Martin Kulov's Blog

I am just returning from a seminar on Unit Testing organized by BASD with the association of Sofia University. The event gathered more than 170 people which make it one of biggest one for the recent months. It is obvious that Bulgarian developers are extremely interested in the benefits and implementation of unit test framework. However on a speaker question how many of them are using unit tests in their current project only 3 percent raise their hands.
While many people think that unit testing should be incorporated in the project schedule in order to employ them I personally think that this is responsibility of every single developer. Before unit testing gets popular and enjoys real attention from project managers the developers must prove their actual value. It is possible that not everyone will write good unit tests or be able to get to the habit of writing them. Actually this may get even worse. If you require unit test to be written and the developer is not feeling good about it he may write bad and too simple unit test that never fail. This can be total disaster since you, as a project manager, will get the false sense that everything is bug free while it is not. A possible solution is to require formal code reviews for unit test code. It may be also possible to get each developer to write unit test code to his colleague changing their roles periodically. I am particularly interested in the last idea. Have you tried it in some of your projects? I think I will give it a try sometime soon.


# posted by Martin Kulov @ 9:25 PM |

Bulgaria signed the contract for joining EU yesterday. Cyrillic becomes the third alphabet in the EU and is going to be an official language also.
Congratulation to all Bulgarians!


# posted by Martin Kulov @ 12:49 AM |

Bulgarian QA Association is going to carry out its second meeting. The primary focus this time is “Risk Management in QA Activities”. See the agenda bellow:

27 April, 18:30h, Sciant office

“Analysis and Risk Management” – Vladimir Aleksiev
“Risk based testing strategies” – George Rusev


# posted by Martin Kulov @ 7:02 PM |

Friday is the most unproductive day. Period.


# posted by Martin Kulov @ 9:17 PM |

Shhhh, quiet.
VSTS Beta 2 is out there. Hurry up while the server is not too busy.


# posted by Martin Kulov @ 2:55 PM |

Chris, we want you back. Please blog anytime, anywhere. Your comments are invaluable.



Join the effort. Help us bring Chris Brumme back to blogging.


# posted by Martin Kulov @ 1:28 AM |

After reading some articles on .NET memory model I understood two things. First you should never rely on MSDN for good multithreading advice. And second – the best way to create a singleton is the following:

public sealed class Singleton 
{
  private Singleton() 
  {
  }
  
  private static Singleton value;
  private static object syncRoot = new Object();
    
  public static Singleton Value 
  {
    get 
    {
      if (Singleton.value == null) 
      {
        lock (syncRoot) 
        {
          if (Singleton.value == null) 
          {
            Singleton newVal = new Singleton();
    
            // Insure all writes used 
            // to construct new value have been flushed. 
            System.Threading.Thread.MemoryBarrier(); 

            // publish the new value 
            Singleton.value = newVal;         
          }
        }
      }
    
      return Singleton.value;
    }
  }      
}

A very good article and follow ups you can find in Brad Abrams’s “volatile and MemoryBarrier()...”.


# posted by Martin Kulov @ 4:34 PM |

Microsoft is planning series of webcasts in April about Visual Studio Team System. Check them out at Webcast Series.


# posted by Martin Kulov @ 1:53 AM |

I watched a demo on VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) posted by Christina Storm, Program Manager for Visual Studio 2005. It is truly amazing! I have been wondering what this VSTO has more to provide from the existing Microsoft Office .NET Interoperability components. Watch the demo to find the difference. A little warm up while you are downloading the video – you can drag and drop components from the Visual Studio 2005's toolbox. The rest follow :)


# posted by Martin Kulov @ 12:59 AM |

Microsoft released the long awaited Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1. Basically it has the features that Windows XP SP2 provides. Additional ones include:

• WebDAVRedirector – Allows you to connect to Windows SharePoint Service and other WevDAV servers as they were file servers.
  
  
• Command line options in netshell command to control the new firewall state and exceptions.
  
  
• The provided Security Configuration Wizard reduces the surface attack by guiding the user using recommended practices knowledge base. You can create and redistribute policies that define server behavior as well. Note that the SCW is not installed by default. You can install it from Windows Components.
  

For more information you see Technical Overview of Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1).


# posted by Martin Kulov @ 12:10 AM |