Chris Szurgot's Blog

Ok, here's my technology wish for the day...

My phone has bluetooth, for which I use a Jabra earpiece. It also has (limited) voice recognition so I can call pre-programmed people just by touching the earpiece, and speaking the name. So far so good, I can contact anybody, answer the phone, and hang up the phone, or record voice memos without touching the phone. But for some reason, I can't do voice recognition on my voice mail system. (SunCom/Cingular, whatever they are...)

It seems like it would be a lot of bang for the buck to implement voice recognition on a Voice Mail system. Only about 5-10 commands. For fancier stuff (like play last 3 seconds), you'd need a keypad, but "PLAY", "DELETE", "REPEAT", "NEXT", "FIRST", "PREVIOUS", "SAVE" would be pretty easy to implement. Or even just the numbers you would normally hit.

Ah well, maybe when the cars can drive themselves, and don't really need hands free anyway.

I'm currently in the process of adding Unit Testing to legacy system (the word legacy here meaning code without Unit Tests) The system has a very interesting design with logic in all sorts of places (ASP.NET pages, utility classes, lots of logic in Stored Procedures, etc...) This has been a most interesting experience (The word interesting here meaning worse that fingernails scraped across a chalkboard), but fortunately rather instructive. I've learned more about the system in the last few weeks that I cared too <grin>

Working with a legacy system like this has been rather interesting. Because so much of the data is in the ASP.NET pages, and so many of the stored procedures require so much setup, I'm doing most of the testing in NUnitASP. This, of course, breaks a tenent of Unit Testing, because the full battery takes several minutes, (with less than 100 tests) and an individual test can take about 10 second because of tear down and ASP.NET page compilation (I'll be glad for ASP.NET 2.0 pre-compilation) The positive side effect is that I'm optimizing each page and query, to bring the time down, which helps quite a bit...

Of course, I also have to build up the test data, so every time I change the test data script, I have to run the full battery, then retrofit my data changes to include a new # of rows or value. Which tends to throw some tests off for no particular reason... Ugh... And takes several minutes.

Of course, the more I do all of this, the cleaner the system gets, the better the code coverage gets, and the faster the system itself gets, so it's all good.

But I'll tell you what, it's all the more evidence to start writing tests as soon as possible, and to put as much logic in a place where you can excercise it quickly. It's already getting real old to run these tests, and it frustrates my boss when I put up a quick change into test and have to wait 10 minutes for all the tests to run.

Ok, if there weren't enough acronyms in there <grin>

I've loaded up and install the Visual Studio CTP. Loaded up some applications I've been working on to see how they compile, and I come to find out I've got no Source Safe module. Unlike the Nov CTP (which was also professional, I beleive) this one doesn't come with VSS for whatever reason. Is that going to be made available, or are we out of luck on that one.

I will say this. It works pretty well. I've been playing around with it, and haven't had any major problems so far. Seems to be faster and I've only had two crashes so far... My thought though is with Beta 2 right around the corner (I keep seeing the date of March 31st), is it worthwhile to submit bugs on this one, since Beta 2 is probably already "in the can" so to speak, and undergoing final testing....

Note/Update: This is the Professional version from MSDN. (I'm assuming Professional, it's not Enterprise, and it's not the Express ones and the VS 2005 site list Profession as being available)