2.08.2012

NCrunch

I think I can say that I know most of the relevant development tools related with the .NET world, so it's obviously not every day that I stumble upon a new tool worth of notice. But today (or rather tonight) was one of those days (or nights). Even more relevant is the fact that this one is free (at least for know, while its considered a beta version).
I'm talking about NCrunch (http://www.ncrunch.net/). It's a tool targeted for developers using Visual Studio and doing TDD. It aims to decrease the amount of time we loose compiling and runing our unit tests, by not requiring us to do it at all! That is, it compiles and runs our tests in background automatically. Even before we save the file with the unit tests source code!
I'm not going to write a full review, but I dare you to use a handful of minutes looking at the video presented in the NCrunch homepage to see the awesome features available.

Happy coding and testing!

2.05.2012

Reviewing uCertify 70-515-CSharp MCTS exam prepkit (Part 2)

Hi again!

As I wrote in the last post, I'm reviewing a preparation kit for the 70-515-CSharp MCTS exam from uCertify.
Today, I'm here to write about what I've found to be the strengths and weaknesses of this product.

This is a full-featured product that pretty much covers everything this kind of tools should cover. I would highlight the following strengths of the product:
  • Easy and intuitive user-interface;
  • Rather complete explanations of why an answer is either correct or incorrect. Some other products I've seen before are only concerned about wrong questions, and dismiss explanations about the correct which may be as relevant as the explanation for wrong questions;
  • Extensive study materials covering most topics targeted by the exam. I didn't use them much myself, because I would rather take a peek at documentation supplied in msdn (links to these online resources are also supplied in a section of this product) and try the old "learn by doing" method. However there are people that would rather read the study materials and retake the tests, so I believe this is a useful feature.
  • Several kinds of test "layouts", from the traditional format, into adptative tests (which dynamically adapt the question complexity to your answers. That is, if you're getting your answers right, the complexity will gradually increase, otherwise they will decrease, thus showing you questions accordingly to your kownledge level).
and my favorite feature:
  • The hability to take quick tests.  Say that you only have a handful of minutes and you want to study a bit. Just open the application, and start a fixed time test, specifying how many minutes you wish to spend. Lacking enough free time to take complete tests, I found myself using this kind of tests a lot.

I would like to point out that despite the target of this application is to prepare yourself to take the 70-515 exam, you can also use it as a way of enriching and testing your knowledge. For instance, I find out that I have some serious gaps in ASP.NET MVC (which doesn't surprise me, knowing that I haven't developed any serious application in MVC). I just might be targeting MVC as one of the next things to investigate deeper.
Bottom line: if you've decided to take this exam, this kind of tools are definitely a good way of testing and evaluating your knowledge and I would recommend the uCertify product. But always remember that you might find different questions and topics in the real exam, so real-world experience is a must-have. Don't take your exam for granted just because you have good results in the preparation tool.

By the way, any readers of my blog are entitled to a 10% discount (in addition to any existing sale) on any test preparation software from uCertify (just use the discount code 'UCPREP' in the uCertify shopping cart).