Welcome!

I finally took the plunge to set up my own website! I’ve been wanting to do this for a while to be able to share some of the things that have interested me as I spend my spare time writing a small game engine. I hope that someone somewhere finds these things interesting!

One other reason that I set up the site is to have central place to store information about a couple of small pieces of software I wrote: DoItNow and MockItNow.

DoItNow is a little addin for Visual Studio 2005 that I use both at work and at home to speed certain parts of the development process up. It’s like Visual Assist, but not as good, and freer.

MockItNow is a C++ mocking framework. If you write unit tests in C#, then you have probably tried out using something like RhinoMocks, or maybe TypeMock. There isn’t much choice in C++, so I wanted to see if I could write something.

MockItNow was a great venture into the unknown for me. I wasn’t at all sure that I would be able to pull it off at the start. In fact, I had two failed attempts (based on ludicrous ideas) before I landed on what I use now. Along the way I learned a lot about areas I’d never looked at in great detail before, like stack frames, x86 assembly, calling conventions, type traits… The list goes on and on. I also learned some nasty little tricks that you can do in order to get at certain pieces of information I needed along the way too. I wouldn’t recommend using some of these techniques, but I had to do what I had to do.

I’ll be providing some more of the gritty details about how MockItNow works over the coming weeks, but If you can’t wait, then feel free to download it and take a look.

The site’s still a bit of a work in progress at the moment, but I set myself the goal of getting something up this weekend, so here I am. Unfortunately the great weather stole a lot of my time, but be sure that I’ll be improving things as I learn more!