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Ben Hall's Blog

Recent Posts

• xUnit.GWT - Given When Then (GWT) extension for xUnit.net

  Posted: 29 Jun 2009 at 11:36 by Ben Hall

  One of the most important considerations when writing automated tests, especially customer acceptance tests is readability. I have been looking at how you could potentially create more readable tests targeted against C# applications. While I have spoke before about IronRuby and RSpec\Cucumber as customer acceptance tests for C# applications, this combination still has some performance issues together with an initial ‘fear factor’ for some users.

• Is it wrong to spend £5 on pick n’ mix from Woolworths ?

  Posted: 25 Jun 2009 at 12:21 by Ben Hall

  This is the question of the day! For those of you not in the UK, Woolworths felt the force of the credit crunch and went into administration, closing its 807 stores. Woolworths was a national treasure, opening it’s first store in 1909 (). It’s still a sad sight to walk past an abandon store bearing it’s name. Woolworths was a very well respected brand, however lost it’s way and as a result the product line became confusing – they sold everything and anything?

• MySQL – Creating a new user

  Posted: 15 Jun 2009 at 21:46 by Ben Hall

  It’s funny how you forget the simple things when you haven’t done them in a while. Tonight I wanted to setup MySQL on my Windows 7 machine. The installation was simple and I happily had my root account created. However, I didn’t want to use my root account for development – mainly because I didn’t want the password to be sorted in clear text. In order to create a new user, I used the command line MySQL client tool which allows me to execute commands against the server.

• DDD South West - Dynamic Languages and .NET and Creating extensible application using MEF

  Posted: 24 May 2009 at 22:19 by Ben Hall

  This weekend I attended and presented two sessions at DDD South West. Thank you to everyone who attended my sessions and the organisers for hosting the event, if you have any questions then please let me know. Slides and code for the two sessions can be found on the posts below. Creating Extensible applications using MEF Dynamic Languages and .NET

• NxtGenUG Cambridge: Creating extendable applications using MEF slides and code

  Posted: 19 May 2009 at 23:59 by Ben Hall

  Tonight I gave a slightly modified version of my MEF presentation at NxtGenUG in Cambridge. Thank you to everyone who attended. Slides and code available below. I’ll be repeating the same session, or at least based on feedback, at DDD South West on Saturday. Creating extendable applications using MEF View more presentations from BenHalluk. Download code: Code.zip The MVC Sample application which I mentioned but didn’t show was taken from

• Alt.Net.UK London - August 2009 – Registration opens TODAY!

  Posted: 12 May 2009 at 09:56 by Ben Hall

  Over the past month Ian Cooper, Alan Dean, Sebastian Lambla, Michelle Flynn and I have been discussing the next Alt.Net.UK conference. We feel its time for another conference and this year we are doing it slightly differently. The plan is: Friday 31 July Evening 6pm-9pm: Alt.Net Beers: Yes we are integrating Seb's alt.

• Dynamic Languages and .NET - Developer Day Scotland slides and code samples

  Posted: 04 May 2009 at 13:53 by Ben Hall

  This weekend I was in Glasgow presenting my ‘dynamic languages and .NET’ presentation at DeveloperDay Scotland. I demonstrated how you can take advantage of IronRuby as a language, but also how you could host the DLR within your own application to enhance your feature set. I had a great time and the conference was a great success. A massive thank you to Colin Mackay and the others for organising the event, as well as everyone who attended my session. Slides can be found below, hosted via SlideSh

• Embedding IronRuby and the DLR into Red Gate’s SQL Data Generator

  Posted: 24 Apr 2009 at 01:59 by Ben Hall

  Over the past few months there has been a lot of discussions online about how embedding the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) into your application opens up some amazing use cases. For example, Phil Haack recently wrote about how ASP.net MVC views can be stored in the database thanks for the DLR.  Resolver Systems have been doing with with great success. Tonight, my latest article for Simple Talk was published. The article explains how I went about creating a new generator for SQL Data Generator w

• Word 2007 – Mouse doesn’t work - can’t highlight text

  Posted: 19 Apr 2009 at 23:32 by Ben Hall

  Not being able to use your mouse when writing a document in word makes life shall we say - difficult. Tonight, I had this happen. My keyboard worked fine, however the mouse simply wasn’t playing. I could select the menu items but if I tried to select anything within the document, it would simply ignore me. This made was not good! After uninstalling a recent Windows Update (did nothing). I tried running the Office 2007 Diagnostic which reported everything as fine (it really wasn’t). I turned to

• DDD Belfast: Creating extensible application using MEF

  Posted: 06 Apr 2009 at 11:14 by Ben Hall

  This weekend I was lucky enough to present ‘Creating extensible application using MEF’ at the DDD Belfast conference in, well, Belfast. The conference itself we really well and I was happy with my session. Slides can be found on Slideshare any embedded below. Creating extensible application using MEF View more presentations from BenHalluk. Feel free to download the Finished Demos from the presentation. Photos can be found on Barry’s blog, who I have to say did a great job of organising the co

• NHibernate – SQLBits IV Slides

  Posted: 06 Apr 2009 at 10:54 by Ben Hall

  Here are the slides from my NHibernate session at SQLBits. Sorry for the delay in getting these up. NHibernate - SQLBits IV View more presentations from BenHalluk.

