This past week I've been able to work with WatiN.  My first impression is that this is a very useful framework.  At this point all I'm doing is logging in and loading all of the primary pages.  For a test to be successful I'm checking for certain controls on the page to make sure that it loaded correctly.

The biggest issue thus far is how much to test in each test.  I like writing my unit tests so they are small can be run independently of each other.  A big piece of testing the UI is testing the navigation of the pages and everything that happens.  So, how much do I test in each test?  My first thought is to come up with a single scenario, no matter how many pages that are part of it, and just test it.  My only hesitation is that the tests can get way too large for my tastes and have too many points of failure.  I guess we'll just see how it goes.

FYI - These are some of the resources I've been using.

• WatiN on Sourceforge
• Bruce McLeod's WatiN Category
• Ayende's Blog

Giddy Up!

We just signed up for a Borders Rewards account to accumulate dollars and get discounts, etc..  They encourage you to register on-line to get a special 25% off coupon.  I registered and quickly got an e-mail with the coupon.  A couple of days later I get another e-mail letting me know that we earned a "personal shopping day" because we've spent more than $50 in March.  I logged into our account today and saw this message

How could it have "come to their attention"?  They never asked me to reply to any of the messages they sent.  I got both e-mails just fine but never displayed any of the images.  I guess phishers and spammers aren't the only ones who use images in an e-mail to know that they've got a valid e-mail address.  I guess it's OK but I found it funny.

 

* Post title is from the song "In the Belly of the Whale" by The Newsboys

I wrote 'What's You're Go-to Password' last year and just last week I came across another article on password management.  If you use a weak password or have a Go-To password then you need to read this article on how this guy would hack your password.  Tell your friends and family as well.  The author does a very good job of explaining how a typical hacker may go about cracking your password, examples of how to make your passwords better, and a nice little chart to show just how fast a typical password can be cracked.

This is a real problem.  Gone are the days where you can have one password and use it for all of your online activity.  Or, as the author pointed out, use a weak password for your unsecure sites (email) that actually lead to breaches into your secure sites (online banking) .  Based on a chart in the article, he says:

Pay particular attention to the difference between using only lowercase characters and using all possible characters (uppercase, lowercase, and special characters - like @#$%^&*). Adding just one capital letter and one asterisk would change the processing time for an 8 character password from 2.4 days to 2.1 centuries.

Whose going to take 2.4 days to work on your password?  If it's all automated then it doesn't really matter (he give links to tools that can do this).  How do you keep track of all of these difficult passwords?  Yep, he recommends Roboform!  I'm telling you, it will be the best $29 dollars you'll spend on internet security.  I've been using it for over 2 years now and I've got my wife on it as well.

Giddy Up!

Please disregard. I've implemented a new piece of code to automatically publish posts...and this is the test run.

Joel shared a funny story about having kids and it reminded me of this past weekend where we celebrated my youngest daughter's third birthday.

We let them pick what we have for dinner so my wife asked what she wanted and she said "cake".  While trying to get her to choose something other than dessert for dinner, she then requested french fries.  My wife asked her what she wanted with her fries. She looks at us like we're crazy and says, "Ketchup". So, she had french fries and ketchup for her birthday dinner.  :-)

Kids are great!

Now that we live in a city that's not spread out like a whole other country, I'm getting use to, and even enjoying, the extra bit of walking we get to do.  One bit of extra walking I get to do is walking from the parking lot to the office every day at work.  I looked up the directions on Google Maps and it said it was a 1/2 mile.  That's not exactly correct as we don't have to walk along the street and have a more direct route.  My best guess would say it's closer to 2/10 of a mile from the parking lot to the office building.  Not really that far but I will say that it seems further when the cold air kicks in off of the Chesapeake Bay.

At the entrance there is a bicycle rack and it is common to see a bicycle or two locked up there...pretty cool.  A few times I've seen an electric scooter locked up along with the bicycles.  Again, pretty cool - someone living downtown rides their scooter 4-5 miles to save gas, time, etc..  That's not a bad idea and something I could see me looking into if the situation presented itself.

Last week what I thought was pretty cool turned out to be un-cool and kind of George Costanza-ish, if you ask me.  As I was walking out to the car, I hear an engine from behind me that sounds like a high powered weed-eater.  I turn around and see the guy riding the scooter that was locked up at the bicycle rack.  After it has zoomed past me, I just have to watch in awe as the guy pulls up next to his car, lifts the scooter into his trunk, and drives off.  I don't know the guy and maybe he needs to get to his car a few minutes faster than the rest of us.  Maybe he's got a special need for it (didn't appear that way to me) but I'm going with the George Costanza bit.  It's funnier and proves that if we dig we can find a little bit of George Costanza in all of us.

Sometimes my kids are too cute to pass up a little fatherly bragging...

Old School (mine are the 4 in the center of the picture)

Don't you hate it when things like this happen?  All I did was add a UserControl to the project and this error started popping up when I tried to compile - “Generation of designer failed“.

This reminds me of a problem getting ASP.NET debugging up and running one time but thankfully wasn't as big a headache and I didn't really have to dig for the fix.  I was able to ignore this error by putting the control declarations in the code-behind but it was only a temporary fix.  Finally, when putting in some post-build events, I saw what the problem was.

How in the heck this little character got in the project file is still a mystery.  Delete it and I was up and running.  I wish I had those 20 minutes back...

I learned about Rob Walling through his technical articles in asp.netPRO magazine.  I saw on the site that he has a blog so I subscribed straight away.  His blog reminds me of CodingHorror at times - he writes on technical and coding topics in his magazine articles but has articles about being a software developer and the work life that we live and deal with. 

Just check out some of these titles:

• Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money
• Personality Traits of the Best Software Developers
• Timeline and Risk: How to Piss Off Your Software Developers
• An Open Letter to the Software Managers of the World
• How To Burn $6,540 a Week: Indecision and Software Development
• Why Expectations Can Kill You and What You Can Do About I

One article in particular that I've printed out and read more than once happens to be #1 on this list - Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money.  Awesome article and any manager who wants to know how good developers think should read this article and see how they score.  If you're a developer then look for these characteristics in your next job.  Apparently he was contacted by quite a few managers.

“After publishing Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money late last year, I received several requests for something that could provide more specific information than the 1-9 score on Rob's Criteria for Keeping Your Developers Happy. In other words, managers want to know which of the nine areas to focus on, and most who wrote suggested I create a survey they could give anonymously to their developers.”

Rob answered and gave them a 29-question survey that managers could give to their developers.  If I was a manager this is what I would want to know so I could do my best in keeping my good developers around.  As a developer, this is the survey I would take and see if it was time to look for something new.  Nice work Rob!