I am pleased to announce the release of our rebuild of www.mennonitefinancial.com -- the Mennonite Financial Federal Credit Union website. It's a complete restructuring/revitalization of their public site, and represents a huge graphical improvement over the previous version.

The site was built in asp.net/C# and uses the Ektron CMS400.net CMS.

Almost every day in the "Answers" section of LinkedIn asking about automated testing of a web page. This one is typical : "What is a good Open source / Free test automation acceptance and regression tool for dot net applications?".

My usual response is "We've had great success using Watir for automated testing in IE. It's built in Ruby, so there may be a bit of a learning curve. Still, there are excellent tools out there to record and build scripts."

Watir, short for "Web Application Testing in Ruby", is a free, open-source testing library for the Ruby language.  It's very easy to use, and extremely powerful.  The Watir engine automates an instance of Internet Explorer (or Firefox, if you use Firewatir),  and gives you easy access to the page content. It's a real lifesaver when dealing with testing multiple page forms.

A simple example in Watir to test my blog page:

require "watir"

# open the IE browser

ie = Watir::IE.new 

ie.goto "http://danimal.acsysinteractive.com"

if ie.text.include? "Musings on web development"  
puts "  Test Passed. Found the test string: 'Musings on web development"
else
puts "  Test Failed! Could not find: 'Musings on web development'." 
end 

Obviously, that's a basic example, but it's very easy to click buttons, follow links, and the like. However, for longer tests you don't really want to hand-write all of the Ruby code. That's where a script recorder is very useful. With a recorder such as Watir Recorder, you can simply browse a site in the application to record the script. Save it as a .rb file and you can run it over and over again.

Frequent testing of your GUI with Watir, and unit testing your business logic can go a long way toward quality code. If you're not using something like Watir, why not check it out?

I love my job. Love it love it love it. I love writing code, love debugging weird problems, love designing systems. To me programming is the perfect combination of craft and art, a daily combination of puzzle-solving and painting castles in the air.

That's why Scott Hackett's post "What would I do without programming" got me thinking. His post was an ode to the joys of being a programmer, but made me think about what I would do if there were no programming to be done.

Sure, it's counterfactual musing, but still merits thought. I like solving problems, working with cool tech, and making a difference for my company. I'm not so fond of business qua business, so my undergrad studies (finance and Asian languages) wouldn't help much. Sales, too -- too much stress, too much insecurity.

I guess I'd have to go with something like medicine. Docs solve puzzles -- tough, real puzzles -- on a daily basi, and get to play with cool tech as well. Maybe that's why I have Doc Shazam in my blogroll? 

What about you, my gentle readers? What would you do if your chosen career path were unavailable? 

Turns out I'll be spending the second week in July going for Biztalk training. Though the subject matter may be a bit dry, I think it's going to be an excellent course.

Biztalk, for those of you not in the know, is a Microsoft server that's designed for application integration. It's used to transfer data between disparate systems, through XML-based messaging. The central Biztalk engine has a few major components:

• a Messaging component, which allows communication across a wide range of software. It offers pluggable adapters for different types of communication, such as FTP, STMP/POP, web services, etc.
• an Orchastration component, which allows the creation and execution of business processes in a graphical environment.
• a business rules engine, so you can change business rules on the fly (as opposed to compiling and deploying a .net assembly)
• an enterprise single-sign on (SSO) tool

We're going to be using Biztalk a lot in our upcoming SOA projects, so I'm thrilled to be able to get this training. Better yet, it's in Waltham, MA, so after class I can take a trip to Jacob Wirth's for a pint of Jake's Dark!
 

FBI wants widespread monitoring of 'illegal' Internet activity

Robert Meuller, the FBI director, called for new legislation that would let the FBI monitor the internet for illegal activity. All internet traffic. 

Mueller said the proposal  "balances on one hand, the privacy rights of the individual who are receiving the information, but on the other hand, given the technology, the necessity of having some omnibus search capability utilizing filters that would identify the illegal activity as it comes through and give us the ability to preempt that illegal activity where it comes through a choke point."

How in any does letting the government sniff all Internet traffic even nod at an individual's privacy rights? That sounds more like China than the USA. 

I wish they'd quit kicking the corpse of the 4th amendment -- it's dead already, let it rest in peace.