Saturday, February 6, 2016

FakeMaker is updated with Episerver 9 support

Hi Episerver developers!

I have updated FakeMaker (helping you unit test your Episerver code) to support the version 9 binaries. Breaking changes caused compile errors (oops!) and made the tool incompatible with the latest versions of Episerver. It turns out that the base library context no longer has to be mocked, and that's a good thing! The solution was simple: delete code. I love deleting code, maybe even more than writing code.

FakeMaker may help you delete your code.

When writing unit tests, creating fake content and mocked repositories can be a bit depressing. When mocked code is all you see on your screen, this little library may help. A bigger screen probably also would, but is probably more expensive (and won't cure depression).

The latest version is available for download on NuGet, and the source code is on GitHub. Both are targeting version 9.6.1 of the Episerver Core libraries.

If you need Episerver 8 support, download an earlier version from NuGet, or clone the GitHub repo and checkout the epi-8-support branch

Please let me know if you have feature requests or run into any issues.


Here's an example of what you can do with FakeMaker: 
you are about to write code that uses the episerver page tree to find pages of a certain type, children of a root node, or maybe just the start page. FakeMaker makes easier to write unit tests for code like that, by creating an in memory page tree and add it to a fake content repository.

Create the pages you need:
var page = FakePage.Create("MyPageName");

or a page of a specific page type:
var myCustomPage = FakePage.Create<CustomPageData>("MyOtherPageName");

Create an instance of FakeMaker:
var fake = new FakeMaker();

Add it to the mocked repository:
fake.AddToRepository(page);

Want more examples?
You will find more examples at the FakeMaker GitHub repo.

Friday, February 5, 2016

Windows? No, I'm a .NET developer.

A couple of days ago, I talked about and coded some of the new ASP.NET Core 1.0 things at the Swetugg 2016 conference in Stockholm. I used my Ubuntu laptop, the one I write code on every day at work (also used for occasional night coding at home, when the kids are sleeping).

Nowadays, I mostly write Python and JavaScript code, both are platform independent languages. I love it! When I was about to begin where I currently work, I knew very little about what kind of dev tools the team (or even the Python community) were using.

"Well, some of us use editors like Sublime or Vim, some use an IDE like PyCharm. Most of us have macbooks, but a couple of team members have various Linux distros installed on their computers. It doesn't matter. You'll be fine as long as you can run the 'make' command. What stuff do you use?"

I think my brain exploded.

Remember this movie scene? That was me.



(it's from the 1990 version of Total Recall. The AI/robot/thing gets an unexpected question from a human, doesn't know how to respond and finally breaks.)

I have never, ever, in my life as a software developer heard that question before! .NET development usually equals Windows and (often a specific version of) Visual Studio, at least from my experience.

On my first day at work I was very excited to use Ubuntu, code in PyCharm and write strange terminal commands. Today, a couple of months later, the terminal has become my new best friend. Ubuntu is fast, responsive and doesn't get in my way. Well, sometimes a bit tricky to use when native apps are missing, but that's fine. It feels like I'm on a diet.

It would be great if we, the .NET people, also were able to freely choose our favourite tools, editors and even operating system.

Why?
Because it's fun! We shouldn't underestimate the value of fun. If the tools we use are platform independent, we can be platform independent as developers too. That will bring us closer to other dev communities. Chances are we will learn (and share) more than when staying in isolation. Being a platform independent developer is a good thing.

In fact, .NET developers can do all of that now.

I have been following the development of ASP.NET 5 (recently renamed to ASP.NET Core 1.0) from the early beta versions, and started experimenting with it on my Ubuntu Linux machine a couple of months ago. This is my current setup: write C# code in Atom, push commits to GitHub, trigger builds and publish to Azure Web Apps when pull requests are merged.



Developing on a Linux dev machine and publishing to a cloud based Windows machine.

Atom, really? I know, Visual Studio is hard to compete with, especially when used together with ReSharper. But editors like Atom are lightweight. I like that. They are not only lightweight, they also have the possibility to install plugins like OmniSharpOmniSharp add editor features close to the ReSharper experience.

Lightweight tools need friends, and one of them is the terminal. It might be a bit intimidating at first if you are not already a command line user. It was for me. Now, I rather write oneliners like this, than right clicking some menu option or opening a dialog window:

git checkout -b my-new-feature-branch

Once learned, it is so simple. Let's stay in the command line window, because there is another essential tool for platform independent .NET development: Yeoman.




With Yeoman, we get the command line version of "File -> new project". You can also install Yeoman as a plugin to Atom. I usually create a new C# project from the command line and later add files using the Atom plugin.

What about Mono?
I haven't figured out how to exclusively use the new modular CoreCLR on my Linux machine. I can't get it to work without selecting the Mono version in the .NET version manager (the dnvm command). I guess it will be fixed soon, but it doesn't really matter if you want to get started now. Mono is the platform independent version of the system wide installed .NET Framework on your Windows machine.

Besides that, Mono comes with a great tool: the REPL.

Great for experimenting and learning about new cool C# features. Just type the word csharp in the terminal and start experimenting & learning.




So far, the .NET development on Linux experience has been very nice.