eWorld.UI - Matt Hawley

Ramblings of Matt

Taking Certifications Seriously

April 20, 2004 23:01 by matthaw

Ahh, so I haven't blogged since last Thursday...guess I've just been too busy lately. Anyway...

Why is it that some people just don't take certifications seriously. I realize that this topic has been covered time and time again, but it still floors me when I see a newsgroup post that says "just quickly read the exam cram 2 book and study the trancenders." This all stemmed from someone asking what else he should do to prepare himself for passing 70-300, in which he has really no .NET experience. I can say that I was the first to respond to him saying that he needed to spend some time with .NET to be comfortable with it, and then work on passing 70-305/315 and 70-306/316 prior to taking 70-300 (from what he said after failing it 1 time before, that most of it relates to debugging and other stuff).

Now, I personally haven't taken 70-300 yet, but will be in the near future, so I can't really speak on what exactly he needs. However, having a base knowledge in .NET will be a positive and helpful thing for any test relating to the .NET certifications.

This just brings me to my next point on why people are getting certifications just to get certifications and passing them using only trancenders, brain dumps, etc. Most of the people that fall into this category, I feel, have had very little .NET exposure, and retain about 0.5% of what they crammed into their head in 1 week. To me, this just kills the idea of certified professionals knowing the technology. I feel that significant time must be spent on the appropriate technology, by reading books, reading online articles, getting your hands dirty in examples & real world cases, and taking practice exams, are all the best methods to ensuring that those who take and pass these certifications actually know about the technology and how to implement it if the time came.

To me, by shortcutting your way into certification just so you can stick it on your resume is completely destroying the idealism of certifications. Now - the real question, is how do those being tested actually prove they know the information rather than just regurgitating it for an exam. In reality, there isn't, I just hope that my employer and possible future employers test my skills that my certifications show before making any presumptions on my skill level. I've heard around the grapevine that some employers are starting to not even look at those with certifications because of the plaguing problem of those trying to beat the system. So why bother? What are your thoughts?



Categories: General
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Apprentice - The Final Chapter

April 16, 2004 05:42 by matthaw

So Bill won, hmph. I wanted Kwame to win, but oh well. I'm in the middle of commercials, so I'm not sure what job Bill's going to take, but I would take the Golf Course job. I've lived in IL all my life, and it would be awesome to be out on the west coast.

Update: So Chicago it is for Bill. Makes sense considering its his hometown, and why move across the US. Good choice! BTW - that Crossfire is a pretty sweet car, though I'd rather have a Corvette.



Categories: General
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Figured out Scroll Wheel Problem with Mouse

April 16, 2004 02:49 by matthaw

I've been fighting this problem for quite some time now...whenever I was using IE or other applications where screens would refresh - and I would use my scroll wheel - the page would refresh, and sometimes go backwards and forwards. It was a very erratic and annoying behavior, but I finally figured out the culprit.

Twas' the Intelli Point 5, and all through the computer, not a creature was stirring, not even my mouse.

So yeah - I uninstalled Intelli Point 5, and voila, my problems solved. Man, their Intelli Point 5 is super buggy. I wish I had 4.2 to go back to, I heard that was a great version.



Categories: General
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TDD Research Findings

April 15, 2004 20:41 by matthaw

As a followup to my previous post on gathering research information, I wanted to share the findings with everyone in case they're put in the same situation I (and another co-worker) was. Thanks to the strong efforts of my co-worker, we were able to produce good measurements of TDD effects.

Advantages of TDD:

  • 87.5% of developers reported better requirements understanding.
  • 95.8% of developers reported reduced debugging efforts.
  • 78% of developers reported TDD improved overall productivity.
  • 50% of developers found that it decreased overall development time.
  • 92% of developers felt that TDD yielded high-quality code.
  • 79% of developers believed TDD promoted simpler design.

The aggregate score of these findings shows that 80% of developers found TDD to be effective. Also, there was an increase in code quality which passed 18% more functional black-box tests.

