Thursday, November 04, 2004

 

Discovering .NET Reflector

I just discovered Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflector. This tool is awesome! Here is a description of the the tool directly from it's website :

Reflector is a class browser for .NET components. It supports assembly and namespace views, type and member search, XML documentation, call and callee graphs, IL, Visual Basic, Delphi and C# decompiler, dependency trees, base type and derived type hierarchies and resource viewers.
The disassembler included with the tool can decompile any of our .dll files we have created with Visual Studio and allow you to view the source code. It will also convert that source code into VB, IL, Delphi, or C#.

Another way to use the tool is to look-over the assemblies included in the .Net Framework. You can then see how MS created their classes and how you can extend those classes to better serve your needs.

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

 

New Google Groups Beta

Google is allowing users to preview their new version of Google Groups. It appears to be in the beta phase. So far I like it much better than their old version. I hope that my posts don't take 3 - 9 hours to get through to the newsgroup anymore.

You can now subscribe to groups. The left nav displays a list of your subscribed to groups as well as groups you have recently visited. You can track threads you want to follow.

So far, I am impressed. Good job Google.

Monday, November 01, 2004

 

Testing ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Web Developer

Scott Mitchell has a post on his blog linking to another post by Scott Guthrie titled Testing ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Web Developer. This post describes what goes into debugging ASP.NET. Microsoft uses an automated test solution called Maddog. Here is an excerpt :

A tester can use Maddog within their office to build a query of tests to run (selecting either a sub-node of feature areas – or doing a search for tests based on some other criteria), then pick what hardware and OS version the tests should run on, pick what language they should be run under (Arabic, German, Japanese, etc), what ASP.NET and Visual Studio build should be installed on the machine, and then how many machines it should be distributed over.

Maddog will then identify free machines in the lab, automatically format and re-image them with the appropriate operating system, install the right build on them, build and deploy the tests selected onto them, and then run the tests. When the run is over the tester can examine the results within Maddog, investigate all failures, publish the results (all through the Maddog system), and then release the machines for other Maddog runs. Published test results stay in the system forever (or until we delete them) – allowing test leads and my test manager to review them and make sure everything is getting covered. All this gets done without the tester ever having to leave their office.

That is very cool.

Enjoy.

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