Good people are always last...

I've been driving through Dresden's early morning heavy traffic lately. Coming from a back road, I was waiting 5 minutes to turn left onto my main route. You probably know this: first there are 30 cars coming from the right and if these have passed, there are another 30 cars from the left and then again 50 cars from the right and so on.

Sometimes there are nice motorists who stop for you and let you pass the road. This also happened to me after 4 or 5 waves of cars from each side: a nice woman stopped to let me drive on. Unfortunately this woman was the last one in a series of cars and if she had not stopped for me, I had been able to cross the road anyway.

As this was not the first time I experienced this, I suppose: Good people are always last. What do you think?

[.NET] Setting up nUnit

As I am somehow addicted to information technology, I'd rather have this blog being a technical one with some soccer-related posts than the other way round. Therefore I am going to start a series about my experiences with unit testing in Microsoft's .NET framework.

This is not going to be a full-flavored introduction to unit testing and agile (extreme) software development at all. For complete information on these topics, Wikipedia's article about unit testing and the eXtreme Programming Homepage are good starting points which I'd like to point you to.

Besides programming mostly in C during my studies (which in fact is a great language!), my favorite programming languages for hobby projects are Python and C#. For a hobby project which is in its early steps at the moment (and which I will link at most if there is something to view on its SourceForge homepage), I am searching for a unit testing environment for .NET languages.

With google as one of your best friends you will soon stumble upon nUnit - the .NET version of the xUnit unit testing framework. Unfortunately it was not able to cope with the newest beta releases of the .NET framework 2.0. I spent a lot of time trying to compile the sources which are available from the project's website, but it really did not make me happy.

Lucky me, today I found out, that they have released nUnit version 2.2.3 which is finally able to run with the latest .NET versions. Therefore setting up nUnit is now quite easy - download the 2.2.3 msi from the nUnit homepage and run the installer. Worked pretty fine for me.

There are express editions of the new Visual Studio languages available and they are free for download until November 2006. Unlike the full-fledged VS2005, these editions however do not contain any unit testing support. This is bad. Even worse: Unlike the real VS, the express editions can not be extended by plugins. An nUnit addin is available for the studio and would have been a great help in developing with Visual C# Express and nUnit.

So the next step to do is setting up nUnit and Visual C# Express another way. Assume you have a production project opened in VC# Express and you want to add unit testing to this project.

1. Add a new project to your solution. This should be a dynamically linked library and will contain our test functions.
2. In the solution explorer right-click the DLL's references and chose "add reference".
3. From the dialog opening, chose "nUnit.Framework" from the ".NET" tab and the project you want to test from the "Projects" tab.
4. The real Visual studio seems to enable users to add a startup action to a project so that you can run nUnit every time you hit F5 / Run. Visual C# Express will not let me run a DLL project so I chose to add a post-build event for my test library.
   To do so, right-click the project and chose "Properties". In the "Build events" tab add a post-build event
   C:\Programme\Nunit\bin\nunit-gui.exe $(TargetFileName) /run
   (where C:\Programme\Nunit is the directory you installed nUnit to) and check that the post-build event is run whenever the build process succeeds.
   This postbuild event will run nUnit every time you rebuild your test library (e.g., by calling "Build solution") and tell nUnit's graphical console to run the tests in your test library.
5. Now that we are done, it is possible to run nUnit from VC# Express by hitting one key.

One thing I noticed regarding post-build events: When nUnit is installed in a directory whose name contains whitespaces, place the directory name into quotation marks, otherwise the postbuild event will fail with an error code 9009 (which probably means "file not found").

[Sports] Dynamo Dresden - SpVgg Unterhaching

It was the final game. Dynamo's chair man had issued an ultimatum telling coach Christoph Franke that he was to leave when losing against Unterhaching. The players agreed that they needed to act against this and against their losing series with only 2 points from the last 8 matches. What hadn't they promised before yesterday's match? - Concentration, fight, the magic of football.

