Opportunistic Advertising?
posted on 08/15/08 at 12:44:14 am by Joel Ross
I spend most of my day in an IRC chat room (##twittertribe on irc.freenode.net - stop by and say hi sometime!), just kind of lurking to see if anything interesting comes along. Every now and then, I'll find a link worth clicking on. Today was one of those days, and I'm not sure why it caught my attention. It was an article about a Netflix outage, and I'm not even a Netflix subscriber!
Anyway, I was amused when I got there and saw this:
Talk about opportunistic ad placement!
Category: General
Querying in the Kinetic Framework
posted on 08/14/08 at 08:00:00 pm by Joel Ross
I was chatting with a few people in IRC the other day about different development approaches, and I brought up the Kinetic Framework. Someone took a look at source of the samples and didn't care for the SQL included in the class files.
Personally, I don't have a huge problem with it, but I understand the concern that others have. It definitely violates separation of concern, instead favoring encapsulation. Good or bad, that's the way it is.
But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered how hard it would be to create a simple interface to create your own queries easily. And then I started building it. By the time I was done, I had a solution in place that allowed me to create all of the queries created by the Kinetic Framework, and cover the majority of custom cases. And it has at least a bit of a fluent interface!
For custom queries, this is what we had before (this is from an example of getting a game with team's real names - there's a number of joins in there):
1: string commandText = @"
2: select " + Game.SelectFieldList + @",
3: [" + Week.TableName + @"].[Number] as 'WeekNumber',
4: ht.[Location] + ' ' + ht.[NickName] as 'HomeTeamDisplayName',
5: at.[Location] + ' ' + at.[NickName] as 'AwayTeamDisplayName'
6: from [" + Game.TableName + @"]
7: inner join [" + Week.TableName + @"]
8: on [" + Game.TableName + @"].[WeekId] = [" + Week.TableName + @"].[WeekId]
9: inner join [" + Team.TableName + @"] ht
10: on [" + Game.TableName + @"].[HomeTeamId] = ht.[TeamId]
11: inner join [" + Team.TableName + @"] at
12: on [" + Game.TableName + @"].[AwayTeamId] = at.[TeamId]
13: where [" + Game.TableName + @"].[SeasonId] = @SeasonId
14: order by [" + Week.TableName + @"].[Number] asc;
15: ";
16:
17: List<IDataParameter> parameters = new List<IDataParameter>();
18: parameters.Add(ServiceLocator.GetDataParameter("@SeasonId", season.SeasonId));
19:
20: return EntityBase.GetList<FullGame>(commandText, parameters);
Notice the large string built and manually working with parameters. Lots of SQL syntax knowledge involved here.
Compare that to the way I came up with:
1: JoinCriteria joinCriteria = new JoinCriteria(typeof(Game), typeof(Week),
2: Game.GameProperties.WeekId, Week.WeekProperties.WeekId)
3: .Add(new JoinCriteria(typeof(Game), typeof(Team),
4: Game.GameProperties.HomeTeamId, Team.TeamProperties.TeamId, "ht"))
5: .Add(new JoinCriteria(typeof(Game), typeof(Team),
6: Game.GameProperties.AwayTeamId, Team.TeamProperties.TeamId, "at"));
7:
8: ICriteria criteria = new StandardCriteria(typeof(Game), Game.GameProperties.SeasonId, 1);
9: IQueryContainer query = (new QueryGenerator(typeof(FullGame), criteria, joinCriteria)).GetQuery();
10: return EntityBase.GetList<FullGame>(query.CommandText, query.Parameters);
I'm not sold on the exact semantics yet, but the idea is there. This doesn't require any SQL knowledge. You still have to know how your objects are related, but not SQL directly, and you don't have to worry about creating your own parameters. The QueryGenerator handles creating the query for you, and as it builds the query, it maintains the parameters as well.
The other nice thing about this is that, while it is meant to work with the Kinetic Framework, it doesn't require any changes to the framework to work - it's essentially an add-on that I could plug into any of my existing projects and immediately get the benefit of being able to build queries quickly and easily.
