Home » Blog

Archive for July, 2007

We’re hiring!

Tagged as News

Life at Mindscape has been pretty busy lately and we’re now needing to expand our size. We have an exciting array of projects, both products based and consulting based that will ensure you develop and refine your existing skills. Mindscape is known for being at the cutting edge of development, we use modern technologies such as WPF, SilverLight, .NET 3.5, Ruby etc and also promote leading development practices like continuous integration, unit testing and agile development. We’re a company for geeks, created by geeks and believe strongly in providing a fantastic work environment with great learning opportunities and equipment.

Intermediate – Senior Developer
We are looking for an intermediate or senior level developer to join our team.

You…

• Have a passion for code, bordering on obsessive.
• Live in Wellington, New Zealand
• Like to find new ideas in IT and enjoy sharing them.
• Want to build or continue building your profile as a technical speaker, blogger, technical event organiser.
• Have excellent communication skills.
• Want to work where you are respected, get challenged and enjoy yourself.
• Have experience with C#, SQL Server, ASP.NET and have interests in dynamic languages, patterns and practices and seeing how far you can push a computer.

If this sounds like you then please send your CV to jd@mindscape.co.nz and we’ll be in contact with you soon. All applications are treated with confidentiality.

– JD

Add your comments
Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 17 July 2007

Transactional Tests in LightSpeed

Tagged as LightSpeed

I got an email about how to do transactional tests with LightSpeed. The pattern to use looks something like this:

[SetUp]
public void SetUp()
{
  _transactionScope = new TransactionScope();
}
 
[TearDown]
public void TearDown()
{
  Repository.CompleteUnitOfWork(false);
 
  _transactionScope.Dispose();
}
 
[Test]
public void SomeTest()
{
  Contact contact = new Contact();
  contact.Name = "Andrew";
 
  Repository.Add(contact);
  Repository.SaveChanges(true);
 
  Contact theNewContact = Repository.FindOne<Contact>(contact.Id);
 
  Assert.AreNotSame(contact, theNewContact);
  Assert.AreEqual("Andrew", theNewContact.Name);
}

The key here is to use the overload of SaveChanges that allows us to specify that the internal state of the current unit of work should be reset. Doing this means that subsequent queries will bypass the identity map.

Add your comments
Posted by Andrew Peters on 6 July 2007

Mindscape in the news

Tagged as News

Recently when BackgroundMotion was launched the story was picked up by the Dominion Post. The article provided a good overview of what BackgroundMotion is about and how to find out more about it.

Click here to view a scan of the original article.

Several points in the article were slightly inaccurate however:

• The Microsoft addition to display video as your desktop is called DreamScene, not Dreamscape.
• Flickr doesn’t allow sharing video files but services like SilverLight Streaming Service do.
• My last name is Trask, not Task :)

Overall the article is great for helping highlight that despite being a young company we are out there creating some cool software for people to use and learn from. If you would like to know more about BackgroundMotion you can read our earlier blog posts about the release or visit the site itself at www.backgroundmotion.com

– JD

Add your comments
Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 5 July 2007

LightSpeed powers SilverLight application

Tagged as LightSpeed

James Newton-King (winner of the recent LightSpeed competition) has published the application he was creating that leveraged LightSpeed for the domain model. The application, TrafficWarden, consists of several components to report on internet traffic using the NetFlow format. A Windows service that uses LightSpeed for modeling and persistence captures the raw data to a SQL Server 2005 database, a web service provides remote access to this information and a SilverLight front end provides an easily digestable view of the statistics (including several different reports).

A lot of the early beta feedback from James was generated from his use of LightSpeed in the development of this project. One challenge was the large amount of data that the router was generating when he was maxing out his connection and this ultimately lead to some of the optimisations that have made LightSpeed so efficient today.

The source code for TrafficWarden is available on the Newtonsoft blog and I would encourage anyone interested to download it.

Good work James.

– JD

Add your comments
Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 5 July 2007

LightSpeed iPod Winner

Tagged as LightSpeed, News

Midnight Saturday night signified the end of our iPod competition for the LightSpeed beta and we are please to announce that James Newton-King has won the 4GB iPod! James by far submitted the most amount of feedback and has been developing in anger with LightSpeed on a personal traffic monitoring application.

James also maintains a popular blog here.

The competition is now over and completed just as we released our first release candidate of LightSpeed. Thanks to everybody who submitted feedback, it was hugely valuable and has helped ensure we deliver the most rock solid products possible. Feedback is still much appreciated and can be made in our forums.

Congratulations James!

– JD

Add your comments
Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 1 July 2007