I'm currently working on a project that is requiring me to write a bunch of x64 assembly code. One of the requirements that surfaced is that I needed to be able to trap exceptions in a specific block of code in the same way that __try / __except works...

So I just spent several days debugging an intermittent crash in some test code. Part of the reason it took so long was because whoever wrote this code introduced a dependency on a legacy test component that was apparently so old that sources and symbols...

Over the past few years, there has been a big buzz about how writing unit tests (preferably via Test Driven Development) combined with code coverage is the silver bullet for keeping bugs out of the product. While the benefits of unit testing are undeniable...

I was recently reading JW's blog post on Prevention vs. Cure: http://blogs.msdn.com/james_whittaker/archive/2008/07/24/prevention-v-cure-part-1.aspx and it set me off a bit. The blog post talks about "developer testing" which got me thinking about one...

If you haven't read The Pragmatic Programmer , by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, I'd highly recommend it. It puts a fresh coat of paint on many of the concepts discussed in Steve Maguire's classic Writing Solid Code and Steve McConnell's CodeComplete ...

I've been working on a system that required intercepting the method calls in an object model; basically I was trying to use Aspect Oriented Programming to weave in some logging and verification code. My first attempt was to simply add an object sink to...

I spent some time today looking at an issue on a Korean system where a test was searching for a specific item in a combo box. The test would iteratively select each item in the combo box, examine it and continue looping until it found the right entry...

In my previous post ( http://blogs.msdn.com/geoffda/archive/2007/08/31/the-designer-process-that-would-not-terminate.aspx ) I talked about an issue where RCWs (Runtime Callable Wrappers) awaiting garbage collection were holding references to a COM object...

I recently was asked to take a look at some VSTO test automation that wasn't behaving correctly on lab machines. The test was fairly simple; it created a VSTO Excel project, dirtied the document, closed the designer window without saving, and then reopened...