Galin Iliev's blog

Lately Microsoft put a lot effort in testing and this combined with the whole process & dogfooding create better products. Even better they do not hide it but are generous and share details with us. Recently a new test center was announced.

The Microsoft Tester Center showcases the test discipline as an integral part of the application lifecycle, describes test roles and responsibilities, and promotes the test investments required to deliver high-quality software.

Kirill Osenkov - SDET @ C# team shares some facts about his job:

• We develop all of our test code using most recent builds of Visual Studio "10" and C# 4.0.
• We do almost no manual testing - almost all of our tests are automated, which means they can run on a lab machine unattended.
• We run our tests on a variety of operating systems, languages and VS SKUs (e.g. Visual C# Express 2008 on Japanese Vista or VSTS on Windows Server 2008 with Visual Studio 2005 already installed side-by-side).
• The Visual Studio Managed Languages Team has about 30000 functional C# and VB tests which run overnight for about 12 hours on 5 to 10 lab machines (paralleled).
• C# tests are written in C#, VB tests are written in VB, F# tests are written in F#.
• We have a lot of automated UI tests - where mouse moves automatically and keyboard "types" on its own - its fun to sit and watch a test creating a C# project, opening files, typing, using refactorings, navigating, etc.
• We prefer testing on the component level, bypassing the UI.
• Our developers write unit-tests, while we concentrate on the functional testing and end-to-end scenarios.
• We reach more than 70% code coverage with our tests - this is a required minimum for our team.
• We use TFS (Team Foundation Server) for source control and work item tracking.
• Many of our tests use a new data-driven test framework where our test scripts are written in XML and are interpreted by a script-like engine.
• Most of Visual Studio tests are out-of-process - our tests attach to a Visual Studio process and control it using Remoting.
• We have a "bug-bash" day about once a month where the entire team just uses Visual Studio and logs bugs.
• We also have AppWeeks, where we form groups and build applications using our product.

I came across an article which covers some details of how ASP.NET web sites hosted by Microsoft are configured:

Key things are:

1. Set the Compilation Switch Appropriately
2. Use Medium Trust in ASP.NET 2.0
3. Restrict Download of Specified File Types
4. Be Careful When Adding Assembly References
5. Remove Manually Set MaxConnection Values
6. Beware of Unhandled Exceptions
7. Ensure Proper Proxy Server Configuration
8. Do Not Display Custom Errors to Everyone
9. Know When to Enable Tracing
10. Disable Session State Web Farms

Read full article for detailed explanations.

It's been a long time since I went on MCP exam. I've been pretty busy these days but now is time to update my certification. Let's start with MS SQL Server 2008 exams. The best thing is these exams on beta stage now so this is a chance to be certified one idea before official release (or at least when the exams are released).

Gerry O'Brien posted an open invitation for two MS SQL beta exams that are extended to July 31, 2008 so hurry up.

The exams are:

• 71-432: TS: Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Implementation and Maintenance
• 71-448: TS: Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance

NB: You need promo codes in order to register for these exams. These codes can be found on Gerry's blog post.

P.S. Note that you won't get exams results on exam completion as the criteria /scoring/ is not clear :). Setting scores is one of the goals of beta exams. Results will be announced in about 2 months from the end of beta period or around  exam release date.

Good luck!

I had some interesting adventures and in one of them I had to figure out the connection string key for LINQ to SQL DataContext class. I found this interesting blog post by Rick Strahl.

In short he describes that LINQ to SQL designer uses different approaches for web site project and class library one. Here is like the website project designer file is:

public DataClassesDataContext() :
        base(global::System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["TimeTrackerConnectionString"].ConnectionString, mappingSource)
{
    OnCreated();
}

while the class library one is:

public TimeTrakkerContext() :
 base(global::TimeTracker.Properties.Settings.Default.TimeTrackerConnectionString, mappingSource)
{
    OnCreated();
}

and you should overwrite it by adding connection string in web.config with name TimeTracker.Properties.Settings.TimeTrackerConnectionString like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
    <connectionStrings>
        <add name="TimeTracker.Properties.Settings.TimeTrackerConnectionString"
            connectionString="Data Source=.;Initial Catalog=TimeTracker;Integrated Security=True"
            providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
    </connectionStrings>
</configuration>

Hmm it works with me too but I remember I had one record in my web.config like this TimeTracker.Properties.Settings.Default.TimeTrackerConnectionString and it worked till I made some change. Go find...

Software business is quite different than other businesses. Mainly this is because in software there are very few routines that can be set as standardized actions, write action plans for them or so on. Let's take retail business - although it has it's own specifics in major part the manager can define in what threshold of goods availability make order to suppliers, or when to put some goods on sale and so on..

In software is different. While in others micromanagement (although bad in general) can be applied in software is impossible.

This is why we have so many methodologies: Waterfall model, Spiral model, Extreme programming and so on...

But where is the secret to success? There is no single answer to this question. But Joel Spolsky shared his experience working with BillG - more especially having him making a design review...

Bill Gates was amazingly technical, and he knew more about the details of his company's software than most of the people who worked on those details day in and day out. He understood Variants and COM objects and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables -- and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date and time functions. He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual programmer.

and more

Bill doesn't really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you've got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don't know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it's never happened before.

Read the whole story (here too) and you will learn some interesting things as how Microsoft made such great product as Excel, how deeply the management should be involved in the details; What is F-counter and how it is related to design reviews :).