DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by david_holland

The Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:45:00 GMT

What happens when you get a few web developers who like puzzles together? Check out Jeff Blankenburg's post on the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever, and rise to the challenge!

What is Unit Testing?

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:45:02 GMT

good introductory article explaining what unit tests are (and are not) and why you should use them

Pulling others up

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:45:00 GMT

What should you do when you're in a situation where the people you're working with aren't using the latest and greatest technology and might not be using the so-called "best practices" that you subscribe to?

Thirty-One Days of Silverlight

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:47:16 GMT

Each day in the month of July, I am going to publish an article on a Silverlight topic. The topics will range from 100-level to 300-level in difficulty, but all of them will be written so that a beginner could start from scratch to create them. I will covering Drag & Drop, Event Handling, and even Collision Detection. This is an extensive list of tutorials, and I hope that it will help you see how useful and powerful these technologies can be. If there are topics you are specifically interested in seeing covered, please leave a comment, and I will do my best to accomodate your request.

Abandon ASP.NET WebForms!

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 07:45:01 GMT

Interesting experiance with classic web forms....

ASP.NET MVC: Rendering a partial view to a string

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 02:58:34 GMT

Sometimes when doing ASP.NET MVC, you want to render a view (or more likely a partial view) to a string. This post will show you how to do it.

LINQ to SQL is NOT dead!

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 19:00:03 GMT

Ever since Microsoft announced that the Entity Framework was their ORM of choice, people everywhere have been saying, "LINQ to SQL is dead!" A lot of people feel like they're not allowed to use LINQ to SQL anymore and that they have to use Entity Framework instead. In fact, LINQ to SQL is not only alive and well, Microsoft has even announced LINQ to SQL improvements in .NET 4.0, including finally adding using ITable<T> for tables instead of Table<T>, which makes it much easier to test. Combine that with this open source tool that will create an IDataContext interface for you and you're on your way to testable LINQ to SQL. So no, LINQ to SQL is not dead!!

Why ASP.NET MVC is better than WebForms: Repeatability

Wed, 27 May 2009 01:45:18 GMT

A lot of people out there are asking, "Why is ASP.NET MVC better than WebForms?" or "Why should I switch from WebForms to MVC?" Usually the response includes these items: * Clear separation of concerns * Testability - support for Test-Driven Development * Fine-grained control over HTML and JavaScript I'd like to add one more thing to the list: repeatability.

How I Learned to Love Dependency Injection: The Code Samples

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:01:16 GMT

Code samples from a presentation on Dependency Injection at Central Ohio Day of .NET

How I Learned to Love Dependency Inject: The Slides

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 02:49:02 GMT

Slide deck from a presentation on Dependency Injection at Central Ohio Day of .NET

Writing tests for stored procedures

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:29:03 GMT

With all of the talk about unit tests and test driven development, there is little talk about writing tests for stored procedures and other database code. I would argue that testing stored procs is just as important (if not more important) than testing .NET code because (a) you don't recompile all of your SQL code when you change something and (b) bugs in stored procs can lead to really bad things like data corruption that are hard to fix. Writing tests for database code is not rocket science. There are no SQL testing frameworks to learn (at least I don't know of any), but that's fine because you can do just fine with plain ol' T-SQL.

Hiding Thread.CurrentPrincipal from your code

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:28:26 GMT

You can get information about the current user who is logged in using Thread.CurrentPrincipal. The problem with this is that it's difficult to work with it in tests. It forces you to set the current principal in your test setup so that your code will work correctly, and this can be difficult if not impossible in situations where you're using Windows Authentication (if you're using Forms Authentication, it's not quite as painful, but it's still a pain).

13 ASP.NET MVC extensibility points you have to know

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:46:06 GMT

One of the main design principles ASP.NET MVC has been designed with is extensibility. Everything (or most of) in the processing pipeline is replaceable so, if you don't like the conventions (or lack of them) that ASP.NET MVC uses, you can create your own services to support your conventions and inject them into the main pipeline. This post shows 13 extensibility points that every ASP.NET MVC developer should know, starting from the beginning of the pipeline and going forward till the rendering of the view.

Kanban Lessons Learned

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:14:52 GMT

After seeing success with Kanban in a production support environment (part 1, part 2), we decided to give it a try in a new development situation. This project was a mix of new development and working with an inherited code base to implement some existing features differently.

ASP.NET MVC: Pass parameters when redirecting from to another action

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 08:03:01 GMT

In ASP.NET MVC, it's common to have a situation where you post to one controller action and then redirect to another controller action. Let's say that you want to pass values from the first controller method to the other. The problem is that in out-of-the-box ASP.NET MVC, there is no way to redirect to another action and pass a parameter into the action that you are redirecting to. Here is one way you can get around this problem.

Talking with Jeremy Miller about Alt.Net

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:16:17 GMT

As a follow up to the last podcast that featured Mike Moore and Scott Bellware discussing Alt.Net I spoke with Jeremy Miller to put out a vision for what he feels Alt.Net should represent and how it can be a positive thing in the community. This will be the last episode here on this topic, I promise to get back to normal technology discussions (next episode is about BDD and TDD).

SubSonic to Acquire NHibernate

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:01:18 GMT

Hanalei, HI - April 1, 2009: SubSonic (http://subsonicproject.com), a data access tool and "Super High-fidelity Batman Toolbelt" (according to its owner, Rob Conery), is set to acquire NHibernate, a much larger data access technology built on the .NET platform. The terms of the deal have not yet been announced but the stage has been set for what many see as a hostile transition of ownership.

Don't cheat on those small apps!

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 07:18:59 GMT

At some point, we all have to write some small apps. In these cases, we often throw good software design principles out the window. We say that we don't need to write unit tests, we don't need dependency injection, we can put data access code in our code-behinds, and things like that. Since it's a small app, we think we can get away with it. Just because your app didn't take you long to write doesn't mean that you get off easy. The consequences of your decisions just aren't as severe, but that doesn't mean that the pain is gone!

Why does software development take so long?

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 22:54:36 GMT

Every year, thousands of software development projects are developed. In most of these applications (especially line-of-business applications) you will see a lot of the same UI patterns. The problem is that on every project, it seems that way too much time is spent getting this stuff to work. Why??

Content Stealing Jerks

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:01:02 GMT

I've grown somewhat accustomed to seeing my articles regurgitated on some random blogger's site and passed off as their own. Usually I just send content stealing jerk (CSJ for future reference) an e-mail asking that they provide some sort of link back to my original article and leave it at that. Sometimes they comply, oftentimes they don't. In the end, life goes on. After all, it's not like I'm going to press charges over it.

System.Linq.Enumerable.Aggregate - Better Know an Extension Method Par

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 05:31:02 GMT

Learn how to harness the power of Aggregate a powerful new extension method brought to you by System.Linq

Running QUnit tests using continuous integration

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 08:48:15 GMT

On my current project we will be using QUnit to writing tests for our JavaScript. What would be really nice is if our CI build could run JavaScript unit tests. Well, it can!

Your personal TDD accountability partner!

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 08:45:35 GMT

The next time you are getting lazy about not writing your tests first and you need someone to keep you in line, you have someone that you can turn to!

Goals for 2009

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 03:05:41 GMT

I got tagged by Jeffery back in January for this, and since there's nothing I should do today that I can't put off until tomorrow...

NHibernate.Validator: fluent-interface configuration

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:46:03 GMT

Fluent interface configuration for NHibernate.Validator explained.