Yesterday's Model View Controller Training in Austin

Yesterday Eric Hexter and Jimmy Bogard from Headspring gave an excellent free four hour overview class on the ModelViewController framework from Microsoft(see previous post). The framework is currently available in preview form, but the 1.0 version is rumored to be out this month. The MVC framework is Microsoft's answer to Ruby on Rails. (Why did Microsoft call it the MVC framework, the same name as it's concept? I guess to be consistent with their bad naming of other technologies. I guess "C# on Rails" would have been too obvious. Why not name F# "The Functional Language"?)
Anyway, I'm very excited about the new framework.

NUnit + Extension Methods + NBehave.Spec.NUnit = Smile

I used a tiny bit of NBehave today and it made me smile. I used the extension methods in NBehave.Spec.NUnit so my NUnit tests can be a little more Englishy.
Instead of

Assert.IsTrue(sum.Equals(13));

I can write

sum.ShouldEqual(13);

which just gives me a warm, almost Rubyisque feeling, deep inside.

Windows is like that

Right before our last scheduled upgrade, one of the staging servers in the UK started acting badly. It was confused between the US date format, MM/DD/YYYY and the UK format, DD/MM/YYYY. All during testing on both sides of the Atlantic everything was fine. The server's identical twin in the farm had no such confusion. We double checked the windows regional settings, the config files, the C# code, and found no problems.
Out of desperation we restarted the web server, IIS. The sun broke through the clouds, birds were singing, and all was right with the world. The box was no longer confused about transatlantic dates. We did nothing but restart IIS. It was very scary.
After additional testing we did the upgrade and everything is fine. Which reminds me of a Haiku:

Yesterday it worked. 
Today it is not working. 
Windows is like that. 

Austin .Net User's Group Meeting

Matt Hinze presented a good introduction to "Practical Dependency Injection" to about 100 people at the Austin .Net Users group.

Two important announcements:
1. Headspring Systems will give a free class on the new Model View Controller on Thursday Feb 19th from 1-4:30.
2. Austin Code Camp is Saturday May 30th.
Lots of pizza consumed:

Great Video on Finding our Energy Future

I was very impressed with the enthusiasm of Bill Gross about energy and his careful research to design something for our future. Maybe he could start work on our 404 flying cars?