Scott Hanselman released a podcast a few days ago called “The Past, Present and Future of .Net Unit Testing Frameworks” where he collected a panel of the creators of NUnit, XBUnit, and other Unit testing frameworks.  It was an interesting listen.

http://www.hanselminutes.com/

The panel spoke of some of the shortcomings of unit testing that still need to be overcome. 

What I found the most interesting was not what was said in the show, but how difficult it is to find good developers who believe in test-driven development at all. 

One of the perks of where I’m working now is being able to work with talented developers again. I don’t mind the occasional solo projects, but you can learn a lot more by working in a development team. One guy I’m working with is very big into design patterns and I’ve actually become very interested in them myself.

I tried to learn some design patterns for C# about six months ago, but found them to be very complex. I was also working with some people who didn’t really see the point of them. The last contract I spent trying to convince the developers that they shouldn’t be using inline SQL in a page source. So, I didn’t have much luck learning it on my own very well. Now, I got loads of code to marvel at and compile.

When I mentioned my difficulty picking up Design Patterns to my colleague, he told me he had trouble with some of the concepts too until he read “Head First Design Patters“. He recommended it as a first book on the subject.

Head First Design Patters is a book about Design Patterns in Java, but the concepts all work with C# and seem to be the same GangOfFour patterns used by .Net developers.

The book is very easy to read and a lot more eye-opening than a lot of the other computer books I’ve read. If you are interested in learning Design Patterns, let me pass on my friends recommendation and suggest this book.