Month: May 2018

Deferring Processing of Azure Service Bus Messages

Enrico

Sometimes when you’re handling a message from a message queue, you realise that you can’t currently process it, but might be able to at some time in the future. What would be nice is to delay or defer processing of the message for a set amount of time. Unfortunately, with brokered messages in  Azure Service Bus, there is no built-in feature to do this simply, but there are a few workarounds. In this post, we’ll look at four separate techniques: let the lock time out, sleep and abandon, defer the…

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London launches world’s first contactless payment scheme for street performers

Enrico

Here’s a casualty of the cashless society you might not have previously thought of: the humble street performer. After all, if more of us are paying our way with smartphones and contactless cards, how can we give spare change to musicians on the subway? London has one solution: a new scheme that outfits performers with contactless payment terminals. The project was launched this weekend by the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, and is a collaboration with Busk In London (a professional body for buskers) and the Swedish payments firm iZettle (which…

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Microsoft Buys Conversational AI Company Semantic Machines

Enrico

In a blog post, Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of AI & Research David Ku announced the acquisition of Berkeley, California-based conversational AI company Semantic Machines. The natural language processing technology developed by Semantic Machines will be integrated into Microsoft’s products like Cortana and the Azure Bot Service. On its website, Semantic Machines says that existing natural language systems such as Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana and Google Now only understands commands, but not conversations. However, Semantic Machines’ technology understands conversations rather than just commands. Some of the…

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Microsoft turns SharePoint into the simplest VR creation tool yet

Enrico

Microsoft is sticking with its pragmatic approach to VR with SharePoint spaces, a new addition to its collaboration platform that lets you quickly build and view Mixed Reality experiences. It’s a lot like how PowerPoint made it easy for anyone to create business presentations. Sharepoint spaces features templates for things like a gallery of 3D models or 360-degree videos, all of which are viewable in Mixed Reality headsets (or any browser that supports WebVR). While they’re certainly not complex virtual environments, they’re still immersive enough to be used for employee…

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Given, When, Then

Enrico

Given-When-Then is a style of representing tests specifying a system’s behavior. It’s an approach developed by Dan North and Chris Matts as part of Behavior-Driven Development (BDD). It appears as a structuring approach for many testing frameworks such as Cucumber. You can also look at it as a reformulation of the Four-Phase Test pattern. The essential idea is to break down writing a scenario (or test) into three sections: The given part describes the state of the world before you begin the behavior you’re specifying in this scenario. You can…

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7 Popular Unit Test Naming Conventions

Enrico

Following are 7 popular unit tests naming conventions that are found to be used by majority of developers and compiled from above pages: MethodName_StateUnderTest_ExpectedBehavior: There are arguments against this strategy that if method names change as part of code refactoring than test name like this should also change or it becomes difficult to comprehend at a later stage. Following are some of the example: isAdult_AgeLessThan18_False withdrawMoney_InvalidAccount_ExceptionThrown admitStudent_MissingMandatoryFields_FailToAdmit MethodName_ExpectedBehavior_StateUnderTest: Slightly tweeked from above, but a section of developers also recommend using this naming technique. This technique also has disadvantage that if…

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