I am on sabbatical for the spring semester, 2008. I will still be located in Blacksburg and still be meeting with research groups or students completing dissertations. However, I will not be holding office hours or be available in my office for drop-in visits. If you need to see me for something, e-mail to ask for a time. I'll be back teaching classes again in the fall.

My office is no longer located in McBryde--Ihave moved offices to Togersen 3160A. Torgersen 3160 is the new Software Engineering suite.

Web-CAT was selected as the winner of the 2006 Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware, a national award that was established to recognize high-quality, non-commercial courseware designed to enhance engineering education. The award was presented at the Frontiers in Education conference on October 31.

The custom PMD checks in the default configuration for the Java TDD Plug-in stopped working at some point, due to a PMD version upgrade. These checks were written to flag test classes that do not contain any test methods, test methods that do not contain any assertions, or assertions that only depend on compile-time values. These checks have been restored in the Java TDD Plug-in's default PMD configuration file.

Late last semester, Tom Copeland sent me a copy of his new book, PMD Applied. We've been using PMD to help grade Java programs on Web-CAT with great success.