Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Foo, Bar, Monorail, and being Test Driven

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People I work with are always amused by my excessive use of "foo" in naming things while I do examples or sketch out ideas. I was equally amused with Hanselminutes 55 which I can roughly quote here:

... so once you've got your foo class accepting a bar class
and more likely it's going to be accepting a IBar interface... foo depends on bar which depends on blah and yada ... your instantiation looks like new foo, new bar which takes new yada...


Fun stuff, but the real conversation was about Monorail, a piece of the Castle Project, a .NET web application framework I've been interested to look at for some time. The most interesting argument for the use of Monorail/Castle was the ability to have greater and more precise test coverage than with a typical ASP.NET application using Watir or an equivalent technology. All the buzz about being Test Driven usually breaks down for me when I'm looking at the kind of web applications we build. Even something like Watir is a frightening prospect on an ASP.NET page with several grids, in a masterpage, loaded with javascript - and has about 10 different "directions" that a tester could take. Extend that to about 100 pages, many of which support different "views," and you've got, well, a bit of a problem in being "Test Driven."

The conversants, besides Scott were Aaron Jensen and Jacob Lewallen.

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