Dot Net Rocks road tour - St. Louis report

I attended this dotnetrocks.com/roadtrip.aspx here in St. Charles tonight. It was entertaining and fun.

The silverlight.onterrasys.com/dnr_roadtrip site they are using is quite cool. (When I visited this site from home (Windows Vista and IE8), I had to upgrade Silverlight version; it was easy)

Kate Gregory was there and she was a good speaker. She mentioned something in passing about Fitt's Law.

Richard walked through something akin to Creating and Running a Load Test Containing Web Performance Tests and it was informative and good. He talked about relative tests and scaling tests. He mentioned webpagetest.org 12 threads by default per core... bytes in heap vs requests queued ... emergency gc --> all requests get queued ... on a 32 bit OS, 800MB heap max with .NET ... can compile as 32-bit and run on 64-bit on a machine with 8GB RAM and this gives you 4GB heap for worker process.

Mentioned that every 25 hours (by default) the IIS worker process is configured to restart.

Carl's presentation on silverlight was pretty cool. Check out silverlight.net and libra.franklins.net/RoadTrip01.wmv


One of the sponsors of the dot net rocks road trip is Telerik.

Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers

The Microsoft presentation on High Speed, Low Drag: Driving Application Quality with Minimal Friction tonight was fun. It was given by Mark Mydland from Microsoft.

He presented with Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010.
A few notes I took during interesting parts of the presentation:
theory of constraints
fix bugs - all bugs - before adding new features.
what does CodeComplete mean?
unit test only validates what I as developer think the code does; still need another set of eyes.
He showed a few slides of "Ellen the vigilant tester"

A guiding principle he uses in his group, where it's a ratio nearly of one tester per developer: is the customer going to be delighted

need to communicate well what's in the build

actionable bugs - capture clickstream & environment info

I liked the story / parable he told about Qa / developer interaction. When playing table tennis with his daughter, he can return the ball like a father (nicely) or like a master table tennis champion, whereby the ball is hit at the highest possible velocity and jumps off the table and is hidden in a crevice of the wall so that it can't be found for a few days, enabling me to go off and do more coding. More often than not, it's better to be the fatherly table tennis player.

pathological bug - only a crazy person wuld have done that ...

IntelliTrace. This looks like a really cool feature. managed code only; can do it with unmanaged code, but have to instrument the binaries first.

developers have abdicated responsibilities in delegation of quality to QA

agile testing quadrants

some say they're doing agile but no unit testing, not continuous integration, not peer programming! Agile is about discipline and quality.

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I got a cool t-shirt at the event. It's a Visual Studio t-shirt with words across the chest, "are you looking at my code?"

Also, there was a flyer for 40% off of a good book. "Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010"