A while ago I posted about my Dell 5150 overheating. Well all the things I tried have helped a bit, but not really sorted the problem so in desperation I called Dell support (when all else fails etc. etc.) They suggested putting the latest bios on (A38), cleaning the heatsink with compressed air and making sure it was …

When installing Windows (any version) on a Virtual PC get the Virtual PC extensions installed as soon as possible. I have been installing a basic XP SP2 from an ISO image on a VPC and it has been hogging my P4HT processor, virtually melting my Dell 5150. After the basic installation I did a Windows update and this was …

First a bit of history, in .NET 1.1 any exceptions that were not handled in a background thread that generated them were just lost, you had to remember to handle them within the failing thread or never see them again. This 'feature' has been addressed in .NET 2.0 and now any unhandled exception in a background thread …

I have just watched the very interesting Ifeanyi Echeruo: Testing WPF - UI Fuzzing with InvokeStress. This gives a great discussion of the role of the tester within the development team, and no they don't 'just press buttons to see what happens'. They are there to drive quality and it is very much a development role. …

A while ago I posted on getting CruiseControl.NET working with MSTest. This has been working OK for us, but as with all things you learn a lot from living with it. So here are some tips and comments about our experiences: Watch your timeouts Many problems we have had have been due to steps in the build process taking …

I have just updated to the new release of CS2.1. All seemed straight forward, I unzipped the distribution, stopped my CS server, replaced the web home directory and then ran the cs_2.x_to_2.1_upgrade.sql script. This is all the readme said to do. However when I restarted the server and tried to login I got the error …

Following my visit to Nxtgen I have added regular expression functionality to GUITester as promised. The ClickTextTest attribute now has an optional extra boolean flag, this allows you to say if the text to match is a fixed string or a regular expression. The usage to check a textbox contains an email address: …

Do you find editing your blog on-line limiting whether it be: awkward to use does not have features you would like to see such as spelling checks you can lost that big blog posting if there is comms failure to your ISP or just that you want to create entries when you are not on-line such, as when commuting If so have a …

SharpRobo is another interesting way to test your win forms application, it uses recorder (test classes) to allow user operations to be replayed. The potential issue for me is that you need to derive your forms and controls from SharpRobo base classes, it remains to be seen how much this is a limitation, but will worth …

This looks well worth the day out Ed Gibson "on the road". Ed Gibson is the new Chief Security Advisor for Microsoft UK. He is an ex-FBI agent and really interesting to listern to at DDD; he has a story or two!