Often you will have tests written that hit a service that is going to be hosted via IIS. On our development box we will probably be using the development webserver that ships with Visual Studio. Often the development webserver is not running when we start our tests which causes a failure. To combat that we have all our service tests inherit from a base class that starts up the webserver if it is not already running. This gives us consistent testability: [TestFixture] public class ServiceTestBase ...

That’s right! After a great event last year we are doing ALT.NET Canada again. This year it will be taking place in Vancouver, B.C. on June 12-14 which is right after DevTeach! In fact we are in the same location as DevTeach so it makes for a great week of training and discussions of some of the best techniques and tools in the industry Registration is limited to 100 people so get in quick. More info and registration can be found on the ALT.NET Canada Website

The big talk lately seems to be about parallelism and writing multithreaded code to take advantage of multi-core/threaded processors. While this is a great way to do more tasks at once it is not usually required for the common line of business apps most of us are writing. Multi-threading is great when you have a big job that can be split appart into chunks for processing on multiple threads. Gaming for instance can benefit a lot from this as gaming is usually a CPU intensive activity. If you are writing a simple app to get things from a database and display...