Rolling! Rolling! Rolling! Time to ge that code 'a rolling!

I am getting some push back from IT about the laptop I want as the normal vendors do not carry the Sager Laptops. That is a bummer. I found that the laptop is a rebadged Clevo D901C. I found some other non brand name vendors that sell variants of the D901C with quad core Xeon procs and 8 gig of RAM. It's cool to think that if I do get the Sager (or some other variant of the D901C) that it can be upgraded to 8 gigs of RAM. *Insert Tim Allen grunt here*

I wrote a basic ftpLoadAgent and data generation code in perl today. The data generation code basically generates text files of a random length with random characters that will be PGP'd into encrypted files that will be decrypted by the application that I'm testing. Along with the files I also generate a CSV list with random usernames and the associated username password that will be FTP'd into the server to force work to be done. I also did basic testing of the ftpLoadAgent and it worked as expected.

Writing the ftpLoadAgent is the easy part. Right now it isn't multi-threaded and I don't think that in this case I will need to generate a zombie horde of FTP requests against the server as the polling interval of the app in question is at minimum 60 seconds and my ftpLoadAgent can average about 240 xfers per minute. If need be, I can multi-thread the ftpLoadAgent to get more xfers per unit time.

I will probably re-write the perl ftpLoadAgent in C# just to get back on development with Visual Studio. It's been a while since I've done any general development in C#. My experience with C# is usually all or nothing and I tend to forget various tidbits. When I'm not coding C# I am mainly coding perl. It's funny how programmers tend to think of solutions in the language that they are currently using the most. Once upon a time I would think of solutions in Pascal or C, and then it was FoxPro or Clipper and then VB and then perl and then C# and then back to perl. Stoopid contextual thinking processes.

I also did some playing around with VS2008 coded web tests. I haven't quite wrapped by brain around it all yet but I can already see that the validation rules are going to be very handy and I can see where I could have used the stock or even custom validation rules in some projects at my previous employer. I ended up writing a bunch of HTML parsing code in C to get the job done and I can see where I could of extracted the information that I needed with those validation rules (even the stock ones) rather easily and made my life a better place.

One thing is for sure, it is time to hop back on the C# coding bandwagon and get back up to speed so that I am thinking of solutions in C# rather than perl. I went ahead and did the perl stuff just because it was faster for me in the short run but I need to be thinking longer term.

Oh yeah... VS2008 didn't make any calls to any licensing servers that I could tell unless somehow my laptop tonight mysteriously VPN'd into work (and I don't have the VPN software installed yet) and communicated.