Concluding another Chapter

Yesterday I finally concluded my studies for the Master in Computer Science at the Free University of Bolzano/Bozen. I even managed to do it with the full grade of 110 out of 110 possible credits :).

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A Test-Driven Dev's Nightmare: Meeting the HttpContext

My main task for the coming weeks at work is to extend one of our older but highly successful web application with new functionalities. The webapp has become quite complex over the years, as it happens with most applications when they're being extended. Unfortunately, devs have not written any automated tests. Not having any tests in place that could function as regression suite is quite bad, as any change turns out to be risky because you don't have any certainty on whether you didn't destroy any previously implemented functionalities.

So what I started with was to create a unit-test project and to write some tests that did at least cover the areas where I was going to modify code. My good intentions didn't last long...one of my tests immediately failed, returning

Object reference not set to an instance of an object

"I probably need to mock something out", I thought...navigated to the code where the exception occurred and  ... gave up. A static helper class used throughout the whole business logic accessing the ASP.net HttpContext...

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JCG - Joining the Java Code Geeks Program

A couple of days ago I was kindly invited to the Java Code Geeks program. Their goal is to build an online community for Java developers by aggregating and republishing content from different bloggers on their blog.

The JCG program builds mutually beneficial partnerships between Java Code Geeks and community bloggers whose articles are of interest to the Java developer community. The program simplifies the process of publishing selected blog articles by JCG members onto Java Code Geeks site.  Through this process, our JCGs enjoy substantially increased visibility and our audience enjoys great content.

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Help, Gingerbread drains the Battery of my Nexus One!!

A couple of days ago I finally got the eagerly awaited system upgrade to Gingerbread on my Nexus One. The update went pretty well, although some Nexus One users reported about problems with the updating process. The only thing I noticed is that Dropbox didn't work after the upgrade.
A re-install solved the issue. All-in-all Gingerbread is great. Beside UI enhancements it feels also faster than Froyo. However, after trying it for two days now, I noticed a substantial increase in battery consumption. By looking at the system battery stats (Settings -> About phone -> Battery use), Android System was listed to consume 23% of the battery *confused*.

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