xt1.org

ScriptUnit update

Bugfix and Source for ScriptUnit.
Now version 0.8
Teardown wasn’t getting called - it is now.
Also added Assert.Error and Assert.IsNotNull and more examples, including a test COM object.

2 comments May 8th, 2005

Stupid Amazon Patent

Apparently the USPTO is in such a hurry to issue more patents before someone reforms the whole rotten system that they have stopped reading or checking the patents at all.
METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR INFORMATION EXCHANGE BETWEEN USERS OF DIFFERENT WEB PAGES (claims 1, 2, and 16 in particular) is pretty much identical to my masters project at Stanford Commentor.

The system is part of a general “virtual document” architecture in which–with the help of lightweight distributed meta information–documents are dynamically synthesized from distributed sources depending on the user context and the meta-information which has been attached to them. The meta-information is managed independently of the documents themselves on separate meta-information servers, both in terms of storage and authority.

The COMMENTOR work fed into the W3C Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS).

Add comment May 5th, 2005

Amen to that: MVC is good

I just spent an hour talking about how to gradually introduce commands into our app at work.
Then I read this article, and I can just nod my head in agreement.

The de-coupling of GUI and model is a key part of MVC, but the decoupling of GUI and actions (the C part of MVC) is easily overlooked. SuperOffice started out as a Model-Document app, but we’ve found that the Command pattern is vital as your app grows larger. Without Command objects you end up duplicating the logic throughout the app, along with all the enable/disable state handling logic and bindings to context. Yecch!

As the Pragmatic Programmers say: Don’t Repeat Yourself.

Add comment April 26th, 2005

Visual Studio Team System

There’s a lot of heat and noise over Microsoft’s changing “Universal” to mean “mostly Universal”. I haven’t got any idea how this affects SuperOffice - I think we’re covered as a Gold Partner, but who can tell.

VSTS will integrate a whole bunch of useful things into the dev environment: bug tracking, source control, project management (task tracking), unit testing, build and deploy scripts. This being a Microsoft product, the whole thing is built around more MS products than you can shake a stick at: SQL Server and Sharepoint Team Services in particular.

So the demos I’ve seen seem spiffy enough, but Sharepoint leaves me cold. It’s too amorphous for me to get a handle on.

What interests me is that the new hooks and integration points in the Visual Studio environment should make building your own bug-track and project-task integration much easier. I think any supplier who doesn’t show up with plugins within the next year will struggle to stay alive. The big question is to what extent will Microsoft publish all the necessary APIs. The Visual Source Safe source-code-control API’s are still licensed only under heavy NDA restrictions. (I suspect this is because they are worried that people will laugh if they see how badly designed they are.)

I hope this stuff opens up - I’d love to have better DevTrack integration from within Visual Studio. Having access to the x-planner task list from within my main programming environment. Being able to check things off without switching tools would be very nice.

Add comment March 25th, 2005

A Good Day

I’ve been working on re-doing the security system at SuperOffice for the past couple of months. The first step was to document the state of the existing security system using unit tests. Lots and lots of test. Mindnumbingly boring tests. But they had to be written and checked. (We discovered that the existing security system doesn’t work as well as it should the documentation and the implementation were not equivalent)

Today, my suite of unit tests passed.

All green. Yay!

I’m very happy.

This means that people who upgrade from an old version of the system should not discover anything different after they upgrade. They will be able to see and edit the same things as before.

Now I just have to add all the cool new features to the security system that I wrote down in the spec (back in october), and I’ll be done. Piece of cake.

Also feeling chuffed with myself for pulling two rabbits out of thin air today: created a patch/workaround for a security bug in our web product (it’s gonna be so good to ditch that pile of VB and ASP code) that means we won’t lose a large contract, and also fixed an old bug in our current release that our danish partners were losing sleep over.

Add comment January 21st, 2005

Intuitive UI

Intuitive User Interface design article by Jared Spool.

I’m with Jef Raskin on this - there is no such thing as “intuitive”. There is familiar and unfamiliar. Affordances can make the unfamiliar understandable, but that does not make it intuitive.

Add comment January 16th, 2005

Secure E-mail that Everyone Can Use

Ciphire is an zero, invisible-ui crypto client.

It works by keeping all the certs in a central location. The central certificate store has triple-redundant-backups around the globe, so it should take quite a bit to knock it out. It seems to be a good, solid implementation of the invisible-crypto idea. PGP/GPG can use central stores too, such as the MIT keyserver, so again it’s nothing new, but it’s well implemented.

It also points out that getting crypto that the people will use is equivalent to deploying a global directory of users. Building a global directory turns out to be a hard problem. Using a centralized directory is an easy way to get started (ref Microsoft Passport), but I think in the long run this will need to work with the Liberty Alliance, which is working on distributed identity (another hard problem).

Add comment January 12th, 2005

Blog Upgrade

A new and improved site - the WordPress upgrade went fairly smoothly, only took an hour or so to get all the bits in place. The new WordPress looks great - much more polished UI. A lot nicer admin tools - comment spam filtering among other things. Hopefully I’ll be able to get the phone blogging stuff working now (i want to be able to mail entries and photos from my phone)

Add comment September 26th, 2004

ScriptUnit meets Visual Testing

Well, we need a user-interface testing tool at work, so I’m hacking away on ScriptUnit again. I’ve added some new words to its vocabulary, so now I can say

set w = GetWindow(”SuperOffice”)
w.Click(”\0\Contact\0\Main\Edit”)
Assert.IsFalse w.IsVisible(”\0\Contact\0\Main\Edit”)
w.Type(”\0\Contact\0\Main\1″, “A new name”)

and stuff like that. By using the window names and id’s to create a path-like string I can adress the windows without relying on mouse coordinates and the like. This should make testing the user interface a lot easier to automate.

I was worried I’d have to emulate the MouseMove and MouseButton Up/Down messages by hand, but it turns out Windows has a whole fake-the-user-input system already in place, easily accessible through the SendInput() function.

Add comment September 26th, 2004

ScriptUnit lives!

Finally it works well enough to show to people.
My little labor of love is complete - ScriptUnit lets you write unit tests in JScript or VBScript. If you have a COM API that needs unit tests, then this is a very handy tool. I’m planning on using this at work. Microsoft can get testers who can write C++ and C#. The rest of us have to make do with testers who can write VBScript.

Add comment July 25th, 2004