Challenges of TDD:

  • 40% of developers found adoption of TDD was difficult.
  • 16% increase in development time of projets.

These results were of a survey done, and not scientific facts. It proved difficult to find statistics on TDD due to the "new" nature and adoption of TDD in the IT arena, which is why our results were based on surveys that were found across the internet.

References:

  1. Elfriede, D. "Effective Software Testing: 50 Specific Ways to Improve your Testing"
  2. Beck, K. "Test-Driven Development"
  3. E. Michael Maximilien, "Assessing Test-Driven Development at IBM" Found Here.
  4. George, B. and Williams, L., "An Initial Investigation of Test-Driven Development in Industry" Found Here.
  5. "An Evaluation of Test-First in University Environment" Found Here.

Update: Some confusion about where we retrieved this numbers has come about. Our company did not do this survey, it was retrieved from one of the references stated in this article. I will talk with my co-worker, who found the survey, to give me specifics on which resource it was found at.

Update 2: After talking with my co-worker, she stated that the information I quoted above comes from the PDF found in reference #4. This was a study done over in Germany.



Categories: General
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Whidbey Updates from Scott Louvau

April 15, 2004 20:09 by matthaw

Scott Louvau just recently posted a summary listing to the Whidbey newsgroups on what his team is working on. Some items were notable enough to get blogged, so here ya go in case you missed them:

"For the build process, we will have an explicit build step, and it will
list all of the Build Errors in the Web Application. This was something we
were still working on when we released the build that you have."

"I'm not sure why they chose the border around braces rather than bolding
to show matched braces. They are fixing it so that it won't cause the
cursor to be hidden. This one bugged me immediately, too. =)"="/P">

Both of these items were big on my list. Most notably, the first one. This is great that we'll be able to build our Web Applications like we currently do, I can't wait to see this in future builds. Also - I too hate the boxes around the curly braces, I like the bolded way better - its less distractive.



Categories: Whidbey
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NUnitASP and Portals

April 14, 2004 18:27 by matthaw

As a followup to my blog post yesterday, my boss decided to throw a new one at me - give an example of how we can use NUnitASP for our projects as another form of TDD during the project life cycle. Well, I hadn't used NUnitASP before, so I jumped right in following their step-by-step tutorial for newbies. Sure, the tutorial wasn't a real-world example, it did give you an idea of how things work and what needs to be done.

So, after my success with that, I decided it was time to take one of our applications for a test ride. Well, this application so happened to be built on a custom portal framework we developed, and things started to go wrong for me from the very beginning. I first tried to get to the first main page, the login page, and grab the username & password text boxes in a test.

Problem 1: NUnitASP took me to the default page, which sets a cookie and redirects the user to their homepage. Well, NUnitASP didn't do the redirect, so I was stuck with a page that had no controls. Solution was to grab the URL manually (which have a few different query string parameters that vary depending on your user/role/application using/page viewing).

Problem 2: NUnitASP needs to grab the controls via HTML ID. Ahh, so I just plopped in "tbUsername" and "tbPassword" - what? It can't find them? Solution was to fully qualify them as "_ctl5_tbUsername" and "_ctl5_tbPassword". This doesn't really make writing tests easy for data driven portals that vary on the modules that are displayed...I mean, how am I supposed to know the unique prefix that is added.

So, from my two problems I just listed, I've come to the conclusion that NUnitASP cannot (as of this blog posting) be used in Portal based webpages. My reasons are as follows:

  • You need to know the exact URL to a page to test, initially at least. If you're page's are dynamically put together with different modules based on you're user, role, and query string parameters, this could vary from time to time, thus breaking your tests which require modifying your tests...not a good practice.
  • You need to know the exact HTML ID of the element you're trying to write tests against. This is a good design if you're pages are darn near static (in the sense that the way they're loaded is not data driven), and are not contained in User Controls (this may work, but the same logic applies) because you know what the HTML ID should be when writing a test. However, if you're using a portal, you will most commonly not know the unique name of the control, which could in turn change from time to time, again (revisit my last statement above, it applies here too).

