Miško Hevery over at the Google Testing Blog has a few things to say about Asserts and testing. He's against asserts, specifically ones which perform null checks, as they get in the way of testing. Whilst I agree with his dislike of assertions (see here) I disagree with his dislike of null checks... Miško complains that by having an object check passed in objects for null and assert if they are this causes him problems in testing where he knows that he doesn't need the objects that are being passed in to test the functionality that he's testing. He prefers…

I've just had a memory leak in the SChannel SSL code reported by a client. It's a fairly fundamental leak has highlighted an omission in the mock buffer allocators that I use to test this kind of code; it also highlights that the SChannel code was somewhat rushed to release before Christmas. I'm working on a fix now and the changes will be included in the 5.2.5 release of the SChannel code. Right now there are only a few clients with the SChannel code anyway and none of you have 5.2.5 and so I'm folding this fix into that release…

I developed the new SChannel SSL adapter for The Server Framework in a mostly test driven style; a while ago I called this Just In Time Testing... It worked well and, to be honest, I couldn't imagine developing code as complex as the SChannel adapter without tests; though as I noted when I first set out on the development, back in 2001 I'd developed the corresponding OpenSSL adapter without any tests at all... The tests worked well for me this time around and I was able to both learn about the SChannel API that I was using and implement the required code…