Nowerdays with RSS Feeds, twitter, Facebook, Myspace etc, you can keep up to date with all the latest goings on, while your at work, while you walk down to the shops, while you travel across the country on a train. Online communications has revolutionised the way news is broadcast across the world – no longer do certain news publishers say they have “exclusive” information – like the Mumbai terrorist attacks – updates were sent, on average, every 5 seconds regarding the attacks.

Twitter seems to have attracted a bunch of celebrities, from Alan Carr (@AlanCarr), to BoJo (@MayorOfLondon) – which breaks down another barrier when following your favourite celebrity, which in my case is Lance Armstrong – I no longer have to scour the net, seeing if he has appeared anywhere, I no long have to stay up till 3am watching Eurosport 3 reruns of the Giro d’Italia to see if he won it and where he placed, I can simply read his Twitter stream, and watch a few of his pre race video’s. I can get (near to) live updates on what he’s upto, and a bunch of other people I follow.

The social media phenomenon also breaks down a few other barriers – I no longer look at Paramedics with fascination and wonder “What is their job REALLY like?” – I read a bunch of medical blogs, from Random Acts of Reality (Tom, if your reading this, you are my hero <3 ) to NeeNaw – and its such a great insight into something that everyone takes for granted. I have alot more admiration and respect for the public services, after reading the amount of crap they have to deal with, especially from drunk / drugged up members of the public.

There are down sides to this evolution of communications though – I am now less “pro active” when it comes to communicating with friends, to see what’s going on with their life. For the friends I have on Facebook, I just load up the Facebook homepage, and see what’s the latest goings on with them. I no longer need to write to my friends (who are on FB at least) and ask them how they are doing, and what iv been upto lately – its all on my stream, in pretty much as real time as I care to update it.

I still love this evolution of communications though. Everything is interlinked, everything is in the now.

First off, this is my desk. Its a cheapo Ikea corner table, that fits. Iv got a bog standard mesh chair, from Ebuyer, for about 60 quid.

My hardware / desk setup:

• Custom built Monster:
  • Quad Core Processors
  • 8gb of the fastest DDR2 ram that was out
  • Dual 500gb HDDs
  • Dual DVD writers
  • 2 monitors – one 20″ widescreen, one 19″ bog stanard, both Iiyama’s (I know i have 3 on my desk, the 3rd one is hooked up to a temp pc)
• Sennheiser HD 465 Headphones – very comfortable, fairly cheap, I wear them for hours a day with no problems
• A small “localised” lamp from Homebase, useful for looking at small things
• MS Natural Keyboard
• Microsoft Laser Gaming Mouse 6000 – Its a lightweight mouse, the last thing you want is a big heavy mouse to move around all day.
• A speaker / subwoofer setup, from Ebuyer, for about 10 quid – for when headphones arnt good enough (probably not recommended for offices!)
• At the bottom of the picture is a fan, for when I get hot, yeah baby!
• Im not sure why my laptop was sitting on my desk…ignore that.

My “misc” software setup:

• Running Vista  SP1 – im tempted to run Windows 7, but not anytime soon, im just getting used to Vista!
  • UAC is disabled on Vista – its the FIRST thing i do when installing vista on a box!
  • IIS7 and management tools installed.
• Hostsman – easy editing of your hosts file for testing
• Winamp – for music! You cant code without music!
• Windows Clippings – easier to use than other screen grabbing software, very lightweight, very very good, deffo worth the $18! Has useful features like timers and ability to send to clipboard etc…
• MSN Messenger / Skype – I know some companies dont like it when their staff play around on IM, so dont abuse it – its saved my skin a few times when iv had trouble, and its less intrusive in the office than annoying someone
• WinSCP – freeware FTP / SFTP/ FTP over SSH client – covers pretty much any server you need to connect to, its free, and it just beats all other FTP clients hands down.
• Ultramon – you get a 2nd taskbar for your 2nd monitor, so basically only the stuff that is running on that monitor is on the taskbar.
• Microsoft Outlook – I have outlook running for my email – its easy to use, very straight forward, and quite cool with exchange.
• Daemon Tools Lite – when you have to mount ISOs without burning them, useful for .iso files downloaded from microsoft / off network shares.
• Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 SP1 – free software from MS, basically allows you to run virtual pc’s – useful for running XP off a virtual machine (Crappy versions of IE, anyone?) – although I had problems installing debian on it, so im looking into running VirtualBox
• Firefox – better than IE by MILES. Have loads of plugins, such as Web Dev toolbar, firebug, greasemonkey, firephp, Fission (cool loading bar thing), IE Tab, Its All Text (You get a cool little “Edit” button on text area’s that load it up in notepad), ShowIP (Shows ip address of server), AdBlock (blocks 99.99% of crappy ads), ColorZilla (picks colours out from page), Download Statusbar, Extended Statusbar (tells you pagesize, how long it took to load, etc).
• Opera – because someone will complain that it dosent work in this browser
• FeedDemon / Newsgator – Free software that sync’s with their free website, so you can still check your favourite feeds away from home. By far the cleanest, easiest to use, and best RSS reader there is.
• Hamachi – Free VPN software that works behind firewalls, very very useful, esp when you have less tech savvy friends.

