Gojko Adzic

From February 2009, Skills Matter will start organising public Alt.NET courses (first in London and then across Europe).

Opensource .NET tools crash course

The first will be a three-day crash course on tools and practices aimed at .NET developers that want to learn about Alt.NET tools and Java developers that are migrating to .NET and looking for good equivalents to the tools that they are used to working with. The course gives an overview of the most popular opensource .net tools and introduces modern development practices that these tools promote, such as test driven development, continuous integration, dependency injection, object-relational mapping and web development using the model-view-controller pattern.

Learn how to:

• Implement TDD in .NET using NUnit, MBUnit, Rhino Mocks and FitNesse
• Utilise Aspect oriented programming and Dependency Injection using Castle Windsor
• Efficiently build Web applications using the MVC pattern in Monorail and utilising Monorail and Script# for Ajax and test them using Selenium Remote Console.
• Manage persistence easily using ORM tools such as ActiveRecord and NHibernate
• Introduce continuous integration in your projects using CruiseControl.NET and CI Factory

See the full programme.

Agile Web Development with the Castle Framework

The second one is a two-day course on Agile Web Development using the Castle project, teaching the basics of the Castle Framework and helping people develop a solid understanding of its benefits. Over the course of the two days, attendees will create a simple but complete web application using agile Web development practices such as Inversion of Control, Dependency Injection, Aspect Oriented Programming, Object/Relational Mapping and applying the Model-View-Controller pattern.

Learn how to

• Apply agile web development practices like MVC and dependency injection
• Use ActiveRecord to manage the object-relational mapping and the database layer
• Use the Monorail MVC engine to create web applications that are easy to maintain and test
• Explain the basics of Monorail views, layouts, rescues
• Use the NVelocity view engine to build web UIs for Monorail
• Apply Windsor Microkernel to configure and wire application components
• Unit test the data access layer with Castle
• Unit test web controllers
• Describe how Castle components come together to help us develop web applications easier
• Explain why this approach is much more effective than ASP.NET
• Apply best practices, common pitfalls, and tips and tricks for Castle Web development

See the full programme.

Here is the video from the Testing Web Applications with Selenium and Selenium Remote Control talk that Milan Bogdanovic, Ivan Sanchez and I organised last week at Skills Matter. The first part of the talk introduces Selenium and some related tools that allow us to use Selenium easier. In the second part, Milan demonstrates Selenium IDE and talks about Selenese language. In the third part, Ivan talks about Remote Control, how to make tests easier to manage and introduced the Page Object pattern. Download links and slides from the talk.

Here are the links and slides from my talk today at Skills Matter on testing web applications with Selenium.

Download Powerpoint slides from here.

• Selenium-core: selenium-core.openqa.org/
• Selenium-Remote Control: selenium-rc.openqa.org/
• Selenium-IDE: selenium-ide.openqa.org/
• Selenium-Grid: selenium-grid.openqa.org/
• Domain-specific testing languages presentation from Agile 2008 by Mickey Phoenix from Solutions IQ: www.solutionsiq.com/agile2008/agile-2008-domain.php
• StoryTestIQ: storytestiq.solutionsiq.com
• Cubic Test: www.cubictest.com
• WebTest Fixtures: fitnesse.info/webtest

Ivan Sanchez will put his slides online at www.isanchez.net.

I’m doing a talk on testing web applications with Selenium next Thursday
at Skills Matter offices in London with Ivan Sanchez and Milan
Bogdanovic. We’ll cover the basics of Selenium, best practices and
pitfalls, using selenium IDE and remote control. The event is free, but
up-front registration is required so that we can plan for capacity. For
more information and to register, click here.

It’s been almost a year since I wrote Automating web tests with FitNesse and Selenium, offering an idea how FitNesse can be used to implement a nice customer-friendly mini-language for user interface testing. Since then, that article has been one of the most popular, if not the single most popular, article on this web site. I have helped several clients improve and integrate their UI testing based on the ideas in that article, expanding and improving the mini-language, especially for AJAX testing. Here is what I’ve learned about that in the last year. Continue Reading »