Computer Systems

Test automation tools for WinForms desktop applications

Posted on January 8, 2012August 14, 2019 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

For a client in the financial services sector, I recently had to identify some candidate products for use in automating the testing their WinForms and VC++/MFC Windows desktop applications. The applications are used for trading financial instruments, so correct operation is absolutely essential.

UPDATE: this 2019 post from Joe Colantonio has a newer list of testing tools for Windows Desktop apps. WinAppDriver, Winium, and White Framework seem to be the best options.

Drop Test by Christoph Bauer - http://www.flickr.com/photos/h34dy/

After a bit of investigation and digging round in the more murky reaches of my memory, I came up with the following list of test automation tools for Windows desktop applications:

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By 2015, HTTPS Will Be Everywhere

Posted on December 23, 2011April 24, 2013 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Public WiFi connections are often unsecured, leaving their connections open to being hijacked or “sniffed” by malicious people. To protect users from data and privacy loss due to insecure and untrusted connections, web sites and applications are increasingly being run entirely over secure connections (HTTPS).

My prediction is that by 2015, it will be bad practice to access web sites via HTTP, and users will increasingly demand HTTPS. This has interesting implications for hardware manufacturers and software development teams alike.

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Node.js is faster on Windows than on Linux – what can we learn?

Posted on December 12, 2011April 24, 2013 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

In an interesting interview on DevBeat (http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/09/node-js-rackspace/), Rackspace systems architect and Node.js contributor Paul Querna talks about the Node.js implementation on Windows. (Original video here: http://vimeo.com/33248104)

Paul’s points in the interview about making use of I/O completion ports on Windows highlights a key issue in cross-platform software development: Windows has some incredibly powerful and advanced APIs, which – if used directly – can provide huge performance benefits for software that uses them.

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Speed up Web Applications with SSL Offloading

Posted on December 8, 2011January 2, 2018 by Matthew Skelton (@matthewskelton)

Web sites and web applications are increasingly using secure connections (HTTPS) for all traffic not just obviously sensitive data, as a way to guard against security threats. However, HTTPS requires encryption/decryption of data, which is computationally intensive. Web applications can therefore benefit from “offloading” the encryption/decryption processing required for HTTPS to specialised hardware devices.

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