My dev setup:

• Visual Studio 2008 Pro – Pro because you need at least that for integrated unit tests and Pex to run.
• Codesmith Generator, with my own custom version of Nettiers code generator – WHY on earth would you want to write CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) for your DB/objects over and over? Point this baby at it, and go baby go!
• Resharper – Solution wide error highlighting BEFORE you hit the big compile button. Instant solution for alot of errors. Advanced intellisense. Advanced unit testing tools. Code clean up, inline code generation. Even does cool stuff like close your speach marks and brackets for you!
• A White text on dark background colour theme like the image below – the last thing you want to do is look at retina scortching white screen for hours on end, it will do your eyes in, it really will.
  
• I tend to have Microsoft SQL Server installed on a virtual PC, so I can mimic the server environment – you can use the Microsoft Loopback Adapter to create your own private network – a hint, the 1.* ip address network (same for 2. all the way upto 9) is non routable, so feel free to use them for your virtual machines – i.e. my vps start off at 1.1.1.2 etc)
• Not sure if this should go in Misc or not, but NotePad++ – iv replaced notepad.exe in window with this, and it works ACE!

Im sure I have forgotten something, so when I remember, ill add to this post. If you have any great ideas, lets hear them!

Pex generates Unit Tests from Parameterized Unit Tests through Automated White box Testing based on Input Generation

Ill be the first to admit, I have never been a big fan of unit testing. To me, it seems like a big waste of time. I’m not sure why, but I just don’t like it – I suppose it has something to-do with spending time writing tests instead of actually doing proper, paid work. Yes, yes, I know that tests “prove” that your code works, as long as you have coded your tests right. But what if you haven’t?

Anyway, I thought id give Pex a test since it generates unit tests for me. I love things that generate things for me, because I like to do things as quickly as possible, and the computer is millions of times faster than me at generating stuff.

For starters – head over to the Pex website, and download it – I downloaded the academic version, since im running VS.NET 2008 pro. Installing it after downloading it also might help matters.

Once you have installed it, you should be able to just open up a project and when right clicking inside a .cs file, you should see a few menu items:

Once you click on that little baby, Pex should start whizzing into action. Be warned, Pex will only test Public classes and methods – it dosent like testing anything else that isnt public, and I believe it will give you a warning.

In VS.NET’s status bar, you will get a bunch of messages, along the lines of “Pex: listening to monitored process (cold start)” and then “Pex: Finished”. It should also pop up a window, something vaguely like the following:

I know this looks confusing at first, but it really isn’t. Its quite simple really. You have various options, but what’s interesting (I think) is the grid view in the middle. The first icon says if the test passed or failed – green = pass, red = ? (Take a guess, gwan, take a guess!) The number denotes the number of the test (its incremental), and the name is the value it has tried If the test fails and throws an exception, that will be listed under the Summary and Error message bits.

If you click on the test, you can see the following to the side :

The details is the actual code for the unit test that it has executed. I know, it says “this.” instead of the class name, and that’s because Pex creates a copy of the code to run tests on, in a partial class. Under the stack trace subtab, it well, gives you the stack trace (Please tell me you knew what that would do. Please.)

This is where Pex becomes rather … brilliant – it allows you to save all of these generated tests into its own project, simply by selecting the tests you want to save, and hitting the fancy “Save Test…” button – it will go off, and generate its own project (It will ask you for the name of the project, where it should live etc, I will provide a screenshot later) – and it will save the tests to that project! Tests that you can run later, and you don’t have to use vs.net’s test suite – you can decide to plug in different testing libraries such as MBUnit (my current fav) by downloading extensions that are available on CodePlex, or I believe you can create your own.

More on Pex later!