I've been doing this String Calculator Kata whenever I've had a spare half hour before 7am and wanted to see how others did it. See the Andrew Woodward Calculator Kata and the Bobby Johnson Calculator Kata.

Differences

It was more than a little odd to see tests pass using the ReSharper Test Runner but fail when using either NUnit or the as yet mystery default option (whichever is used when Test With > Debugger is selected from the context menu).

Reason being that ReSharper is kind enough to run the tests in the order they appear whilst the others do so in alphabetic order. Dependencies between tests become apparent. Slaps to the forehead are delivered. We resolve to steer clear of using statics for unit testing.

Mouse

With only one monitor at work - everyone has just the one monitor so we're not too keen on standing out for being flash by having two monitors! - it would be handy having test results appear in the status bar using an ALT-T shortcut and TestDriven.NET. However, licensing! So it's tabbed Unit Test Sessions and CTRL-TAB until we're in the promise land.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Also, it turns out the the advertisement for going mouseless is true. Keeping the hands on the keyboard does indeed speed up coding. The next problem then was trying to access the Debug Tooltips (available ordinarily by hovering the mouse over variables). The solution is AutoHotkey and the script is courtesy of Rob Henry.

Bloomberg connectivity is a riot. We submit (by FTP) a text file with an expected format using carriage return and line feed to separate data entity requests.

From C# this means shelling out to a batch file (remember DOS) which executes some Java code responsible for handling request/response. If the request is valid then one minute later a zip file is returned that contains a text file. We parse and we have a database ready data file. If the request is badly formed, however, then an error file is created on the remote FTP directory but that is never returned!

Five years ago someone asked on WILMOTT (serving the Quantitative Finance Community) how to connect a Java application with Bloomberg to send and receive data. Dominic Connor was kind enough to reply.

At another time, at another place we used the DLLs on the Bloomberg terminal to return the data we needed. It was fast, efficient, predictable and illegal. Good times.

It's been almost one week since we started doing this daily code Kata: Roy Osherove's TDD Kata 1 - String Calculator. Thirty minutes every day in October so far. Six days. Three hours. Writing the same functionality over and over. What happens is that, naturally, each time we get a little closer to the end (we've not yet completed it in thirty minutes) and we optimise by anticipating functional requirements and code to allow for simple changes ahead. We'll decide how much of this is cheating once we're actually done a few times within thirty minutes before moving onto the next Kata.

We're using just the one code snippet, TDDtestmethod, which generates a test method. We abandoned the calculator variable name, opting for c.Add instead.

Is there a prize for the longest [Test] case method name?

Calculator_ 
MultipleDelimeterVaryingLengthSpecifiedDelimitedMultipleStringDecimalValues_
ShouldReturnSummedValues()

Using underscores would only make matters worse. And when we looked at some of our tests recently we discovered that we were unit testing parts of the framework (guess we're still not sure about Entity Framework) and using unit tests for spikes too. The words "Gone Too Far" appeared suddenly.

Today, a courier cyclist arrived bearing the gift of a new contract for new employment. If everything goes as expected we'll be working in the City within two weeks.

It's perhaps better not to mention the employer by name but they're a solutions provider working within an interesting area of finance and our role's likely to involve helping to ensure the reliability of systems processing terrabytes of data with issues of cleanliness and performance being most important. We're thinking optimised data querying, concurrency (scale) and transformation/calculation.

Without much recent UI experience all the cool Winforms & Web developer roles seemed out of reach so this is where our spare time needs to be invested over the next couple of years whilst the day job is all about the data, touching possibly on F# and elements of grid computing and much more of the modelling languages: UML & XML.

In terms of development approach the experience from the last consultancy role at Man Investments should prove invaluable in terms of transferring agile methodology and process where appropriate but because this is a smaller company, enterprise systems integration complexity ought not to present the same kind of challenges. I'm hoping for a more contained, bounded, intra-application kinda complexity. Those woods and trees managed to get quite blurred in that last assignment.

The new mission is to help provide Market Transparency.

I should add that Man Investments was a fantastic place to work.