Steve Trefethen's Weblog

TestComplete Training Online

Steve Trefethen — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:21:04 GMT

I joined Falafel Software a little over a year ago now and in that time I’ve done a lot of online training for TestComplete. For those Delphi fans TC is written in Delphi a fact I usually slip into the training sessions. Online training is, or perhaps more accurately was a new business (it’s no longer new) for Falafel that I was able to pioneer. One thing I looked forward to when I changed jobs was the ability to try and do different things and online training is certainly different! I’d been straight-up programming for nearly a decade at Borland/CodeGear and at Falafel I’ve had the opportunity to be involved and have influence in many different parts of the business which has been a lot of fun.

Presenter’s view of online training

When I sit back and think about all the technology used during TestComplete online training I’m really amazed. We use a multitude of software to present all of the different testing functionality TC supports including:

TestComplete (of course, that’s obvious right)
Microsoft’s PowerPoint
GotoMeeting the software that powers desktop sharing
AutomatedQA’s Remote Agent for Distributed HTTP Load Testing
Virtual PC to demonstrate Distributed testing support
NUnit to demonstrate TC’s integrated unit testing
VS.NET 2008 to demo support for:
- Web Services
- Web Site Application testing (ASP.NET)
- Testing of Open Applications
Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005 to demonstrate Data Driven Testing (DDT)
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server to demonstrate TC’s integrated support
Automated Build Studio if/when the discussion leads to Continuous Integration
Acrobat reader for the TestComplete Made Easy courseware (which I helped author) and that you can print for yourself from Lulu.

Out of all of this GotoMeeting is the software that facilitates online training and is very cool. It allows for sharing of one’s desktop to multiple PC’s at the same time in different locations. Connecting to GotoMeeting is very straight forward and I’ve yet to run into any problems setting it up which is saying a lot. Additionally, you can turn control over to an attendee as well as display an attendees desktop. In fact, I’ve conducted a number of classes with people scattered around the country which is interesting in and of itself. (Note to attendees, when you ask to share your desktop be sure you haven’t been chatting something in the GotoMeeting chat window you wouldn’t want others in the class to see ) Here is a screenshot of what things look like on the presenter’s end of things:

As you can see there’s quite a bit running not including any of the sample applications used to illustrate features.

Along with the online training Falafel provides the above book in PDF form as well as source code to all of the examples and additional TestComplete projects illustrating nearly every type of testing supported by TC.

Since referral commissions go in my pocket this post wouldn’t be complete without a plug right? So, if you or your company is interested in either online or onsite training on AutomatedQA’s TestComplete please contact me and I’ll be happy to provide you more information or help get you signed up!

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Screenshots on the iPod Touch and other enhancements in v2.0

Steve Trefethen — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 06:11:28 GMT

With the release of v2.0 firmware for the iPhone/iPod Touch Apple added a much needed feature which is the ability to take screenshots. If you hold the home button down and press and release the power button the screen will blank out for a split second giving the illusion of a photo being taken, a very nice touch. The screenshot is stored in your photos and easily accessible. When you reconnect to Windows you’ll first see this prompt:

If you select the highlighted option you’ll see the following prompt:

Which will allow you to quickly grab these screenshots for use in things like blog posts.

Keyboard Improvements

There are a number of other nice features in the v2.0 firmware like this minor but super useful change in keyboard layout (below left). Notice the spacebar is 1/3 size and the @ symbol and the period are provided for things like email addresses. The screenshot on the right illustrates the new password handling where the last character that you typed stays on screen for a second before switching to a dot which makes it easier to correctly enter passwords (notice the spacebar in this case is full size).

