If you live anywhere around Memphis, be sure to be there on November 10. That is when the Memphis Day of .NET is scheduled. It was just announced today that Charles Petzold will be delivering the keynote as well! Charles has already posted about it on his blog. I'm incredibly jealous of all of you who are planning on being there - I had been planning to go but then when I found out when it was scheduled, I realized I had conflicts and wouldn't be able to make it. Of the other speakers scheduled, I got the chance to meet both Keith Elder and Jeff Blankenburg at DevLink and I know their presentations will be great. I know that Colin and others have put a lot of hard work into making the Day of .NET great, so if you get the chance, go out there and show them your support!

It is Halloween after all. It would be a great day to start learning Boo.

Sorry. I couldn't help myself.

Ayende is the man. Seriously.

Today, he released Rhino Mocks 3.3 to great fanfare.

If there wasn't great fanfare, there should be. My favorite new feature - mocking objects that inherit from MarshalByRefObject. You might be asking yourself, why does this matter? Doesn't that only apply to remoting? Well, yes, sort of. The thing is, a huge number of the built-in classes in the CLR support this remoting infrastructure. You know the ones I'm talking about - the built-in classes that are hard to mock and test.

At least they didn't let you mock them out until today. Here's an example of something that might have been harder to test before today:

Yeah, I'm mocking System.Diagnostics.Process. Sweet.

Take a look in Reflector and you'll find out just how many objects actually inherit from MarshalByRefObject. I think you'll be quite surprised.

Thanks Ayende!

I was reading through my feeds this morning and came across this gem of a paragraph:

Manual testing is immoral. Not only is it high stress, tedious, and error prone; it’s just wrong to turn humans into machines. If you can write a script for a test procedure, then you can write a program to execute that procedure. That program will be cheaper, faster, and more accurate than a human, and will free the human to do what humans to best: create!

The paragraph is actually an aside to the rest of the post, too! Go read the entire TDD post in context at the ObjectMentor blogs.

My wife and I got back from Nashville last night and we had a great time. While she went around shopping at garage sales and hanging out with family, I got to spend some time with some great developers at devLink. The conference was incredible. I'm still amazed that they were able to do so much with only $50, but no complaints here

Here are a few of the high points from the conference:

Keith Elder had a great presentation on the Enterprise Library. It was especially good to hear from someone who is using EntLib successfully from a WinForms perspective. I also got to talk to him a little after his presentation on some of their techniques for storing configuration across smart client applications.

Josh Holmes is a great speaker. I'm not at all surprised that he is one of the hosts for the new Code To Live! show. He is clearly passionate about the coding craft. He shared some great information about the DLR with us.

I got to hear Dave Laribee talk about Domain Driven Design, which was great. I also spoke with him about ALT.NET and Microsoft's upcoming MVC framework for ASP.NET. He told me that there are already plans for the next ALT.NET conference which is great news.

Ron Jacobs had the closing keynote on Saturday evening that covered Test Driven Development and the Model View Presenter architecture. It was a great presentation and it was encouraging to have Microsoft's presence there encouraging and pushing TDD.

One of the best things about the conference was how approachable everyone was. I got to meet a lot of great people and I even got the change to give Colin grief about winning the blogging contest (not that you can give someone much grief about winning an Xbox 360). My only complaint was that I wasn't able to attend some of the other presentations where there were schedule conflicts.

All in all, the conference was great. The staff and the presenters all did a great job.

I'm getting ready to start the drive to Nashville tonight for DevLink 2007. It will be my first real conference to attend and I'm really excited about it. It will also be fun to get to hang out in Nashville. If you'll be at the conference, look me up!

I know a few of you who are planning on going so you have no excuses to not say hi when you're there!

*sigh*