John Miller|“Risks weren’t that scary once you took them.”

January 1st. Usually around this time of year I create a list of pie-in-the-sky resolutions for the new year, although they are almost always forgotten by Valentines Day. Like most people, I start out uber motivated with full intentions of keeping that pace throughout the year. But that eagerness fizzles out as the weeks go by. I think this happens for a couple of reasons. For starters, my goals are usually over zealous and unrealistic. Setting the bar high is important (very important) but goals need to be reasonable and attainable. For really large, long term goals, it helps to break them down into smaller easier to swallow milestones. The feeling on accomplishment after hitting a milestone will help keep the interest alive as you move towards the final, larger goal.

The second cause of demise in new year’s resolutions stems from a lack of accountability. It’s way too easy to put them off if you are the only one who knows what your goals are. So this year I decided to post my list of goals on this blog and will be submitting updates every two months to show my progress.

I would like to challenge anyone reading this to do the same in the new year. Set high, but attainable goals for yourself over the next 12 months. And don’t keep them to yourself! Advertise them. Whether that means listing them on a blog, hanging them up at work, or just sharing them with your significant other. Measure the progress at regular intervals and make adjustments if you’re not happy with where you’re at.

Technical Goals

Read the following books:

• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture – Fowler
• Domain Driven Design – Evans
• Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns – Nilsson
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code – Feathers
• Refactoring – Fowler
• Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C# - Martin

Become proficient with the following tools & technologies:

• ASP.Net MVC
• NHibernate
• The Castle Stack
• Team City
• Ruby (the basics at a minimum)
• Powershell

Get involved:

• Two blog posts per month
• Two technical presentations for coworkers to push agile methodologies at my current company.

Certifications:

• Upgrade MCPD certification from 2.0 to 3.5

Personal Goals

Family Time

• Take 2 one week long trips
• Take 6 weekend getaways
• By the end of the year, work from home regularly two times per week

Belief System

• Read the Bible completely through

Financial

• Reduce debt by two-thirds
• Become familiar with some of the ins and outs of day trading, as well as how currency trading works

Side Projects

• Finish the project I’ve been working on for the last year!
• Start a new venture and grow it to produce $500 per month of automated income by the end of the year.

Would love to hear about goals that you’re pushing yourself towards this year!!

I ran into a case today where one of our unit tests was failing when we ran it, but would pass when we debugged it. We’re using MSTest and had recently branched the project in TFS, and I was working on changes in the new branch. We were getting a “method not found” error when running the test which immediately made me think that Visual Studio was using a cached version of the class under test.

It turned out that the culprit was our use of Code Coverage. While working in the initial branch, we had turned on Code Coverage for the project we were testing. However Visual Studio will look for the project dll two different ways depending on your solution structure. If the project is in the solution directory, it will look for the dll using a relative path such as:

<Solution Directory>project1\bin\debug\project1.dll

However, if you like to keep your solutions separate from the projects like we are (we have a separate folder containing all our solutions), it will use an absolute path to find the dll.

C:\Source\project1\bin\debug\project1.dll

This worked fine until we created a new branch of the code. I mapped the new branch to a different location locally and Visual Studio was still using the old version when running Code Coverage. (Which why it would pass when we debugged the tests, Code Coverage isn’t run when you debug tests.)

So after branching, your Code Coverage list could potentially look something like this.

Note that there’s two ClassLibrary1.dll artifacts in the list. The first actually points to the initial branch of the code. The second points to the newly created branch. Unchecking the first and checking the second fixes the issue.

On a side note, I can’t wait to drop MSTest and go back to NUnit!

Scott Guthrie recently announced a *new* charting library for .Net 3.5 called Microsoft Charting Controls. These are currently available for both web and winforms. For those of you familiar with Dundas charting, you’ll notice that this looks strikingly similar to what they’ve been selling at premium prices for the last few years. Turns out that Microsoft has aquired Dundas’ data visualization technology and is including the toolkit as part of the framework! Having worked with the Dundas’ charting controls on past projects, I’m excited to see that it’s going to become more accessible. The hefty price tag Dundas was asking put it out of budget on some smaller projects but now it will become a first choice on many future projects.

From this press release, it sounds like the aquisition started last year and they’re just now starting to roll out the products, branded as Microsoft Chart Controls. For now, you can download the ASP.Net and Winforms charting controls for .Net 3.5 SP1, and they will be included in .Net 4.0. SQL Server 2008 will also be including the Dundas based charts in the new version of Reporting Services. Alex Gorev also mentioned that Microsoft will also be including the Gauges and Map controls eventually but does yet have a release date.

Judging from this post, you *should* be able to use the new Charting controls in ASP.Net MVC as well. But keep in mind that you may need to toy around with the charts to get them to work in an world without viewstate. From past experiences, running Dundas Charts without viewstate hasn’t been a big issue, but I’ve run into a few problems on complex charts where it took some creative workarounds.

For you Sharepoint folks, there’s a web part available on CodePlex.