Over the last year, I’ve written a fair amount of Visual Basic .NET code for a customer project. As a result, I know a lot more VB.NET than I would like to, and I’ve run into a number of peculiar behaviors, such as this one. In this …

When it comes to unit or integration tests, there are of course good ones and bad ones. There are few things more treacherous than a test suite filled with low-quality tests that don’t test what they’re supposed to, if anything at all. When the test suite goes green …

I stumbled upon an interesting little detail as I was using a regular expression in a unit test case in a C# application. I had a multiline string and was searching for a particular substring in multiline mode. The newlines in the string were Windows newlines, meaning CR followed by …

When you build a GUI, all lengthy operations that can be triggered by the user should take place on a background thread so that the GUI doesn’t become unresponsive. Why would it? Well, it’s because all GUI operations take place on a single thread - the GUI thread (the …

One of the things I do like about VB.NET is XML literals. Given that XML is so common, it’s really a great idea! Here’s a tiny example:

Dim x = <p>Some test.</p>

I thought I’d write about how XML literals can be abused to create …

According to Merriam-Webster, a diacritic is:

a mark near or through an orthographic or phonetic character or combination of characters indicating a phonetic value different from that given the unmarked or otherwise marked element

Right! :-) In the Swedish language, there are three common letters with diacritics, namely å, ä and …

I just ran into a tiny little problem and thought I’d share the solution.

I was writing some tests in which I was mocking a dependency using Mock. My test code was roughly equivalent to the following (based on an example in the Mock documentation on magic methods):

>>> sub1 …

I currently work in a VB.NET project with a customer, and what amazes me is that I over and over again get the feeling that the language is designed to be easy to work with, but at the same time there are so many aspects of it that behave …

When you write unit tests, you occasionally need to mock away dependencies of the subject under test (SUT). By far the easiest way to do this is to use a mocking library, which has the added benefit that it allows you to verify the behavior of the SUT by inspecting …

Recently I wrote my first Node.js program! Yeah, yeah, I know! Late to the game and all that! But I thought it was time to catch up with the rest of the world. Better late than never, right? (Also, the program needed to parse JSON data, so JavaScript felt …