This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz
by Peter G Provost.
Original Post: Geek Notes 2004-04-28
Feed Title: Peter Provost's Geek Noise
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Feed Description: Technology news, development articles, Microsoft .NET, and other stuff...
So I forgot to tell you all about my favorite new toys. After a recommendation on
the Win Tech Off Topic mailing
list, I decided to buy a hard drive enclosure and a drive instead of paying for a
Maxtor. A buddy in MCS recommended this
brand of enclosures (he had a couple) and boy are they cheap! I got a 3.5 inch
USB 2.0 case for $29.99. Even better, I got a 2.5 inch (for laptop drives) USB 2.0
case for $17.99. The really cool thing about the little one is that it is cable-powered,
so you can basically use it like a multi-gig thumb drive (and it is only as big as
a deck of playing cards).
I was lucky because I had a spare 7GB 2.5 inch drive just gathering dust, so I popped
that in the little case. But for the big one, I headed over to my local ComUSA and
looked for rebate deals. I finally found a 160GB 7200 RPM 3.5 inch drive for $59 after
rebates. When combined with the cost of the enclosure, that comes to about 56 cents
per GB. The best
price I could find on a Maxtor OneTouch was about 94 cents per GB, so I saved
about $60. And I have the added win of being able to swap out the drive itself later
if I can find a better (bigger) one for a good price. Sweet!
Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# - Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas have a new book in the Pragmatic
Programmer series about unit testing in C#. You can get one chapter online here and
a number of other excerpts here.
Ruby Auto-Mocks -
Wow. This is one of those things that I think you can only do in a dynamically typed
language: bind to a particular mock implementation on the fly. I think I agree with
Michael Feathers that this could
be seriously abused by people, but could be very useful in particular kinds of
situations.
The
Provider Pattern in Whidbey - Andy Smith argues that the Whidbey Provider Pattern
is actually a combination of Abstract Factory, Singleton, Strategy and Component Configurator.
I agree, but isn't that what we call a pluggable architecture?
Static Classes
in Whidbey - Somehow I missed this one in the literature... we will now be able
to assign the static modifier to a class instead of just making the constructor private.
Sounds good to me since it makes the code clearer and more self-documenting.
Naked
Objects for .NET - I remember reading about these things when they hit the Java
scene a few years ago. Now we have them in .NET so I suppose I better go figure out
what all the hype was about. :)
Contiuous
Integration with CruiseControl.NET and Draco.NET - There was a discussion on WTOT
lately about why someone would use CC.NET instead of Draco. We use CC.NET but I know
people who like Draco. Tomato... tomato. The general opinion is that CC.NET is the
bigger, more configurable CI tool, but as always, you should use what works for you
and your team.
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