testingReflections.com - programming

Literate Programming in Practice

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:02:19 +0000

I've been secretly working on something... well, it's not that much of a secret... It's a new Fit Fixture for Given/When/Then acceptance tests (or BDD style tests). Andy Palmer and I have been writing it in what spare time we have...

Part of it involves finding classes (potentially written by someone else), instantiating them and returning them for use... Today we took the class that does that and refactored it to death... until it looked like this.

Nullable type performance

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 07:16:38 +0100

Warning! Nullable types considered hazardous to your performance.

Anthill: controlled build process tool

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 06:23:42 +0000

Anthill is a tool that ensures a controlled build process and promotes the sharing of knowledge within an organization. Anthill performs a checkout from the source repository of the latest version of a project before every build and tags the repository with a unique build number after every build. It supports many reposistory adapters including: CVS (Concurrent Versions System), Clearcase, MKSIntegrity, Perforce, PVCS, StarTeam, Subversion Visual Source Safe, and FileSystem.

Examining the validity of Inversion of Control

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 06:25:28 +0000

Inversion of Control (IOC) through injection also known as Injection IOC has not been a designer or programmer friendly pattern. Many question its validity and the validity of IOC in general. IOC seems to be a contradiction to the fundamental concept of object encapsulation. Context IOC is a new approach that attempts to capture Inversion of Control as a pure design pattern to demonstrate that IOC is indeed a very powerful concept.

aechmea C2: DbC code generator for C++

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 06:43:10 +0000

C2 is a code generator for C++. It enables you to use Programming by Contract in the comment lines of your source code. During compilation, the C2 compiler generates the code for the conditions you have made concerning classes, methods or functions. Of course you can use the C++ compiler of your choice.

Three books

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 06:09:33 +0000

I'd read chunks of Michael Feathers' book, Working Effectively With Legacy Code, before publication, but it's only on the lastfew plane rides that I've read it straight through. It's really good: gobs of experience distilled, delivered in a consistently readable style and with an encouraging, even gentle, tone.

Scriptom: scripting ActiveX and COM with Groovy

Sun, 30 Jan 2005 21:41:12 +0000

Scriptom is an optional Groovy module developed by Guillaume Laforge leveraging the Jacob library (JAva COm Bridge). Once installed in your Groovy installation, you can use a wrapper to script any ActiveX or COM component from within your Groovy scripts. Of course, this module can be used on Windows only.Scriptom is especially interesting if you are developing Groovy shell scripts under Windows.

Data Input Validation Using ASP.NET Forms

Sat, 29 Jan 2005 10:08:42 +0000

Kirk Miller (another Consultants Guild member) has a great introductory post on data input validation for ASP.NET forms.

as2lib: Flash MX 2004+ framework

Tue, 11 Jan 2005 06:30:07 +0000

The as2lib is an opensource framework targeted to Macromedia Flash MX 2004+ developers. It offers support for basic idioms like event-handling, exception-handling, output-handling and reflections as well as different kinds of data holders and iterators. Also contained is a comprehensive set of IO classes, and unit-testing/mock objects frameworks. Currently in beta stage.

Programming the PDP-1

Tue, 11 Jan 2005 06:45:51 +0000

A story, following up on my post about the virtues of knowing languages close to the machine. One of the things that always impressed me about the great Lisp hackers was the way they moved effortlessly between levels of abstraction. At one moment, they could be thinking extremely abstract ideas like call-with-current-continuation (often abbreviated call/cc). The next, they could be hacking PDP-10 assembler. But are the two levels so unconnected?

Low-level is higher now

Tue, 11 Jan 2005 06:37:19 +0000

For old fogies who think there's no progress in software, this advice from Joel Spolsky to college students:

Learn C before graduating

C. Notice I didn't say C++. Although C is becoming increasingly rare, it is still the lingua franca of working programmers. It is the language they use to communicate with one another, and, more importantly, it is much closer to the machine than "modern" languages that you'll be taught in college like ML, Java, Python, whatever trendy junk they teach these days. You need to spend at least a semester getting close to the machine or you'll never be able to create efficient code in higher level languages.

eclipse2ant: export Eclipse project settings to Ant build files

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 17:55:50 +0000

This small plugin allows you to export project settings to an Ant build file. It adds a new export filter item (File -> Export -> Ant Buildfile) and a context menu item called "eclipse2ant" to the Package Explorer context menu.

WmUnit - webMethods Unit Testing

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 17:59:34 +0000

WmUnit is a unique package designed to help webMethods 4.6 & 6 customers achieve a higher standard of quality and reliability with their webMethods services by allowing them to use automated tools for developing and testing their services. WmUnit is based upon popular industry unit testing techniques and does NOT require developers to write complex Java code.WmUnit is a commercial tool.

How to determine whether Javascript is enabled

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 17:58:56 +0000

I just found an interesting article on 15seconds, Creating a Server Control for JavaScript Testing by George Masselli. It shows you how to create a control that verifies whether Javascript is supported and enabled. Apparently it is not easy to determine if a user disabled Javascript support for security reasons.

Test-AutoBuild: Perl automated build tool

Wed, 10 Nov 2004 07:29:09 +0000

Test-AutoBuild is a Perl framework automating the building of a project's complete software stack on a pristine system from the high level applications, through the libraries and right down to the smallest part of the toolchain.