Unit testing saved my life, and other thoughts about tools

The text parsing in POP Forums has always been the bane of my existence in that product. Version after version, it's the thing I've hated most to try and make it work better. In a nutshell, it's supposed to translate “forum code” into HTML for post storage as well as reverse parse it or parse the sad excuse for HTML that comes out of IE's built-in HTML editing.

For the Whidbey version, it's actually going better than it had before. Writing unit tests before the code makes all the difference because it provides instant feedback with a set of conditions to test every time. That's a lot easier than testing via the application's UI. It amazes me how different my approach is from just two years ago, and it reminds me that I've always got something new to learn, even if I am writing my own books.

The debugger in Visual Studio has been my best friend as well. When I think back to the ASP days I wonder how I got along without it. I've never been quite as happy as I am now with the tools that I use.

So far the rewrite of the parser is going pretty well. The big change is making sure that the final output is more or less XHTML compliant, and the only challenging part of that is dealing with overlapping tags.

I should be writing for the book, but I've got seven chapters down and ten to go. I feel pretty good about the progress there.