Wednesday - More Unit Testing and more C++

ARC308 - The future of unit testing Following up yesterday's session about designing for testability, Roy gave an opinionated overview of the existing unit-testing tools/frameworks (there are lots of them), comparing those he thinks will stick around against those that might fade away. His final advice:

if you're new to unit-testing, don't get into TDD immediately, start with writing a few unit-tests incrementally to get the hang of it.

His powerpoint is here. TLA401 - Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 for Unrepentant C++ Developers The last time I saw Kate Gregory was at TechEd 2007 in Orlando. She hasn't changed: her demos go really fast :-). VS2008 SP1 comes with TR1 which is a set of proposed additions to the next C++ standard C++0x. It includes stuff that is currently in the boost library. Kate explained and demoed each of the following language additions:

• shared_ptr: safer, more intuitive, more powerful than auto_ptr.
• lambda expressions: [] or [&] or [=] equivalent of => in C#. Allows you to define short functions inline. She showed how elegantly they integrate with STL.
• auto: equivalent of C# var so you don't have to spell out a type when the compiler can work it out by itself.

Kate's question to the audience: "who in this room learned C++ in this century?" Just one person raised his hand (that wasn't me). Kate's final message: "C++ is not dead!". Indeed, new versions of Visual Studio keep adding new things for C++:

• TR1 additions
• New MFC classes, ribbon toolbar
• New libraries for parallel development
• Some Vista features are only available to C++
• C++ is the most practical language to do interop