With this in mind friends and me went to the stadium once again to see Dynamo win eventually. Every series needs to be ended and hey - they could not really lose against Unterhaching, could they? 2 hours later we knew they could.

Terribly raining, the air at a temperature of about 3°C - yesterday evening was not everyone's favorite weather for a football match. That's probably the reason why only 12.213 visitors attended the match that could have been the last one in an epoch. The game they saw started like all the others during the last 3 months: the players appeared to play soccer but Unterhaching scored an early goal. But this time everything looked better. Only 5 minutes after the 1-0, Dynamo attacked and the ball crossing into the penalty area hit Unterhaching's Omodiagbe which then scored a wonderful goal of the week - into his own goal. 1-1.

Now that this happened, the players seemed to realize that this was their home game and the fans supported them as if this was the last day on earth. With this backing, another 7 minutes later Joshua Kennedy scored the 2-1 and Dynamo seemed to win this game. After this they however grew a bit tired or too self-confident. This was punished by Unterhaching's equalization right before the break. With a 2-2 after 45 minutes everyone agreed that this was not the end and we could win this match.

All the fight from the first half was unfortunately over right from the beginning of the second one. We suddenly saw the same team as ever: no one deared to stand against the opponents, no one wanted to play the ball, no one wanted to duel the others. It looked as if they just wanted this to go over and maybe score another goal with some luck.

Those who don't fight will not win. That's how an old saying goes and it became true in minute 65. All our players were in Unterhaching's half when a counterattack started and the ball flew onto Ignjac Kresic, our keeper. He ran out of his goal to kick the ball away, ran 10 meters, 20 meters, 30 meters in front of it. This time however, he did not manage to hit the ball right - Unterhaching's forwarder was there and kicked the ball into our empty goal. 2-3. This also was the final score.

There is something people call the "third half" of the game. Normally this is the moment where all the nice people should be at home quick, because it is when the hooligans start to vandalize and fight the police men and women around the stadium. Nothing to be proud of, but not a problem of Dresden only. This time the third half consisted of one or two thousand fans not leaving the stadium, but celebrating their coach again and again. In my last post I supposed, that the fans were undecided about whether they liked him yet or not. Yesterday I saw that most people were in favor of him. The fans blame the players for losing the last games, not the coach.

When I got home I read in an online-magazine, that Frantisek Straka would probably become the new coach of Dynamo. Frantisek who? But then I remembered: he is a nice Czech guy who coached LR Ahlen until last October. This is the one who dismissed himself in Ahlen because he did not mentally reach the players. What the f*** could this man do here? If he really comes here, he will not have any beginner's advance. The people will want him to beat Cottbus and Rostock in the last home matches of the year. If this does not succeed, he will be the last man standing on a lonely position.

However, when I opened the newspaper this morning, Straka was not the only option anymore. Impressed by the fan's clear vote in favor of Franke, the Dynamo management might also decide to keep him at least until Christmas. This would give him another 4 opportunities to get the team back to business. I wish this to happen. Let's see...

[Sports] Fight and win!

Three days left until Judgement day! After being defeated by Erzgebirge Aue three weeks ago, Dynamo's manager told the coach that he was to leave if they did not fight with honor in Karlsruhe and if they did not win against Unterhaching afterwards. The fight was there in Karlsruhe: Dynamo lost 1-2 against a strong opponent, but the real good thing: for the first time in 8 games they were leading 1-0 --- although for 5 minutes, only. :)

Next Sunday we will see the home match against Unterhaching, another direct competitor. They are currently on rank 15, Dynamo is on 16. Both teams gained 11 points up to now, but while Dynamo has not won since 8 matches, Unterhaching has an upward trend after two nice wins out of the last three games. That's the situation and all can read this from the news.

But how does it look inside?

• The team declines all critics for the coach and says, they will play for him.
• The coach is calm and silent as usual and even forgives those, who critizise him devastatingly.
• The fans are undecided. That's a bad point. Many of them know that the coach as achieved wonders within the last 4 years. He took over Dynamo when they were near death, playing in League 4 and led them into League 2 within 3 years. But all this does not count, if you are not successfull at the moment. Easy to see, that there are also fans who would prefer to see him leave and restart the Dynamo engine, before it is too late.

