2011 Q3 link clearance: Microsoft blogger edition

Raymond Chen

It’s that time again: Linking to other Microsoft bloggers.

• Aaron Margosis investigates The Case of the Mysterious Law Manager Startup Error.
• John Guin shares the Robinson Crusoe Theory of testing and illustrates it with a stack of printouts which takes two days to verify manually. John explained to me that the human eye is surprisingly quick at spotting issues. The effort required to automate the process is significant. (Build robots to physically connect each printer, programmatically install the printer driver, print the test notebook, then collect and collate the output, feed it into a scanner, then use image processing to compare the results against reference output.) This degree of testing is performed only twice per OneNote release (once for the beta and once for RTM), so the cost of developing the automation would never be earned back with interest.
• The Microsoft Unlimited Potential Blog reminds us that eligible nonprofits can request software donations from Microsoft.

Raymond Chen

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