I started playing with .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 over the weekend. I quickly came to an interesting problem however. I switched a while ago on .NET 3.5 to using xUnit.NET instead of NUnit or the unit testing in Visual Studio 2008. I like to redistribute my test suites with my products as a support aid for end-users that are using my applications. Since I can’t redistribute the Visual Studio testing assemblies, I prefer the open source frameworks. But the problem that I quickly discovered was that neither xUnit.NET or NUnit supported .NET 4.0 yet, which is completely understandable. I figured out a couple of configuration changes that could be applied though to get unit tests to work and run in the .NET 4.0 runtime. More...

What I like about software development is that after developing software for sixteen years, I can still learn new things. Sometimes, in fact, like this morning, I can learn new things about topics that I thought that I’ve understood in the past, only to find out what I was wrong. I honestly believe that to be a good learner, you need to accept that not everything that you do is correct, and that sometimes you thought they were correct given your understanding of the information available, which in this case is accurate.

This morning, driven by some information that I noticed in the Objective-C documentation for the NSObject class, I decided to do some digging. In earlier posts about NSObject, I was looking at some of the similarities to the .NET System.Object class and the Java root Object class. Specifically, I was looking at the Equals and GetHashCode methods in .NET and their similar constructs in Java and Objective-C. The problem lay with the statements in the Objective-C documentation that said (summarized) an object should give back the same hash code each time and that if two objects are equal, then they should have the same hash code. More...

My last set of posts were an introduction into Objective-C and a look at the NSObject interface. In this post, I’m digging into iPhone applications and looking at all of the parts and how they really execute on the iPhone. More...

From time to time, even in this enlightened age of software development, I run into developers that don’t use version control for their software projects. I don’t understand why. The state of software development isn’t like it was a decade ago where CVS was the only free option and all of the commercial systems cost a lot of money. I even remember when people had to pay for Visual SourceSafe just to endure the pain. But in the modern era, there are a lot of choices that are very economical, and the commercial systems aren’t that bad either. More...

In the last post, I showed off the description, isEqual, and hash methods defined by the NSObject class. In this post, I’m going to look at another aspect of Objective-C known as properties. More...

In my previous post, I went into more detail about the NSObject class. NSObject is the root class of the Objective-C object model. In this post, I’m going to explore the NSObject class a little deeper and look at the description, isEqual, and hash methods. More...

In my previous post, I gave a brief overview of the Objective-C language. In this post, I’m going to expand on that and discuss the root base class of all object hierarchies in Objective-C: NSObject. In addition, I’m going to discuss the memory management story for Objective-C applications and how how to create instances of classes in Objective-C. More...

I’ve posted on this before, but you can never post too much about test-driven development and unit testing. While I try to do unit testing and code coverage on my projects, I have run into a project that I rolled off of recently where I couldn’t do as much testing as I wanted to. Unit testing was a constant criticism among the team members, and it would have been nice to have more unit tests. But in the end it all comes down to an economic principle known as scarcity. More...

Electric Rain has a product coming out next month that I’ve been waiting anxiously for. I would have like to have written it myself, but time has always been my biggest limitation. Convexion is a Microsoft PowerPoint to Silverlight or WPF converter. Basically it will take a PowerPoint presentation, and will generate the XAML-based slides for replay in Silverlight or WPF. Take a look. More...

A few weeks ago, I made the plunge that I never thought that I would make. After 16 years as a developer on the Microsoft Windows platform, I made the jump and bought my first Apple MacBook Pro. The first one was a 13-inch laptop. I didn’t actually buy it for me, because I was too scared to make the purchase for me. Instead, I justified the purchase by buying it for my wife. I figured that she could learn how to use it, and while she wasn’t watching, I could jump on it and try out iPhone/iPod development on it to see how well I liked developing on a Mac. More...