Partially automating TC22 (No, that’s not a new designer drug)

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Some years ago, a short while before I started stress testing my first set of diapers, Lennon was singing “Life is just what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans“. That was just the the first phrase that went through my head when I was told, last week, that another product would be pushed through the Certified For Windows Vista process. The phrase that followed was (reproduced here in a highly sanitized form) “Oh dear, we’ll have to run Test Case 22 on every installer”.

For those lucky people who have not yet had the dubious pleasure of running this test, it goes something like this: you open two instances of Orca, once containing your installer and one containing the reference schema. Then, you go through 80-odd tables, making sure that no custom fields have been added to the standard tables, and no custom tables (and their fields) have names starting with the “MSI” prefix. It is, in short, a drag, and a necessary one at that. You can read more about it in the Certified For Windows Vista Test Cases document.

Having a low boredom threshold, I know that if we were to do such a test manually, chances are that I’d miss something, with all the ensuing hilarity. This sounded like a job for [dramatic pause] a hastily clobbered together script! [fanfare] Continue reading “Partially automating TC22 (No, that’s not a new designer drug)”

After the silence …

And so it’s done. Things have been quiet here for some time, and it’s not just another attack of apathy on my side this time. We’ve pushed out two new products, but I’ll let the Chief of chiefs tell you about those.

What Marlon has not mentioned is that Speed Up My PC, affectionately known as The Sump, is, as of last Wednesday, Certified for Windows Vista. The process is certainly stressful (the testing is a lot more intense than I remember the older Certified for Windows tests – but maybe that’s just my memory covering up for trauma), but not as much as I’d anticipated. .Net goes a long way through helping you do things properly. In any case, congratulations all around to everyone involved 🙂

There will be some more silence for another week or so while everyone gets some overdue R&R, and then… well, then I’ll see if there’s anything I can be bothered to write about. One problem at a time 😛