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Review of iPhone v2.0 applications

Steve Trefethen — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 07:37:03 GMT

I’m going to use this post to rate the iPhone/iPod Touch applications I’ve tried using a one to five rating. In alphabetical order:

Apple’s Remote -
I think this is a great little app.
Banner -
Cool scrolling LED sign app, free but missing a number of key features like scroll speed, color etc. still cool
Bloomberg -
Ignore’s accelerometer so no wide screen reading. I think I like the white text on black but we’ll see. Portfolio tracking could be a bit better but hey, it’s free!
BofA Banking App -
It’s just their web site in an app
Facebook -
The update-to-date address book alone is awesome
Google’s Mobile App -
Like BofA there are just a bunch of links to web apps. I’ll have to play more with the search capabilities to see how those improve on the web version.
NY Times -
Seems pretty slow, though nice to have.
Pandora - (added July 13, 2008)
Radio comes to the Touch!
Tap Tap Revenge - (added July 16, 2008)
I can’t stop laughing when the dots start streaming down faster than my reflexes can handle!!
Where -
For the longest time it displayed the large red "W" then returned to the home screen. IOW, it did nothing. I think their servers are probably getting pounded as just browsing to www.where.com is very slow or times out. It’s working now though only in pieces but I can see there is a ton of stuff to look at. I’m not sure I like bubble selector at the bottom.

What apps are you liking?

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Apple's Remote iPhone application rocks!

Steve Trefethen — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 05:39:36 GMT

With the introduction of v2.0 of the iPhone/iPod Touch software Apple introduced an application called Remote giving you the ability to remotely (surprise) control iTunes on your computer and yes, it’s two way. Personally, I’ve been wanting this sort of functionality for a long time as I’ve had my computer connected to my receiver so I can listen to my Yahoo LaunchCAST station. The downside is the lack of control as my computer is upstairs in my office and my receiver is downstairs in my family room. With Apple’s Remote application can control what’s playing from anywhere in the house, very nice!

I think Remote is a great example of how the iPhone is going to showcase new ways for people to interact with their PC’s remotely. I can already imagine a dozen other situations where I’d like to be able to remotely control other applications on my machine.

Now, where’s Remote Desktop?

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

iPod Touch 2.0 finally available only I can't download it

Steve Trefethen — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 02:47:31 GMT

Like pretty much everyone it seems I’ve been awaiting the update to v2.0 of the iPhone/iPod software and according to iTunes an update is available as of 7:30pm PST however:

I’ve been able to download a number of what appear to be interesting applications so I’m definitely interested in getting my iPod updated. Here’s what I’ve found:

Anyone else find something interesting?

Also, anyone know if the new Exchange support works with Intermedia’s hosted Exchange servers?

[Update: July 11, 2008 9:27pm PST] Now downloading...
[Update: July 11, 2008 9:31pm PST] Backing up, preparing for restore...
[Update: July 11, 2008 10:00pm PST] Done installing, exploring the above apps. Google’s app seems very lame as it’s just a bunch of icons to web pages, what am I missing??

Other iPod posts:
Is the new iPod Touch worth it?
My answer to Apple’s iPod Touch is it worth it?
Protecting the iPod Touch with an Agent 18 Shield Case

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Setting Subsonic's connectionstring at runtime

Steve Trefethen — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:51:11 GMT

I’m a fan of the Open Source project SubSonic, spearheaded by Rob Conery of Microsoft, which describes itself thusly:

A Super High-fidelity Batman Utility Belt. SubSonic works up your DAL for you, throws in some much-needed utility functions, and generally speeds along your dev cycle.

I’ve seen a few questions on the Internet about setting the SubSonic connectionstring at runtime and thought I’d post what I’ve done. SubSonic includes a tool to generate a DAL for you which picks up settings from your .config file which provides the connectionstring among other things. I’m using SubSonic in a plugin to CruiseControl.NET for EDI processing and here the portion of my ccservice.exe.config file related to SubSonic:


          
            
            <?
            xml
version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"
            ?>
            
            
            <
            configuration
            >
            
            
            <
            configSections
            >
            
            
            <
            section 
            name
            ="SubSonicService"
             type
            ="SubSonic.SubSonicSection,
SubSonic"
             requirePermission
            ="false"
            />
            
            
            </
            configSections
            >
            
            
            <
            connectionStrings
            >
            
            
            <
            add 
            name
            ="Velocity2"
             connectionString
            ="Data
Source=db;Initial Catalog=db;Persist Security Info=True;"
             providerName
            ="System.Data.SqlClient"
            
            
            />
            
            
            </
            connectionStrings
            >
            
            
            <
            SubSonicService 
            defaultProvider
            ="Velocity"
            >
            
