Cook Computing

benjaminm's blog has links to posts on the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper event at Microsoft in Reading last Saturday. I enjoyed the event. Its good to learn about something different from what you're doing day-to-day. In particular Stephan Schoenig's session on TDD was the first time I'd heard of NMock. Funny how you can miss things like that, from which you can deduce I don't do a huge amount of unit testing with .NET code. I do use NUnit for XML-RPC.NET, which is self-contained and so mock objects are not necessary, but in the day job we don't have the necessary commitment to move to TDD. Having said that NMock is definitely something I will be investigating.

Brian Long presented an entertaining session on .NET debugging which actually inspired me to use the cdb debugger in earnest yesterday, so that was another session of great practical use.

Guy Smith-Ferrier's session on ClickOnce deployment was interesting and raised some questions in my mind about how CAS is used in this scenario so I have some research to do in this area.

There was even a session on Mono, presented by Ben Lamb. I was amused when he said that he had planned to give a demo of MonoDevelop but hadn't managed to get it to install. Some things never change in the Linux world.

I'm working in London the second half of this week so I've registered for the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper event at Microsoft, Reading, on Saturday. Working in a small development group things can get a bit stale at times and it will be good to meet some other developers, absorb some enthusiasm for software development for a change, and hopefully learn a thing or two.

I am about to switch. My Mac Mini is slowly making it way across Europe after leaving Pardubice in the Czech Republic on Saturday. By 5:05GMT this morning it had reached Luxembourg. I ordered the base model with an upgrade to 512M memory.

A while ago I mentioned a couple of problems with XML-RPC.NET and Whidbey. One remains in beta 2: proxy generation using System.Reflection.Emit failed because TypeBuilder.CreateType could not create the proxy class due to an "inaccessible interface" error. I reported the bug to the MSDN Product Feedback Center, and it has since been fixed for the RTM milestone. Proxy generation fails if you define the interface like this:

[XmlRpcUrl("http://www.cookcomputing.com/sumAndDiff.rem")] 
interface ISumAndDiff
{ 
  [XmlRpcMethod] 
  SumAndDiffValue SumAndDifference(int x, int y);
}

The workaround is to define the interface as public. Obviously this is not much use if you don't have the source code.

The next release of XML-RPC.NET is overdue. Finishing off the documentation remains, always the hardest part.