NUnit macros for VS2005

I’ve been told the most current direction is to use the Unit Test framework, however I see no reason to convert or change my own methodologies since from what I’ve seen so far this new feature seemed a little buggy.  I’ve noticed some minor glitches in the way it works with source control bindings and just in general the NUnit just seems a little more simpler to get running.  I’ve sure Unit Test will get better and probably become the standard for TDD in time to come with VS.

In the meantime, I wrote a couple macros for VS2005 to help my testing workflow.  I like TestDriven.Net as an add-in to the VS IDE, I just don’t like constant checks to check on what needs to be rebuilt.  Generally, I know the dependencies myself and would like to go right into debugging oppose to these checks.  So I created a macro to automatically attach and debug to a current “nunit.exe” process.

Here’s the code below, I think a nice little enhancement would be a listbox asking which one to debug (assuming you have multiple projects currently with NUnit guis up).

Afterwards export the file to where you put all your macros and then you can add them to your IDE.

   1:  Imports System

   2:  Imports EnvDTE

   3:  Imports EnvDTE80

   4:  Imports System.Diagnostics

   5:   

   6:  Public Module AttachToNUnitGui

   7:      Sub AttachToNUnitGui()

   8:          Dim ps As EnvDTE.Processes = DTE.Debugger.LocalProcesses()

   9:          Dim process As EnvDTE.Process

  10:          Dim p As EnvDTE.Process

  11:          Dim found As Boolean = False

  12:   

  13:          For Each p In ps

  14:              If p.Name.EndsWith("nunit.exe") = True Then

  15:                  found = True

  16:                  process = p

  17:              End If

  18:          Next

  19:   

  20:   

  21:          If (found) Then

  22:              p.Attach()

  23:          Else

  24:              MsgBox("No nunit consoles running")

  25:          End If

  26:      End Sub

  27:  End Module

Currently listening to Tapes N' Tapes - Insistor

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Jack Johnson at Blossom Music Center

I can officially say that I will never ever see a large act at blossom music center again. You’re probably saying you should have known better to see someone like Jack Johnson with such a large following at Blossom, you’re probably right I should have. I was hoping it would be different.

The last time Jack made it near Cleveland was 2004 when he traveled with G love and Donovan at the Amphitheater. This wasn’t bad as Jack’s following didn’t hit its peak yet. This time around I was pretty much miserable the first hour. Reason because, Blossom sells too many tickets. Yesterday there were just too many people there who figured Jack was just trendy for the week. Alot of annoying uncontrollable underage alcohol-consuming kids having no idea who Jack was. Just kind of annoying. I’m happy for all the successs he has had, definitely well-deserved, however, I miss the grassroots feel to his music. Yesterday, everything around him just felt too commercialized. Also we were so high up the hill, the music wasn’t loud enough to drown out the sound of underage kids scheming on how to get alcohol. (Which I know was probably be 6 years ago)

Maybe I’ll have to travel elsewhere to really enjoy him live again, in the meantime I’ll continue to scour here for his live tapings.

Plus the cold rain sucked, sorry I’m bitter its only been a day.

Zip Studio 2005

Now I’m not one of those hardcore version control guys who needs source safe setup up on another box on his personal network with binding attached to all his VS projects.  I think this admin causes more issues and extra work without following through with all the benefits.  Especially, considering source control main advantage is being able to work with concurrent projects.

Though even for personal usage I think source control can be a total advantage in other areas.  Namely prototyping ideas.  It reduces the risk and time to attempt some different design or attempted refactor on the current solution.  Without some type of source management, you run the risk to have a sort “safe” working solution with an opportunity to attempt a “ground-breaking, change the world” design.  Attempting this change is the risk paid in time and chance that you fubar your solution to where you can’t get it back to the glory it once was.

I had the idea of writing a plugin which wouldn’t be as full-blown as a real version control system, all I need is a little snapshot I can get back to.  I wanted to be able to take a specific solution as argument and parse through the projects and zip them with directory to a location, sounds useful?  Too useful that it has already been done? correct again… This plugin saves me weekly.

Tecmo Bowl Update…

In lieu of the upcoming super bowl, I figured I’d put out some screenshots of an extremely early beta of one of my side projects which is relevant to the super bowl.

This really had nothing to do with the super bowl, but more to do with my thumb killing me the last week so I chose not to play in a vball tournament this week. Team Haeg-ah still won. But because of this I’ve been shelling out code to this project like crazy. Good code or bad code?… still in the air on that one.

Anyways, this screen shot is technically not “in-game” but more of a performance test of 24-26 guys on the field at once running in place and also swapping in and out sprites assembled into a particular sequence. Looking promising so far, I hit a performance issue when adding the actual field. Field texture was too large and added a large difference in fps. Put in a tiling engine which I found on here by Kurt Jaegers, pretty quality – straightforward. Anyways I’m working on refactoring this into the TecmoBowl solution and looking at the performance differences then, we’ll see this week..

C# Express NUnit

C# Express does not give you the ability to run through your nunits in debug. To mitigate your test-driven developments hassles, I came across this little workaround gem…. http://nunit.com/blogs/?p=28 . You’ll have to mess around with the arguments after that but you get the point.

Anyways continuing to focus some of the common library functionality for this XNA toy project, getting closer by the day. The design process has been a little backwards at this point (tons of refactoring err… rewriting). Lot of proof of concept projects, testing some ideas, trying to be creative, borrowing others code to see what I can leverage. Can kind of be expected with the concurrent refactoring done with the XNA framework as well. They changed things on their side which have all made great sense, causing me to refactor on my side because of the new way of thinking. I think I’ve ironed out most of the kinks at this point, and have a pretty good understanding for what I’ll be able to work with on the next level up. More to come soon.

Came across this from Carmack on Slashdot interesting read on the differences between the PS3 and 360 SDKs.

I think thats enough random stream of consciousness for one night.