The first beta of Silverlight 3 was recently announced at MIX09 conference. The changes are really exciting and the new release brings Silverlight closer to ASP.NET as well as WPF. There are several great features in Silverlight 3 including:

• Enhanced data validation support
• Support for business objects via RIA Services
• Deep linking and Navigational support within an application
• Library caching support
• Out of Browser Capabilities
• New controls like DataForm and DataPager
• And much more

GoodCore is already developing an enterprise application in Silverlight 2, and the organization look forward to Silverlight 3 development as well.

Settng up a Navision database on SQL Server requires a few steps. Here’s a quick checklist:

Navision requires traceflag 4616 to be set ON. We have two choices for this:

1. Execute the following SQL-statement.
   DBCC TRACEON (4616,-1)
   This approach will turn the flag on for the current session only, that is, as long as the SQL Server is not restarted. Once the server gets restarted, you will have to run the above query again.
2. Add the startup parameter -T 4616 to the SQL server database service: MSSQLSERVER. The best way to do this is to use the SQL Server Configuration Manager. This solution is rather a permanent one and the flag is set across system/service restarts.

If you try to open a Navision database using Windows authentication, it displays a missing stored procedure xp_ndo_enumusersids error in xp_ndo.dll. To solve this, you will need to copy xp_ndo.dll to C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Binn (default path) and run the following SQL-script:

USE master
EXEC sp_addextendedproc xp_ndo_enumusergroups, 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Binn\xp_ndo.dll'
GO
GRANT EXECUTE
ON [xp_ndo_enumusergroups]
TO PUBLIC
 
GO
USE master
EXEC sp_addextendedproc xp_ndo_enumusersids, 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Binn\xp_ndo.dll'
GO
GRANT EXECUTE
ON [xp_ndo_enumusersids]
TO PUBLIC
GO

Useful References:

DBCC TRACEON:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187329.aspx

SQL Startup options:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190737.aspx

Adding xp_ndo.dll manually:
http://www.dynamicsnation.com/NAVNavision/Forums/tabid/61/forumid/53/threadid/67/scope/posts/Default.aspx

Recently I evaluated a few tools for the automation of testing for one of our web applications. I tried a few tools, which are as the following:

• AutomatedQA’s TestComplete – It is a very nice product offering a very rich set of features. This produce could be used very nicely for GUI application testing automation. It provides scripting support in C# and has native support for .NET application.
• Watir – I couldn’t try this much but it was mainly dropped from the list due to the learning curve involved in learning Ruby for using this whole suite efficiently. It is a very good testing automation suite both for web and desktop applications. Later after my evaluation, I also got to know that there is a .Net port available for Watir named Watin. I am looking forward to try that some time later.
• Sahi – I evaluated it and found it super fit for my testing automation. I chose Sahi mainly for the ease of use and the scripting language being Javascript. It provides an easy to use interface for recording and playing back the test cases. I started automating testing of the web application and to date I have been able to automate a very large portion of it. I hope to achieve about 60-70% of automated testing for my web application.

In the next post, I will write more in detail about Sahi that how we used it.

by Meraj Khattak