Quick file navigation feature in Visual Studio 2005

Today I was researching the new features that Visual Studio 2005 gives to its users. One of the super cool and sexy feature that I found, is the quick navigation among the open documents: just press CONTROL + TAB and a dialog box will appear, where you can choose among all the open documents, but also you will have Toolbox, Servers and many others menus at your fingertips.

The only thing that I can say is: THANK YOU! I am getting more and more convinced that this version of Visual Studio IDE has really got the goal to make developers’ work more productive.

More about the quick navigation between files can be found on the following MSDN article:
How to: Navigate Within the Integrated Development Environment (click here to see it)

Common Software Errors

I recently ended up on a very interesting document, describing common software errors. What I really liked in this article was that the information in it was very systematically prepared, and as it is mentioned in it, it will help one tester to develop his/her way of thinking at least. I am sure that some of you will say that most of these bugs are not relevant, but try to look at the things from another angle – try to take the most out of the presented bugs, ant to remember as many bogus cases as you can. I am sure that this will help you a lot next time when you are trying to write test case scenarios for given software (provided that you are a QA engineer) or things to be careful while designing or writing code (if you are software developer). I provided this document to the QA manager at the software company, for which I am currently working. He was pretty amazed by this collection and recommended it lively to all of the other QA engineers as a “must read” source.

The aforementioned article is named “Common Software Errors” and can be at LogiGear download site (after you fill in a quick download survey).

Windows Live: Microsoft's answer to Google's homerun

Today I found this new service, which Microsoft is now implementing. It is still a beta version, but still the idea behind it is really very valuable. I as an ordinary Internet user, have very often faced the problem with not having my Favorites in place. That is why I am used to have a USB drive with me so that I always have access to such personal things. Well, with Windows Live you will have this in your finger tips.

Secondly, I use my Motorola MPx200 very often to check my email, but now I will have seamless integration between my mobile phone and my emails, just like I have it already with Microsoft Outlook.

At last, but not with least significance, I will have a free virus protection guard (Windows Live Safety Center) so that my PC will become more secure. And then who says that this world is not perfect? (

Well, if you want to find out more about this new Microsoft service, just go to:
http://www.live.com/

To see what are the main benefits (ideas) behind it, go to the link below to find out more:
http://ideas.live.com/

Open source tools for software testing professionals

I've recently seen a movie with Diijstra, who was talking about the software testing and QA. He mentioned that years ago, they were proclaiming the idea that every software developer should write rock-solid code, but it actually happened that nowadays developers believe that testers are responsible to detect software bugs (thus developers are somehow not responsible for low-quality code). I personally have seen lots of statistics about how many bugs can be detected by testers performing black box testing (which adopted by most ISVs) - the ranges varied between 30 up until 50, but not more (scary uh? :-) ). And honestly, when you think about it you will realize that software developers can be the best testers ever - they see the code, and they know what it is and is suppose to do, which is the basic pre-requisite for any test being performed by whoever.

And here is the way I looking at the things for software development vs. testing - I usually try to think from the QA engineer's point of view such as I am trying to break my code, what extraordinary cases I haven't considered, any boundary situations, what about UNICODE characters and encoding issues, etc, etc. There are many other questions that one may have, specific for the given project that is running, but it will be always a good think to have this kind of thinking - how I can make sure that my code is really solid!

The project that I am currently involved, has required high-quality since its very beginning. Therefore, every developer is responsible to write unit test and to run his/her code against it, and thereafter, while preparing the daily build, these unit tests are run automatically through the build process that is engaged. What is the benefit of this? Just to name a few, writing simple test cases helps you get a better understanding of the problem that you have to implement; it guides you whether the current implementation meets the functional requiremenets.

And if you are a software developer who is looking for testing tools, here is a very good site that you can find tons of free (open source) frameworks for unit test, performance tests, requirements tests and so forth:
http://www.opensourcetesting.org/

I highly recommend this site to all developers and QA engineers - there is something for each of you :0)

The manuscripts of Edsger W. Dijkstra

These days I had to implement a semaphore synchronization object in C#. To note, Microsoft .NET 1.0 and 1.1 don't have such kind of synchronization primitive in contrast to the new version 2.0 where it is available. However, while I was looking for some guidelines for semaphore as a concept, I found out that this synchronization primitive was invented by one of the founders of modern Computer Sciences - the same Edsger Dijkstra - respect!!! During my bachelor's degree, I used to hate this guy because he has so many theorems that our professors insisted on knowing their proofs by heard :)

Despite this, I found an archive containing the manuscripts of Dijkstra, some of which are even hand-written - really impressive and somehow touching! If you want to see them just go here.

The one that particularly is about semaphores (and which is hand-written) can be seen here:

Enjoy!

Google Print is up and running

Google Print is working! For those of you who are not acquainted, Google Print provides you a virtual online library, containing a huge set of books.

How you can take benefit? Well, whenever you are looking for something, you just can search for it in Google Print and you will receive a list of books, which may help you with this. You have the possibility to see an electronic version of each book as well as to order a printout for yourself. Unfortunately, I didn’t find books like Code Complete 2 or Effective C++ (Third Edition), but I guess it is a question of publishing rights. More about Google Print can be found here.

I personally love reading and therefore for me this service is like а gift from God. I highly recommend to try it out at: http://print.google.com/

Microsoft Win32 to Microsoft .NET Framework API Map

Hey Folks,

For all of you who have quite an experience with Windows 32 API, and who are now migrating to Microsoft .NET, here is something that you may find useful: Microsoft Win32 to Microsoft .NET Framework API Map. You can use this article whenever you are looking for something particular that exists in Win32 and you are wondering where it is situated in Microsoft .NET class library.

Here is the link to this article:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/win32map.asp

Best of luck!