The girl with the strong arm has started licking batteries. And that's kind of strange even for her.

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The Trip-Hop station on Pandora rocks. I guess not literally.

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I just finished reading Martin Fowler's Mocks Aren't Stubs. This is a great document because it gives some names to things that I hadn't been able to name before. Classicist vs. Mockist TDD is a key distinction that we have been struggling to define as we develop more concrete testing methods at work. To know that other people, who know what they are doing, have also dealt with it helps us to know that we are not just making things up.

My key conclusion from this is that I follow a Classic TDD model. I don't want to care about the behavior of my methods and therefore I am not going to do strict mocking where I verify that certain methods have been called. The interesting wrinkle here is that I really want to use a mocking framework for the ease with which I can create a stub or dummy object. This isn't well supported in all of the frameworks, but I have heard that Moq is going to be what I want to look at.

Fowler's article linked to Dan North's BDD introduction. I hadn't understood BDD before, and I can't claim that I really do at this point, but there is some interesting content in this introduction. The first few paragraphs of this description really seems to address a number of problems that I have had with TDD and unit testing in general. Here are the questions he poses:

• Where to start?


• What to test and what not to test?


• How much to test in one go?


• What to call their tests?


• And how to understand why a test fails?

After this simple suggestion, North goes on to point out how he developed the BDD method from this insight. On my first evaluation of this description, I do not like it. While I like North's initial insight and I think his answer to the questions above is very insightful and useful, I can't see myself adopting a full BDD process.

Update: my coworker John mentioned that the main point of North's introduction is more that the test methods need to be named in a testShould...() format. Certainly the BDD people would argue that you are doing it wrong if your test methods aren't of this form. For my purposes, I don't think this is strictly necessary, but is a useful point to keep in mind.

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get-childitem MyPage.aspx* | %{ svn rename $_ $($_.ToString() -replace 'MyPage', 'new-page') }

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Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed.

Sir Winston Churchill

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Excellent Music. Saw them in February. It was fun.

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Nothing changes: 

If success is rare and slow, everybody knows how quick and easy ruin is.

William Makepeace Thackeray. Vanity Fair. 1848

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It’s funny because it’s true.

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Humankind cannot stand very much reality.

T. S. Eliot

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Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

Kurt Vonnegut

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<tr class='<%# ((IDataItemContainer)Container).DisplayIndex % 2 == 0 ? "CommonListRow" : "CommonListRowAlt"  %>'>

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You need to run the following command to get the system state backup, which is what you can use to restore a DC it fails and you need to restore to a different machine, or to a new install on the same machine.

wbadmin start systemstatebackup -backupTarget:<driveletter>:

A few other notes that are valuable:

When you are saving system state you must backup to a drive, it can't be a network share.

And can't be one of the source drives of the backup, but you can get around that. To get around the drive limitation create a DWORD in the registry at:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\wbengine\SystemStateBackup\AllowSSBToAnyVolume

If you have the space, you can also backup the entire machine with a job defined through the GUI (or wbadmin). This will allow you to restore to the machine the backup was pulled from. It is good idea to have both this kind of backup and the system state backup.

Microsoft would ultimately like to sell you their System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) product and that is why there are not as many options for wbadmin as there were for ntbackup. We don't need (or have the hardware to support) DPM here, so we are currently making do with some wbadmin and some scripts cobbled together.

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1. Notepad2 - I rename it to n2 and put it in my PATH. Then it is just a WindowsKey + R, n2 away.


2. Firebug - Couldn't style a webpage without it.


3. DiffMerge - Comparing versions of code is pretty and easy.


4. Pidgin - Allows me to be on MSN and Google Talk.


5. GridMove - I have a 1920x1200 screen which is too much real estate to only use one window at a time, but Windows doesn't have a good way to manage my application windows.


6. Depending on what I am working on, either VS 2008, or Vim + ctags.

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Open an explorer window in the current directory:

> $shell = New-Object -comObject shell.application> $shell.Explore("$(resolve-path .)")

You can present a folder selection dialog to a user:

> $shell.BrowseForFolder(0, "Title", 0, "c:\") | get-member   TypeName: System.__ComObject#{a7ae5f64-c4d7-4d7f-9307-4d24ee54b841}Name                       MemberType Definition----                       ---------- ----------CopyHere                   Method     void CopyHere (Variant, Variant)DismissedWebViewBarricade  Method     void DismissedWebViewBarricade ()GetDetailsOf               Method     string GetDetailsOf (Variant, int)Items                      Method     FolderItems Items ()MoveHere                   Method     void MoveHere (Variant, Variant)NewFolder                  Method     void NewFolder (string, Variant)ParseName                  Method     FolderItem ParseName (string)Synchronize                Method     void Synchronize ()Application                Property   IDispatch Application () {get}HaveToShowWebViewBarricade Property   bool HaveToShowWebViewBarricade () {get}OfflineStatus              Property   int OfflineStatus () {get}Parent                     Property   IDispatch Parent () {get}ParentFolder               Property   Folder ParentFolder () {get}Self                       Property   FolderItem Self () {get}ShowWebViewBarricade       Property   bool ShowWebViewBarricade () {get} {set}Title                      Property   string Title () {get}

> $shell.BrowseForFolder(0, "Title", 0, "c:\").Self.Path

MSDN gives the information you need for the third argument. It is a 'flags' field that can be any combo of ulFlags on that page.

See $shell | Get-Member for more.

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