…standing on the shoulders of giants…
Unit testing is a tricky beast. As with all unit tests it is important to abstract any dependencies – so in the case of EF it’s the data persistence source. This must be handled carefully because EF creates a container that performs the interaction with the data source. Abstracting that container (via mocking or stubbing)... Continue Reading →
As a .NET developer I don’t like using third party controls when there is tooling available from MS that will do the job I need. For example I prefer using the “baked in” MSTest suit as opposed to NUnit or MBUnit. The same is true for a mocking framework. I have tried with varying levels... Continue Reading →
Recording web tests on Soap UI Pro won’t work in full-blown 64 Bit environments (64bit windows, SoapUI and JRE). This is due to incompatibility with the Mozilla browser engine. Updates are expected soon. This will except with the following message: “Browser Component is Disabled” In the mean time install the 32bit version from http://dl.eviware.com/4_0/soapUI-Pro-x32-4_0_0.exe For... Continue Reading →
During the deployment of a WCF service to an HTTPS QA server recently had us stumped… The service didn’t respond, didn’t display any error messages and didn’t log any issues in the Windows Event Log. The issues turned out to be (as expected) a type in the configuration file, we had used; system.serviceModel/services/service/endpoint/behaviorName and this... Continue Reading →
It is possible to run SQL Server Management Studio under the guise of another user account from the command line: The command line will request a password which (quite rightly!) cannot be entered into the command. Successful authentication will launch an instance of SSMS 2008. Lovely.
Many, many years ago I had a flatbed scanner and that scanner had a gnatty ‘scan-to-email’ function that would email any scans as a PDF attachment. Many years later (but still many years ago) I signed up for the Google Documents online service and registered for their Email to Documents service. This was a hashed... Continue Reading →
A colleague recently asked me the difference between the different version properties available in a .NET assembly. I had read about this recently in Jeff Richters outstanding CLR via C# but couldn't remember the semantics off the top of my head. AssemblyFileVersion: The version number you want the public to see. Ideally you'd want the... Continue Reading →
When implementing a date picker that is used to fetch some ‘details’ based on the selected date, the chances are that you don’t want to begin fetching the ‘details’ immediately. If you did, and made a rapid change to the SelectedDate (maybe holding down an arrow key), the asynchronous fetch will be repeated a large... Continue Reading →
We had some really strange problems getting MSDTC to work recently, specifically upgrading to VS2010 and SL4. Our developer environments are pointing to networked database servers and during this particular use-case the development workstation is running a both the hosted Silverlight Client and the Business Logic (API) served through a WCF service (both in Cassini).... Continue Reading →
Just found a tricky little quirk with TabStop that caused a fair bit of confusion. It turns out that the default implementation of ContentControl overrides Control, so implements the IsTabStop property, and defaults that value to true. ContentControl is implemented by the delightful BusyIndicator, so if you have used a BusyIndicator within the scope of... Continue Reading →
Mark Cooper 