Dennis "D.C." Dietrich

C#, .NET and the Curse of the Resource Fork - A Tester's Tale

Decoding standard output and standard error when redirecting to a GUI application

The Process class allows you to redirect the three streams basic I/O streams of a process: standard...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 11/08/2010

D.C. and the Wrapper Factory

A while ago I wrote about using reflection for testing non-public members. Since then I've been...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 01/24/2010

DTACM (D.C.'s Test Automation Coding Manifesto)

I find myself getting more and more frustrated whenever I see test code that is best described as...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 11/20/2009

All the wonderful colors of code coverage

I'd like to share my colors with you: R G B Coverage Not Touched Area 230 128 165 Coverage Partially...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 10/21/2009

EMTF 2.0 Beta released

It's been a couple of months since I first blogged about EMTF. Since then I've been busy refining...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 07/14/2009

Adding and removing websites to/from security zones programmatically (C#)

When you're searching binging for how to add or remove websites to/from IE's security zones you'll...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 06/24/2009

HTTP debugging for Silverlight developers (Mac OS X edition)

Many posts have been written about how to debug problems with issuing HTTP requests from Silverlight...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 06/08/2009

Back from Portland Code Camp

The Portland Code Camp yesterday was a blast. In fact, it was one of the best (un)conferences I've...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 06/01/2009

Creating an API testing framework 101

Writing a fully featured API testing solution is a lot of work. You have to deal with things like...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 02/24/2009

Introducing EMTF

A while ago a needed to do what I like to call quick and dirty testing, i.e. getting as much test...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 02/17/2009

It's all about systems - even if you're testing only a component

Earlier this year I bought a brand new computer and wanted to play what turned out to be one of my...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 10/22/2008

MIX09 announced

Don't make any plans for March 18-20 next year (or cancel the plans you've already made) since...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 10/22/2008

I Am The Seattle Code Camp (And So Can You!)

I have to admit something embarrassing: I've never been to a code camp! So, I thought, before people...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 10/14/2008

Which Microsoft virtualization solution to use for software testing

I have to admit the title is a bit misleading this time since - if you ask me - there is only one...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 09/29/2008

A poor man's approach to testing with databases

Say you are working on software that accesses a database server and you need to test it. To some...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 09/26/2008

Unit testing non-public types using reflection

Let's say you want to unit test the following class: using System; internal class Foo { internal...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 06/19/2008

How would you test a... C# code generator with Visual Studio Team Test

Introduction I spent some time this week thinking about how to test a code generator that generates...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 06/14/2008

Compiling code at runtime, C# 3.0 and "Compiler executable file csc.exe cannot be found"

Compiling code at runtime is incredibly easy thanks to the CSharpCodeProvider class. But as always,...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 06/12/2008

Transitionals - About a little piece of Acropolis that wanted to become open source

While Microsoft is certainly not an open source company there are some instances of code drops from,...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 04/30/2008

Reflections on MIX 08 part II: What's the secret Formula?

One of the outstanding sessions I attended was What's the secret Formula? (PNL14). The panelists...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 03/24/2008

And another award for Skinkers...

If you read my Silverlight-based P2P live streaming client wins MediaGuardian Innovation Award post...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 03/20/2008

Reflections on MIX 08 part I: First day keynote

This is the first on an n part post series about my personal thoughts on this year's MIX based on...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 03/19/2008

Reflector add-in (proof of concept) for highlighting platform APIs

I was talking to one of our partners at MIX about the new security model in Silverlight. In case...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 03/11/2008

Silverlight-based P2P live streaming client wins MediaGuardian Innovation Award

The first MediaGuardian Innovation Awards were held two days ago in London. Its motto - at least...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 03/08/2008

What happens in Vegas...

Well, I published a post on Tuesday and haven't ever since (not counting the remote debugging post...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 03/07/2008

Setting up Silverlight 2 remote debugging on Mac OS X

Let's face it: Silverlight is awesome! So are the Visual Studio Tools for Silverlight. One reason...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 03/05/2008

The day before MIX...

So, I finally made it to Las Vegas. However, not without a four hour delay in Portland due to a...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 03/05/2008

Join the family - Become a UI Framework Tester!

By the time I made up my mind that I really wanted to work at Microsoft I was already really excited...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 02/17/2008

YACVCP (Yet another CurrentCulture vs. CurrentUICulture post)

The CultureInfo class and particularly its properties CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture are often...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 02/05/2008

Configuring Outlook 2007 for using a Hotmail Plus account with POP3 and SMTP

I finally signed up for a Hotmail Plus account. While the web interface is awesome I wanted to...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 12/02/2007

Happy Usability Day!

Today is the World Usability Day 2007 and I'd like to encourage everyone to look into it especially...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 11/08/2007

Want to get HD audio out of a low profile PC? No problem!

A disclaimer first: The following post is my personal opinion and by no means an official...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 11/04/2007

Referenced assembly 'filename' is a localized satellite assembly (why it's not wise to ignore warning al1056)

Usually you should fix all warnings you see when building your code right away and personally I'm a...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 10/13/2007

Building a Windows Home Server: The Parts

My Windows Home Server (WHS) has been threatening me to quit for the last couple of days. In its...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 10/12/2007

Fun with events and delegates

So how can you verify that a given class raises an event? Well, you can simply write some code that...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 10/01/2007

Additional information on the garbage collector and weak references

I received some feedback on my previous post A good reason for calling GC.Collect() basically saying...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 09/30/2007

A good reason for calling GC.Collect()

You've probably heard that you should not call GC.Collect() and generally speaking this is...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 09/23/2007

Command Connection Points and Exception Handling Reloaded

In Debugging of and error handling for synchronous Commands I explained why you can't handle...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 07/09/2007

Windows Home Server RC released

Today the Windows Home Server team announced the availability of the Home Server Release Candidate...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 06/12/2007

Extending the Notepad sample with a Web Browser View - VB.NET Edition

Ricky Tan wrote a really cool post for the Acropolis Team Blog titled Extending the Notepad sample...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 06/12/2007

Acropolis' "Hello World"

"Hello World" code samples are a long tradition whenever you're trying to introduce someone to a...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 06/08/2007

The Parts Portal's Dependency Resolver and the Factory Pipeline

One of the features of the Parts Portal is that it supports the instantiation of parts which have...

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 06/07/2007

Debugging of and error handling for synchronous Commands

So you might have your first Acropolis application up and running and everything works just fine....

Author: Dennis 'D.C.' Dietrich [MSFT] Date: 06/06/2007