[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] In the soon to be released Smoketest framework it is sometimes useful to create new test types to supplement the tests built-in to the framework. In this and the next post I will walk through the process of implementing and registering a custom test with the Smoketest framework.
[Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes] To alleviate the grind of polishing and sanitising my code (and, let’s be honest, just plain ‘fixing’ it in some cases) ready for release, I have re-kindled my participation on Stack Overflow. In a happy confluence yesterday a question came up which allowed me to exercise one of the libraries that I’m preparing to release: Smoketest.
[Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes] I soon hope to be releasing “Smoketest”, a testing framework that I have developed over the past few years. It has actually been in production use for most of that time (albeit by my own good self) but also continues to develop and evolve. On the occasions when I have mentioned it, people have asked me to publish it, but I have been reluctant to do so up to now for a number of reasons, not least that it needs a bit of polishing to make it suitable for public scrutiny.
[Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes] Prompted by a conversation with some colleagues where-in we collectively speculated about the implementation details of a generic class and what impact – if any – this might have on performance vs a “traditional” polymorphic equivalent, I threw together a quick performance test case in my Smoketest framework, and as a result discovered a couple of significant changes in Delphi 2009 that created some unexpected problems.
[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] Since I’m preparing a series of posts about (and eventual publication of) Smoketest, my own testing framework, I thought I’d test the water with this weeks poll and see what – if anything – people are already using as far as unit testing goes. Also I thought I’d briefly mention that I am at Microsoft Tech Ed ’08 (NZ) this week, and it was good to see that the NZ CodeGear reseller, Developer’s Inc were handling a steady stream of traffic at their stand where Delphi 2009 was on display (in the form of data sheets :)). I asked when Delphi 2009 was expected to ship and was told that it had been released to manufacturing and was on target to start shipping on 20th September – I forgot to ask whether that was an NZ date or worldwide. Not quite from the horses mouth, but pretty darn close. 🙂
[Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes] A colleague of mine directed me to a further minor refinement of the ‘final’ Exchange() code I posted the other day. The change is minor but yields a worthwhile performance improvement, but my main reason for bothering to post (yet!) another update is an excuse to introduce the testing framework I developed that allowed me to quickly assess any benefit.
