Virtual PC on Windows 7

You can run Virtual PC 2007 on Windows 7, but Windows 7 does include a new version of Virtual PC as part of the operating system, which is good. The problem I have, and as will many others, is though my 64Bit Acer 8210’s Intel process has hardware virtualization support, Acer for some bizarre reason chose to disable it in the BIOS; thought it was enabled in the 32bit 8200 series, and is enable in the later Travelmate equivalents. Acer are not alone in this choice. This means that many people with fairly recent PCs will not be able to run the newer version of Virtual PC. ...

May 9, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Next weeks Agile Yorkshire meeting

Don’t forget the next Agile Yorkshire meeting on the 13th of May about Exploratory testing. Usual time, usual place, usual free pint for everyone thanks to our sponsors.

May 6, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Updating Windows 7 Beta to RC

The upgrade took about 2 hours following the ‘enable in-place upgrade’ notes. There was a lot of no progress bar movement & percentages not changing whilst the disk light flashed, but we got there in the end. Thus far all seems OK. so the summary a bit slow but smooth

May 6, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

My grok talk on Sharepoint testing with Typemock Isolator and Ivonna at DD Scotland

I had an enjoyable day at Developer Day Scotland in Glasgow yesterday; a big thank you to the organisers and speakers. I did a short grok talk on ‘Testing Sharepoint using Typemock Isolator and Ivonna’, a few people asked me for more details. Well the session was based on a post I did a while ago. I have updated that post to tidy a couple of issue I found whilst preparing the session. If you need more details of the potential pitfalls in using these tools I suggest you also look at the MVC post I did a few days ago as this details the setup you need to get it going. ...

May 3, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Testing access attributes on the Microsoft MVC framework

The MVC framework provides an excellent way to create a testable web site. In fact when you create a new MVC project you are given the option to create an associated test project that contains MSTEST unit tests for all the sample methods in the MVC Controller class; which you can add to as you go along. Recently whilst working on an MVC project I noticed that the one area that this model does not let you test is that of access control. MVC uses attributes on Controller methods to limit who can access what e.g. ...

May 1, 2009 · 9 min · Richard Fennell

My NxtGen tour in August

I will be speaking on developer testing of SharePoint projects using Typemock at both the Birmingham and Manchester NXtGen user groups in August. For more details check the NxtGen site.

April 29, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Licensing exception with Ivonna the Typemock add-in (and any other add-ins I suspect)

Like a good developer I have been trying to run Visual Studio with least privilege; with Windows 7 this seems to work well. My main account is not an administrator, but Windows prompts me for elevated rights when needed. I have been developing happily with Visual Studio and Typemock without any need for extra rights. However, when I have been doing some testing using Ivonna, the Typemock add-in, I hit a problem. When I tried to create an Ivonna.Framework.TestSession() I got a Licensing.LicenseException: This copy has expired. Which it hadn’t as I have a fully licensed product. ...

April 25, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

System.Web.Abstractions missing on a ASP.NET web site

I recently re-enabled feature on a ASP.NET site. This feature (a set of pages) had been running OK about six months ago for an initial pilot project but was disabled until now until a decision was made to develop the feature fully. In intervening time the web site had other modification and had been rebuilt (it was targeted at .NET 3.5) without issue. When I re-enabled the feature (renamed a .ASPX file) I got the error ...

April 24, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Follow up to my session yesterday at VBug Newcatsle on DataDude GDR

Thanks to everyone who attended my session at VBug Newcastle last night, hope you enjoyed. As I mentioned in my session, to celebrate my talking at VBug, Microsoft chose to release the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR R2 yesterday. If you are using DataDude you do need to get this installed, it addresses many know issues. Slides virtually identical to yesterdays, as used at SQLBits, are on the Black Marble site ...

April 23, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Speaking in Newcastle tomorrow

If you are in Newcastle on the evening of the 22nd I will be speaking at Vbug on Visual Studio 2008 Database Edition. Hope to see you there.

April 21, 2009 · 1 min · Richard Fennell