Theo Moore

So, there I was talking to my VP at the coffee machine (we have this instant coffee machine from heck....Flavia?) and he asked me what I've been up to lately. I discussed my work, but also mentioned that I'd done code camp...one of my sessions was on nUnit. I mentioned that I sure wish I could have commented more on VSTS' testing tools, but alas, I am but a poor Software Tester/Amatuer Game Dev...and I've neither the money nor need for it. I am currently reading a MS book on it (more like a 200+ page sales pamphlet) that gives some good info on it. Being the primary automation engineer here, I was curious if we could make use of it, etc.

Well, little did I know I was talking myself onto the team who will be installing, configuring, and evaluating it. We aren't sure we will jump in (our Config. Manager isn't entirely excited about it and how it might impact our process), but we have to see it to know. So....as of Monday, I expect to be cursing under my breath a lot and I will be trying to get the darn thing installed.

I sound annoyed, but I'm really not. I am actually looking forward to it.

Next time I do my presentation, perhaps I will be able to contrast nUnit and VSTS....cool....

Anyone got any “LOOK OUT!” type advice to give on it, or is it as simple as my book suggests that it is?

I was just introduced to a novel approach for game development: using a Stack. Those of you who have known this for ages are going to probably chuckle at my expense, and it's well-warranted. I confess that although I'd heard of them before, I had never made the connection between a stack and an undo cache before. However, it's simply perfect for it. You can store the moves the player makes in the stack using Push. When you want to back up/undo, simply use Pop to get the last move out. I was pretty darn happy to hear of this. I've used all kinds of approaches in the past including arrays and collections, but these methods weren't really a good solution. Collections had too much overhead and arrays had real performance issues (Redim sucks for speed), but they were all that occurred to me. Until now. The items in a stack are Pushed and Popped as objects, and you can mix types.

Something else interesting in regards to the Stack type: As of VS2005, you can use the Of statement to limit the types on your stack:

Dim Undo as Stack(Of String)

This is great for ensuring the proper data makes it into the stack, if your app cares about it. The Stack is also supported by the NETCF, so I am doubly excited.