I have been reading some of the Coding4Fun articles that are on MSDN.  Several of the articles are focused on connecting your computer up to external devices and writing .Net code to interface with the devices.  This has always been a main interest of mine since I am interested in robotics and home automation.  The resent release of .Net 2.0 has made some nice features available for doing serial communications.  Also Microsoft has made the Visual Studio Express editions freely available for 1 year.  This makes up a great solution for the general hobbyist to play with software and hardware.  So I thought it was time that I start my own set of articles on building software and integrating it to hardware devices.

 

So I gave it some thought on where to begin.  What project will be a prime candidate?  How would I build the foundation so I could leverage different hardware solutions to a given interface problem.  So I decided on a few goals to keep in mind about the project:

• Provide a solution to an interfacing problem that could be used in many projects.
• Build the library using .Net 2.0.
• The library should extract the consumer from any hardware implementation.
• The library should be testable without hardware implementation. 
• The library can use external pluggable components to fulfill the interface to the hardware itself.  So 3rd party components can be built and plugged into the library.

 

Stay tuned for a series of articles on this project

Hey looks like the new .Net 2.0 supports a serial class that makes serial communications a snap.

http://msmvps.com/coad/archive/2005/03/23/39466.aspx

I need to get going on some project to try this out.  Maybe a PC to BX24 project that will be useful in my house.  I need to give it some thought. 

Well I have been looking at VS.Net 2005 some since it has released.  I wanted to try out some of the new features.  Well I am pretty attached to using NUnit so once I got a little bit of code going in VS.Net 2005 I decided it was time to try NUnit.  Fortunately there is a new iteration release of NUnit (2.2.3) that works with VS.Net 2005. 

So I downloaded it and wrote my first test like I always do.  Create a test project, add a reference to NUnit, add a new class, put a TestFixture attribute on the class, and add a public method that returns void that also has the Test attribute. I then proceeded to fire up NUnit GUI and run the test. However the test I wrote does not show up in the GUI. I fiddled around with the test code for a while and I even downloade the NUnit source code to try and figure out why my test was not seen by NUnit. Well after about 30 minutes of messing around I realized that when you add a new class to VS.Net 2005 project it looks like the following

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
namespace ProtoSystem.Scrum.Business.Tests
{   
   class Class1
   {
   }
}

I never noticed the fact that public does not appear before the keyword class. So the test class could not be seen by NUnit.