            
            <
            providers
            >
            
            
            <
            clear
            />
            
            
            <
            add 
            name
            ="Velocity"
             type
            ="Subsonic.SqlDataProvider,
SubSonic"
             connectionStringName
            ="Velocity2"
             generatedNamespace
            ="VelocitySubSonic"
             includeTableList
            ="AR_*,CORE_*,EDI_*,II_*,IN_*,SA_*"
             excludeProcedureList
            ="WMS_InsertImportQueue"
            
            
            />
            
            
            </
            providers
            >
            
            
            </
            SubSonicService
            >
             ...

One of the things I wanted to do is override the connectionstring using a property on my CCNET plugin. To do that I implemented a property like this:


          
            
            [ReflectorProperty(
            "
            connectionString
            "
            )] 
            public
            
            
            string
             ConnectionString
{ 
            get
             { 
            return
             m_connectionstring;
} 
            set
             { m_connectionstring 
            =
             value;
SubSonic.DataService.GetInstance(
            "
            Velocity
            "
            ).SetDefaultConnectionString(value);
} }

The instance name comes from the name used in the config file above then simply call SetDefaultConnectionString and voila the SubSonic connectionstring is now set at runtime.

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Switching back to My Yahoo classic

Steve Trefethen — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 23:42:28 GMT

On Thursday, Yahoo rolled out changes to my.yahoo.com updating the layout of the page with a beta version. One of the items that seemingly got lost was the link to switch back to the classic layout. I’ve played with the new layout and still prefer the old classic style that I’ve used for years now. Fortunately, at least for the time being, you can still switch back to the classic layout using this URL.

[Update: July 9th 2008] Well that was short lived, below is a message from my current Yahoo page. Thanks a lot Yahoo.
[Update: July 9th 2008 8:30am] I posted a comment last night to this Yahoo blog post asking James, a My Yahoo! Product Lead, why he provided a link to switch back to classic knowing it would last only a week and the comment was deleted. I had included a link to the post I wrote about why Yahoo has frustrated me and indicating that this decision to kill Yahoo Classic was simply yet another reason. I guess that was just too over-the-top.
[Update: July, 14th 2008] Now that we’ve all be forced over to the new page I’m now getting hundreds of search engine hits on this post. Looks like I’m not the only one who like the "Classic" style.
[Update: July 15th 2008] According to one commenter Yahoo is now deleting requests to support the Classic mode from their web site properties though this page is still alive at least for now. I’m now getting 100’s Internet search hits for this post so this is a pretty popular subject. Feel free to digg this post and see if we can shine a little more attention on this.

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Great American Backyard Campout

Steve Trefethen — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:53:23 GMT

Celebrating the Great American Backyard Campout!

4:45pm Tents up and full of "gear"
...
6:20am We made it! Kids loved it and Alexis want's to roast marshmellows for breakfast.

Who knows it could be over in a few short hours.

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Our Mac Mini back online with a new main logic board

Steve Trefethen — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:55:29 GMT

The other day I mentioned our Mac Mini had died after just 18 short months of little use. I’d done some digging around on the web and found good reviews of a company called DT&T Computer Services and after describing the problem they quoted me $245 to replace the main logic board and $15 for shipping and handling. I filled out their online form and printed out my RMA information and sent the machine in last Friday. We got it back today and fortunately, it’s working once again. DT&T has a 6 month warranty which is nice although I hope we don’t have to use it.

I’ll add that my experience with DT&T was very good. They answered the phone immediately when I called, no waiting, hold, etc. answered my questions and once the repairs were done they called to complete payment and confirm shipping. It all went off without a hitch.

Now, of course, the thing I’m happiest about is my wife has her own machine back.

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Facebook Starter Kit updated to v1.7

Steve Trefethen — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 04:38:45 GMT

With the recent release of v1.7 of the Facebook Developer’s Toolkit I’ve just updated my Starter Kit which you can download here. The v1.7 version incorporates the New Design Platform Changes introduced by Facebook (unfortunately, the link on the CodePlex page to the FB wiki is incorrect).

