Developer News

The Morning Brew #211 Another bumper edition today, and I

The Morning Brew #211
Another bumper edition today, and I completely ran out of time preparing the Brew this morning so with all that is left over from today I’m sure that tomorrow will be even larger ! Software Silverlight Tools - The Visual Studio integration for Silverlight has hit a final release,

TestDriven.Net 2.10: Smart Build

There are a number of new features in TestDriven.Net 2.10 that I want to highlight (apart from the VS 2008 crash workaround). The one I’m going to focus on here is subtle, but significant I believe - especially for people working with large solutions.

Smart build is a new optimization that allows you to skip the build step before test execution when there are no source code changes. Anyone working on a solution with a large number of projects will know how time consuming the build can be before any tests can be executed. Somewhat surprisingly this remains true even when no actual source code edits have been made and nothing needs to be compiled. I’ve had reports of the build check taking as long as 45 seconds before any tests could be executed! (Thanks to Brian Genisio in particular for bringing this to my attention)

The new smart build feature overcomes this particular problem by monitoring your solution for source code edits and automatically skipping the build step if there is nothing new to compile. This can significantly improve performance when running multiple tests in the same solution. For example there is now no penalty for choosing to execute all tests in a fixture after an individual test starts to pass: a common usage pattern.

I will elaborate further on other new features in future posts. In the meantime you can read the latest release notes and download TestDriven.Net 2.10 from here. If you find any issues, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Windows Vista Done Right?
Watching the live stream of the PDC keynote yesterday, there were bits of Windows 7 that appealed to me. Libraries and Home Groups seems good, as does the Device Center (I notice they didn?t have a Zune connected in the demo). I like the easy switch to projects, useful for those of us who present, a

How to Change Crystal Report Formatting for Different Customers - Part 2
Eric continues the series on how to format your Crystal reports programmatically. This can be very helpful when deploying the same reports for different customers who want a different look. He demonstrates the different formatting methods, such as custom formatting a WinForm application, and also that of Crystal objects with the help of relevant source code.
Eric Landes