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If I only knew then...

Fri May 27 2005

Not what I know now, but what I'm learning now. I recently picked up a copy of the src to FlexWikiPad. I just wanted to see how things were wired together in there: I only have a very old installation of FlexWiki sitting around that still looks like crap in FireFox.

To his credit, Craig has done an awesome job of making FlexWikiPad very testable - something I didn't think was all that easy to do in winforms. Apparently, his dialogs are very humble. He's using a pretty strict Model View Presenter (or controller, whatever) pattern throughout the application. I thought this was a lot of extra coding at first (it kinda is), but in the process Craig has made FlexWikiPad easier to maintain and update thru the use of mocks/stubs and tests with this pattern.

Currently, I've got this itch that I want to scratch with regards to PostXING that would have been so nice to be able to test my way thru. I'm just hacking thru it now, and I've done a pretty good job of messing everything up so far :) In my defense, I'm still learning unit testing and when it comes to winform applications I feel that there is a balance that I like to hit right on the line of usability and architectural beauty. Anyone who has looked at PostXING's source will soon see that my architectin' ain't so purty - it's still just a lot of different pieces from different places glued together. I don't validate everything that I should. I left fields that I intended to add functionality for disabled but visible. Even up to 1.1 versions. BUT...

...and this is a big but...

...it works. That was priority #2 for me with PostXING. Priority #1 was to make something useful that I could use to learn winforms.

Anyways, I'm hoping that I can glean some insight off of people like Craig that are way more knowledgable than me on this front. If I feel like the task for PostXING to be testable is too great, I may just try to apply this knowledge to future projects. So, thanks Craig for making FlexWikiPad follow a concise pattern that I did know about but have never seen implemented with tests in C# before.

💾 May the source be with you. v3.2.1004