I've been a metal fan for years. I've seen Priest a few times in the 80s, and those were some fantastic shows. I'll be a fan, I suspect, forever. I've waited eagerly for the the follow-up to the very good, solid Angel of Retribution CD. Nostradamus came out and I got it. I mean I actually went to BestBuy and bought it rather than waited for the release on Napster. I listened to it intently, and surged with joy.... Until the music actually started. This is possibly the worst Priest CD ever. It is...

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: http://wblo.gs/W29

I've already written some commentary on SlickEdit. Basically, to recap, it's pretty good. It has its uses and can make some development shop's work much easier. Overall, I like it. I also mentioned in my previous review that I hadn't had much chance to review the VS version. I have had a chance to do so since my review. Again, overall it's ok, but I find myself turning to the VS tools more often than not, and I find myself not really aggressively learning the tool. It seems to be good, but it also...

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: http://wblo.gs/W1t

Every time you bring automation to a place where there was none (to speak of) previously, the reaction is pretty mild and no one seems to care a lot. That is, of course, until you release your first script. I recently did a demo for my boss and his boss, along side one of the manual testing leads. I had built a script that did detailed error message validation (create a set of data, generate error, verify that the error given was the right one, rinse, repeat), but had used reusable components with...

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: http://wblo.gs/W09

I am not a big fan of the datatable in QTP. This statement comes as no surprise to those who know me, and my work. I've always been forced to use it. I do agree that it does allow for ease of using Excel sheets as a data mechanism between me and my manual user; I create an Excel sheet and it becomes the data contract between me and the user. However, the datatable does me wrong at the worst of times, and in the worst of ways, it seems. I've threatened to write a replacement for the datatable about...

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: http://wblo.gs/VyX

There are days when I want to start litigation to have the letters "Q", "T", and "P" removed from the alphabet, and today is one of those days. Today's reason: The Debug Viewer For those unfamiliar with the DV, it acts like a watch window in VS. It is convenient way to observe a test's behaviour and figure out what is happening. I use it often. I assumed it worked like the watch window, and it does to some degree. But not completely, it would appear. Imagine that I have function 1 that calls into...

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: http://wblo.gs/VxL

We had an interesting discussion at work today about the nature of test automation. This discussion stemmed from a need to provide a fast, automated means of generating data to satisfy testing scenarios at my place of employment. Basically, our manual testers generate data necessary for testing every time they want to run a test. In order to complete a short test (<5 minutes), 10 or 15 minutes must be expended. The acceptance criteria for any given test varies greatly from test to test, and often,...

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: http://wblo.gs/VxB

I've been evaluating SlickEdit for awhile now, and wanted to see how it worked. In a word: wonderful! It's a good IDE, and does the job very well. A couple of good points in particular are: 1) It provides a mostly standard interface to work on projects of all different kinds. This is particularly useful if you have apps written in a variety of languages, or are called upon to support a legacy app whose native IDE is unknown to you. 2) It comes out of the box with a great set of tools including a...

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: http://wblo.gs/Vwz

I am here in WI to see my kids graduate from High School, which means I am old enough to have kids that are graduating from high school.... And a commercial for PMS meds made it only worse. The music for the commercial? "We're not gonna take it" by Twisted Sister. Someone shoot me

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: http://wblo.gs/Vu3

I recently started a new project for Mobile Devices using the NETCF and VB.Net. I am building a stack screen calculator with reverse polish notation. Ok, ok, not terribly original, I know. It should be fun and good to stretch the ol' Mobile Dev muscles a bit. I started a project blog on ilovevb.net called Schizo Developer which I will use to log notes and progess on the project. I will also be cross-posting anything QTP/VBScript related to that project blog also. More on that to come.... I won't...

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: http://wblo.gs/VtD