Excellent. TDD xUnit in Ruby

Somebody else usually gets there first (fortunately) :
http://rubyeyeforthejavaguy.blogspot.com/2008/09/xunit-in-ruby.html

simply VB Unit

My sucessful conversion to the xUnit section of "TDD By Example" as mentioned in last post, made me think that the boot-strapping technique might be fun to try out with Ruby, Smalltalk and my old nemesis VB6. Looked at VBUnit site while thinking of SimplyVBUnit and realised from the steps that I never used SimplyVBUnit properly, hence my total lack of progress. This could be getting interesting. Will report more, but for me the problem was not having "Break on Unhandled errors" not checked. Cant think why not. (Didnt think is more like:-)

Zowee - into Unit testing at last!

I have languished at chapter 2 of"Test Driven Development by Example"
the classic by Kent Beck, but unfortunately after 3 years or so, I still find it nearly as unreadable as Craig Larman's majestic but insomnia-curing
"Applying UML and Patterns" -- so today I jumped to the half way point, like a bad murder mystery reader, and discovered part 2 which is a joy where he boot-straps a unit testing framework from scratch in Python.
It is completely enchanting and transcends the whole yawny 'you-should but why bother' reaction brought on by the first section. Almost entirely my fault of course, but the combination of starting from scratch and the test and run cylcle with an interpreted language just brings the whole business to life -- finally I think I am getting it

Great solution - whats the problem again?

On first glance this seems great but when you dig deeper it starts to seem to make less sense -- HTML to native? Isnt that the opposite of the way we are all going?
http://www.appcelerator.com/
Except almost definitely in the mobile space where pathetic describes the on-board resources and a bit of native would be a god-send.
Having said that the most attractive short cut would be writing apps for the iPhone without having to learn Objective-C (yuk twice, its always made me feel uncomfortable). But not on anything except a Mac with the iPhone SDK though -- why would you bother? Unless of course you wanted to build a Hackintosh first :-)

http://lifehacker.com/5351485/how-to-build-a-hackintosh-with-snow-leopard-start-to-finish

Another tech that wont die

'Classic' ASP is still out there, unloved and almost forgotten, but not by the programming community!
People have been working on MVC and ASP.Net-friendly frameworks for it ...
ASP to ASP.Net:
http://code.google.com/p/claspdev/
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/asp/ClassicAspFW02.aspx

ASP MVC:
http://robrohan.com/2006/09/19/simple-mvc-asp-framework/
(use 7zip on the zip file, windows doesnt recognise it as a file)

http://zend.lojcomm.com.br/goodies/asp-xtreme-evolution/

Nice article on web based apps

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/09/05/desktop-aps-versus-web-apps/
Some nice links as usual on SEO and suchlike (goes right over my head but however:-)
Also mention of Ruby on Rails, I must track back through his previous posts

playing with Django

the framework, not the guitarist :-)
Finding it very like Ruby on Rails so far, not a surprise. The pleasure with the two (RoR and Django) is that they pretty much Just Work and get out of your way, unlike certain other frameworks which pretend to be MVC. I've never been particularly a fan of MVC but there is a logic and rhythm to them when you work through an exemple with Rails or Django. Incidentally, on the language level I still dont warm entirely to either Ruby or Python, they seem like re-threads of Smalltalk -- but the web frameworks definitely know how to win friends and influence people