Autumn of Agile Iteration 01 – Part C Screencast is now Available

As of now, I’m happy to announce that the next installment of the Autumn of Agile Screencast series is available for download and viewing from the main site.

WARNING: Length is still an issue!

Despite my best efforts to contain the length of these things, this one has now set a brand new (personal) record for length: 3 hours and 17 minutessmile_embaressed  I know that in comments rec’d to this prior post, viewers indicated that longer wasn’t necessarily an issue (so long as there was good content for the entire length of the screencast), but even if viewers combine judicious use of the STOP button with Windows-Media-Player’s ability to play in 2X speed, I’m still concerned that the length is going to be a barrier to consumption.

Determined NOT to fade-in and fade-out

Never the less, I am determined not to fall back to the fade-in/out method and start skipping any actual recording of work on the project.  I feel strongly that for this effort to be truly valuable to a viewer, its important to show the entire process, warts and all, so that what is presented here is a realistic version of an actual Agile project (or at least as real as it can be when there is only one member of the team and there isn’t really a client/end-user in-play).

That said, I’d be very interested in viewer feedback about what really starts to constitute too long an installment.  What’s too big to download in today’s era of (generally) available higher-bandwidth Internet connections (this one is over 380MB)?

What’s Covered

The upside to a 3+ hour screencast, is that we get to cover A LOT of material smile_teeth.  Here are some high-points in this installment…

  • Thinking about the design of our URLs as first-class citizens in our application
  • Creating our first ASP.NET MVC controller
  • Creating unit tests for the controller
  • Wiring up our IoC container to inject our repository into our controller
  • Extracting an interface for our repository so that we can mock it in our unit tests
  • Understanding how to (properly) mock our Rhino UnitOfWork abstraction for the sake of our unit tests
  • Creating our first ASP.NET MVC view
  • Wiring up HTML CheckBox inputs to our SkillTypes list
  • Creating our first HTML form elements in ASP.NET MVC
  • Understanding HTTP Verb Action Filters in ASP.NET MVC
  • Introducing a UserService to get the Employee object for the current user
  • Writing unit tests for our action methods
  • Understanding how to pass complex objects from Controllers to Views (introducing the ViewModel concept)
  • Uncovering a bug in ASP.NET MVC BETA form data modelbinding (and working around it)
  • Exposing an oversight in our AddSkill(…) business logic (and saving it for next time!)

As always, comments, feedback, etc. are welcome from all.

Happy viewing~!