I've also been messing around with the ASP.NET MVC bits as well. I'm trying to figure out how I could use that with the Kinetic Framework, and be able to unit test the controllers. Because of all of the static Get methods, that's tough. So I've been messing around with the idea of adding Repositories to handle the actual retrieval and persistence of the entities. It's still a bit awkward, but I was able to unit test my controllers without ever hitting any of the static methods or any persistence methods in the framework - because I was able to mock my repositories. I need to tighten that up a bit, but I'll probably blog about that a bit in the future. Actually, the above querying technique makes the repositories easier to create and less coupled to the static methods in the entities - a good thing. But that's for another time.
So, if you use the Kinetic Framework, would this be something you'd be interested in? It still needs a lot of work, but I wanted to see if there's any interest in it before I pursue it too much.
Category: C#, RCM Technologies
Simple Online CMS
posted on 08/13/08 at 08:00:00 pm by Joel Ross
Ever since I started this site, I've been trying to figure out a way to simply manage a few items and pages - such as my about page. I know I could have done a blog post that included my about information, and then just linked to that, but it seemed like a hack, and the URL wouldn't be as clean.
So I created a static page - well, relatively static. It's still a page using my blog's template, but the main content area is static content instead of code that pulls in blog posts. But even so, it's a pain to maintain. I have to edit locally and then upload the files. And it's all maintained in a virtual machine, so it's even more of a pain.
Ok. So it's not that bad. I'm just lazy.
But the other day, I saw a tweet from Cisco, a fellow RCMer, mentioning CushyCMS. You see, Cisco's a designer who is very good at what he does, and if he's saying something is good, that means it's well designed, has good usability, and doesn't take any technical knowledge whatsoever.
Yeah, yeah. That last one wasn't fair. But in this case, it's true. CushyCMS offers you online HTML editing of any page on your site. It's simple to set up and it works well. I have one page under its control now, and am thinking of adding others - or at least parts of others.
What it's actually doing is pretty simple - it uses FTP to push the file back to the server. But the ability to edit online from anywhere in a WYSIWYG fashion is killer. And I can segment my page anyway I want - just add a class="cushycms" to any element and it's editable. Below, I've added the class to an H3 (About RossCode.com), a div around some content, and then to another H2, and an H3 below that. They all show as editable areas:
In the past, I've hesitated to add a blog roll to the sidebar, because it's too difficult to maintain - or really any manually maintained areas there that I would want to change. But now, I could add some of those types of features and manage them easily, preventing them from getting out of date.
As I was writing this post, I was also tweeting my experience. Nathan Bryan responded that it's a problem when you keep files under source control. While this is true, I think some of it depends on how you use it. If you're adding CushyCMS directly to your code files, then yeah, that's a problem. But CushyCMS recommends against that anyway, instead recommending that you store the content you want to edit in a static file by itself. Then you just include that content in the dynamic page where you need it. To me, this isn't really that much different than storing your content in a database - something most CMS systems do - and then working out a backup process for those custom files.
CushyCMS probably isn't something to use for a large site, but for small, one-off solutions, it looks like a good, easy to integrate solution that solves a common need.
Category: Software
Getting Started With Mocking and Moq
posted on 08/08/08 at 12:45:40 am by Joel Ross
Lately, I've taken a keen interest in unit testing. I've started to rewrite some of my code to make it more test-friendly. One of the frustrating parts about doing that is that I found I was creating a lot of fake classes in my tests so that I would be able to test just a single part of my code, while holding other parts constant.
Maybe it's just because I always envisioned that testing would be pretty simple, but for some reason, having all of those extra (fake) classes around didn't sit well with me. So I decided to look into a mocking framework. Since I was using .NET 3.5 and I'd heard that Moq was built on that, I figured I'd give that a go. It's worked out quite well.
Imagine that I have a User class:
1: public class User
2: {
3: public FirstName { get; set; }
4: public LastName { get; set; }
5: public UserName { get; set; }
6: public Password { get; set; }
7: public Email { get; set; }
8:
9: public User() { }
10:
11: public bool EmailPassword(IEmailSender emailSender)
12: {
13: string subject = "Your Password";
14: string body = String.Format("{0} {1}, your password is {2}", FirstName, LastName, Password);
15: return emailSender.Send(subject, body, Email);
16: }
17: }
One of the things you'll notice about code written to be tested is that it's very modular, so when a user requests their password, the User class doesn't know anything about how an email is sent - it just uses an interface, and it's up to the calling application to supply that. If you start to write all of your code this way, you'll quickly see the usefulness of using a dependency injection framework (such as Ninject) to handle resolving your dependencies for you. But that's not what I'm focused on here. As a matter of fact, I don't care about the actual implementation of IEmailSender that the application will use. All I care about is the interface:
1: public interface IEmailSender
2: {
3: bool Send(string subject, string body, string email);
4: }
If I want to test the EmailPassword method, I have a couple of options. I could create my own mock email sender and implement the Send method and have it return true. But what happens when I want to test what happens when it returns false? Or it throws an exception? Now I'm starting to write a lot of code in a fake implementation, strictly for the purpose of testing. While I think the benefits of doing that are there, I also think there's potentially a better way.