Enjoy!

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

For me Google Reader just gained some serious competition in feedly

Steve Trefethen — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 05:12:15 GMT

If you haven’t checked out feedly and you’re a blog/RSS reader you definitely should. It’s a Firefox 3.0 plugin that has some really cool features and turns your feeds into a magazine style web page.

[Updated: June 24, 2008] I should mention that this is really functioning as an alternative UI for Google Reader rather than a replacement since it updates Google Reader as I'm reading items.

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

SQL Server Index Nightmare

Steve Trefethen — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:21:13 GMT

The other day I discovered one of the MSSQL tables I’m using heavily at the moment had 214 indices! There were about 20 with sensible names and the rest were all named similar to _dta_index_SA_OrderHeader_5_499519046__K1_2_6_9_13. I mentioned this issue to John Waters in the office today which elicited a nice laugh until I sent him this screenshot:

While I’m not exactly new to MSSQL I’m no expert though fortunately Falafel has a few experts on staff and John’s one of them. He dug into the problem answering the what, where and how to deal them, feel free to click through if that’s what you need.

Had I not blogged back in February asking about MSSQL tools this problem would likely have gone undetected for a lot longer. Microsoft’s Management Studio doesn’t show these so called Hypothetical Indices so you have no way of knowing your table/DB is being impacted by them. Ironically, they’re created by the Index Tuning Wizard. Anyway, one commenter to my post mentioned EMS Database Management Solutions (a mouthful notwithstanding whatever EMS stands for) SQL Manager 2008 for which there is a freeware download. SQL Manager’s treeview provides a wealth of information including counts for things like indices which allowed me to easily stumble upon the problem.

All in all, there were 500+ of these indices hanging around but thanks to SQL Manager no longer!

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Techmeme helping drive traffic to sensational c|net blog post

Steve Trefethen — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:50:50 GMT

How is it that blog posts like the one below from Matt Asay on c|net’s News.com can become a top headline on Techmeme? Is this sort of headline grabbing BS to be expected now that CBS owns c|net?

I’m not going to do it justice by linking to it so if you want to you’ll have to search. I believe this story and headline were written for no other reason than to generate traffic for c|net. Mr.Asay is clearly out-of-touch with the Windows software development world if he actually believes the data he’s referring to. Couple that with the fact that companies like CodeGear and tools like Delphi can go a long ways towards alleviating the pain of moving to a new version of Windows by changing their runtime frameworks to help either adopt or mask the differences between versions allowing developers to continue to focus on the task at hand.

Fortunately, a number of comments in reply to the post are appropriately taking him to task. Of course, the downside of all this is that it accomplishes c|net’s goal of driving traffic to their site.

I’m not sure of the selection criteria for Techmeme but it just took a step down in my book.

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Our G4 Mac Mini dies costing us $44 a month

Steve Trefethen — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 05:11:41 GMT

In December, 2006 I bought a G4 Apple Mac Mini for my wife for Christmas and three days ago it died. It’s bad enough Apple came out with an Intel version within 4 or 5 weeks of my purchase but to have the thing die after 18 months makes it by far the most expensive computer I’ve ever owned based on of operation. That’s not to mention my wife used it maybe 15-30 minutes a day, if that. It’s not like it was running protein folding or some similar CPU intensive task rather it was in sleep mode the vast majority of the past 18 months.

And by died I mean pressing the power button does absolutely nothing. I’ve tried two different power supplies, resetting the PMU as well as taking out the RAM and re-seating it all to no avail. Yesterday, I took it to the Apple store Los Gatos where they told me "the worst case scenario for repair is $460.23" and that my only option is to authorize them for the worst case and they would charge me accordingly based on the type of repair required. They mentioned that if the machine had to be completely replaced the data on it would be lost, so I don’t even get the dead box back. Perhaps needless to say but I’m not going to go that route.

If anyone has suggestions for Mac Mini repair I’m all ears. I’ve read a few good things about DT&T in Fremont and that will likely be my choice unless I hear otherwise.

[Update: July 7, 2008] Here is how things turned out.

