[textile]Chris McMahon "writes an entertaining article":http://chrismcmahonsblog.blogspot.com/2005/12/but-it-works-on-my-machine.html
about an interesting problem with a unit test. He explains the problem and identifies the appropriate solution. Despite this, there are still several interesting problems with the test.

h2. Living in the Here and DateTime.Now!

The test was a unit test for a Class called Range :

I won't bore you with all the details as to why, but I had a string in field in a webpage that was HtmlEncoded and contained "'". All I wanted to do was decode it to a literal " ' " (apostrophe) so that my automated test could perform a comparison. So, tried (in C#):

string decoded = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(myString);

but did that work? Worked for & < > and so on but not for ' - Grrrr! (A bug methinks) I don't like ugly code but sometimes it is necessary simply for pragmatic reasons... the workaround I settled on:

string decoded = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(myString).Replace("'","'");

Source code: Download

Lately, I have noticed that the Humble Dialog Box or Model View Presenter are gaining more and more acceptance among software developers, especially in agile communities, because of its benefits regarding the very good separation between the view and the behavior and because it can be very easily unit tested, on a problematic field: user interface.

SharpRobo is a Functional Testing and Recording tool for WinForm applications written in C#. It supports all the standard WinForm controls. SharpRobo records the tests in FIT format which can be played back using Fit (File or Directory Runner).

[textile]How many times have you had to spend ages getting deployments to result in a working application on a new environment? Even worse, when it happens every time a new build lands on the test environment! I touched on this in "When the code first leaves the nest":http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/2311 where I talked of Julian Harty's example of 3-4 days in a weekly build cycle spent just getting the environment to work. This is an all too common occurrence, based on my own experience and that of many of my peers.

On a project that I am working on, we had this idea... why not automate the deployments? Taking it one step further, perhaps the ability to deploy to test, staging and production environments could be defined as a technical user-story with associated unit and acceptance tests (afterall, it is a TDD project)?

Automated deployment seems to be the flavour of the month...

It is interesting that now we have free versions of JProbe and Compuware profilers. I made a list of some profilers with short comments: Profilers

Quest JProbe "...complete performance toolkit for Java code tuning. JProbe helps developers diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks, memory leaks, excessive garbage collection,