Developed to help introduce key topics in Test Driven Development, for new and veteran developers alike. Some examples are language-specific (C# / MSTest / Moq), but the principles apply to any object oriented language.

Principles and patterns for test driven development

Stirring up a grassroots movement is hard work.

Dallas Interfaith Power & Light's steering committee has been working together for about two years now. We've held a number of workshops and dialogues on diverse topics, including: forming a green team, energy efficiency, solar, health impacts of climate change, the value of our park systems, the science of climate change, and more. Perhaps 100-150 people have attended, although our actual signed-in attendance count is 84 across all events.

As a "team lead" software engineer, I feel that an important part of my role is to ensure that the code is simple, but not necessarily easy. In fact, when I hear a developer say that "using this approach is easier," I have to fight the urge to lower my tail and growl menacingly.

Granted: code that only a senior developer, or worse yet only the author, understands is likewise unacceptable. Show me a piece of code that is too complex and abstruse, and we can have a conversation about (a) object oriented design theory and patterns, (b) refactoring to more self-explanatory methods, and (c) adding some appropriate formatting, comments and/or external documentation for blocks of code that are still unnerving. After all, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler," to (supposedly) quote Einstein – and frankly, general relativity is still hard to understand without significant study.

In the east, you have the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird. In the west, there's the Black-Chinned Hummingbird. As with many other east/west divisions in both the animal and plant kingdoms, the two hummers sometimes overlap right here in Dallas county — for example, you can find both of them at Dogwood Canyon Audubon Center at Cedar Hill. Living in northwestern Dallas County, we did not know which to expect when we set out our feeder a few weeks ago. Thus far, it is has been entirely Black-Chinned.

Recently I have been looking at ServiceStack's OrmLite "Micro ORM" as a light-weight alternative to Entity Framework. It is relatively easy to use and very powerful, with capability for both code-first and database-first development. After learning the basic interaction, it was time to flip back into TDD-mode.

And then I found quite the challenge: I wanted to write unit tests that insure that I'm using OrmLite correctly. I was not interested (for the time being) in testing OrmLite's interaction with SQL Server itself. That is, I wanted behavioral unit tests rather than database integration tests. Time for a mock. But what would I mock? This ORM framework makes extensive use of extension methods that run off of the core IDbConnection interface from the .Net framework - so it would seem that there is no way to take advantage of Dependency Injection.

Last weekend, faith communities across the U.S. hosted more than two-hundred events aimed at expanding awareness of the reality of climate change. This was the National Preach-In on Climate Change, sponsored by Interfaith Power & Light. As Co-Chair of Dallas Interfaith Power & Light, I was excited and honored to be able to give a presentation to my own community (Bahá'ís of Irving) and to attend the innovative Preach-Off on Climate Change in Austin. The Bahá'í s of Austin also afforded me an opportunity to give my presentation on Moral Imperatives for Climate Action, from a Bahá'í Perspective, at their Sunday morning devotional program. Hopefully I was able to provide something useful to a few people; I certainly received much from my conversation and participation with people from many faith backgrounds. This will, God-willing, be the first of two blog posts reflecting on the conversations.

We got up this morning with merely grudging acceptance of the breakfast we planned on attending — an introduction to the Valley Ranch home owners association and committees, for new home owners. We left the meeting feeling excited and optimistic. We already knew that it was a good, "master planned," neighborhood. Now we feel more confident that it has a bright future as well, one that includes serious water conservation measures, ecological aesthetics, and social opportunities.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a great tool for building client/server applications in the .Net environment. It is one of those technologies that can be challenging to dig into when services are just one of many tools needed to assemble a business application, as opposed to being an end in itself. With some of my co-workers in mind, here are some of the lessons I have learned in using WCF for internal, line-of-business, applications. These notes, which will be published in several parts, assume a basic understanding of WCF and contracts.

Climate change and air quality were the unifying concerns at this past week's Dallas Interfaith Power & Light (IPL) meeting, held at White Rock United Methodist Church in Dallas on January 9. Our guest speakers, from Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), attracted an eclectic group of people from many organizations - attended by active members of IPL itself, the Sierra Club, Downwinders at Risk, Frac Dallas, and Americans for Nonsmokers's Rights. Each of us, from slightly different perspectives, are concerned about the damage we are doing to our selves and each other from continued pollution of substances such as mercury, CO, organic compounds, and CO₂.

Continue reading at dallasinterfaith.org (dead link removed; SF 2025)

I have set myself the goal of learning how to develop a Windows user interface with a moderately complex workflow, one that implies a Wizard-like set of screens to guide the user through a set of steps. The demonstration project's architecture will utilize the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern, with the help of Caliburn.Micro (CM). The solution will utilize the Application Controller pattern and CM's Conductors.