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Verifying code and testing with Pex

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:46:05 GMT

Earlier this week, Katrien posted an update on the list of Belgian TechDays 2009 speakers. This post featured a summary on all sessions, of which one was titled "Pex - Automated White Box Testing for .NET". Here's the abstract: "Pex is an automated white box testing tool for .NET. Pex systematically tries to cover every reachable branch in a program by monitoring execution traces, and using a constraint solver to produce new test cases with different behavior. Pex can be applied to any existing .NET assembly without any pre-existing test suite. Pex will try to find counterexamples for all assertion statements in the code. Pex can be guided by hand-written parameterized unit tests, which are API usage scenarios with assertions. The result of the analysis is a test suite which can be persisted as unit tests in source code. The generated unit tests integrate with Visual Studio Team Test as well as other test frameworks. By construction, Pex produces small unit test suites with high code and assertion coverage, and reported failures always come with a test case that reproduces the issue. At Microsoft, this technique has proven highly effective in testing even an extremely well-tested component." After reading the second sentence in this abstract, I was thinking: "SWEET! Let's try!". So here goes.

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 4 - Membership and authentication

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 13:31:18 GMT

This post is part 4 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is all about implementing authentication in CarTrackr. Other parts: Part 1 - Introduction, containg links to all other parts Part 2 - Cloud-enabling CarTrackr Part 3 - Data storage Part 4 - Membership and authentication (current part)

When Should I Write Tests?

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 06:46:03 GMT

The definitive answer to a question that comes up all the time...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 3 - Data storage

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 08:16:16 GMT

This post is part 3 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is all about implementing cloud storage in CarTrackr. Other parts: Part 1 - Introduction, containg links to all other parts Part 2 - Cloud-enabling CarTrackr Part 3 - Data storage (current part)

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 2 - Cloud-enabling CarTrackr

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 20:16:11 GMT

This post is part 2 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is all about enabling the CarTrackr Visual Studio Solution file for Windows Azure.

Track your car expenses in the cloud! CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Par

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 21:46:07 GMT

As you may see in the title, I will be starting a series on modifying my CarTrackr sample application to a cloud-based, Windows Azure application. At this point, I don't know if it's easy nor do I know what it takes to achieve this goal. I only have some assumtions on how CarTrackr can be converted to a cloud application. This post is part 1 of the series, in which I'll describe the architecture of Windows Azure and what I think it takes to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application.

New Entity Framework / LINQ blog!

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 06:50:24 GMT

Just a quick recommendation note: One of my colleagues, Julien Hanssens, has started blogging on his experiences with the Entity Framework and LINQ. Here are some links to get you started

LINQ and Dynamic Query Expressions

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:57:02 GMT

In this article I wish to elaborate on the "how-to" and advantages of providing a dynamic and type-safe 'engine' for developers on which you can query any random property.

Entity Framework and Stored Procedures limitations

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 08:14:21 GMT

Know what you cannot do with the ADO.NET Entity Framework and stored procedures.

CarTrackr - Sample ASP.NET MVC application

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:32:39 GMT

Some people may have already noticed the link in my VISUG session blog post, but for those who didn't... I've released my sample application CarTrackr on CodePlex. CarTrackr is a sample application for the ASP.NET MVC framework using the repository pattern and dependency injection using the Unity application block. It was written for various demos in presentations done by Maarten Balliauw.

Introduction to ASP.NET MVC for VISUG - Presentation materials

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 08:08:04 GMT

Yesterday evening, I did a presentation on the ASP.NET MVC framework for VISUG (Visual Studio User Group Belgium). I really hope everyone got a good feel on what the ASP.NET MVC framework is all about and what it takes to build an ASP.NET MVC application. Thank you Pieter Gheysens for inviting me for this talk! And thank you audience for being interested for over an hour and a half! A recorded version of this presentation will be available later, for the moment you'll have to do with the presentation materials. The download contains the slides, the Hello World application and the testing demo. The CarTrackr application can be found on CodePlex.

Article on ASP.NET MVC in .NET magazine

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:40:09 GMT

Download the up-to-date example code of my MVC guestbook on my blog.

Creating an ASP.NET MVC OutputCache ActionFilterAttribute

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:16:07 GMT

This blog post explains how to create an OutputCache ActionFilterAttribute to enable server-side and client-side caching. In every web application, there are situations where you want to cache the HTML output of a specific page for a certain amount of time, because underlying data and processing isn't really subject to changes a lot. This cached response is stored in the web server's memory and offers very fast responses because no additional processing is required. Using the ASP.NET MVC framework (preview 3, that is), output caching is still quite hard to do. Simply specifying the OutputCache directive in a view does not do the trick. Luckily, there's this thing called an ActionFilterAttribute, which lets you run code before and after a controller action executes.

The devil is in the details (Visual Studio Team System test policy)

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 05:44:03 GMT

What if you have a Team Project with 2 solutions in 1 team project it? How can I enforce the check-in policy to run tests from solution A only when something in solution A is checked in, tests from solution B with solution B changes, ...

Code based ASP.NET MVC GridView

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:31:05 GMT

Maarten Balliauw shows you how to build an ASP.NET MVC html helper extension method which generates a nice gridview-like control using pure code and MVC framework.

ASP.NET MVC framework preview 3 released!

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 07:16:03 GMT

Don't know how I do it, but I think this blog post is yet again the first one mentioning a new release of the ASP.NET framework (preview 3) The official installation package can be downloaded from the Microsoft site. Source code is also available from CodePlex.