Pierre-Emmanuel Dautreppe

Recently, I was playing with WatiN to do some integration and web testing, and I have "discovered" the concept of session merging in the browsers.

Of course, that's an important feature allowing to deal correctly with popups dfor instance. But when you do some web testing and that you would like to launch several browser logged in with different users to check simultaneous actions or things like that, this feature can be very very annoying.

Internet Explorer 8 has added a new feature that allow you to surf in a new session, meaning you just deactivate explicitely the session merging. You can do that via the interface of in command line (IExplore.exe about:blank -nomerge)

What I will show here is how we can benefit from that feature in COM using the WatiN API. [Plus]

Here, I will be using the tool NDepend - an analysis tool by Patrick Smacchia - to extract the call tree - the method dependencies - of an assembly.
We will see how we can do that using the menus of the tool, and also using the CQL (a SQL-like language to run queries against code to extract metrics) and more specifically functions like IsUsedBy, DepthOfIsUsedBy or NbLinesOfCode. [Plus]

Patrick Smacchia just offered me a licence of NDepend - an analysis tool.
I will soon try it on my code to extract some metrics ! I'm more specifically willing to try the CQL (a SQL-like language to run queries against code to extract metrics). [Plus]

I will describe here an interesting scenario : what can you do when you have a VSTO project but that you want to open the file from command line (from another process) but anyway being able to access the classical VSTO method and members like Globals.ThisWorkbook, ...

Here we will see :
- how to open a VSTO document from command line (ie how to open an excel document from command line) and getting interop object
- an explanation about why you cannot convert this interop object to a VSTO object
- how you can get use of .NET remoting to access to the VSTO objects inside of your document
- and finally how you can achieve the same result using WCF [Plus]

I am currently working with finite state machine and I was wondering how we could render this easily.
To achieve this goal, I will be using Graphviz, a set of tool in C++ that can render many graphs. They are based on a structure named "dot file".
I discovered a library named "Quickgraph" created by a Belgian guy working now at Microsoft Research : Jonathan 'Peli' de Halleux. It can work with MSAGL (Microsoft Automatic Graph Layout, ex Microsoft GLEE), but as this is not free I will make work together Graphvuz and quickgraph.

In some cases the solution I present here may freeze. As a consequence, I will also present a solution to be able to workaround this problem and thus to work asynchronously with the Process object. [Plus]