This week, I began to feel like I have finally hit my stride and begun to transition from a knowledge sponge into a competent, contributing member of the team.  I spent most of this week creating test automation for a Windows Communication Foundation service.  It was a bit tricky, as the particular service in question does not have a GUI but rather is a pure network messaging component, but fortunately there are tools out there (*cough*WCF Test Client*cough*) that ease the pain of figuring out the message schema.  By the end of the week, I had created a suite of component-based, data-driven automation that invokes the various API methods of a WCF service.  This automation will be used in the future for both performance and functional testing.

I also spent some time updating existing project files to use a newer version of the .NET runtime.

Company culture-wise, the department I’m in had a team outing this week.  We all went to a nearby park, where the heads of the project teams had rented out a space.  There was a virtual cornucopia of food available– pizza, snacks, and various other treats abounded.  We spent all day at the park, playing games and doing a photo scavenger hunt.  There was a bit of a competitive element, as there was a big pool of prizes up for grabs… mostly though, the day consisted of a lot of lounging in the sun and visiting with my coworkers.  It is always nice to get to spend time with people outside the office, and I’m grateful that I just so happened to be interning when this event took place.  Wizards definitely looks out for the happiness of it’s worker bees.