The Question

Should I be concerned that free content I release on my wiki, or the videos I release, use paid-for tools?

I expect people will also answer a secondary question: which tool I should use for Ruby. I’m interested in that as well, however my primary question is the general one of whether I should stick to free tools for the free content I release.

The three laws of TDD are:

• Write no production code without a failing test
• Write just enough of a test to fail
• Write just enough production code to get the test to pass

This list doesn’t include refactoring, which is typically an assumed activity. In fact, some people refer to these rules as “red, green, refactor”. An even older version of this, from the Smalltalk community, is Red, Green, Blue. (Why Blue for refactor? I think someone was thinking RBG for a color space, luckily they didn’t try to use CMYK or LAB!)

In this simple model, there two kinds of code: test & production. There are two kinds of activity: writing & refactoring. Interestingly, at one level it is all code. The thing that distinguishes both sets is intent.

I’ve taught a few C++ courses recently to people primarily moving from C to C++. I know C++ has been around for years and it’s not in vogue like it was 15 years ago. I stopped using it full time in 1997. Even so, there’s been quite a bit of work on the library and language standard. And there are still a lot of places developing new systems with C++. I know some people are still be learning C++ in school.

At the #coderetreat in Orlando I spent an hour programming with @lunivore (Liz Keogh). We worked in Clojure on Conway’s game of life. It was quite an experience!

Moved the article and the file. Reduced resolution from 300 dpi to 75 dpi (using a quartz filter on OS X from Jerome Colas

Here’s the story with the updated location: The Moved Blog

Some of you asked for it. Here’s something to get you started:

http://schuchert.wikispaces.com/cpptraining.UsingCSlimWithVisualStudio2010

These instructions are a work in progress and alpha. However, they do get the basics working.

If you are so inclined, have a look at the NMakefile (you’ll come across it in the instructions) and give me a better way to build it.

I spent probably 8 hours getting a working environment (much yak shaving including a faulty mac book pro DVD drive). I then spent another 8 – 10 hours getting this working. I worked through it about 5 times to minimize the amount of changes I needed to make to the original library source.

I ended up using some link and pre-processor seams to get most of this built. However, most of my time was spent trying to figure out the command line tools and their options.

If you can give me some guidance on improving this, I’d like to hear it. However, this is now a low-burning thread, so some assembly required!

Enjoy,

I’ve been working with FitNesse.slim, using the cslim implementation to execute C++ code. I have some rough notes online. These should be enough to get started, though you’ll need to be using G++ 4.4 or later.

In any case, have a look. Give me some feedback if you’d like. I’ll be working on these over the next month or so: http://schuchert.wikispaces.com/cpptraining.ExecutingBinaryOperators

In my previous blog I mentioned adding a single method to the cslim library:

cslim/include/CSlim/SlimListSerializer.h:

void SlimList_Release(char *serializedResults);

cslim/src/CSlim/SlimListSerializer.c:

void SlimList_Release(char *serializedResults)
{
  if(serializedResults)
    free(serializedResults);
}

I continue working on these. I was stuck in the airport for 5 hours. Between that and the actual flight, I managed to create three different test examples against a C++ RpnCalculator. Each example uses a different kind of fixture. I had a request from @lrojas to publish some results on the blog. So this is that, however these are in progress and rough.

Title says it all: http://schuchert.wikispaces.com/cpptraining.GettingStartedWithFitNesseInCpp

First draft. If you have problems, please let me know.