It’s reasonable enough I suppose, but annoying none the less. Everytime a new update comes down through Windows update, it breaks Office 2007 Beta 2 by “updating” some of its DLLs to older versions. Fortunately, the repair functionality in the office installer seems to fix it but it means waiting around for 15 minutes or so while it gets fixed. It would be nice if Windows Update checked that the file it is replacing is the one it expects to be replacing before going ahead – it would avoid all kinds of problems like this.

I find it somewhat amusing that Scoble is discovering the enterprise market at the SAP conference. One quote in particular stuck out for me:

SAP is no Web 2.0 business. The cool kids like Mike Arrington don’t follow its every move like, say, the way we follow Google or Microsoft. On the other hand, name the business and it probably runs on SAP.

Ephox is like that – tiny little company that no one seems to have heard about, but you name the big enterprise CMS and we’re probably in it. We have a client list that most companies would kill to get their hands on and unlike most Web 2.0 businesses – we not just burning VC.

There’s an interesting pattern when you start doing TDD and trying to make your tests as atomic as possible1. First of all you wonder how anyone could ever get far with completely standalone classes that don’t interact with anything – obviously a program needs some level of communication between classes. Then you discover Mock objects. These wonderful little gems allow you to have communication between classes but still test them independently. Pretty soon you’re going on a cookie monster style binge session with mocks. Everything can should and will be mocked out and there’s no longer any need to worry about making your classes keep to themselves, all those external dependencies can just be mocked out.

Somewhere along the line I stumbled across Mark Pilgrim’s description of how the universal feed parser sanitizes HTML. A key part of this is that the universal feed parser strips styles because IE on Windows can wind up executing part of that style as JavaScript.

While obviously at the moment this how to be done, it seems completely unreasonable to me that any content that wants to be syndicated accurately needs to avoid CSS entirely. It seems to me that rather than stripping style information, we should be pressuring Microsoft (and any other affected browser vendors) to fix the browser so that it doesn’t ever treat information in CSS as executable code.

At least in my mind, there seems to be a clash of aims in XP. You want to make sure that you have complete confidence in your tests so that you can go faster and reduce the cost of change. To achieve this you write lots and lots of tests – until your fear of something breaking turns to boredom from writing tests you know will pass. Most of those tests are atomic and test a particular component, but fear lies in the gaps between components too so you regularly get recommendations like Ola Ellnestam’s on my previous post, Testing Your Setup Code:

I’ve had an interesting experience the last couple of days – I’ve been trying to add some major new functionality into our list code. The code is exceptionally well tested and fairly easy to understand but it wasn’t clear how to write a test that described the functionality I wanted to add.

I started off by writing an acceptance test for what I wanted and then started drilling down to what I needed, but it was leading me off into a rewrite of our list code because it was too difficult to see how to reuse the existing code for what I wanted. In the end, I decided to almost reverse refactor the existing code to extract out the logic that I needed. I say reverse refactor because instead of making the code simpler to read and understand, it was making it more complex – it really felt quite wrong to be applying the refactorings.

I complained before about Obnoxious Referrer Links and now Andy has stumbled across problems they cause in the real world.

It turns out that having a meme tracker for the feeds you subscribe to can produce some interesting results. The big issue is that some feeds either rewrite URLs to include a redirect through their server, or strip all HTML and just give you a snippet of the article. This makes it basically impossible to determine if two items link to the same article.

A lot of projects these days have taken to using a wiki as a way to get the community to write the documentation for them. This appears to work really well with a huge range of pages being created telling you how to do all kinds of stuff. Unfortunately, for anyone who actually needs to learn about the project, these pages are about as useful as tits on a charging bull.

Why is it that a hugely database dependent framework, that’s meant to be extremely quick to get up and running with is so infuriating when it comes to get it actually talking to the database? I know cross-language interfaces are always difficult, particularly when you try to make them work cross platform but if I can get Java, PHP and perl all talking to MySQL easily, why does it have to be so damn hard for ruby?

I realized an unintentional side effect of deciding to not use the ternary if (a ? b : c) – there’s a bunch of code that we don’t duplicate that we otherwise probably would have. In particular, when working with views there’s a very common pattern to convert between a Shape and a Rectangle1:

Rectangle bounds = shape instanceof Rectange ? (Rectangle)shape : shape.getBounds();

The reason for this is that getBounds() on a Rectangle will create a new Rectangle instance so if you happen to be getting the bounds a few thousand times every time you go to paint the text pane, you generate an awful lot of useless rectangles. Since every shape passed in is in fact a Rectangle, you can eliminate all of that junk without risking a ClassCastException if at some point you do get a different type of shape.

Once you have an automated build, the next step is to automate deployment1. A lot of people take this to mean that you should be able to check out the code, compile it and deploy it all from your local work station. I think this is largely a really bad idea.

Firstly, if you have deployment system that needs to vary, or might in the future need to vary, based on the version of the product, then your deployment scripts have to be in source control with the product and be branched and versioned just like the actual source code. If your product just spits out a zip file that is uploaded to a web server for clients to download, you my want to separate the deployment of that zip file from the code base since it will change based on changes to the web server, not changes to the code. You should however still be able to build the zip file from scripts that are versioned with your source code.

Having a fast build is an important part of XP so that the continuous integration cycle doesn’t take too long. Do people usually see this as including all the acceptance tests as well or does this just include the developer’s tests?

How do people handle acceptance tests failing? Does it cause the build to fail or not? What about acceptance tests that have been added for the current iteration but haven’t been implemented yet?