith Professional for all attendees. This certainly went over big with the crowd.