Technical Musings

Exploring .Net Code with Pex

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:36:24 -0600

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a tool called Pex from the Microsoft Research Labs: "Pex finds interesting input-output values of your methods, which you can save as a small test suite with high code coverage." Not having much...

C# Extension Methods for IDataReader

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:29:11 -0600

My team often starts Tuesday morning status meetings with a round of win/learn/fun - a team-building exercise where each person gets to mention an exciting "win", something they learned in the last week, or just something fun. Several weeks ago...

Bonjour is Evil

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:43:29 -0600

I'm a FireFox user, so it was only a slight inconvenience: for months Internet Explorer has not worked properly. Most of the time, it would just spin, refusing to load a page, but also refusing to timeout. I installed IE8;...

SSIS Crashes When Editing OLE DB Source

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:49:26 -0600

Problem: SSIS 2005 (actually, Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence Studio) crashes every time you click on an OLE DB Source to edit it. (there are probably similar errors for OLE DB destinations). Solution: oddly enough, synchronize a few DLLs: Version...

Securely Accessing Network Resources in an ASP.Net Web Service

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:12:50 -0600

Problem: You have an ASP.Net web service/site that needs to access network resources, and IIS is running in a service account that you do not want to have access to those resources. Solution: Create a custom network account and setup...

TDD - Scenario for Red, Green, Refactor

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 13:53:09 -0600

Here’s a really dumb scenario that will illustrate a point about the usefulness of the “red, green, refactor” approach to testing and coding. Here’s the functionality – need to test whether or not a string has a value other than...

Encryption, Views, and Stand-Alone Stored Procedures in the Entity Framework

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:12:48 -0600

Problem: You have an table with encrypted columns. In the ADO.Net Entity Framework, you can't directly write an update to this table, since it does not handle the encryption commands. Furthermore, the framework will not return meaningful information, since it...

Closing A Cursor in SQL Catch

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:42:42 -0600

Problem: In a T-SQL script, an exception occurs while a cursor is open, resulting in the cursor never being closed. But, the exception handling wraps the entire script, not just the cursor, so there is no guarantee that the cursor...

Think For One ... Second

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 07:58:06 -0600

What’s wrong with this code? There are unnecessary lines. So? Why care about unnecessary lines? Because it shows that the programmer was not really thinking about what he was doing. MyObject obj = someList.Find(delegate(MyObject test) { if (test.Id.Equals(packageId)) { return...

Unit Testing Functions That Call Microsoft Enterprise Logging

Wed, 27 May 2009 21:53:23 -0600

Problem: you have a method that logs a message using the Microsoft Patterns & Practices Enterprise Library Logging Block, and you would like to write an automated unit test for it in NUnit (or Team System – solution is...

Sub classing for automated testing

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 15:55:26 -0600

A few months after I first purchased it, I am still reading xUnit Test Patterns. Been reading a few pages every day – now on page 590 with a few hundred to go! I have finally arrived at the point...

Automatic Properties in C# 3.0

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:39:43 -0600

We just upgraded our servers to support .Net 3.x, so at last I'm able to start migrating some of my code. I haven't taken a close look at all the features available yet, but one that caught my eye and...

Nice technique for modifying a subset of a List

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:27:00 -0600

One of my team members sent in the following piece of code, which is clearly intended to update the OrderNumber field for all objects in a List of objects that match a particular productId. I took one look at it...

Curly's Law and Questions for the Team

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:54:02 -0600

Coding Horror, almost two years back, christened a name for the principle variously known as "don't repeat yourself," "once and only once," etc.: Curly's Law. Excellent formulation of the principle. In sending this to my development team, I thought it...

Unit Testing - Code Coverage and Separation of Layers

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 12:13:48 -0600

Lately I've been working with my team to understand and utilize good automated unit testing strategies with NUnit. A code release I was inspecting revealed a couple of good points that seem worth expanding on: the importance of testing each...