Resharper 2.5 EAP Update

Well I've been using the Resharper 2.5 EAP for awhile now and I'm quite impressed with how quickly they have brought the quality of the Visual Basic integration up to snuff. Of course they are only doing the read-only functionality but even that subset of functionality is quite a bit. The EAP has quickly become a tool we can't imagine developing without. One small example is how we've set Alt+U to run all unit tests in the solution. The guy I pair with won't admit it but I think he prefers using the Resharper Unit Test stuff over NUnit. Sure the big green circle isn't as big but the integration and ease of use is so nice. We still use TestDriven.Net for running individual tests but we love Resharper for running all the tests.

In terms of a 3rd party tool nothing I've tried comes close to Resharper in terms of how it will affect your productivity. If you didn't try this before because it was only C# you are in luck. So print out that Key Mapping document and get started today. You won't regret it.

A Daily Build Process...

We spent a large part of Sunday in at work. Our original intention was to implement a daily build process. The easiest method I could see of implementing this was to use CruiseControl.Net. Before we could do that though we needed to add a few remaining projects to the CC.Net process so that everything was CI'ed.

This is the part where our plans for the day start going south...

As we're adding the new projects we realize that our original directory layout was wrong. And then we realize that our actual build scripts require way to much effort to get working for a new project. At this point we can either leave things as they are and just hack together the remaining builds or we can fix things.

Of course if we don't fix things now we'll just have more to fix later...

So we ended up fixing all our scripts and moving things around. Now this is all based on our current level of knowledge about CC.Net so we may have made a few errors in how we set things up, but I think I'm actually quite happy with how it all came together.

Now about that daily build process...

Domain Specific Language

Martin Fowler does an a very good job at explaining Domain Specific Languages in a JAOO conference talk. One thing to note is that the actual slides he uses in his presentation are shown lower on the page in real time. I didn't realize this at first which made it a bit hard to follow at first. Definitely a must see.