What is This?

There was a time when I used to prefer to print documents so I could make notes on them and kind of map things out.  Needless to I have not needed to do that in a long time.  Until yesterday.

I had written a test, bigger than a unit test but nothing huge.  I needed to test my methods that would take a string from a database with special mark-up and make it into JSON.  The special mark-up would allow information from another database to be injected and some XMLish in it would map fields from our object to the JSON.

I had three text things I needed to view; the source string, the data object, and the JSON generated.

I had two tests like this and did the first one the old-fashioned way.  I printed each text on its own paper and went to work making sure things were correct.

Is There a Better Way?

I thought to myself there has to be a better way.  Or at least a way to not use all this paper.

Naturally I thought of OneNote.  At first I hoped to place each text item into its own note, pop them out across my monitors and go.  I could not pop my notes out.

Finally I made a note with a three column table.  I had to stretch it some but it worked!  Maybe not as easy but I had more color choices, less paper, and I technically could keep this note as proof.  Although once I knew things were correct I knew my expected string was correct.

I do not know if I will need to do something like this again, but if I do you can bet I will go to OneNote first.