Specification by Example with SpecLog – Some Initial Thoughts

February 21, 2011

I have been talking about BDD or specification by example almost every day for a year and a half now. I still love the idea—executable specifications that everyone concerned can read, so you can talk about the behavior of the system before a single line of code is written. Yeah, you see, as soon as I start to write about it, it’s hard to stop.

Most people (or roles rather) react positively to this idea; developers love the possibility to get a detailed specification to start from, testers see great promises in automating the tests, and requirements people love the traceability features and the level of detail that you get before you start.

It’s the workflow or process that is the “problem.” How do we organize the work around this? Who writes those features? Where are they updated? I have blogged about this several times before, but...

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SpecFlow presentation at Sweden Progressive .NET

February 20, 2011

I got an invitation to the Sweden Progressive .NET (the group formerly known as Alt.Net Sweden) to do a presentation on SpecFlow. I know many of the people in this group, a lot of them work for Avega, and have the highest respect for their knowledge.

So to get an invite from them to talk about a BDD tool was really cool, and a bit nerve-wracking. But it also made me step up my game and I put quite a lot of time into creating a demonstration project that shows the different features of SpecFlow and how to use them effectively.

Of course, I created features for them so that you can easily read and understand them without even having to look at code. This was inspired by how TechTalk themselves spec out new features of SpecFlow and proved to work very well. I plan to update them as new...

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Error “The provider did not return a ProviderManifestToken string” with SQL Compact Edition

February 16, 2011

I was totally terrified when this happened to my yesterday. I had prepared a little website to use on a SpecFlow demonstration. I had run it several times and it worked fine. But all of a sudden – when I was doing one of those “just checking” it failed on me with this (“The provider did not return a ProviderManifestToken string”) error.

The site was using Entity Framework Code first with SQL CE as described here

Goggling for it didn’t help me to much but I suddenly realized that something was missing. I had used MvcScaffolding to create the database, but I hadn’t added any entries into the .config. Neither had MvcScaffolding but it was totally a slip from me. So I simply added this:

<connectionStrings> <add name="[Name from you dbContext class]" connectionString="DataSource=|DataDirectory|AnyName.sdf" providerName="System.Data.SqlServerCe.4.0"

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In SpecFlow the test runner is just glue

February 10, 2011

I answered a question on Twitter today from a guy who had problems running SpecFlow scenarios with MSTest. That shouldn’t be I thought to myself – in SpecFlow the test runner is only used for the auto-generated stuff (#2 in this pictures) and shouldn’t affect the code you write. Lets try it.

The default test runner is NUnit so first I simply create a new Specs-project and created the following scenario:

stupid steps in scenario

I then Nuget’d SpecFlow, Should and NUnit with these commands:

Install-Package SpecFlow Install-Package NUnit Install-Package ShouldFluent

And sure enough – when I compile some NUnit code is auto generated for me:

generated NUnit code

Just for good manners I implemented the steps and ran the specification. It worked with these (naïve) steps in place:

naive steps

If I now change...

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Kanbanboards V–creating new boards

February 5, 2011

OK – after the last post of refactoring I now feels great to turn my focus on some new functionality; I want to let the users create new Kanban boards. This involves some new views and controllers stuff, uploading pictures and also changes in the domain model.

I got some valuable feedback from my colleague Joakim Sunden on the real purpose of the Kanban board application / site. I actually never wrote it down. So I’ve updated the first post in the series with the following:

www.kanban-boards.com will be a site where users can upload their Kanban boards for other people to see, vote on and get inspired by. In this way we can share and learn from each other I think and hope. The creation of this site is documented as my learning process.

On with the show!

New functionality – new scenario

...
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Customize your SpecFlow templates and more

February 1, 2011

I got this tip from a non-developer. An intern, actually. He’s brilliant though and figured this out by himself, about 3 months after I introduced him to SpecFlow. Thank you, Dejen – you’re great!

The fact that this is not documented anywhere just adds to the coolness, but also makes the solution a bit hackish. Sorry for that.

SpecFlow stores templates for the feature files in this folder:

C:\Program Files (x86)\TechTalk\SpecFlow\ItemTemplates\

I’m using a 64-bit system, so your path may not contain the (x86) part.

Here, you’ll find several zip archives containing the templates. You can modify the EventDefinition, StepDefinition, and (maybe most commonly) the Feature template. All the structure is the same, so you can follow it in the same manner as described below.

How to Modify the Feature Template

  1. Make a copy of the current template (SpecFlowFeature.zip) to...
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Kanbanboards IV–shaping stuff up

January 30, 2011

I have now coded away for a while and it’s time to reflect a refactor a bit. I don’t like code lying around that I might not need. YAGNI you know…

So I thought I’d give it an hour to clean stuff up. And maybe put some better looks on the site. Hopefully I’ll end up in a better place. Here are the things I have planned:

  1. Remove all the Views and Controller methods that I’m not using
  2. Bring in a theme for the site
  3. Shape up the lists on the first page
  4. Create a page object to write my acceptance tests against
  5. Introduce a read service for the site – the start of my CQRS initiative

Man – that looked long! But most of them are small. Just imaging how much better the code will be afterwards.

Here we go.

Remove unused stuff

OK –...

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CQRS–another love story

January 27, 2011

People who know me also know that I easily get all ga-ga, fall in love in or simply get very excited over thing that I like. Actually the other day I thought for myself that I right now talk a lot about BDD, Specflow and Kanban – simply because I think that these things are just great. A quote that I often use by Dan North;

“It’s no silver bullet, but this darn close”

When I thought about that I also came to think that I don’t want to talk about or focus on things that I don’t feel like that for. There are simply to many new concepts, frameworks and technologies out there – I cannot take them all in and of course not be ga-ga over all of them.

The second that thought left my mind I started to watch a recording...

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Using Unity as Dependency Resolver in ASP.NET MVC 3

January 25, 2011

There have been a lot of improvements and additions to dependency resolving in ASP.NET MVC 3. Even in areas that you first didn’t think about (dependency injection in views) at first.

OK – after my last post, in which I’m using Ninject (with the cool website) I got the questions if it can be done with Unity. Of course it does. This post shows how.

I’m using Ninject because of the super-slick integration with ASP.NET MVC 3 via NuGet. It gives me a “correct” and easy to start with solution. The main part in this found in this App_Start static file, that is run before any other code with the Web Activator mechanism:

ninject dependency resolving in asp.net mvc

And converting that to Unity would be something like this:

unity dependency resolving in asp.net mvc

Yup – actually...

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How to apply a pull request on GitHub with TortoiseGit

January 24, 2011

I am loving GitHub!

Especially the social collaboration that occurs around projects and code. If you’ve never committed code to an OSS project, try it—it’s an exhilarating feeling. And just imagine the other side of the coin—to receive suggestions and improvements from others! That’s the good news. The bad news (for me, at least) is that Git is something else. It’s great but takes some getting used to. I’m not there yet. For example, the preferred way seems to be the command line, which I haven’t quite mastered.

There are some GUIs available to help people like me overcome the abyss, with TortoiseGit being one of the most well-known tools. TortoiseGit was the tool that finally helped me understand, use, and love GitHub.

However, when I received a pull request, I hit a brick wall. The instructions at the bottom of the pull request page on GitHub...

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