The second option is to use a mocking framework. When you work with a mocking framework, what you're doing is essentially implementing the interface on the fly, and telling it what it should return when methods are called. Let's look at an example of a test that just verifies that EmailPassword returns true when emailSender returns true:
1: [Test]
2: public void User_Can_Send_Password()
3: {
4: var emailMock = new Moq.Mock<IEmailSender>();
5:
6: emailMock
7: .Expect(sender => sender.Send(It.IsAny<string>(), It.IsAny<string>(), It.IsAny<string>()))
8: .Returns(true);
9:
10: User user = new User();
11: Assert.That(user.EmailPassword(emailMock.Object) == true);
12: }
Line four says that I want to create an implementation of the IEmailSender interface, so I can use that later in line 11, when I call EmailPassword. Notice the .Object - that's the dynamically created IEmailSender. Lines six, seven and eight are the meat of the mock. Line seven sets up how the mock should expect to be called. Any time Send is called, passing in any string for any of the parameters (the It.IsAny<string>() code), line eight specifies that it should return true.
Now if we wanted to verify that EmailPassword returns false when IEmailSender.Send returns false, it's just a matter of taking the above code and changing line eight to .Returns(false). Each test sets up the mock the way it wants, so the mock is isolated across tests. There's no need for any extra logic to determine what should be returned in scenarios beyond the scope of that test, like there would be if I created an actual MockEmailSender to cover all of the different cases.
There are different options with the expects (in line seven) to allow you to match that the correct parameters are passed as well. You can also add a .Verifiable() on the end of the mock setup code and then call emailMock.Verify() after you run your test code (so, after line 11) and verify that the method was actually called.
I'm still fairly new to Moq and mock objects in general, but so far, I'm impressed with what I've been able to do and how quickly I can do it.
Category: Development, C#
An Interesting Summer Ahead
posted on 07/24/08 at 12:55:37 am by Joel Ross
A little over a week ago, The Wife headed out to the garage to get us some dessert. When she came back into the house, she was pretty excited - she found some moose tracks ice cream - and she came flying up our back stairs (there's 4 of them).
"Joel! I just broke my foot!"
I looked toward the back of the house, and she was standing on the stairs - on one foot, holding the other one. She can be a bit dramatic, so I didn't think too much of it. She tells me that she's broken a bone on a fairly regular basis, and after "toughin' it out" for a little bit, it's usually just fine.
But this was different. She wasn't putting her foot down, and she wasn't moving. So I headed down there and helped her to a stool in the kitchen. Then I went to get a neighbor to help get her to the car. We had the neighbors watch the kids (I love my neighbors - they are ALWAYS willing to help us out when in need), and we were off the ER.
Once at the ER, I got to hear what happened from her perspective. Get ready to cringe. As she was coming up the steps, she felt her foot start to slip (she was in a pair of flimsy flip-flops). This isn't anything new for her, but usually she slips down and bangs her shin on the step. She didn't want to hurt her shin again, so she gripped down on her foot. But she wasn't fully on her foot - just the end of her foot was step. She pushed down, and when she was done, she knew something was wrong. When she looked down, she could see her bones sticking up in her foot. Not through the skin, but she knew it wasn't right. Before the pain kicked in, she reached down and pushed the bones back into place!
After 4 long hours, excruciating pain (she said this was the worst pain she ever felt, which is telling given that she's given birth to three kids), X-Rays and a CT, the doctors came to the same conclusion it took my wife two seconds to come to: Her foot was indeed broken. The prognosis was basically that she folded her foot in half. She was given some Vicodin and a splint and sent home on crutches.
