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Phoenix Park and snow boarding

Last weekend I went to Phoenix Park (in Gangwon, Korea) with my colleagues. There I played snow boarding, it's the first time and IT'S VERY EXCITING!

We played from about 5:30 PM to 11:30 PM and my whole body is hurt. IMO, I don't have any problems to keep the balance. But, for me, the hardest thing is how to control the knees. My knees seems are very rigid so I cannot control them as I want.

I tried to flow my colleagues' basic instruction to control the board to move forward then stop, then forward... but then I gave up. I couldn't do it. But later I tried the more advanced instruction, this time I could do it better. At that moment, the hardest thing for me is how to stop the board and can you guess how? Most of times I used my buttock to stop, ha ha.

The boarding road is >950m long and I board 6 or 7 times. Time after time, I did it better and I satisfied myself. Hope that I will have more opportunities to play boarding :-)

Some pictures of Phoenix Park





A picture of me

Delaying

I will not come back to Vietnam next month, but a few months later.

SigmaK3

With me, SigmaK3, the first micro processor is made in Vietnam, is more interesting than acquiring MySQL AB by Sun.

And here are 2 application of SigmaK3: Led Matrix Display System and Robot.

Updated:
- Changed title
- Changed link to English. For Vietnamese, you can see here and here.
- Added links to applications.

Getting old & Time to come back home, or The Past & The Future

Just some brief information

- One week ago (8^th of January 2008) was my 29^th birthday.
- One month later (15^th of February 2008), if there is no special change, I will come back to Vietnam

The weekly bag - Dec 16

• ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 4): Handling Form Edit and Post Scenarios


• What's New in Groovy 1.5


• Continuous Integration


• A Brief Introduction to REST

The weekly bag - Dec 8

• What's Ailing ASP.NET Web Forms


• ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 2): URL Routing - Lack of support for URL routing configuration in web.config?


• ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 3): Passing ViewData from Controllers to Views
  


• Spring 2.5 Makes Unit Testing Easy with Annotations
  

TeamCity 3.0 is released with a FREE version

These days continuous integration (CI) becomes popular in software development 'cause it aims to support software developers to produce higher quality products. To apply CI in your project, usually, you need to use a CI server. There are many CI severs you can found: CruiseControl, Hudson, Luntbuild, Parabuild,... and most of them are free.

If you've ever heard about IntelliJ IDEA - the most intelligent Java IDE - is from JetBrains, you should know that they also have a CI server which has many innovative features, TeamCity. And today, JetBrains releases TeamCity 3.0, especially there is a free version.

For more information about TeamCity 3.0, you can find here: http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/

Try it out and have fun :-)

The weekly bag - Dec 1

• Testing on High: Bottom-up versus Top-down Test-driven Development


• Pair Programming vs. Code Reviews


• Exceptions for action


• A Leaner Start: Reducing Team Setup Times


• Design to Unit Test

What will the new features in Diana?

With Diana (a.k.a. IntelliJ IDEA 8) will appear in Q4 2008, it's time to think about the new features. As my experience with JetBrains and IntelliJ IDEA, I don't think they will provide support for other frameworks but they will have more support for team work. Even IDEA can do some tasks for team work in conjunction with Team City and IDETalk, but they're not too many. So here the main feature list I think they will provide in Diana:

• A Task-Focused user interface, like Eclipse's Mylyn and even better


• Improvement in supporting Spring, Hibernate, Seam, Facelet, Flex


• Improvement in integration between Hibernate and Spring


• Improvement in Ruby and JetGroovy plugin

Even I want to see UML support in IDEA (support for popular diagrams, generate source code from UML, reverse engineering from source code, synchronize between diagrams and source code,...) but I don't think it will appear in Diana.

OK, now wait and see, in a few weeks later, they will post the road map for Diana.

Update: Added Facetlet, Flex

How to restore a tab which has just closed in Firefox?

Just closed a Firefox's tab unfortunately? There is a solution for it, you can use Ctrl + Shift + T to restore the tab.

And even more suprise, if your text box contains text, it will not be lost :-)

How to call EasyMock.verify() when you expect an exception in TestNG

I have this test which is written in JUnit

public void testConvertWithUnknownCurrency()
    throws UnknownCurrencyException {
    EasyMock.expect(
        exchangeRateService.getExchangeRate(
            EasyMock.isA(String.class),
            EasyMock.isA(String.class)
        )
    ).andThrow(new UnknownCurrencyException());
    
    EasyMock.replay(exchangeRateService);

    try {
        converter.convert(10.0, "EUR", "-UNKNOWN-");
        fail("an unknown currency exception was expected");
    } catch (UnknownCurrencyException e) {
        // do nothing, was expected
    }

    EasyMock.verify(exchangeRateService);
}

I converted it to use TestNG as below

@Test(expectedExceptions = {UnknownCurrencyException.class})
public void testConvertWithUnknownCurrency() {
    EasyMock.expect(
        exchangeRateService.getExchangeRate(
            EasyMock.isA(String.class),
            EasyMock.isA(String.class)
        )
    ).andThrow(new UnknownCurrencyException());
    
    EasyMock.replay(exchangeRateService);

    converter.convert(10.0, "EUR", "-UNKNOWN-");

    EasyMock.verify(exchangeRateService);
}

then found that EasyMock.verify(exchangeRateService) will never be called 'cause converter.convert(10.0, "EUR", "-UNKNOWN-") throws UnknownCurrencyException. So how to make the test works as same as JUnit version?

