Technical Journal

Unit Testing

andocs — Tue, 12 May 2009 16:29:49 +0000

Software testing is a very important stage of software development; the better the software product is tested the higher the quality of your work gets.
This post is just opening a series of small entries in which I will try to get the best out of software testing techniques and make use of them in
further development processes.
I’ve started browsing the web and reading books. Up until now, I’ve found a nice book on unit testing (xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code (Addison-Wesley Signature Series) ), which sheds some light on the topic. I plan on using NUnit to perform my unit testing, which is fairly easy to use and it’s free.
Of course, unit testing is not all there is to software testing, but this is where I’ll start. More on this to follow.

Enum to List

andocs — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:23:40 +0000

I’ve found this method useful lately so I thought I should add it here where everyone can see it.
It is meant to be used with the .NET Compact Framework. In the full framework this would have been much easier -
without reflection.
What the method does is that it adds the enum’s fields to a generic list of the same type T as the enum.

public static List EnumToList( )
{
Type enumType = typeof( T );

if( enumType.BaseType != typeof( Enum ) )
{
throw new ArgumentException( “Not an enum type!” );
}

List enumFieldList = new List( );

FieldInfo[ ] enumFields = typeof( T ).GetFields( );

foreach( FieldInfo fieldInfo in enumFields )
{
if( !fieldInfo.IsSpecialName )
{
enumFieldList.Add( (T) Enum.Parse( enumType, fieldInfo.Name, false ) );
}
}

return enumFieldList;
}

Zeitgeist

andocs — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 11:08:24 +0000

This movie contains some thinghs that I’ve already aknowledged during time and others I just found out. I think we should see all sides of our social existence and not just the one we are being served. I am not saying that everything here is the truth, but it certainly looks like the truth. The zeitgeist does not look like a heaven for the ordinary people.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-594683847743189197

Windows CE Full Screen applications

andocs — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 07:04:29 +0000

The first task I had to do when I started developing my first Windows CE application was to make my main program window appear in full screen mode. After some research I came across a small article posted on Code Project. It describes a method of showing a window in full screen mode using standard window management calls which is what I was looking for. I completed the source with proper definitions of system calls and structures. I provide this source code along with a basic test application.

The usual method of doing this would have been to use SHFullScreen, but I was not able to use this function as my OS Design was not to contain aygshell.dll, the library from which this function was part of.

I am developing under .NET Compact Framework 2.0.

First, I had to define some useful enums containing constants of the Windows API. Here are some of them, for the rest please see the attached project as this post would grow unreasonably if I pasted them here.

[Flags( )]

internal enum FullScreenFlags : int

{

SwHide = 0,

ShowTaskbar = 0×1,

HideTaskbar = 0×2,

ShowSipButton = 0×4,

HideSipButton = 0×8,

SwRestore = 9,

ShowStartIcon = 0×10,

HideStartIcon = 0×20

}

internal enum Hwnd : int

{

HWND_TOP = 0,

HWND_BOTTOM = 1,

HWND_TOPMOST = -1,

HWND_NOTOPMOST = -2

}

A very useful thing to do is to check www.pinvoke.net and retrieve the values of certain constants that you would make use of in various situations.

Next, I had to implement a static class that imports my needed functions from coredll.dll. This dll is very useful to get acustomed with because in it you will find system calls that you are very likely to need in your development process under .NET CF. So, here is what you need:

public static class Coredll

{

///

/// The function retrieves the handle to the top-level

/// window whose class name and window name match

/// the specified strings. This function does not search child windows.

///