Blog

Today I received a mail from Microsoft with an invitation for an Expert session. As you can see, sometimes even the experts at Microsoft let a glitch through…

Recently I put up a list of my Xbox 360 games. I’ll try to keep it up to date. I must say it’s difficult to choose which game to get next. There are so many good titles out! Assassins Creed, Need for Speed ProStreet, Call of Duty 4 Modern warfare, and more… Want to join me when gaming online? My gamertag is OZGump (see my gamercard).

When asked about my point of view about a guideline concerning code coverage, my answer always is: go for 100% code coverage. 100%, unless… Here is why. When the guideline for code coverage is 80% (not an uncommon guideline) the devil is in the details. Or in the 20% which is not covered to be exact. When a developer ‘only’ needs to cover 80% of his code, you can expect him (or her) to start with the easiest scenario’s, and work his way towards the more difficult scenario’s until the coverage guideline has been met.

The last two weeks or so, my blog has been hit by a wave of comment spam. Every morning there are 20-something comments like ‘Nice’ or ‘Sorry :(’ to be deleted. Fairly pointless posts… The only link they contain seems to be in the URL field, and not in the message like they used to. Do they really think a blogger would see that kind of rubbish as a serious comment?

At my current project we made a project template for Visual Studio for our testers. We added all the references, folders and files a tester needs to add a new system tests project. One of the testers (!) extended our XML generator, which generated XML testcases based on data entered in Excel, to now generate a complete C# test class. Making (system) tests which are automatically run during the nightly build now really is just as simple as entering data in Excel.

I have lots of games for my Xbox 360 I still need to / want to finish, like The Orange Box and Bioshock. And despite this, I’ve been working ’non-stop’ behind my laptop for the last two evenings to prepare it for Visual Studio 2008, and to download and install it. It’s almost time… 😉 I can’t wait to get busy with the final version of Visual Studio 2008 and stuff like LINQ, extension methods, anonymous types, lambda expressions and so on.

As of 01-01-2008, I’m joining Avanade. You might have heard Avanade opened an office in the south of The Netherlandsthe first of November. I’ll be joining the ranks over there (Eindhoven!) and I am exited to get started. I spent the past years at LogicaCMG. I had a lot of fun and, even more important, I learned a lot. I’ll miss the guys (and girls!) I worked with, but I’m sure I will keep in touch with some of them.

Test Driven Development is hot, just like unit testing your software and any other kinds of (automated) testing. And as we all know: sometimes stuff that’s hot is misinterpreted, explained wrong or just simply used in a really bad way. Unfortunately, testing is no exception to this rule… Not too long ago I had a discussion with a project manager who told me the code in his project had a code coverage close to 100%.

The MasterPage doesn’t have a property for setting the Theme at design time. Despite this, I wanted to set the Theme for a MasterPage, so I decided to set it from code. I was aware of the possibility to set the Theme through the web.config, but that wasn’t the way I wanted to set it. One of the reasons being it would result in the theme being applied to the entire website.

Back in July, Barry Goffe (Director Windows Vista Ultimate) mentionedthat the missing Extras identified in January would be released at the end of the summer. I just got a bit curious about when these Extras would finally be released, so I visited windowsultimate.comagain. And there it was: DreamScene was releasedrecently (September 25th). And although I’m not quite sure if I’ll use this ever day, it’s kind of a cool feature. Isn’t it?

WOW The single player mode feels like a multiplayer game, with excellent gameplay. Certain parts of the game are pretty creepy, and I like it that there are some surprising elements in there. Sometimes you expect something to happen, which doesn’t. And when you least expect it…. So the (story in the) game is original. That makes a game interesting to play. One of the things I like a lot is that you can use almost everything your opponents use, like vehicles and weapons

Thanks to the MSDN forums{.} (and specifically one Hua Chen), I found a way{.} to disable specific code analysis rules for a team build. In this post I’ll combine the steps I followed earlier with the description given at the MSDN forum. I’ll start out with some steps earlier on in the process: how to quickly get a list of all the code analysis rules you want to disable (without having to type it all yourself 😉 ).