Although I say NUnitASP is not a good framework for portal based solutions, I do see it as being a very viable framework for pages that are not dynamically created. Maybe this is something that will possibly change in the future, however I'm not sure if or how it would. What are your thoughts on TDD of portal based application UIs?

Update: I missed the "UserControl" tester object that can be used for accessing User Controls and controls within those. However, this will still not work for dynamically created UC's that are added that don't have a distinct ID that is set, IE - portals.



Categories: .NET
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Lack of Good Articles? I don't think so.

April 14, 2004 17:42 by matthaw

I just ran across this very well stated newsgroup posting (to microsoft.public.dotnet.general):

"I would like to share my disappointment of Microsoft with you readers. Be
aware that I'm in no way a Microsoft "basher" and that, in fact, I use their
programming technologies everyday. More importantly, I find these
technologies quite useful and, most of the time, very well done.

But I'm currently quite fed up with what Microsoft is doing with the next
generation of the .NET Framework. It has absolutely nothing to do with the
functionalities, far from that! It seems like a terrific new product. The
.NET runtime environnement really impressed me from the start and it will
continue to. But the problem here is that MSDN, and all the ressources at
Microsoft, seems to focus on a product that is not out yet.

On MSDN, the majority of articles seems to be "how to do that on Whidbey",
"How Whidbey is great for that", "How life is wonderful with Whidbey", and
bla bla bla. But hey guys, the majority of your readers can't even test the
little example you put in your great articles about Whidbey! Why should I
care? Out there we only have the .NET Framework 1.1 to work with. There's
not even a beta version of whidbey that I can use to experiment with this
great new environnement! Why focus on a product that is not out yet and,
from certains informations, will not even be in the current year!

I was a very "patriotic" reader of MSDN for the great number of quality
article that it propose. But now, I just go there from time to time to
realize, each time, that they talks about something I can't use and will not
be able to use for the next year or so. Imagine a computer hardware magazine
that do mainly reviews of product that readers will never be able to use
before one or two years? I want programming information that is useful for
me now, not hypothetically in the future..."

After reading this, I actually agreed with the poster. Although, I do have to say I do have access to the March bits of Whidbey, so I can test those examples. However, like the poster said, the majority of people cannot currently test that information. My only rebuttle to the poster is that the information is very good and right on, and when the Beta is finally released (sometime this summer), you'll have an abundance of reference articles that you can go by, and will not be having to wait around like most of us right now to get some good examples and explanations of things.



Categories: .NET
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TDD Case Studies

April 13, 2004 23:29 by matthaw
I'm trying to shift my division at work into using TDD. Everyone seems to be in favor of it, however they're wanting some quantitative measurements via Case Studies or White Papers that will show over time or over a project that TDD decreases bugs and increases developer productivity. Does anyone know of any references that are available online that I can point them to?

Categories: General
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BlogJet 1.0.0.17 BETA Released

April 13, 2004 23:27 by matthaw

BlogJet has released v1.0.0.17 BETA. Get it now!

BlogJet 1.0.0.17 Beta Release Notes
April 13, 2004

FEATURES
* XHTML compatibility.
* Improved speed of receiving post for editing (Blogware).

BUG FIXES
* Fixed issue with categories.
* Access violation at address 0041CF29.
* Fixed error in version checker.
* Minor bug fixes.



Categories: General
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Retrieve AS/400 Data

April 13, 2004 00:41 by matthaw

Wally just pointed out a new data provider for .NET that will allow developers to talk directly with AS/400 servers. I don't know how many times we've had to access data on AS/400 systems in a round-about way. No more will we need to use DTS in SQL Server to transfer data over on a nightly basis!

Thanks Wally!



Categories: .NET
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