If you’ve been following the Tadmap blog then you might be wondering why there haven’t been any updates since November. Well here’s why.

Before Christmas I decided to try out the new ASP.Net MVC framework, for no other reason than wanting to learn more about it. My initial impression was that it would be ideal for Tadmap, so I decided to go for it. The change over meant refactoring all the pages I already had into controller and views, and I got 90% there very quickley. As I had never used MVC before I started following Rob Conery’s MVC Storefront series to make sure I was doing things right. This may or may not have been a mistake.

First, he was using a fancy new version of the Repository pattern which I liked the look of very much, this lead to even more refactoring and learning more about LINQ on the way.

I tried to ignore the Test Driven Development aspect of what Rob was doing, but eventually I downloaded Nunit just to try my hands at writing an automated test. Straight away I was hooked on TDD. I tried limiting TDD to just new code but to make the new code testable meant refactoring the old code to reduce dependencies.

It’s taken a lot longer then I wanted but I am having a lot of fun doing it. My code is clean and loosely coupled and I have over a hundred unit tests and a bunch of integration tests that I can fire with one click.

Even though I have no boss and as yet no users, I have still run into the age old problem of doing it right versus getting it done. There is the ultimate balance to be made between making things perfect while achieving the goals and real world features that help our moral and motivation. It’s starting to bother me that I haven’t been able to add any new features in over a month.

So in the next few weeks I hope to get an, albeit imperfect, ASP.Net MVC version of the application up on the live server. I’ll then be in a position to iron out the last few post refactoring bugs or implement a cool new feature when I need the motivation to keep going.