Speaking at VSLive Redmond on October 20, 2011

Updated 10/24/2011: the slides and code samples for these talks are available here.

FYI, I’ll be speaking at VSLive in Redmond, Washington on October 20th, 2011.  While I’m there, I’ll be giving two talks: 1) “Team Foundation Server 2010 Builds: Understand, Configure, and Customize” and 2) “Design For Testability: Mocks, Stubs, Refactoring, and User Interfaces.”

Here are the abstracts:

Design for Testability: Mocks, Stubs, Refactoring, and User Interfaces

You’re sold on unit testing. You’re even doing “test first” development – but there are always those nagging questions. How do your user interfaces fit into your testing plan? Do I have to call my database in order to have a good, solid test? What about calls into separate sub-systems or calls out to web services? Do you really need to have all those pieces running in order to test your logic?

In this session, Ben will start by clarifying the difference between “unit” and “integration” tests. After that, he’ll demonstrate how using dependency injection, mocks objects and stubs can help break dependencies and simplify your tests. Throughout the talk, you can expect to hear a lot about design patterns, how much code coverage is enough, and the fine line between too much and too little object mocking.

Team Foundation Server 2010 Builds: Understand, Configure, and Customize

The new Build system in TFS2010 could be the best new feature in the product. Actually, it’s almost definitely the best new feature in the product. It’s been completely re-written to use Windows Workflow and has done away with the old-style, clunky TFS2008 Team Build scripts. (Buh-bye, MSBuild.) It’s better integrated with Source Control through the new Gated Checkin feature that requires a build to pass before code can be checked in. (Buh-bye, broken builds.) There’s even integration with Lab Management.

Let’s just say that there have been a lot of changes.

In this talk, Ben will start by giving you a tour of the new features. Then he’ll move on to show you how to configure your build servers and builds. Finally, he’ll show you how to extend and customize the default build scripts to handle environment-specific configuration files, configuring IIS applications, and more.

-Ben