DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by rasmuskl

Craftsmanship In The Wild

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 03:48:30 GMT

Title says it all.

Code Coverage - What You Need To Know

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:35:28 GMT

People often talk about the percentage of code coverage they have from unit tests, whether it be actual coverage or the goal they or their project have set. Having a high coverage percentage is often seen as a quality, but code coverage is not really a metric that gives much value in itself. In this post I want to investigate the different types of code coverage that exists and address some of the problems with code coverage.

Testing a Visitor - Mocking and Test Readability

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 03:00:30 GMT

The other day I was using TDD to write a visitor for an object graph at work. I often use mocks a lot and was using mocks in this particular batch of tests as well. However, in the end creating my own fake class turned out to be much better (in my opinion). Favoring state-based testing over interaction-based testing (sometimes) can really simplify the noise within a test and provide clarity.

A new breed of magic strings in ASP.NET MVC

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:01:02 GMT

One of the common patterns in Ruby on Rails is the use of hashes in place of large parameter lists. Instead of hashes, which don't exist in C#, ASP.NET MVC uses anonymous types for quite a few HTML generators on the view side. This is a trick used by the MVC team to simulate hashes. Since the dictionary initializer syntax is quite verbose, with lots of angly-bracket cruft, anonymous types provide a similar effect to hashes. However, don't let the magic fool you. Anonymous types used to create dictionaries are still dictionaries.

Reducing Check-In Friction (in Continuous Integration)

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 02:48:04 GMT

Short post on reducing check-in fear and enabling regular check-ins in a continuous integration environment.

Craftsmanship over Crap

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:59:28 GMT

I challenge you. Be a craftsman, think about leaving the code slightly better than you found it. Maybe your new new years resolution?

C# Design Patterns - Abstract Factory Pattern

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 15:46:04 GMT

We'll be continuing on with our fictional city council that has commissioned us to develop an application that lets them manage their yearly dog registrations. Since the application is all about managing dogs and their owners it makes sense to have a DogFactory class that will create the different breeds of dogs that will be stored in the application.

Activator.CreateInstance Performance

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 04:31:23 GMT

A look at the different forms of Activator.CreateInstance and the performance implications of each.

There is More Content than Just the Front Page on DotNetKicks

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:01:03 GMT

Are you tired of going to DotNetKicks and finding the same stories on the front page for days in a row? Trust me, there is some great content out there that never makes the front page. You just have to look a little deeper. When you do, you can help put some of that great new content in front of the masses. Even if you don't submit stories yourself, you can still help out by giving the initial votes that push a story to the front page.

Verifying code and testing with Pex

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:46:05 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.

Thinking only of the Junior Developer

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 02:16:15 GMT

How do you treat Junior developers, what code do you give them, and do you let their presence change your architecture?

Not Your Typical Top Ten Of 2008 Post

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:45:04 GMT

Phil lists his top 10 posts but also the posts he liked the most from other bloggers

Is lambdas syntatic sugar, or Turkish delight?

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 18:46:04 GMT

In this post, Tuna tries to clarify his points on whether lambdas are syntatic sugars or not.

Debugging With Tracepoints

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 22:31:04 GMT

Well, last week, while I saw John Cunninghams session at PDC 2008 about Visual Studio Debugger Tips & Tricks, I learned something new about breakpoints. The Visual Studio debugger has another feature called tracepoints.

What is Microsoft waiting for providing a decent path API?

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 01:31:13 GMT

I was recently browsing the code source of Managed Extensibility Framework and realized that this future part of .NET 4, full of tricky and advanced ideas, was naively relying on strings to describe files and directories paths. It seems that the version 4 of .NET will miss the need for a descent path API. There is the class System.IO.Path but it is feature limited, full of flaws and pitfalls (to not say bugs) and it fosters users to encode their paths into raw strings. It seems to me that using strings to encode paths is as primitive as using String.IndexOf("<tag>") to parse some XML.

Raising Events the right way, the easy way, with an Extension Method

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 17:16:19 GMT

Raising events takes 3 lines of code. Let's follow the DRY principal and get that down to one line. Less noise, more action, very tastey. Merry Christmas.

BlogEngine.NET Unofficial Forums

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 15:01:02 GMT

The name says it all - forums you can use to discuss BlogEngine.Net.

A WinDbg Debugging Journey - NHibernate Memory Leak

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 01:34:15 GMT

A small debugging tale of how I got introduced to WinDbg and how it helped me track down a memory leak in NHibernate and reduce my memory usage from ~800mb to ~50mb. It's a funky tool and can be quite scary at first, but if it helps me remove memory leaks, I am all for it. The second lesson learned is that sometimes - although I still won't look there first - SELECT is broken.

Oxite: A good example after all?

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 00:53:28 GMT

The community response to Oxite has been.interesting. The general consensus seems to be that they got it all wrong...

Composing animations with Silverlight.FX

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:26:50 GMT

Shows how to use Nikhil Kothari's Silverlight.FX with a fluent interface to build composable animations like jQuery.

Oxitis - Acute or chronic anxiety toward sharing code online.

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 04:31:15 GMT

It was going to get defined sooner or later...

Migrations in C# using RikMigrations

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 01:31:14 GMT

Jealous of those pesky Ruby on Rails developers? Want to be able to use Migrations in your .net apps? Well then check this post out!

How To Guarantee That Your Software Will Suck

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 22:31:10 GMT

Do you bad software and unhappy developers? Well, it isn't that hard...

Using System.Web.Abstractions in Your WebForms Apps

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 01:31:14 GMT

Check out how to use the System.Web.Abstractions assembly in your ASP.NET WebForms applications!

Have you ever wondered why CodePlex is so slow?

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 22:31:21 GMT

Taking a look at one feature on CodePlex that is much slower than it needs to be, due to indiscriminate use of UpdatePanels and bloated ViewState, and then comparing it to similar functionality on Stack Overflow to illustrate how much more efficiently the same feature can be implemented.