Visual Studio is fine for most debugging purposes. Just occasionally, it isn't practicable, or there are other quicker ways of doing it with a user-mode debugger. Edward argues that debugging in MSIL or assembly language is a strangely liberating experience and can be a lightweight route to discovering the cause of elusive bugs. He starts off with a simple introduction to SOS debugging.

Portals provide information from diverse sources in a unified way. When portlets are integrated into a portal, the functions delivered as part of each portlet should be available all of the time. Unit testing can ensure that the features of your portlets will work all the time, and everywhere. It is important to unit test portlets before they are hosted publicly, and testing with frameworks will speed up the testing process. In this article, learn about portletUnit, a JUnit testing framework for testing JSR-168 portlets. portletUnit uses a mock container for testing, thereby reducing the cost of investment in huge portal server environments. With the portletUnit framework you can run unit tests on any machine—without a portal server.

This article provides an introduction to Test-Driven Development with concrete examples using Nunit.

Building security into software is harder than it should be. This article explores a way to align application security practices with other software development best practices in order to make building security in easier to manage and more cost effective. In particular, this article looks at combining continuous integration (CI) with security testing and secure static code analysis.

Google provides an interesting and easy-to-use open source alternative for developing unit tests to validate C/C++ based software. This article introduces readers to some of the more useful features of the Google C++ Testing Framework and is based on version 1.4 of the release

Continuous Integration is one of the buzzwords most people have probably heard of but surprisingly few are actually following this XP best practice. Keeping this in mind, I'll begin this tutorial by briefly describing what Continuous Integration actually means, why you should consider doing it, and finally, showing step by step how to do it using one of the most used Continuous Integration products, the open source CruiseControl.

Jester is an automated JUnit test tester tool. Using a clever modify-recompile-test cycle it is able to spot code areas that are insufficiently tested or that contain redundant code.

Writing unit tests for code that accesses the database is a recurring challenge for Java developers. This post will describe a technique we’ve used successfully on a number of database-intensive projects: using HSQLDB as an in-memory database so that the database access code can be thoroughly tested without dependencies on external resources.

The basics of installing and configuring the Hudson continuous integration engine to continuously build and test Oracle Application Development Framework applications

Understanding combinations and permutations is a fundamental skill in software testing. In this month’s Test Run column I show you how to work with combinations and permutations using code written in the new F# language.