Ohad's Blog

Internet Explorer 8 RC1 is out

Internet Explorer RC1 - short for "Release Candidate 1" is out on the wild.

Release candidate software is ready to be evaluated by users while it undergoes final testing.

You may experience minor bugs or compatibility issues with websites while browsing

Download it over here

Read more about it on the IE blog

Update: 30 sec after the install i had my first IE 8 RC1 crash

Microsoft Visual Studio Learning Pack 2.0

The Visual Studio Learning Pack 2.0 is a software package created by Microsoft to help students learn about computer programming. Improvements in this release include support for Visual Studio 2008 Express and more support for Visual Basic

It consists of the following five components:

• Sort Designer Control is a supplementary teaching tool developed to help students learn the basic concepts, algorithms, and implementations of popular computer sorting algorithms. It supports bubble and insertion sorting. The control generates initial values automatically and demonstrates intermediate states in the sorting process. It also generates sorting source code for both Visual Basic and C#.
  
• Search Designer Control is a teaching tool developed to help students learn the basic concepts, algorithms, and implementations of popular data search algorithms. It supports binary and sequential searches. The control generates initial values automatically and demonstrates intermediate states in the searching process. It also generates source code for both Visual Basic and C#.
  Using the Visual Sort Designer and Visual Search Designer Controls teachers can easily develop a sample program to demonstrate the fundamentals of sorting and searching. They can also customize the control's appearance by simply dragging the control onto a form and setting its properties. These visual demonstrations help in teaching programming concepts and increase students' interest in learning.
  
• Visual Declarative Designer is an intuitive variable declaration tool designed for novice programmers. During the coding process the student can declare variables of various types and generate the corresponding source code. Visual Variable Declarative Designer provides a visual approach to variable declaration. Teachers in the Information Technology (IT) field can use this designer to teach students the basic concepts of variable declaration and naming, variable types, access modifiers, and initial values.
  
• Assistant Class Designer is a visual class designer for novice programmers. This designer guides students through the processes of adding classes, properties, methods and events. The designer also generates the corresponding source code for new classes. By using this designer, teachers and students can easily create and configure complicated classes. Assistant Class Designer provides an intuitive and interactive method for designing classes and helps students to understand key object-oriented programming concepts such as classes, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism. The Assistant Class Designer generates source code for C# only.
  
• Visual Programming Flow Chart is a supplementary teaching tool designed to help students understand program control flow. It generates flow charts for functions and saves them in the JPG picture format. This tool is easily activated from the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) by simply right-clicking on a function name and choosing “Generate flow chart…” from the context menu. The resulting flowchart can be customized by changing its colors and other effects. This visual tool provides an intuitive way to explore source code, to examine its control flow, and to identify logic errors.

Download it over here

Hands On Labs - Validation Application Block (4.1)

This set of hands on lab should act as your guide to learn about the Validation Application Block and practice how to leverage its capabilities in various application contexts.

There are thirteen exercises (labs) in the package.

Labs 1 through 11 deal with a WinForms data processing application which takes the information entered by the user to populate and process Customer and Address business objects. The Validation Application Block is used to validate the created business objects before processing them in gradually more sophisticated ways.

Starting with Lab 7 the WinForms validation-integration feature is used to validate the input for the form's controls directly.

Labs 8 through 11 deal with the extensibility of the block.

Lab 12 shows how to use the ASP.NET validation-integration feature of the block to validate the ASP.NET control's values, using a web forms version of the simple data entry application from the previous labs.

Lab 13 the ASP.NET application works as a front end for a WCF service while the WCF validation-integration feature of the block is used to validate the service parameters declaratively on the server side.

Download from here

Design for testability is a fraud - TDD is easy - NZUG meeting

I've just returned two hours ago from the third meeting of Ness Tziona Usergroup as usual the meeting was great :-)

Lior Friedman gave a talk about the doing TDD through not by designing for testability.

The meeting was divided to two parts (with several slices of Pizza in the middle) the first part was a discussion about TDD, design for testability - its pros and cons and why it is a fraud. The second part involved demos of C++ & C# Unit testing / Mocking framework specially the Typemock isolator - there was also a Java unit testing demo ready but only one attendee was working with Java so we passed that demo.

Thanks to Ness Tziona municipal for having us use the hall for the lecture, HP Indigo for financing the refreshments, cookies and Pizzas in the break and of course Microsoft for the books that were draw.

Following is the list of tools that were covered / mentioned over the meeting:

Isolation Tools

Thanks for everyone who attended the meeting - see you next time.

P.S. Ketty was very lucky to win a book a meeting after meeting !