As Editor-in-Chief for the .NET Developer's Journal, I get a lot of press solicitations.  Most of them are not relevant to the .NET platform.  Some of the ones that aren't relevant are still interesting, though.  Up until now, I haven't done anything with these kinds of solicitations other than enjoy them, then trash them.  Going forward, I thought I might post some of the more interesting pieces to this blog.

To start with, check out this site.  These folks make some kind of ultra-searchable text database and one of their tools for marketing it is to provide free databases containing popular, non-copyrighted text.  For example, you can current get the Bible, some Shakespeare plays, the 9/11 Commission Report, etc.  Pretty cool -- but not really relevant to .NET.

A colleague just let me know that Ziff-Davis has reproduced and commented upon my recent little tirade of an editorial on SOA.  Looks like I should lose my temper more often.

The online version of NETDJ has been receiving some feedback on this editorial, also.  Most of it is intelligent support or dissent, but the folks who are criticizing my Microsoft-centric viewpoint on this matter seem to be missing the fact that it was written for the .NET Developer's Journal.  One might, I think, expect Microsoft-centric viewpoints to occur from time-to-time in a magazine focused exclusively on a Microsoft-created platform. :-)

A couple of months ago, I left my MP3 player unattended for a few minutes on the treadmill at my local healthclub.  When I returned, it had been stolen.

I just got the following email from the MP3 player's manufacturer and, frankly, I laughed so hard that I almost wet my pants...

PLEASE TAKE NOTE THAT THE MP3 PLAYER YOU RECENTLY RECEIVED MAY BE DEFECTIVE AND MAY CAUSE SEVERE HARM TO ADULTS, CHILDREN AND PROPERTY.  THE MP3 PLAYER MAY SPONTANEOUSLY IGNITE AND START A FIRE AND BECOME A DANGEROUS FIRE HAZARD.

...

So, take that, Mr. MP3-Player-Stealer! :-)

Scott Woodgate -- the Microsoft BizTalk guy -- has posted a list here of new adapters in 2006.  This should be good for those of you doing a lot of integration work.

Microsoft just saved my bacon, yet again.  Here I am, in the middle of co-presenting MSDN Events on ASP.NET 2.0 with Jacob Cynamon -- our local Developer Community Champion -- and my laptop gave me a bluescreen on startup.  Now, I've seen this before, but honestly not much at all with XP.  On the rare occasion that I have, a reboot has cleared everything up.

This time, a reboot didn't help.  Several reboots didn't help.  Cursing, begging, and prayer didn't help.  What did help, thankfully, was Microsoft Knowledgebase article #307545.  Basically, this article showed me how to get into Windows XP, find one of the many restoration points that XP has kindly been making for me (since I would, admittedly, never have done this on my own), use it to blow away my corrupt registry, and get everything back to exactly where it was just this past Wednesday.  I didn't lose any data and I haven't installed anything for a couple of weeks now, so I'm as good-as-new.

I'm very impressed that XP has been keeping these restoration points for me.  I'm a little puzzled as to why I got a BSOD out of nowhere, though -- no new software, no new hardware, etc., etc..  I'm thinking that I might've gotten a virus, but that seems unlikely, given my security settings and that I am running Norton Anti-Virus.  My version of Norton is a bit old, though so -- per Magenic IT's recommendation earlier this year -- I am now upgrading to the most recent version.

Learn from my mistakes -- someone should!

I am a big advocate of unit testing.  The big fly-in-the-ointment for me, though, is that there are so, so many situations that are difficult to unit test, because they involve external resource integration -- databases, Active Directories, etc., etc..  Of course, the answer to this is the creation of mock objects, but there are two problems with this, in my book.  First, a mock object is not the real thing and, to the extent that you aren't testing against the real thing, you are introducing into your tests the possibility of not really testing what you think you are testing.  The second thing -- which I saw a lot of at my previous employer -- is that hours and hours can be wasted creating mock interfaces for tests, rather than actually creating productive code.

To address the second of these issues, some folks have created an automatic mock object library thingy for .NET called nMock.  The link is http://www.nmock.org/ and I strongly encourage you to check it out.

Here are some good links (thanks to Magenic's Steve Baker) on using nMock...

http://vaderpi.scottandlaurie.com/blog/?p=185

http://www.todyruik.com/files/NMock2QuickReference.pdf

http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2005/06/18/413577.aspx

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/nmock/nmock2/src/NMock2.AcceptanceTests/Example.cs

I was recently sent a link...

http://www.ncover.org/Index.html

...which provides access to a free tool for finding out how much of your codebase is covered with unit tests. Unit tests are an absolute must for any software project of decent size, and the more coverage you have -- the better. So, with this in mind, I strongly recommend you take a look at NCover as a potential addition to your CI processes.