• UK Conferences – March, April, May

  Posted: 17 Mar 2009 at 11:47 by Ben Hall

  The conference season is upon us and we have some amazing events coming up over the next few months. All of these conferences are free and organised by the community. They are a great opportunity to learn a wealth of information and meet new people at the same time. SQL Bits 28th March 2009Geoffrey Manton BuildingOxford RoadManchesterM15 6BH Website: http://sqlbits.com/ Agenda: http://sqlbits.com/information/NewAgenda.aspx Registration: http://sqlbits.com/information/Registration.aspx I will b

• MSDN Magazine: Automate Acceptance Testing With IronRuby

  Posted: 25 Feb 2009 at 01:16 by Ben Hall

  Last month part 1 of my IronRuby and testing article was published in the MSDN Magazine. Part 2 has now been published in the March edition. The article is titled Automate Acceptance Testing With IronRuby and focuses on the the higher level tests within a system. Read it online: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd453038.aspx

• Alt.Net ‘In the North’ Conference – Registration opens at Noon!

  Posted: 24 Feb 2009 at 10:51 by Ben Hall

  Last week Richard Fennell sent through details about an Alt.Net Open Space Conference he has helped organise in Bradford on 17th/18th April 2009. The event will be hosted by Black Marble at their office in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and there will be space for 50 attendees. The format will be the same as previous UK Alt.net conferences. A planning session on Friday the 17th April from 7pm to 8:30pm, followed by a trip to a bar to socialise The open spaces sessions from 9am to 4:30pm on Saturda

• Tribes and Software Development

  Posted: 20 Feb 2009 at 00:08 by Ben Hall

  Creating software is easy. Selling software is difficult. Software houses are spending huge amounts of money attempting to create great software to solve problems. Companies spend huge amounts of time and effort on creating amazing technical solutions, attempting to understand the market while pushing their latest release under the noses of anyone who might be interested. This is wrong. For a large amount of time, no one is actually listening. This is a problem, if no-one is listening, how can

• MSDN Magazine: Getting Started With IronRuby And RSpec, Part 1

  Posted: 09 Feb 2009 at 00:10 by Ben Hall

  My latest article has been published in this months MSDN Magazine. The article is an introduction to IronRuby, finishing with an initial focus on how you can use RSpec and IronRuby together to test C# applications.  Using IronRuby to test C# applications is an interesting concept and I look forward to seeing how people use the two technologies in the future. I’m really pleased to have been published within the magazine. I have been reading it since I started with .Net so it feels a little str

• DDD7 Session Video – Microsoft Pex – The future on unit testing?

  Posted: 02 Feb 2009 at 19:13 by Ben Hall

  As you may recall, in November I presented at DDD7 in Reading, UK about Pex and the future of unit testing. Is unit testing about to have a major change? Pex is a project from Microsoft Research which automatically generates a traditional unit testing suite with high code coverage from hand-written parameterised unit tests. In this session, Ben explores the Pex framework, explaining the approach the framework takes and how it computes the test inputs based on your programs execution. Ben demonst

• ASP.net MVC RC1 - ViewData.Model becomes Model

  Posted: 28 Jan 2009 at 02:44 by Ben Hall

  With RC1, the team has added a top-level property to access the Model for the page. As such:   Becomes:     Both work the same, however the second is just a little bit cleaner as you don’t need to go via ViewData…

• ASP.net MVC RC1 – Removing Code Behind files

  Posted: 28 Jan 2009 at 02:36 by Ben Hall

  With ASP.net MVC, one thing I always wondered is why we still had to have the code behind files. Looking at the FubuMVC samples, everything looks much cleaner without the additional files – with RC1, code-behind files are no longer required! However, if your upgrading from beta, you will need to change your ASPX pages. In this post, I will cover the steps I went through to remove these files. During beta, my solution looked looked like this: In my code behind, I have a mixture of strongly type

• Upgrading a project from ASP.net MVC Beta to ASP.net MVC RC1

  Posted: 28 Jan 2009 at 01:42 by Ben Hall

  As I'm sure you are well aware, the ASP.net team have released ASP.net MVC RC1 tonight.  Eager to find out how much additional work I had, I downloaded and upgraded my solution – I was pleasantly surprised. All I had to do was: Uninstall beta bits Install RC1 bits Update project references for System.Web.Abstractions.dll, System.Web.Mvc.dll and System.Web.Routing.dll Build Test Done! Following my own advice, I commit the updated installer and assemblies into source control. Everything a