Fridathon: unstructured learning or hacking you can opt-in to do on any random Friday.

  • Mocks: by-the-book vs practical

    Posted on December 27, 2007

    Lately, there’s been some formalization of the definitions of mocks, stubs, fakes and dummies, which Fowler popularized through his site with his article Mocks aren’t Stubs by introducing the concepts from Gerard Meszaros’ xUnit patterns book. I haven’t read the book, but the definitions are sensible. [Read More]

  • State Testing vs Interaction Testing

    Posted on December 21, 2007

    Highly recommended reading: Fowler’s article Mocks aren’t Stubs. It’s a very clear characterization of the types of so-called Test Doubles (mocks, fakes, stubs, etc.) you can use to aid your unit testing needs, but also of the kinds of TDD you can do: classic (or state) TDD and mockist (or interaction) TDD. [Read More]

  • High-performing virtual machines with Diskeeper

    Posted on November 30, 2007

    One of the first things (if not THE first thing) I install on virtual machines (as well as the host) is Diskeeper. It really makes a noticeable difference on the performance of the VM, especially when compared to other VMs you use for quite some time without defrag’ing. VMs stress the hard drive a lot, so keeping it in good shape is a must for well performing VMs. [Read More]

  • How to parse specific date-time formats using DateTime.ParseExact

    Posted on November 20, 2007

    I’ve done this myself: write an entirely new date-time parser using regular expressions. I’m sure most people implementing standards have done the same (i.e. for syndication libraries, etc.). There’s almost no point in doing so, except for some very specific cases, as DateTime.ParseExact is very flexible through the use of custom DateTime format strings. [Read More]

  • Windows Live Writer RTM: a missed opportunity on extensibility

    Posted on November 16, 2007

    The Window Live suite final version was finally released. I’ve been following quite closely its evolution since Beta2, and have done a quite complicated (although not from the point of view of the end user) plugin which goes quite deep into WLW libraries (deeper than I dare to confess, if you know what I mean ;)). [Read More]