November 2004 - Posts
Google has added a few Asian languages to its Google Translate service.
This service looks suspiciously like AltaVista's Babelfish to me. If you try to translate the text "My name is Bond" to French, you get the same result as with AltaVista's translation service -- "Mon nom est en esclavage" ! I guess auto-translation technology isn't at its peak just yet.
The Altavista service offers more languages than Google, by the way.
Oh yeah, not to be Google-bashing, but the Blinkx Desktop Search tool, which I find not as easy to use as Google Desktop, does support searching in PDF files. Just FYI...
Scott Guthrie, program manager for ASP.NET, reports on his blog that ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 2 and Visual Web Developer Beta 2 have hit the zero bug-bounce milestone, meaning they are almost ready for release. But the team is now performing a 4-to-6-week security push to review every line of code in their system for security violations (as specified in Michael Howard's and David C. LeBlanc's book Writing Secure Code). This means that, very probably, Whidbey Beta 2 won't ship before January...
But I'm sure it will be worth the wait. Beta 2 is expected to be much more stable than Beta 1 Refresh (read: less bugs), and they are also overhauling the System.Xml namespace. It does seem, however, that refactoring support for VB.NET won't have much more functionality than "rename method". Hey guys, what's with that? Refactoring support is important, much more important than the My namespace (at least, that's how I feel about it).
Incidentally, if you want excellent refactoring support for C# in Visual Studio.Net today, check out JetBrains' super ReSharper tool. It supports renaming, extracting methods, turning fields into properties, encapsulating code with if or while constructs, templates and much more!
Today I feel like I'm eighteen (and I was just a couple of days ago, or at least that's how it often feels), but the fact is I'm 2 * 18 today. They say life begins at 40, so I guess I'll start living just before Bush leaves office :-) (disclaimer: that wasn't an endorsement for any candidate.)
On with real work now...
I have always considered one of the great advantages of NUnit the fact that it is supported by so many tools out in the field. This is something that, so far, MbUnit does not enjoy, even though it is a vastly superior tool.
So today I set out to try an experiment: to port an NUnit extension project, NUnitForms, to MbUnit to create MbUnitForms. And it was surprisingly easy to port the main part of the application.
NUnitForms is an open-source extension to NUnit to test WinForms applications. Unit-testing UIs is a major headache and this extension makes it possible. A typical NunitForms test contains tester controls for automatically filling in text boxes, "clicking" buttons, verifying content of text boxes and labels, etc. Very useful but so far only available for use with NUnit (for ASP.NET developers, there is a similar utility available called NUnitASP which should be just as easy to port as NUnitForms.)
The trick? Just "correct" the references (to the MbUnit.Core and MbUnit.Framework assemblies), do the same to the Using statements (to use MbUnit.Core.Framework, MbUnit.Framework, MbUnit.Core and/or MbUnit.Core.Exceptions as necessary), and recompile. There's nothing more to it!
Maybe I'll put the sources of the straight-port "MbUnitForms" up on SourceForge, if nobody objects. Either way, it's great to know that NUnit projects port so easily to MbUnit!