Craig Murphy (Scottish Developers co-organiser, DDD founder, Scrum Master, MVP, author, speaker, project manager and developer) is coming to The .NET Developer Network on Tuesday 22nd January 2008 to deliver two sessions:-

• Automating your build process using FinalBuilder
  For non-trivial applications, having a managed build process is essential. However, if that build process is irksome to use and requires a series of fiddly steps in order to complete it, developers/build folks will not been too keen to run it frequently. This is a shame because a repeatable, fast and easy to use build process increases confidence and product quality.
  
  Thankfully there are tools available to help us automate the build process, FinalBuilder is one such tool. Automating the build involves scripting every action that you need in order to compile, test, deploy and re-test your application. Everything from pressing F5-Compile through to creating a setup.exe (MSI, installer, etc.), copying into a [clean] virtual machine, setting up database connections, sending e-mail, creating images, posting blog entries, burning CDs, starting/stopping IIS, version control integration...they are all part of the automation process.
  
  Over the course of this session Craig will explain the need for automating the build process and will demonstrate VSoft’s FinalBuilder tool (and Automise if time permits). Craig does not have any formal connection with VSoft, he is just evangelical about their product!


• An Introduction to Test-Driven Development
  With Test-Driven Development (TDD) now entering the mainstream via such tools as NUnit and more recently xUnit.net, it is becoming an important tool to have in your developer tool chest. If you are wondering how to "get more" from TDD, code coverage could well be part of the answer. I believe that we can improve the quality of our application by using a combination of TDD and code coverage.
  
  Code coverage, whereby we "track" how much of our code is covered during testing, is not new. Indeed, we can practice code coverage and TDD in isolation. However, applying what we know about code coverage against our unit tests allows us to move our applications to the next "quality" level: no longer is it acceptable to have unit tests on their own, we must know how well written the unit tests are, how much of the classes under test are really being tested?
  
  Over the course of 60-75 minutes Craig will introduce the benefits of code coverage using both manual methods and automated tools. He will briefly introduce TDD and will go on to demonstrate the benefits of using code coverage tools against your unit tests, i.e. how well do your tests exercise your classes/application?
  
  Craig will be using Visual Studio 2005 and C# - his demonstrations are available for Visual Basic.NET and Borland compilers too.

Craig lives and breathes this stuff so everyone can be sure to get some solid, in-depth coverage of these subjects. For details go here.

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