TestComplete by AutomatedQA is a tool for automated testing, useful in many software testing scenarios ranging from internal unit testing to black box UI testing. The next major version 4 has been in the making for a while now and they still don’t announce a release date, but every now and then they make previews of various new features available (for example on their new community site). The latest thing that caught my eye was that OCR is going to come to automated testing in TestComplete 4. F …

This blog article explains that, and why, a late change to the implementation of nullable types is being made in the runtime, making nullables an intrinsic type. This solves the problems that many had reported when nullables were used in situations where boxing occurred, and where null comparisons were made involving generic types. Read the original article for the details, this is good news!

I’ve been evaluating MindManager X5 and I really dig it. It’s a great program, it’s able to work with ink on my Tablet PC, it can integrate with MS Project. I have tried eight other mind mapping tools (FreeMind, Visual Mind, ConceptDraw MINDMAP, Thought Mapper, MYmap, BrainMine, Mind Pad, Map it!, MindMapper and OpenMind, in case someone’s interested) and they just can’t compete with MindManager’s feature set. So, one seemingly small problem I’m having is that the fonts that MindManager shows i …

I just came upon this question in a newsgroup and had a quick look at the new classes that .NET 2 offers for access to the Windows file system ACLs and general system security information. In short, to get to the name of a user or group that’s the owner of a directory in the file system, you can use the following code:

DirectoryInfo directoryInfo = new DirectoryInfo(@"c:\Windows");
DirectorySecurity directorySecurity =
  directoryInfo.GetAccessControl(AccessControlSections.Owner);
Id ...

Lookahead and lookbehind assertions are a feature of regular expressions that’s not needed as often as others. The .NET regular expression implementation has full support for them and the documentation is here. But what exactly are they good for? What do you do with them?

One answer is, they can be quite important when using regular expressions for replacing parts of strings. The reason for this is that a regex replacement always replaces the complete matched text. It’s possible to use substit… …

Starting up IE 7 and navigating to Google :-), one of the first things I was wondering about was a funny whiteish blob, saying “Google”, in the upper left corner. As large as the funny combined tool-/menubar, but more imposing because of the white background colour, I was wondering what that might be. Well, now I know: it’s the tabs that IE 7 supports at long last, in the rendition created by the new Aero theme. Wow, who would have thought that this feature would have that ugly a visual represe …

I can’t find anything about it in Google and I don’t have time right now to pursue the matter, but my new Vista installation steadfastly refuses to talk to my file server, running Samba on a Linux machine. I can try to connect to the share and I’m asked for my authentication, but Vista doesn’t like my username/password combination, no matter what I do. I did manage to connect to a Windows XP machine, so I guess they just killed the protocol once again…

There’s a new release available of Refactor! Pro by Developer Express and there are some awesome new refactorings in it. A lot of work has been put into the so-called preview hinting, that allows the user to see what exactly is going to happen when a specific refactoring is executed. This screenshot should tell you a lot about preview hinting (granted, in an extreme scenario):

It’s probably worth repeating that …