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Continuous Integration means developers doing command line builds

Steve Trefethen — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:07:31 GMT

Building from the command line != building from the IDE

I just spent the last several hours fixing a large number of assembly references in a big C# solution. That means lots of errors like the following that leave you grep’ing your way through .sln/.csproj files to figure out what’s gone wrong:

Solution file warning MSB4051: Project {A9E00AF7-A1E0-4E65-90EF-CB66E8580 9AE} is referencing a project with GUID {958E0376-0272-4149-A1CF-E03521D12A72}, but a project with this GUID was not found in the .SLN file.

And builds stats that look like this:

Not good. It doesn’t help when VS.NET itself can cause these problems yet continue on blissfully. What I ran into today was a different reason for the same error message, this time around it wasn’t a missing "EndProject". The issue was that the second GUI was referring to a project that not only wasn’t in the .sln file but no longer existed. Regardless, the outcome was the same, building from VS.NET worked but executing MSBuild from the command line failed. WHY?! IMO, VS.NET should have failed just like MSBuild because it’s not doing you any favors when it doesn’t fail consistently along with MSBuild rather that’s just masking a problem. In addition, the error could be improved to show better information about the GUIDs that do reference a project rather than the GUID itself. I couldn’t agree more with Jeff Atwood’s post title The F5 Key Is Not a Bulid Process where he says:

If your "build process" is the F5 key, you have a problem. ...

Get your build process out of the IDE and into a build script. That’s the first step on the road to build enlightenment.

Amen.

Communicating Continuous Integration Requirements

If you’re chasing the holy grail of CI and working to get automated builds, test execution, static code analysis, build stats etc. make sure the developers working on the project understand the build requirements of your CI setup. In this case, building the main project is about as straight forward as it gets:

%SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\msbuild /t:clean mysolution.sln

%SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\msbuild /t:build mysolution.sln

Like I said, simple. Now, on the build server itself things aren’t quite this simple but for the bulk of the build if you get by this step you’ve gone a long way as it builds 22 C# projects. The first line above, that cleans the build is crucial. If you skip it and build from the command line after building in VS.NET you’ll continue masking the problem. A successful clean process is just as important as a successful build process. On this particular project there was a major project renaming that introduced a slew of errors but the VS.NET IDE sat idly by and in fact allowed this problem to occur. Eventually a checkin that trigger this set of failures occurred all the while "it builds fine on my machine".

The second problem was solution file name changes, copy/renames to be more specific, which further broke the CI build. The third problem was that the old .sln and csproj files were not deleted from the repository which led to even more confusion but I digress, that’s life in the real world, we fix it and move on.

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException loading a project into VS.NET 2008

Steve Trefethen — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:14:13 GMT

Recently, based on comments to this post I decided to turn Vistas UAC back on in "silent mode" using TweakUAC. Doing so allows me to run Windows Live Mesh to support folder synchronization which I’m now using to backup my blog content. The downside is that after making this change I started getting System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException errors when loading a large application into VS.NET 2008.

After a bit of head scratching I thought to change my VS.NET shortcut to launch with "Run as Administrator" enabled which resolved the error. Now, back to work!

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.

Facebook Starter Kit updated and available to install on Facebook

Steve Trefethen — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:08:12 GMT

Here is an update for my Facebook Starter Kit for VS.NET 2008 which fixes the Invalid Parameter error in part by using the toolkits CanvasIFrame(...) base classes as well as adding the P3P header. These changes cleaned up the original code considerably making it much easier to read not to mention function properly.

FacebookASPNET available on Facebook

With this update I’ve added the application to Facebook as FacebookASPNET in case you want to add it to your Facebook account and play around. If you have feature suggestions or additions please let me know. At this point, the application is very simple but, of course, that was the point.

Lastly, if you monitor the RSS feed for the Facebook Developer’s Toolkit you already know about the pending 1.7 release as well as the pre-announcement of a 2.0 release which is great news and indicates the project is alive and well! Btw, I’ll be updating the Starter Kit as these updates come out but felt this change was significant enough to post now. If the 1.7 release comes out this week I’ll just update this post.

Let me know how it works. Thanks!

The original source for this content is stevetrefethen.com.