Thursday, October 07, 2010
Pex - Automated White Box Testing Tool for .NET
Haven't updated this blog in ages it seems. Its not that I haven't been working on interesting stuff all this time ... it's just that once you get out of your habit of keeping up with your blog, its hard to get back to it. I will try and be more regular and post all the cool and techy stuff I get to do, not to mention all the stuff I learn about on the web.
So first off is Pex (now called Pex and Moles) is a product of Microsoft Researchers Peli de Halleux and Nikolai Tillman. Pex is an automated white-box testing tool that will generate unit tests for your code with a pretty high code coverage. It uses symbolic execution to accomplish this. There's a significant body of research that has gone into automated test generation over the past decade or so, and concolic testing is one such area that has enjoyed a great deal of attention. Now, as a result, we can see the testing field evolving to incorporate these newly-developed techniques. You can read more about Pex here, or try it out for yourself at: pexforfun.com.
I took a course last fall (yes, it took me this long to blog about it!) where we had to use Pex on an open source project and present our results. It was an exercise in test generalization (using parameterized unit testing). We chose xUnit.net as our target program and employed Pex with Code Contracts on it. The result was a slight increase in code coverage (coverage was already pretty high), but we thought using class invariants and code contracts, in general, made the code more testable.
Labels: .net, microsoft, testing
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Microsoft Recite
Another cool new technology preview from Microsoft. This time it's in the realm of voice recognition, aptly named Microsoft Recite.
From Nick's blog:
From Nick's blog:
Watch the demo here.How it works -- geeked-out version
Microsoft Recite analyses speech features using an ensemble of supervised and unsupervised classifiers and employs a noise robust approximate indexing and scoring of generic symbol streams for matching.
To Install Microsoft Recite
Microsoft Recite is a free download for Windows Mobile devices (version 6.0 and higher). Simply direct the browser of your Windows Mobile device to http://recite.microsoft.com/download. Standard carrier rates apply to the data sessions and download time on your mobile device. Those fees are dependent on your data plan with your carrier.
Labels: human-computer interaction, microsoft
Monday, March 02, 2009
Office 2019
Microsoft's vision for the future - 2019 to be precise. Impressive if you ask me.
While the technological progress in the last decade alone has been nothing short of astounding, we are still far from that point where all the technologies work together, interoperate with each other at one place. That's what Microsoft envisions for the next decade, and such is the pace of technological advancement nowadays that this may just become a reality in 10 years time!
<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&showPlaylist=true&from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>
While the technological progress in the last decade alone has been nothing short of astounding, we are still far from that point where all the technologies work together, interoperate with each other at one place. That's what Microsoft envisions for the next decade, and such is the pace of technological advancement nowadays that this may just become a reality in 10 years time!
Labels: human-computer interaction, microsoft, ms office
