Ever need to write managed code that then talked to unmanaged code elsewhere? Sometimes when debugging about why things are not working the way you expect it is useful to just inspect the values on both systems to understand the differences. One of the...

Products are primarily designed for customers, yet a test team must test these products. Who is thinking about how you might test the product? If you are a tester, you better be thinking about it and providing feedback to your developers about their design...

In order to test a product there is always a fair amount of infrastructure needed to keep the wheels running.  Just a few examples of the types of infrastructure that test requires are: Test harness Logger Common code for building test automation...

Technorati Tags: SDET , Test When you take on a feature to test, how does one prove it is right?  Generally you might work off some checklist of buckets or areas like functional, globalization, security, boundary, localization, performance, stress...

I have been looking around for a bit for a way to paste code for blog posts.  My requirements were pretty simple: Able to paste code from blog - such that readers could copy & paste code into their own editor Syntax highlighting – Syntax highlight...

Recently I have been messing around with figuring out how to serialize some data back & forth between two applications.  The code in particular leveraged several interfaces, classes with readonly properties, & generics.  This caused...

So you know your product & the code, what else is there?  Your customer!  They are the ones that will be using your product to solve their real problems. Knowing your customer So your PM, Dev, & you have implemented the greatest feature...

A tester just needs to master the art of understanding their product & then file bugs based on their findings right?  Wishful thinking! You better have the technical understanding of the code your developer is writing if you intend to properly...

So you accepted the challenge of being a tester, got your machine setup with the latest version of the code, installed your product, and your manager has given you a hot new feature to test.  It seems so easy. You think you can just focus on that...

This time of year at Microsoft is when we have what we call our Mid Year Career Discussion (MYCD). Note that this is not a Mid Year Review, but instead a Career Discussion as the intent is for you to specifically reflect on & discuss your career development...

It is an exciting time as customers plan & start to roll out their FIM 2010 deployments.  One of the initial questions asked is how much hardware do I need?  The team is working on providing some more documentation to help answer these types...

When building out your deployment there may be cases where you want to extend the default timeouts used in the system.  A key scenario of this might be if you create a separate Administrators portal for your FIM Admins.  This could be used for...

The latest update & last one prior to RTM has been posted to connect .  A few highlights from the update include: MPRs now have a MPR Type of being Set Transition or Request based Support for SQL Server Failover Clusters Updates to allow taking...

You can find the latest update for FIM 2010 RC1 making it’s way out via Microsoft Update now.  There are many more fixes included in this update such as improvements to Sets. Install it on your systems & try it out. Links KB Article #977312  ...

In my previous post , I covered Server Partitions which showed how to setup multiple servers in your topology. Once you have your servers setup, you will need to ensure your clients are pointed to the appropriate servers. Below is the topology that...

One of the updates found in FIM 2010 RC1 Update 1 as David points out is the ability to ensure Requests and Workflows (WF) created on a specific FIM Service Partition are executed only on the same FIM Service Partition that it was created on. FIM Service...

You can now find FIM 2010 RC1 Update1 making its way out via Microsoft update. This is a cumulative release with many fixes across the product. Of particular interest from a performance perspective is some changes we have made to significantly improve...

Scale For the discussion of scale the first question is the number of users & groups you expect to be in your system.  There are fairly easy numbers to determine with a few queries of Active Directory or whatever is your directory store of choice...

Policy Objects are the heart of your deployment where you will implement the business logic needed.  These will also be influenced by the scenarios (credential management, group management, user management, etc.)  that you deploy.  As such...

My goal with this post is to give you some data on the type of hardware we are using internally for our testing, which you could use to help inform your own hardware needs.  This is the hardware we are using to evaluate the product for release &...

Customers have very different deployment needs for their product, all of these driven based on their various business requirements.  For ourselves we have taken a two pronged approach for testing the performance of FIM 2010 in different topologies...

One of the areas I have been focused on recently has been testing the performance of our product.  With the release of RC1, I thought I would start off with some insight into what you can expect with the product.  A key problem with figuring...

Today FIM 2010 RC1 has been released. There have been alot of improvements since RC0 which we believe you will enjoy, so download it, try it, & let us know your feedback. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID...

After about 7 years at Microsoft, I have decided to join the role of bloggers.  As such I should start with a quick introduction about myself. I have been working at Microsoft over the past 7 years as a tester in what was originally Microsoft Metadirectory...