Personally, I did not want the coach to leave after the Aue game and I am convinced that the current situation is not his fault at all. But the rules in professional soccers are as that: he is the one responsible for the situation, because he is the easiest one to be thrown out. After two weeks of thinking, I do not wish him to be kicked out, but this is not because I admire him so much, but because I want them to win on Sunday. Everything else we will see afterwards.

The weather: 70% snow probability for Sunday. 100% supernatural heat probability in the stadium.

One - two - three - FIRE!

We really had a bad night today. Went to bed some time after midnight and woke up from the noise of a party in the room above around 4 o'clock in the morning.
I live in a dormitory, so such things sometimes happen. It's annoying, but you can do nothing about it (except maybe attending the party yourself... *g*).

So I was just a bit pissed of, because they didn't let me sleep. But then at about 4:45, the fire alarm started to ring. Cursing I stood up and went out to see what was going on. You could easily differ the experienced students from the newbies: as a newbie you rush out of the house when the alarm rings, if you are more experienced, you know that most of the time some drunken idiot simply wanted to make fun of waking up all the house.

As an experienced student I first went to see whether there really was a problem. Well, this time it was: The 4th floor was full of smoke which came out of a room. So now it was time to really leave the house as also the fire department was already arriving and requested us to leave the house.

Nice happening: all the residents standing out on the street at 5 in the morning. Let's see it optimistic: The good thing about this is, that you can meet all the people you know and haven't seen for a while. ;) But in fact it's terrible if you get awoken by a loud and annoying bell and then stand out in the cold. (Another advantage as an experienced student: I put on my warm clothes instead of rushing out in my pyjama...)

At 5:30 the party was nearly over. The fire fighters did their job well and we could return to our beds. I guess I don't need to mention that we did not get up as early as usual, today. Instead we slept until ten and then slowly started to get up and to embrace a new day.

[Sports] Dynamo Dresden vs. Erzgebirge Aue

Some weeks ago someone suspected that I might be Dynamo's guardian angel, because they always won when I was there and they lost when I was not. I suppose, these times are over. After the Aachen desaster, Dynamo lost 0-3 against Nuremburg in a national cup game last week. That was not that bad, because Nuremburg plays in the major league and it is okay to lose such a game.

After being thrown out of the cup, it seems plausbile that the team now can concentrate on the league games. This seems necessary, as after having a little high in the beginning of the season, Dynamo has not won a game since the beginning of September. This weekend they reached the descending ranks for the first time this season and needed to win at home against Erzgebirge Aue to get out of them again.

To sum the game up: it was horrible. Dynamo did not even try to resist Aue's attacks. Consequently Aue scored their first goal after only 6 minutes. The rest of the game did not get even better, Dynamo could have lost 0-6 or 0-7, but our great goal keeper once again helped us. Unfortunately his help yesterday resulted in only 4 goals for Aue. Many fans started to exit the stadium after 70 minutes - they did not see Dynamo's goal of honor in minute 89. The final result of 1-4 sounds like a disgrace for all of us, but in fact it was even flattering.

What we saw yesterday was a team with a huge menthal problem. These guys cannot be that bad, they already won against Freiburg and Munich this season. But through the last weeks all you could see were players in fear of losing. No one wants to possess the ball, so they pass it over to someone else. No one dares to fight, so no one kicks the ball onto the goal. Very sad.

But wait: hope is not lost yet. Only one point more and we wouldn't be descending. There are still 23 games left until the end of the season. It must be possible to make it. The next opponents are not that frightening: on Friday Dynamo plays in Karlsruhe where they tied last year and won at home. After that we play at home against Unterhaching - this team is currently positioned even worse. Then follow matches in Ahlen and Saarbruecken (both teams in the lower part of the league) and the very important home matches against Cottbus and Rostock where we need to recover the honor lost to Aue yesterday.