In the previous parts of this short series (that took a long time to finish) I looked at testing code that depends on pinvoke calls. I did this by wrapping the PInvoked functions in a class and then injecting that class into the depending code. I used the wrapper class to put some checks around the platform invokes to smooth some rough edges of the calls to unmanaged land. This creates a nice reusable interface around these calls but now we have the same problem we started with, testability. In this post I'll look at adding a final layer of indirection to be able to test this code.

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I had a weird problem today. For a piece of software I'm creating I had to start an executable and then poll it periodically to see if it was still living. If it didn't respond for a certain time my program had to kill it and start over. There's a neat class in System.Diagnostics that can do this. System.Diagnostics.Process. But I found sometimes it acts a little strange.

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Jurgen Appleloo posted this question on his blog. He wants to know what motivates you to do your job very well. He also promised $100 in books for the best answer if that isn't motivating I don't know what is.

Actually I think the question is the wrong way around. I do this work because I love doing this. I had no work I would be programming (and looking for a job, I'm not that wealthy). I don't just love the technology, I love helping people finding solutions for their problems.

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Joel Spolsky of Joel On Software and FogCreek fame and Coding Horror Jeff Atwood have been kicking up a lot of dust recently with Stack Overflow. We've been able to follow the developments around the creation of this site for about half a year now on their podcast http://blog.stackoverflow.com. And the site has been open for beta testers for one and a half months. I've been hanging around there for the last two weeks too. And since the site is going to be opened to the public tomorrow I thought this might be a good idea to write down some of my experiences and ideas around the site.

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Sometimes it seems Visual Studio is set up for a completely different programming style than mine. For example the context menu's in the solution explorer has an "Add Class" item that I use often but there is no "Add interface" item. It's easy to customize Visual Studio so I set about adding this. Should be easy right? Right... I even had to write VBA to get it done, I feel dirty. But I got through it so you don't have to, enjoy!

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