Spend more time to read TestNG document and search in TestNG forum, I found that I can use @Test's dependsOnMethods attribute. But note that TestNG supports 2 kinds of dependencies: hard and soft. And here is explaination from TestNG document:

* Hard dependencies. All the methods you depend on must have run and succeeded for you to run. If at least one failure occurred in your dependencies, you will not be invoked and marked as a SKIP in the report.
* Soft dependencies. You will always be run after the methods you depend on, even if some of them have failed. This is useful when you just want to make sure that your test methods are run in a certain order but their success doesn't really depend on the success of others. A soft dependency is obtained by adding "alwaysRun=true" in your @Test annotation.

Now I have a clear understanding about dependsOnMethods, what I need is a soft dependency. And here is TestNG version of above test.

@Test(expectedExceptions = {UnknownCurrencyException.class})
public void testConvertWithUnknownCurrency() {
    EasyMock.expect(
        exchangeRateService.getExchangeRate(
            EasyMock.isA(String.class),
            EasyMock.isA(String.class)
        )
    ).andThrow(new UnknownCurrencyException());
    
    EasyMock.replay(exchangeRateService);

    converter.convert(10.0, "EUR", "-UNKNOWN-");
}

@Test(alwaysRun = true,
      dependsOnMethods = "testConvertWithUnknownCurrency")
public void verifyAfterTestConvertWithUnknownCurrency() {
    EasyMock.verify(exchangeRateService);
}

The test works as expected. Smile :-)

Updated: Re-think about my TestNG test version, I will remove alwaysRun = true from verifyAfterTestConvertWithUnknownCurrency(). Why? 'Cause if testConvertWithUnknownCurrency() fails, it means the test fail, don't need to waste my time to verify something it was failed.

One reason to use dependent methods 'cause it makes the test clearly. I know exactly where the test fails, 'cause it doesn't throw exception or 'cause EasyMock.verify() fails.

The weekly bag - Nov 18

• Software Testing With Spring Framework - The article is a bit interesting, but it is more interesting in the comments ;-)
• ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 1)
• Spring 2.5 RC1 is here - introducing new configuration approaches
• F#

Custom or Standard?

Modern languages like Java, C#,... provide powerful APIs with many libraries which are ready to use. But sometimes I consider I should use the "standard" class or create my own custom class. Spending more time to think about it, I realize that it depends.

Assumes that I want to have a list of members, if I use Java, I can use List<Member> or create my own MemberList to store all members. If I want to have more features than the standard List<Member> provides, of course, I need to create my own MemberList, which bases on List<Member>. But what will I do if I only need a read-only list? A List<Member> cannot do it. To have a read-only list, I need to use Collections.unmodifiableList(myMemberList) or create MemberList which supports read-only only.

Now consider that I only need to use the read-only list inside my application, which solution can I choose? One of two but maybe one of three. I also can use List<Member> and forget about its "edit" methods.

To have a clearer design, using MemberList will be the best solution but it needs time to implement. To be lazy, using Collections.unmodifiableList(myMemberList) or List<Member> without using its "edit" methods is an acceptable answer.

The rest books

Today, I received the last 2 books for my order from Amazon. They came earlier than the estimation 3 days :-)

Too many books to read, too much works to do :-)

One more fall

The first delivery

Even though I chose to pack all items in one package but Amazon delivered my order in 2 separate ones. And I've just received the first package, it contains 3 books

• Head First Design Patterns (Head First)


• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code


• The Business of Software: What Every Manager, Programmer, and Entrepreneur Must Know to Thrive and Survive in Good Times and Bad

Amazon estimated my first package will be delivered from Nov 12 to Nov 20. And today, I received it. Their service works exactly :-)

The second one will be here from Nov 17 to Nov 30. Then I will spend more time for reading about testing.

FYI: Spring 2.5 supports to test by TestNG (and JUnit 4)

The weekly bag - Nov. 11

• Test-Driven Everything - An interesting story
• Java EE 6 - I would like to see how they can provide a hassle-free way to mix frameworks, like Spring, Hibernate, Struts 2,... to work together in web applications
• Introduction to Groovy - Part 2

The weekly bag - Nov. 4

• Holding a Program in One's Head


• Easy 2 Test == Less Reason to Test? - It's the question sometimes I ask myself

The weekly bag - Oct. 28

This weekend I don't have enough time to read much.

• Mock Object Testing With EasyMock 2


• ASP.NET MVC Framework


• Mocks Aren't Stubs