This is the penultimate day of Tech Ed and I’m beginning to feel the burn. Long hours slaving over a hot notebook (not a metaphor) combined with early mornings have finally worn down the chiselled figure that is me.
Well all lies aside, this morning I found it difficult to identify exactly which seminars appealed to me. I finally settled on an initially intriguing session on tracking User Experience (UX to the cognoscenti). Why track User Experience, well assuming you care, the idea is to incrementally improve the usability of applications by monitoring unbiased user behaviour within a statistically significant number of user actions.
Continue reading ‘Tech Ed EMEA 2008 Day Four’
I had intended to start today with a brisk, rousing discussion on threads, but had to settle for the “Future of Unit Testing”, as the talk was cancelled. I usually prefer very technical talks, in fact the more impenetrable the better. The talk actually turned out to be interesting though and not as fluffy as it might have appeared at first glance. It was given by TypeMock’s, Roy Osherove. TypeMock currently make the best .NET Isolation Framework in my humble opinion, pity it’s a commercial product. It’s hard to justify purchasing software when so many effective, free alternatives are available.
Continue reading ‘Tech Ed EMEA 2008 Day Three’
The Test Team at DSI have been using Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2008 Test Edition for over a year now. We first began using the beta version of the 2008 product late last year and have been consistently relying on the released product for both Web testing and Load testing since then. So now’s as good a time as any to do our ‘Year in the Life’ review of this product and see what we know now, that wasn’t so clear, when we first began using the product.
Continue reading ‘Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team System Test Edition - A Year on’
Five seminars viewed today. The somewhat misnamed “Developing Data-Centric Web Applications” turned out to be a fascinating discussion on the relatively new ASP.NET “Dynamic Data” feature. This is sort of a belated response from Microsoft to the Ruby on Rails hype from a few years ago. You know, generate a web site based on your data in under ten minutes flat. But unlike Ruby on Rails, elements from “Dynamic Data” can be plucked out and added to a more traditional ASP.NET control based application thereby significantly simplifying and decoupling them.
Continue reading ‘Tech Ed EMEA 2008 Day Two’
The keynote speech delivered by the ever-enthusiastic Jason Zander, as usual, promised and delivered peeks into forthcoming Microsoft products. In this case, pre-alpha versions of both Visual Studio 2010 and the much awaited Windows 7.
Continue reading ‘Tech Ed EMEA 2008 Day One’
