March 2010 Blog Posts
Over the last couple weeks I’ve spoken to a few people about something I’m calling QA Based Testing, and I figured it would be a good time to write about it. There’s been a lot of attention around Test Driven Development in the last couple years. TDD does take some practice to get used to and it requires team participation. If your boss tells you to “do it right now” while he looks over your shoulder waiting to alert the business that it’s ready, you might have a hard time practicing TDD ;). But there’s another way to...
LINQ-to-SQL DataContexts have a boolean property called ObjectTracking which is used to determine whether the framework should exert the overhead necessary to remember previous states. This defaults to true and is used to determine the SQL UPDATE command to run when persisting the object. We have a project with data that’s read-only and so we decided to turn ObjectTracking off (set to false). We figured this was a good idea since, the thinking went, it would save overhead and since we’re not persisting the data anyway (read-only) we’ll have nothing to worry about. Boy were we wrong. All...
Mike Gleason Jr has a bit.ly client library written in C# called BitlyDotNet (it’s hosted on here on Google Code). If it wasn’t cool enough before, it just got more awesome. I submitted a new version with the following improvements: Added support for error code 208 ("you have exceeded your hourly rate limit for this method") Overload to shorten multiple URLs in one shot Fixed bug that occurred when hourly limit was exceeded (SingleOrDefault throws InvalidOperationException because of multiple errorCode nodes) This library saved me time on...
This post is a follow up to to 2 posts: Find/Replace on Render – an MVC alternative to Response Filters and Response.Flush and the crimes against Page Caching. In the first post I explored a way to parse special tags before rendering a page. I’m working on a CMS that accepts special tags inside content. Those tags are then replaced on render. For example, an author might place a tag like: 1: <CustomAmazonBestSellers Count=”5” />
to display the 5 best selling products on Amazon (we don’t support...