Kartones Blog

Now that I'm getting better of a cold plus stomach sickness combo, I've got in mind some posts, and this is the first one, the five freeware tools I've most used this year (and why).

• Firefox: Despite the 2.0 security flaws, I still prefer it to IE7, mostly thanks to the extensions/add-ons system (everymonth I add new ones which optimize even more my browsing experience).
• VLC Media Player: Before discovering this media player, I was using ZoomPlayer and/or Media Player Classic (IMHO, Windows Media Player is s**t). VLC is updated almost weekly, doesn't hangs, has some cool options, lots of parameters (deinterlacing modes, audio output mode,...) and works fine with all file types (MOV and WMV had problems under ZoomPlayer).
• Secway's Simp-Lite MSN: A tool to encrypt instant messaging communications (supports all IM clients). The Lite/free version allows one protocol encryption (MSN for example).
• ImgBurn 2.x: The Nero killer. Before this tool, I was using Nero 6.x because of it's ease and fast Data DVD burning. Since the 2.0 version of ImgBurn, I can do the same and more advanced tasts (like building an ISO file without burning it) in seconds. Lots of advanced configuration options too :)
• VNC: VNC. Simple and fast. While there are others with more options (FTP file transfer from the Viewer, advanced logging...), I like the original one because of it's ease of use. I use it to manage my storage server (at home) and to my family and some friend's PCs when they have problems * (kinda like Windows Remote Assist/Desktop).

Well... the moment has come, the final version of XNA GSE has been released.

We've got the final doc. at MSDN too, we've got Creator's Club available too for playing XNA Games on XBox 360 (at 49$ for four months or 99$ for a year of subscription)... but...

But I gave a look at the readme, and as I was afraid of, no support for Windows Vista at the moment (seems that when Visual C# Express Edition gets support for vista, XNA will too), no support for Visual Studio 2005 Pro and Team System editions and XACT tool doesn't work too with Vista ("This issue will be corrected by an updated release of XACT sometime in the first half of 2007").

So, more or less either I format again my laptop and install XP service pack 2 or I can't use XNA until "somewhere in 2007" if I keep Vista. And as I'm not willing to format and reinstall again the system, XNA and I will have to wait a bit longer to get to know each other correctly...

But as we're at xmas, if someone is willing to pay me a subscription to the Creator's Club, that would be a great incentive to revert to Windows XP :D

While cleaning a bit the hundreds of unread RSS feeds I've got, I've come to some very interesting articles related to Test Driven Development and testing in general.

First, an article about unit testing, including a full example in ruby of testing an IRC bot with mock objects. And what are mock objects? Here's a quick explanation with a java example.

I found too another article about pros and cons of white and black box testing. Maybe too short, but serves as an introduction and gives few advices/tips.

The most interesting thing I've found is an article about TDD Anti-Patterns. It contains a list of anti-patterns, each one with a description.
Quite useful, as probably most of us have done at least one of them (Excessive Setup and The Loudmouth, for example).

Oh, and there's a new version of NUnit, release 2.2.9 (mostly bugfixes and .NET 2.0 default runtime).