SDNUG Slides Available

I went to the SDNUG meeting on Thursday night and got to see Veronique Blick talking about automated functional testing – using an application that they at Infomedia work on. It was a great presentation, especially since it looked at a solution for Windows Forms applications, which is a challenge. They are using Test Complete 3 with a .NET plug-in (can’t find a link to it). Anyway, the slides are available on the SDNUG site.

Troy (Illustrious Leader) Magennis also presented on some of the new VSTS functionality in the upcoming VS 2005 BETA (check it out). Specifically he looked at some of the unit testing functionality which is now baked into the environment. Its very cool, especially considering it doesn’t really place too many constraints on the way that you work. Troy’s slides are available for download too.

ArmySteve heading to Iraq . . .

A good friend of mine and ASP.NET guru, Steve Smith, is heading over to Iraq (probably already there by now) as part of the US IRR call-up. I’m not a big fan of what has happened in Iraq, but you have to respect those who do their duty for their country when the government calls on them.

Good luck Steve, and stay safe!

NewsGator NewsPage = http://scoble.weblogs.com/

I am a very heavy NewsGator user – and have been since the early BETA versions. One of the features that I would really like to use that I don’t is the NewsPage which as set as the default view for the folder structure that the blog posts are loaded into.

The main reason is that it takes an incredible amount of time to load given the number of feeds that I tune in on. Anyway – just a few moments ago I thought I might give make Scoble my NewsPage a go – seems like he has the nack for summarising most of what is going on.

MSN Search Updated – But Still Not Perfect

The infamous scoble has mentioned that the MSN search engine has been updated. I’ve found that it is certainly very quick – as a bit of a test I search for a keyword from a snippet of source that I posted up.

“httpcachedependency”

Its a dinky (for dinky – see inefficient and bug ridden) little implementation of a CacheDependency which checks to see if files on a HTTP server have changed. The MSN search didn’t find a hit, but Google did.

I can only think that this is an issue of scaling. Google probably has a much larger index that the MSN search, and you can only spider so fast.

For the time being the Google Toolbar is going to remain – hits on obscure source code references are extremely important to devs me thinks.