Analyzing dumps

Likely someone at your company is doing this. From a QA perspective, it can shed quite a bit of light into some of the odd behaviors that is seen sometimes. This blog may be a good reference on understanding the details.

http://www.dumpanalysis.org/blog/

Automate Changes to web.config files for unit testing ASP.NET Web Services

We're starting to automate unit tests with our build process and I was told about some new features in VS2010 to help us out. Thanks to John Z. for pointing this out. With Visual Studio 2010, you can manage both the developer and release versions of web.config files and even publish different database versions.

Here is the main link on Microsoft's website for these features. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd394698(v=VS.100).aspx

Specifically, Here is the link to creating a transform for the web.config file. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd465318(v=VS.100).aspx

Also, you can specify a database by following the informaiton here. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd465343(v=VS.100).aspx

Here is a summary of a blogger that has discussed these deployment options. http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/2009/09/overview-post-for-web-deployment-in-vs.html

Summer Hiatus for Meetings

We'll be putting the Red Earth QA monthly meetings on Hiatus for the summer and pick back up again in the fall.

Better Software in 60 Seconds, #1

Here is an early sample of a project I'm working on. It's very rough, but this should give you an idea of what I'm trying to do. All feedback is welcome!

Open Source Load Testing Tool

Recently, a friend asked if I would be interested in learning about Erlang, a functional programming language, for a project he was thinking about. Essentially, it's a language that lives on concurrency and recursive algorithms. Then it seemed obvious that it would be a great platform for performance testing.

And a quick search resulted in finding Tsung (http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/). It supports HTTP, WebDAV, SOAP, PostgreSQL, MySQL, LDAP and XMPP/Jabber. Give it a try and see if you find it useful.

Google's Website Has Vulnerabilities (and they want it that way)

I ran across http://jarlsberg.appspot.com/ the other day. It's a site that Google has assembled to teach anyone how to find vulnerabilities. It's set up so that you can walk through a live site and see exactly what kinds of things to look for, how they behave and how to fix them.

Why not get a few QA nerds (like yourself) together and work through these labs?