My Daily Websites

To further my quest to avoid writing unit tests (yes, I'm still busy, and yes, I stopped putting it off I'd finish quicker and get it over and done with, I know, I know), here's a list of the websites I visit pretty much every day:

• For Better of For Worse
• My GMail, of course
  
• IOL
  
• news.google.com
• slashdot
• bbspot
• theregister
• boingboing.net

and I'm sure there must be others ... let me check my history list .... well, google, of course, but that doesn't really count.

That's pretty much it for the sites I go to every single day (often several times a day).

More on nUnit and Exceptions

After complaining about the exception handling in nUnit, I did a quick search on google about it this morning. And oops, nUnit does handle it fairly well after all :-)

There's a method attribute

  

[ExpectedException

   (typeof(YourExpectedException))] 

which does exactly what you'd think - if the exception is thrown, the test passes, otherwise it fails.

I'd prefer something that works on the level of a single line of code rather than an entire method, myself, but I'm not going to get picky. You probably shouldn't have more than one test per method, anyway, I suppose.

Now the only question is how none of us at work noticed that useful little attribute .... :-)

Unit Testing with nUnit

Okay, I'll come clean. I'm catching up on all the unit tests that I never got around to writing before, and as I hate writing unit tests, I keep thinking of things to blog about instead :-)

I see the usefulness of unit tests, and since I've been doing system testing I really appreciate them, but I still don't like writing them. And this is code that I wrote months and months ago, before we decided to do unit testing, so now it's a mission to go back and write comprehensive units tests for them. But I guess it has to be done at some point :-(

We're using nAnt (sorry, TestDriven.NET), and on the whole I'm pretty happy with it - I haven't used any other unit testing tools, so I don't know how it compares, but it works well enough for me. The one thing that does annoy me is that it doesn't have any support for exceptions. It should have something like:

  ByteArray b = new ByteArray("AFX12");

  Assert.ExceptionThrown(ArgumentException);

but instead you have to do something awkward like this:

  bool ExceptionCaught = false;

  try

  {

    b1 = new BitArray(bools);

  }

  catch (ArgumentNullException)

  {

    ExceptionCaught = true;

  }

  Assert.AreEqual(ExceptionCaught, true);

which is a lot more clumsy.

But enough delaying, back to the unit test writing :-(

MSN Messenger - v7.0 and Plus!

Gosh, I'm just full of blogs today :-)

I use MSN Messenger quite a bit, and I recently installed the Plus! plugin, which is quite nice. I especially like the notifications feature - you can choose to be notified when any of your contacts changes their status in any way (it's all customizable, based on contact and status). It's a lot more useful than the default messenger options, which will notify you when someone logs in but not when they log off, change their status to away, or change their status back to online. And the other cool feature is that you can show contacts on your desktop, so you can easily see their status and send them a message (or e-mail, or whatever); you can set whether it will always stay on top of any other apps, and you can set the transparency, and all sorts of cool things.

I actually installed the beta version of version 7.0, but I wasn't terribly impressed. The main contacts window is very cluttered, and though it adds some cool things, there's not much extra functionality that I'd actually use. It seemed as though it would be useful to be able to see the status of my contacts before I sign in (or at least, before they can see that I've signed in), but then I realised that I sign in automatically when messenger starts, and messenger starts automatically when windows boots, so it's not actually terribly useful to me. And it doesn't work with Plus! (at least, not yet), so I decided I'd rather have the old version and Plus! than the new version. Of course, uninstalling it then uninstalls the old version too (it's an uninstall, after all, not a "revert to previous version), so then I had to go back and reinstall 6.2, or whatever it is that I'm using.

Oh, and Plus! lets you do cool things like rename your contacts, and it has some extra emoticons and a useful emoticon panel, and stuff like that.

But there's one feature that I'd really like and I haven't been able to find (not that I've been looking terribly hard, to be honest) - I'd like to know, when a contact's status is set to "away", whether they've set it manually or whether it got set by default because there hasn't been any activity on their machine for x number of minutes (and similarly for "busy", although that one's not as important).

So is there a plugin there that can do that? Are there any other really cool (and useful) plugins I should know about? Leave a comment and tell me your favourite!

The Chair Saga: A Surprising Twist

Just as I was putting off phoning Mr Salesman, he actually phone me! (Maybe he was reading my blog ....)

They're now going to deliver the new chair, which he assures me will be checked thoroughly, on Saturday between 12:00 and 14:00. No mention of the big bosses, but that's okay because they're going to get a very detailed fax describing the entire long saga - I'm just waiting for it to come to some sort of resolution first.

So now it's just a case of waiting until Saturday, and seeing if they actually turn up and whether the chair really is in a satisfactory condition or not.

The Chair Saga, continued

So by now it's Wednesday, and I still haven't heard from the salesman or the so-called "big bosses" who were going to sort everything out. I can't say I'm surprised, really, but it does mean that I now have to phone old Mr Salesman again, and listen to more of his excuses. I'm sure he's sick of hearing my voice when he pickes up the phone, but then I'm sick of hearing his excuses too, so it's at least equal. On the good side, I now know their phone number by heart (although I don't know that I really need more useless junk cluttering up my mind :-)