Just happened to stumble on this site by Stephen Walter that contains loads and loads of small utils and tips for ASP.NET MVC coding. Such as creating an Excel document output from an action.

Here you got them all in a long list.

After some consideration, I have decided to follow the ASP.NET MVC best practices quite closely – and do the listing of the products as a separate page, the Index method on the Product Controller.

I’ll focus on this before the actual adding is fleshed out. This is because the Create method of the ProductController does a redirect to the Index action.

Also, I will keep the GUI very simple. If I do the MVC right, it will be easy for anyone who knows this.

[Wait one hour – Marcus is coding :)]

I actually got a product added today! And the more I work with TDD, DDD, and ASP.NET MVC, the more right it feels. Read this and you’ll see what I mean.

I will have to create a factory for products… but my hour is up.

Today I had a very interesting conversation with a colleague and friend. He is very accomplished in matters concerning Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). The more we talked about that and the things I am learning with the Sprint Planner Helper (TDD, DDD, and ASP.NET MVC), the more I am convinced that I am on the right track. It’s the way to go – especially if you want to be agile.

Just take my experience with this project. I have now coded for some time (about 15 hours) without having to lock down to a database design and data access strategy. Not even near – I am working out the model. I am even planning to handle the database stuff at the very end.

You could choose to view the data access strategy and database as a “necessary evil.” I know I will need one to persist my data,...

Winter has “struck” Stockholm and we have lots of snow. And knowing the Stockholm weather, we expect most of it to be gone in a few days.

So we hurried out and bought Abbe his first pulka (kind of small sledge) and went to the slopes of Kronobergsparken.

We thought that it was loads of fun. Elin and Abbe swished down the slopes. I got a few runs myself (for myself also ;) and the memories all came back. Running up the slope with the pulka in a string behind you. Getting cold after the first run… Ahh the memories.

Apparently, Abbe was not as amused as we were.

Today, I started off with some refactoring of the code from yesterday. The ASPX page had some pretty ugly code that I’ve now cleaned up by adding properties to the domain model.

Progress on Product and Backlog Functionality

I began working on adding functionality for the Product and the product backlog. This immediately led to some trouble as I realized I needed a list of product owners to populate the form. This meant more test data and repositories were needed.

While Test-Driven Development (TDD) is fantastic, it doesn’t solve the problem of test data. Even with a solid repository pattern, it’s still a challenge. I hope that the effort will pay off in the long run.

Since I’m alone and Abbe is sound asleep, I decided to break the 1-hour rule and push on a bit further.

ASP.NET MVC Integration

ASP.NET MVC integrates smoothly with Visual Studio...

I have this last week got two very real answers to my and other peoples prayers.

I am still amazed that I still become amazed that prayers are answered.

But that is how it is – it works. So if you ever find yourself in peril just put your hands together and whisper “Jesus – help me now!”.

He will hear you!

It’s been a while since I last worked on the project. Abbe has been quite sickly, and I haven’t had much time. No worries – it’s all a hobby. 😉

Progress Update

Since my last update (which was only 2 x 15-minute sessions), I’ve managed to produce a list of Products on my webpage with a new layout:

This progress made me realize that I should have included some disclaimers regarding the UI. I created a specific CSS class for the product list, which will help later on. My focus now is on functionality, not aesthetics.

Model Enhancements

I also discovered that my model could be improved with additional features such as status for the product items and aggregated values for progress tracking. I used Test-Driven Development (TDD) to implement these changes and integrated them into the GUI. This process was quite time-consuming due to some challenges with...

I know that some people will mock this and say “Uninstall it!” but I am pretty much stuck with my computer (Dell Precision M 70) and my installation of Vista.

Here is some suggestions and by only doing the first point I got it up to a working condition in no time!

It’s now much uglier but workable – I’ll take that any day.

I have now tried to grasp the DDD-concept without fully “getting it”. I must confess that I have thought: “What is the deal with this… I have done it before”.

But today we had a most prominent guest at Elevate (the education initiative at Avega) – Jimmy Nilsson.  And what he said got the coin to drop for me.

The heading of his presentation was something like “A new era for data access”. And the things he said that got me to understand was something like this – not a quote but rather his reasoning:

Traditionally we focus on the database design in application development. So very early we want to get the database design in place. “We need it to start to do code”. Since we did that design early in the process we often got it wrong and inherited those error through the process. And...

I have pointed here several times before – but it’s so nice.

It’s an implementation of the Repository Pattern using generics, that will minimize your code in a very nice way. I am sure that the FindAll can be refined into something very nice with LINQ, that allows you to send a specification criteria or so.

Here is my implementation that uses a common interface (IBaseEntity) for all my entities. It basically has an ID, so that the abstract implementation can use it as a key:

namespace Marcusoft.SprintPlannerHelper.Repositories { /// \<summary\> /// A generic repository interface that dictates all the methods that a repository should map to /// \</summary\> /// \<typeparam name="T"\>the type of the interface\</typeparam\> public interface IRepository<T>  where 

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