I still haven’t found a good Ruby IDE that offers intellisense, but I did come across Ruby in Steel today. It’s a Ruby plug-in for Visual Studio 2005 and while it doesn’t offer intellisense yet, the company, SaphireSteele, is advertising a developer edition with intellisense will be available in Jan ‘07.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

These last few days, I’ve been working on a program that unlike many of my projects, has data that won’t sit still.

There are tons of network links, socket connections and data sets that I don’t have any control over; it’s incredibly difficult to unit-test.  How do you test a socket connection when the data the server is sending to you keeps changing?  I realized that there are lots of network programming tasks where I don’t even know how start unit testing, and sometimes, when I can test, I have to set up dummy servers to replicate the data, it’s incredibly painful and it feels wrong.

How do you go about unit testing these kinds of applications?

I really wish Sun would simplify the classes related to dates in the Java Library. The java.util.date and java.util.*calendar* classes are a mess, very verbose and cumbersome to use. This ONJava article helps but it’s just a reminder of how much easier dates are to play with in .NET