I know I’m way behind the curve with this, but… I downloaded Virtual PC from the MDSN subscriber downloads at the weekend. It rocks. I needed to try something out on a Windows 98 box and I didn’t fancy repaving one of my machines so I went virtual. What’s cool is that once you’ve booted the virgin virtual PC and installed your OS of choice you can just copy the drive somewhere and use it again and again.

Barry sent me an interesting link to a piece that points out just how easy it is to bypass wireless network security. I wonder if you can get a Bart Simpson shirt with him saying “Sniff my packets” rather than “Eat my shorts”…

I’ve been busy :( but it’s paid busy so I suppose I can’t complain… This evening I got some time to myself to finally sit down and see how hard it would be to use all of my previous test code plus the real production POP3 server and command parser to act as a test framework for my POP3 client. It took just over an hour to plug it all together and then it just kinda worked…

And this is why I hate TDD, testing is a great thing. But testing too early is bad, and you are obviuosly doing that. First you need to know what your code has to do in full. For instance even if you wanted to have both sync. and async. APIs (I personally abhore sync. APIs due to non-scalability) the obvious implementation is to have something like… James Antill - in a comment on my Tangled Testing entry.

I’ve enjoyed the hoo har over exceptions this week. It’s made me think and analyse and reassess what I do. I’ll be continuing pretty much as before, but it’s worth spending the time to think about these things once in a while. It was interesting to see people defending their positions and how some were open to new and different ideas and how some were not. It was useful to be reminded that what I consider an acceptable development trade-off may be completely different to what someone working on embedded stuff thinks is acceptable.

Last night I started on my POP3 client code. I didn’t know where to start; I wasn’t really in the mood, so I wrote a test… That got the ball rolling. As usual the test first thing left me with a nicely decoupled class to write. Now I’m in a bit of a quandary about how to mock up the server that I need to test the client against… The point of the CPOP3Client class is to provide a programmatic way to send POP3 commands and receive the results, parse them and present them in a way that’s easy to manipulate programmatically.

We’re going to run out of amusing titles for these exception related blog entries sooner or later… Joel wants Ned to rename the functions in his ’exceptions are better’ example. He wants InstallSoftware(), CopyFiles() and MakeRegistryEntries(). Jesse Ezell leapt in with a C# version which includes the rollback functionality that Joel was undoubtedly hinting at. The thing is, although Jesse is defending the use of exceptions, I think his example is making the case for the other side…

This week we started to make some changes to the FX code. The existing code made some strange assumptions about some of the edge cases and the resulting display was occasionally inconsistent. We fixed that, and the tests saved us from a couple of embarrassing mistakes. Meanwhile, in my free time, the test driven POP3 server development continues. I now have a working server that can run off of a message store that lives on the file system and can do all the things that a POP3 server is supposed to do.

Like drumming up traffic to your site, perhaps? ;) On Monday Joel Spolsky wrote a controversial piece about exceptions; he hates them. Much blog cross linking and local discussion ensued. Today he’s followed that piece up with a piece that basically says ’exceptions can be good and they can be bad, it’s a design tradeoff’. Which, of course, takes all the controversy out of the original posting; strangely I was expecting something like this…

Wheee. I can throw all of my existing MSDN disks in the disk bucket and I don’t need to keep wondering which is the latest version. They’ve changed my subscription ‘for the better’… Hmm, it seems that now the colours will be used to identify the type of disk (I’m sure that’s how it used to be before they changed the subscription ‘for the better’ last time around) and the major numbers will stay the same when a disk replaces another disk, only the minor number will increment… Sounds sensible… I hope it works.