Visual Studio Extensions

As of January 2015, these are the Visual Studio extensions I currently have installed:

• Bootstrap Snippet Pack – Code snippets for Bootstrap
• EntityFramework Reverse POCO Generator – Generate Entity Framework class files from an existing SQL database
• Grunt Launcher   Right click extension to launch Grunt commands
• I Hate #Regions – If you have to work with legacy code that uses #regions, this extension makes them fade into the background.
• ReSharper – The ultimate productivity tool!
• Package Intellisense - NPM and Bower package Intellisense directly in the Visual Studio JSON editor
• PowerShell Tools for Visual Studio – First-class support for editing PowerShell files
• Productivity Power Tools 2013 – Various enhancements. I only use ‘Column Guides’, ‘Fix mixed tabs’, ‘Power Commands’, ‘Quick launch tasks’, ‘Solution Error Visualiser’, ‘Structure Visualiser’, ‘Syntactic line compression’
• SideWaffle Templates for Visual Studio – lots of extra file templates
• SQL Server Data Tools – SQL Server database projects
• tangible T4 Editor – T4 template editing with syntax colouring
• Task Runner Explorer - This extension lets you execute any Grunt/Gulp task or target inside Visual Studio by adding a Task Runner Explorer window.
• VisualSVN – Subversion integration
• Web Essentials 2013 – Lots of extra bells and whistles for web stuff.
• Windows Installer XML Toolset – Generate MSIs (Version 3.9 includes a bug fix I contributed)

Any other suggestions?

Old new things for ADNUG

For the longest time, updates for the Adelaide .NET User Group (ADNUG) were sent out by email. Then around 3 years ago the transition was made to use LinkedIn Groups. There’s currently over 200 members there.

Earlier this year, I created a Twitter account for the group. Follow @AdlDNUG

Tweets by @AdlDNUG

A lot of user groups are also moving to Meetup to help coordinate their events. A few weeks ago ADNUG signed up, so you can now join https://www.meetup.com/Adelaide-dotNET/ and register to attend our events there.

More recently I was wondering what happened to the old email list. Hopefully most made the switch to LinkedIn – but maybe some didn’t bother, so I figured it might be worth firing up the list again just to see if it would help get the word out a bit further. Using MailChimp, I now have the email list running again. I plan to send out an email about once a month with meeting news and other relevant info. If you’d like to subscribe, click here.

Finally, after catching up with the ADNUG organising team today, I decided we should also be on Facebook. So if you like ADNUG, you can now share that fact with your friends!

By the way, our next meeting is this Wednesday 10th December, 6pm at Marcellina Adelaide. David Rogers will be presenting on the MembershipReboot library and claims authentication. Register now!

Looking ahead, as I mentioned in the email that went out a couple of days ago, I’m hoping to get some US-based Microsoft speakers to do virtual presentations next year. Just because we’re in Adelaide shouldn’t mean we can’t get access to great speakers where ever they might be – home grown, interstate, or even overseas.

So now there's lots of ways and lots of reasons to keep up with what's happing with .NET in Adelaide!

Testing for Exceptions with NUnit

I’ve been aware for a long time usual way of writing a unit test with NUnit that expects an Exception to be thrown is to use the ExpectedExceptionAttribute on the test method.

[ExpectedException(typeof(ArgumentException)] [Test] public void Test() { var sut = new ThrowUp();

sut.DodgyMethod(3); }

I hadn’t noticed that around the release of NUnit 2.5, an alternative was added. The Assert.Throws method allows you to be specific about which bit of code in the test should be throwing an exception.

public void Test() { var sut = new ThrowUp();

Assert.Throws<ArgumentException>( () => sut.DodgyMethod(3) ); }

I think it’s a good improvement, and makes it a bit clearer where the exception should be coming from.