Under the hood and working with .Net, TDD, Software Design, and Agile Stuff
In the vein of "getting started," the question came up today about how to access shared binary tools like NUnit or NAnt. I'd say that the best practice is to have all the binary dependencies checked into your source control repository and use those copies of the tools (operating systems & database servers obviously don't apply). Don't depend on a GAC-ed copy of NUnit or NAnt.
WHY?
One of the tenets of a Continuous Integration strategy is a single, authoritative source repository for the application, including binary dependencies. There are two end goals:
- Know exactly which versions of what (NUnit, NAnt, NHibernate, NEtc.) your code depends on
- Be able to walk up to a clean machine, checkout the code tree, run the automated build, and voila -- you're ready to go. Depending on a GAC-ed copy of NUnit, for example, defeats this goal.
About Jeremy D. Miller
Jeremy began his IT career writing "Shadow IT" applications to automate his engineering documentation, then wandered into software development because it looked like more fun. Jeremy previously worked as a systems architect building mission critical supply chain software for a Fortune 100 company and learned agile development practices as a .Net consultant at ThoughtWorks, one of the pioneers of agile development. Jeremy is the author of the open source StructureMap (http://structuremap.sourceforge.net) tool for Dependency Injection with .Net and the forthcoming StoryTeller (http://storyteller.tigris.org) tool for supercharged FIT testing in .Net. Jeremy's thoughts on just about everything software related can be found on his weblog "The Shade Tree Developer" at http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller, part of the popular CodeBetter site. Jeremy is a Microsoft MVP for C#.