I had been blogging with Wordpress for over two years, and while Wordpress has some great features like the statistics and comments engine, the core writing experience was never completely smooth for me. The online editor has a tendency to get spacing wrong and reformat blocks of text on a whim. Editing with Windows Live Writer is a improvement, but doing simple things like adding snippets of code or XML was always more difficult than necessary. Read more

I've been using SpecFlow to write behavior specifications for just under a year, and one question that comes up is whether or not nested tables are supported for creating complex or hierarchal types. Other folks have discussed this at Stack Overflow and Google Groups. Nested tables aren't currently supported, and that's probably a good thing. The intent of the Cucumber syntax is to express business requirements in the language of the business. Read more

UPDATE (11/18/2016): I’ve written a number of posts since this one was published that cover advanced SpecFlow topics like composable steps, tags done right, managing state, useful regex, etc. For a list of all my SpecFlow writing, you can click on the SpecFlow tag. SpecFlow is a fantastic tool that’s changed the way I develop software, and I hope it does the same for you. Happy testing! My last post covered three tips or best practices for SpecFlow that covered manipulating the current ScenarioContext with extension methods, binding multiple Given/When/Then attributes, and using hooks. Read more

UPDATE (11/18/2016): I’ve written a number of posts since this one was published that cover advanced SpecFlow topics like composable steps, tags done right, managing state, useful regex, etc. For a list of all my SpecFlow writing, you can click on the SpecFlow tag. SpecFlow is a fantastic tool that’s changed the way I develop software, and I hope it does the same for you. Happy testing! Late last year a co-worker Jay Brummels introduced our development group to SpecFlow a . Read more

As 2012 comes to a close, it’s time to look back on some of the things I’ve learned. During the past year, my focus has been on enterprise service development, and thanks to a talented software architect and co-worker Kelly Brownsberger, I feel much more confident with my development skills. Together we focused on re-architecting and refactoring large portions of an ordering service. Now, looking back, three lessons in particular have stuck with me and changed the way I develop software. Read more

I learned a cool programming technique this week from a co-worker Kelly Brownsberger to enable container access to a singleton. Say you have an interface IApplicationSettings exposed as a static singleton property, but you want to inject it into other classes via a container. The trick is to create another class that implements IApplicationSettings and grabs a reference to the singleton in the constructor. Each implementation of an interface member simply delegates the call to the corresponding member of the singleton reference. Read more