The PDC web site is up! At the time of writing it’s 151 days, 3 hours and 25 minutes to the conference start :-) Anyway, if you live in the US you’ve probably bought a ticket already. If you don’t and are lucky enough to have a budget big enough to travel to the US, PDC is something to consider. My impression of PDC compared to TechEd is that you’ll get to know what’s coming, as apposed to TechEd where you get to know what’s already there. I would love to go, but I’m afraid I’ve spent most of my budget and are left with buying books only :-) I’m going to NDC2008 though, which will be a great event as well.

Brian Harry over at the TFS team has a great post about the new features that will be available in the coming SP1 for TFS 2008.

Lately I’ve been trying to focus on how to make testing work better at our company. We’ve fully integrated our testers into the Scrum teams, but there’s still some things I feel is missing. Especially related to the tools/frameworks we use for testing. One of the things I’m looking into is Fit and FitNesse (Framework for Integrated Test) created by Ward Cunningham in 2002. The first time I got an introduction to Fit was in Nils Christian Haugen’s presentation at JavaBin back in March. This got me very excited, but I’ve hadn’t had time to look enough into it, but now I think I will.

In essence Fit is a framework that lets your user stories’s story tests (or acceptance tests) to be automatically tested/verified. The way you do this is by using a table structure (as showed on the left) to give in values and expected outcome. This is a very nice way of working with tests from a customer perspective. Everyone can understand this by having a short introduction to how it works.

Much like you do with unit tests, this process is automated. The preferred way of authoring unit tests is by using Test Driven Development (TDD). Similarly, working with Fit you can use Story Test-Driven Development (STDD). I really find this way of working to be very interesting and I hope to try this out live soon. Hopefully I can post some more articles on this later when I have some actual experience with it :-)

David Hussman does a great job describing Fit in his presentation.

Earlier this month Fredrik Normén wrote a post about argument validation. Yesterday Rune Grothaug from MS Norway posted a link to a new tool MS has developed in their research lab called Pex (Program EXploration). Combining these two (argument validation and Pex) have to be a perfect match.

PS! This article is about Norwegian wireless broadband’s, but you might find similar solutions in your country.

A couple of years ago I considered buying a subscription for a wireless broadband from ICE to use when I was out traveling or at our lodge. ICE uses the old mobile network in Norway (NMT 450) at 450 MHz which had and still has a great mobile coverage in Norway (though not used for mobile phones anymore). This network has a max down speed of 3,1 Mit/s and upload of 1,8 Mbit/s. However, at the time the subscription was too expensive (around 400kr/$80/£50) per month. It was not an option to have both a fixed broadband at home and the wireless subscription on top of that. Recently though they have started to offer a different subscription based on usage. Or actually it’s a subscription where you pay for one week at the time, which is more attractive but still quite expensive if you’re just using it in the weekends. However, having this as an option to get on the Internet when you absolutely have to is of great value. DinSide.no has an article about ICE.

Another company offering a similar concept is Telenor. Telenor offer wireless through normal GSM network (EDGE/3G/Turbo-3G). They has several subscription options from monthly, weekend to just usage. You can find more info here. There’s also a test by DinSide.no here.

A third company (NetCom) also provide this service. Their subscription services is very similar to Telenor’s, except they don’t offer usage only.

Common for all of these is that you’ll need a USB modem that your provider will provide as part of your subscription. Some providers let you use your mobile phone or your PC modem with a SIM card instead.