Sunday, December 16, 2007
Wideband Delphi
The wideband delphi software estimation technique is actually a process where a group of experts arrive at a consensus based on the Work Breakdown Structure. It's simplicity is one of it's greatest strengths and it relies heavily on the experience of the experts called in to make the decision. If there are large differences in the estimates, they resolve it through further discussion and finally come up with the final numbers.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
NCover
NCover is a pretty good code coverage tool for .NET. You can use it to determine which parts of your code aren't tested by unit tests, thus letting you know if you need to write more tests.
A common problem identified by code coverage tools is that you have blocks of code that you wouldn't encounter under regular circumstances, such as Exception blocks that are intended to catch unforseen errors or error conditions that occur rarely. Due to insufficient testing for those blocks, you could be releasing some untested code that could result in a bug.
NCover can be run with pretty much any kind of tests - you just need to provide them as parameters to the command line NCover tool or browse to find the executable for the graphical tool so you aren't limited to any single testing framework, such as NUnit.
A common problem identified by code coverage tools is that you have blocks of code that you wouldn't encounter under regular circumstances, such as Exception blocks that are intended to catch unforseen errors or error conditions that occur rarely. Due to insufficient testing for those blocks, you could be releasing some untested code that could result in a bug.
NCover can be run with pretty much any kind of tests - you just need to provide them as parameters to the command line NCover tool or browse to find the executable for the graphical tool so you aren't limited to any single testing framework, such as NUnit.
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Sun Java on Fedora 8 has an issue
Fedora 8 has a buggy libxcb package due to which we get the following error when using Sun Java...
java:scb-slib-c:so:scb_slib_unlock:Assertion 'c->xlib.lock' failed.
Aborted.
You can, however, use the default Java that ships with Fedora 8.
java:scb-slib-c:so:scb_slib_unlock:Assertion 'c->xlib.lock' failed.
Aborted.
You can, however, use the default Java that ships with Fedora 8.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Upgrade to FC8
Fedora Core 7 was pretty cool when it was released. I showed all the guys and girls at work how it could do better on fancy effects than Windows Vista when you turned on the Desktop Effects and used Gnome. When the launch of Fedora 8 was announced, I just had to go and get myself one of those. I started off by upgrading my desktop at work from Fedora Core 7 to Fedora Core 8 and it seems to do a pretty good job on some counts. I had to upgrade KDE-SVN for it to work, which was just a matter of typing a "yum update kdesvn". The OpenOffice icons from my taskbar are now missing but the documents that I had placed on my desktop now have thumbnails displayed. There's lots more to it, but I guess I'll write more as I come across it.
Friday, December 7, 2007
WSUS
Microsoft has a Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) utility that we can use to download updates and get them installed within the network. It can download updates for different versions Microsoft Windows Operating System. The domain clients have to be setup via Group Policy. For workgroup clients, you would have to make registry changes; see:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/athif/archive/2005/09/14/Manually_Configure_WUA.aspx
To manually search and download Windows updates, you can also use the Microsoft Windows Update Catalog via your browser. Unfortunately, it doesn't list available updates so you can't browse - all it's got is a search box where you can type the update that you're looking for.
http://msmvps.com/blogs/athif/archive/2005/09/14/Manually_Configure_WUA.aspx
To manually search and download Windows updates, you can also use the Microsoft Windows Update Catalog via your browser. Unfortunately, it doesn't list available updates so you can't browse - all it's got is a search box where you can type the update that you're looking for.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Intel vPro
Intel's vPro is a hardware based management solutions for systems. The benefit of using a hardware based approach is that you do not require the PC to be running and don't even require the Operating System to be started up.
The Altaris Console Management is probably more popular among the vPro-based tools for administration, but you'll find more tools shipped from Avocent, BMC Software, CA, Farstone, Kingsoft, HP OpenView, LANDesk, Medialand, Microsoft SMS, StarSoftComm, and SyAM.
You can also get the Intel AMT developer tools from:
http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/articles/eng/1034.htm
For details from an Altaris Console Management demo, go to:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/vpro.ars/2
The Altaris Console Management is probably more popular among the vPro-based tools for administration, but you'll find more tools shipped from Avocent, BMC Software, CA, Farstone, Kingsoft, HP OpenView, LANDesk, Medialand, Microsoft SMS, StarSoftComm, and SyAM.
You can also get the Intel AMT developer tools from:
http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/articles/eng/1034.htm
For details from an Altaris Console Management demo, go to:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/vpro.ars/2
VS2008 and .NET 3.5 released on 19 Nov 07
Visual Studio 2008 was released on 19th November 2007. The Express editions are available as a free download. .NET 3.5 brings a lot of updates to C# and VB.NET as languages. LINQ is probably the most awaited feature.
For newbies, having Windows Presentation Foundation, Workflow Foundation and Communication Foundation integrated in the IDE is probably the best part.
For newbies, having Windows Presentation Foundation, Workflow Foundation and Communication Foundation integrated in the IDE is probably the best part.
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