My VSLive San Francisco 2009 Slides

March 03, 2009

I spoke at VSLive San Francisco 2009 last week.

Here are the talks that I did and links to download my slides:

Eliminate Team Build Headaches with Unit Tests, WiX, and Virtualization

You’ve got your application written. The unit tests pass on your machine. It’s time to check in. Now what?

What you really want to do is trigger a build with Team Build. Ok. That’s simple enough with TFS2008. Let’s say though that in that build, you want to run your unit tests and, if all goes well, have something that’s ready to promote from the Dev environment to QA. What’s the best way to do that? What if your application isn’t so simple that you can just run the whole thing on the build server? What if in order to unit test your application your app needs to be deployed to multiple servers first? How do you handle environment specific configuration files? How do you put this all together without losing your mind?

In this session, Ben will show you how to use combine Team Build, Windows Installer Xml (WiX), and Virtualization to solve some major hassles in your real-world automated builds.

(download slides)

Windows Azure: Is the Relational Database Dead?

Is the relational database dead? Well, maybe. But let’s put it a different way. Windows Azure lets you take your skills as a .NET developer and write applications that can run at “internet scale” without having to learn a bunch of new stuff. You don’t have to worry about managing your datacenter or servers or anything like that either – it’s all taken care of for you and you just write the app. Except that in order to make that “internet scale” performance a reality, you have to think a little differently about your data storage.

In this session, Ben will show you how to write an application for Windows Azure using ASP.NET and WCF. He’ll also tell you what need to know to get the most out of Windows Azure Storage including accessing storage via REST. Along the way, Ben will also show you some best practices to help you be more productive while writing and maintaining your Windows Azure app.

(download slides)

Beyond Basic Unit Testing: Mocks, Stubs, User Interfaces, and Refactoring for Testability

You’re sold on unit testing. You’re even doing “test first” development. How do your user interfaces fit into your testing plan? Do you even unit test your user interfaces? (Probably not.) What about calls into separate sub-systems or calls out to web services? Do you really need to have all those pieces running in order to test your logic? And what are mocks and stubs anyway?

In this session, Ben will answer these questions, show you how to test your user interfaces, and also show you how using mocks objects and stubs can help simplify your tests.

(download slides)

If you have any questions, or comments on these slides or would like me to come give any of these presentations at your company or user group, drop me a line.

-Ben

Categories: good-stuff msbuild tech visual-studio-team-system-vsts wcf windows-azure-services wix
Tags: c-sharp team-build tfs