Friday, 31 August 2012

.NET Application Architecture

I've just finished reading first 6 chapters of a great book ".NET Application Architecture Guide".
In my opinion it is a must-read book for any senior software developer or a software architect (no matter what language you use).
The main point of this book is to provide a basis, a starting point for getting holistic knowledge about modern software architectures.
This book has a lot of references to other articles, books, guidelines which can be used for further study.
I may expect some concerns that this book is outdated because it was released in 2009, but things and technologies described in it is still in use and architectural approach described in it can be used not only for .NET platform. Another concern can be about "obvious" topics covered by this book (in my opinion these topics are not very obvious because I've seen a lot of software products designed with a lot of simple rules broken).
This book is important for me as a set of recipes, references and check lists for software design and this is just priceless!

Sunday, 6 May 2012

Problem steps recorder

Last week I found very useful tool in Windows: Problem steps recorder.
It can be executed as "psr.exe" (from either command line or "Windows+R")
The following window will appear:


Then you can record all the steps, for example, for reproducing a bug or explaining how to do something.
The "Steps Recorder" creates a ZIP file which contains MHTML with steps descriptions and screenshots.
I think it creates a sequence of steps more descriptive then any tester can provide me with.

So now I recommend the testers to use this tool and just send me a ZIP file generated by "Problem Steps Recorder".