The Seattle Code Camp (which despite the misleading photo, isn’t a camping trip) is now over and I have nothing but good things to say about it. I didn’t get a chance to see a lot of talks but did enjoy the xUnit.net talk by Jim Newkirk and Brad Wilson. I’m a fan of their approach to providing extensibility and this session provided all the impetus I needed to really give xUnit.net a try rather than simply talking about trying it. :)

Well today I turn old. 33 years old to be exact. A day after Hanselman turns really old. It seems I’m always following in that guy’s footsteps doesn’t it?

In a recent post, Frans Bouma laments the lack of computer science or reference to research papers by agile pundits in various mailing lists (I bet this really applies to nearly all mailing lists, not just the ones he mentions).

After joining Microsoft and drinking from the firehose a bit, I’m happy to report that I am still alive and well and now residing in the Seattle area along with my family. In meeting with various groups, I’ve been very excited by how much various teams here are embracing Test Driven Development (and its close cousin, TAD aka Test After Development). We’ve had great discussions in which we really looked at a design from a TDD perspective and discussed ways to make it more testable. Teams are also starting to really apply TDD in their development process as a team effort, and not just sporadic individuals.

File this in my learn something new every day bucket. I received an email from Steve Maine after he read a blog post in which I discuss the anonymous object as dictionary trick that Eilon came up with.

Six months ago and six days after the birth of my son, Subkismet was also born which I introduced as the cure for comment spam. The point of the project was to be a useful class library containing multiple spam fighting classes that could be easily integrated into a blog platform or any website that allows users to comment.

You’ve been forewarned, this is yet another end-of-year slightly self-inflating retrospective blog post (complete with the cheesy meta-blogging introduction).

Recently, Maxfield Pool from CodeSqueeze sent me an email about a new monthly feature he calls Developer Faceoff in which he pits two developers side-by-side for a showdown.

A common pattern when submitting a form in ASP.NET MVC is to post the form data to an action which performs some operation and then redirects to another action afterwards. The only problem is, the form data is not repopulated automatically after a redirect. Let’s look at remedying that, shall we?

The ASP.NET Routing engine used by ASP.NET MVC plays a very important role. Routes map incoming requests for URLs to a Controller and Action. They also are used to construct an URL to a Controller/Action. In this way, they provide a two-way mapping between URLs and controller actions.

Yesterday, Wally McClure interviewed me for the ASP.NET Podcast Show. We chatted for around half an hour on my background, Microsoft, and ASP.NET MVC.

I have a set of little demos apps I’ve been working on that I want to release to the public. I need to clean them up a bit (you’d be surprised how much I swear in comments) and make sure they work with the CTP. Hopefully I will publish them on my blog over the next few weeks.

Love them or hate them, the ALT.NET mailing list is a source of interesting debate, commentary and insight. I can’t help myself but to participate. Debate is good. Stifling debate is bad. Period. End of debate. (see!? That was bad!)

Eilon Lipton, the lead developer on the ASP.NET MVC project shares some of his thoughts on the design philosophy guiding the shaping of the framework.

UPDATE: ASP.NET MVC now works with Visual Web Developer Express SP1

UPDATE: Completely ignore the contents of this post. All of this is out-dated. Test specific subclasses are no longer necessary with ASP.NET MVC since our April CodePlex refresh

UPDATE: Much of this post is out-of-date with the latest versions of MVC. We long sinced removed the ControllerAction attribute.

One of the guiding principles in the design of the new ASP.NET MVC Framework is enabling TDD (Test Driven Development) when building a web application. If you want to follow along, this post makes use of ASP.NET MVC CodePlex Preview 4 which you’ll need to install from CodePlex. I’ll try and keep this post up to date with the latest releases, but it may take me time to get around to it.

Sometimes when writing unit tests, you run into the case where you want to override the behavior of a specific method.