Family Trees and Logical Deduction

This last weekend, I got bit by the genealogy bug again. It started off as an investigation as to why my existing GEDCOM file didn’t work in a WPF demonstration app (Family.Show), and kept losing relationships. It turns out that the GEDCOM format requires a relationship (or FAM record) to specify the two people who …

Learning Unit Testing III – Emergent Design

So having seen the answers on my own StackOverflow question on TDD Design, I’ve decided to go ahead with the ‘emergent design’ crowd and see what happens. It appears that the refactoring and mid-stream redesigning is an integral part of the TDD process. It’ll all, of course, be described here (the process might be a …

Learning Unit Testing II – TDD vs. Traditional Design

As you can see, I’ve only done a small amount of Test-Driven Development so far. I notice that for small classes – so far, there’s only a very simple turn tracker – it’s easy to write a test first when there’s only very little code and no interaction with other classes. When things get a …

Throw Away Your Television

I’ve not been a huge TV fan for a long time. So when I have to choose between paying around £150 or not watching television for a year, it’s a pretty easy choice to make. I like to have money in my pocket, and I don’t like watching television. I’m sick and tired of TV …

Learning Unit Testing I – The Basics

Right, so I’ve chosen my project and I’m ready to begin. I’ll skip past the introduction, straight to page 8 of the rulebook. The characteristics section. This is basically a class layout, nothing too heavy, so I’ll start off by creating Model.cs: class Model { public string Name { get; set; } public int WeaponSkill …

My Next Learning Project

I’ve long ago established that I learn best from doing things. Even if those ‘things’ never get anywhere, the journey through real problems helps me get a handle on what they are. My army list program got me through WPF, and then MVC. It’s faltered, since I don’t really have the enthusiasm for it that …

Validation and self-worth!

I had an answer accepted as the answer on Stack Overflow! I answered this question absolutely ages ago, not expecting it to go anywhere (the question had already been answered, but I felt it was a valid, different approach) but slowly, over the months, it’s been up-voted (until, I am pleased to say, it had …

I don’t like being called a Nazi

On Saturday, I joined a few (reports vary between ten and over twenty thousand) like-minded people on a stroll through London to let David Cameron know that we aren’t very happy. The reason is the Pope’s state visit to the UK. I’d been thinking about joining a protest since I found out about the visit …