Wavyx

When reading all the buzz about Google Buzz, I was shocked by some similarity between the buzz logo and some old “evil” company logo…
What do you think ?

Anyway, I’m still waiting for the buzz activation in my Gmail but I had some fun yesterday on the iPod touch. Looks like Google Buzz may overcome twitter, facebook and everything else by aggregating all the mess, fuzz, buzz in one “clean centralized place”.

I’m looking for a way to insert an auto-update functionnality in a .Net application.  So far, I found only 3 approaches to easily update an application:

1. Microsoft Patterns & Practices provide an Updater Application Block v2.0. An application block is a kind of reusable and extensible module. This specific application block provide a quick and easy mean to add self updating capabilities to .NET-based smart client solutions, like Windows Forms applications. Here you can find the Introduction, the Design overview and an article on how to use this application block.
2. Sharp AutoUpdater is a library providing an auto-update feature for .NET applications. It relies on XML configuration files and handles the detection of a new version, downloads, unzips, and installation of the new files.
3. Microsoft also has a ClickOnce deployment solution that handles updates. It is similar to the  java webstart solution. You can find more information here, in this article or among the wikipedia external links

ClickOnce seems fully integrated in a .Net environment, but as far as I know there is no solution to use a standard webserver (not IIS) to handle updates. I should definitely give it a try and see if IIS is really mandatory or if you can use some workaround.

Do you know other methods? Sometimes deployment tools include auto-update container to bundle an generic updater with your application (like install4J).

Working for Google is often considered as The ultimate dream job for geeks and technos. Great pay, 20% free time for your “own” projects, full services including baby care, doctors, social security, … I probably forgot a lot of good reasons why Google is generating so much buzz around working inside the most secret company around. Yeah Google is hype but let’s face it, so far you could only see what PR let you see. I mean the videos are controlled, we are showed clean or almost commercial videos about how much fun is…work. I bet some of you already know by heart the “do no evil” motto and the 10 company values.

But you’ve got to be honest one second, no company is absolutely perfect. And along with the exceptionnal growth of Google, maintaining such values is really an hard (if not impossible) task in any company whatsoever.  Not mentionning that Google is now in almost every single parcel of enterpreneurship. Every time you look around and try to build some new concept, you may face a huge Goliath (funny that starts with G too) already owning or launching a massive web application, that you can definitely not compete with in term of scalability or load or marketing resources. There is still a chance you can be David, but it’s becoming more slighter after each Google acquisition.

But with time and tough economic condition, it seems for the first time that some informations leaked out. I just read a couple of the answers to “Why Google Employees Quit“. This is really interesting, because IMHO it will help to figure out the real face of the G word. I even think that this more human presentation could really attract (more) people into working for Google, but this time for the right reasons and knowing what they are jumping into.  Another aspect, one should monitor is how Google will handle this recession period in term of communication about layoffs: 30 000, 24 000, 20 000, … ? who relly knows how many people work in these undergrounds of search (see 10 000 layoffs and 6000 layoffs). So time will tell, if the “do no evil” can hold against rough conditions.

Yesterday, I randomly discovered a new tool for .Net to help developers with code testing. Microsoft Research has developed Pex, a test plugin which can be integrated to Visual Studio. So far nothing is really new, right ? But, say you’re as lazy as me when it’s about writing unit tests, you should definitely go look the official Pex homepage.
To be more specific, Pex automatically discovers interesting test paths. It finds interesting input-output values for each method and generate a test suite offering a pretty high code coverage. The keyword being “generate”, which means less time on testing and more on… (suit yourself).

At first sight, I must confess this may sounds a bit magical.  So how does it work?  Pex performs a systematic analysis, hunting for boundary conditions, exceptions and assertion failures, which you can debug right away. Bringing all this together, Pex offer a new approach to Parameterized Unit Testing and will hopefully reduce debug time and maintenance costs. This general test technique is also referred as  white box testing.

You will find extra information on this slideshow or on the Pex documentation section. Channel9 offers a “getting started” video as a tutorial on how to use Pex inside Visual Studio 2008. Microsoft Research has also a document about Parameterized Unit Tests.

Also let’s stay cautious: automated or generated tests are not THE solution to avoid code inspection and application stress. As a responsible developer, you should use tools to ease your life and make your products better. But never be too confident when it comes to magic black box software making your job