We went to a local doctor a few days later. He essentially told us that she broke bones in 5 places and would be off her foot for 3 months, but no surgery at this point. They'd re-evaluate on a bi-weekly basis, and with that, we were done - 5 minutes with the doctor. The Wife wasn't comfortable, so we decided to get a second opinion. In that five minutes, he did tell us that it was "a very bad and very serious injury" so we felt justified getting a second opinion. Of course, we were pretty sure it was a bad injury since, you know, you're not meant to fold your foot in half!
The second doctor was far, far better than the first. He sat with us for about an hour explaining everything. We actually got to see the X-Rays - he was impressed that the ER picked up on what happened, but his diagnosis was completely different than the other doctor's. He said that yes, there were either 4 or 5 bones broken, but that wasn't the concern. Those would heal as part of treating the real issue. What she actually did has a name: The Lisfranc Injury. Apparently it's actually quite often missed in diagnosis - that article says as many as 20% are missed.
He gave her two options - surgery or no surgery. He gave us all of the pros and cons of each, and left it up to her. He said she would never forget that she broke her foot, and that most likely, it would never be solid enough to withstand the rigors of the NFL (his examples of other people who had the same injury were Duce Staley and Aaron Brooks), so I guess that means her NFL career is over! The good news was that he thinks the recovery time (surgery or not) would be 6-8 weeks, rather than 12. And he made it more comfortable for her to sleep. Based on the pros and cons, she opted out of surgery, and I think it's a good decision.
While she's healing, she's essentially stuck on the couch. She can't put weight on it, and using the crutches requires two hands. She can't really pick up or carry our 11 month old son, who is taking it pretty hard - mommy can't be mommy right now. Frankly, it's hitting all of us pretty hard, but we'll make it through.
One last thing: I told my oldest it was time for bed the other night, and that she had to get off the cough. She told me she couldn't because "mommy's crotches are in the way." I'm almost positive she meant crutches!
Category: Personal
The NuSoft Framework Is Now The Kinetic Framework
posted on 07/16/08 at 09:32:59 pm by Joel Ross
One of the first questions I got when people heard about RCM bought NuSoft Solutions was whether we were going to be renaming the NuSoft Framework. At the time, I had no idea, and frankly, it was about as far back in my mind as it could be.
Well, the acquisition is three months in the past, and we're starting to integrate things tighter now. As part of that, there was concern about brand confusion with RCM using and sponsoring the NuSoft Framework. So, the decree came down to rename the framework.
Which we did. Since we've started a new group - Kinetic IG - it was only natural to lean towards the Kinetic Framework, but that's not the only reason we settled on that name. The framework has two important aspects that relate to the word "Active" (of which Kinetic is a synonym). First, it uses the Active Record design pattern for it's entities. Second, it relies on active code generation - the majority of the code generated can be re-generated if your data model ever changes without wiping out any custom code you may have. Given those things, combined with the idea of kinetic having to do with motion and momentum, we felt it was a good name.
We've updated the CodePlex address to http://www.codeplex.com/KineticFramework, but the old address does redirect to the new one. I am in the process of changing all of the content and source to reflect the name change - I would expect to be done in the next few days.
As far as framework development goes, not much has been going on. I have been playing with it a bit to make it more testable, but nothing official yet. More on that if I ever get it to a place where I'm happy with it.
Category: RCM Technologies
Testing the NuSoft Framework
posted on 07/09/08 at 12:45:25 am by Joel Ross
I've started up a new project that is using the NuSoft Framework, and because of some of the interactions, I realized it would be much, much easier if I had a set of automated tests, rather than going through the process of firing up an application, going through a WCF service, and then eventually hitting the code I needed to test.
I realize this isn't earth shattering for those used to doing TDD or unit testing, but it's not something that I've done a lot of in the past. On one project, we had well north of 100 tests, but they were all isolated to a particular hairy part of the code and it was rather self-contained.
To be honest, the NuSoft Framework is not ideal for unit testing, since the data persistence is pretty well embedded into the entities. That's OK in my mind, since I've rarely seen a case where my persistence layer has changed. Once, I knew I had to build for different databases, but that was known up front, and not added after the fact. That may be viewed as a naive attitude, but it's worked for me so far.
Anyway, there's a reason I didn't call this "unit testing" but rather referred to it as just testing. It's not unit testing, since it's not testing just one thing. It's more like an integration test, since it's also going to rely on a known state of the database.
Essentially, what you have to do is manage your own transaction, and then at the end, after you assert that your desired action worked, you roll it back, leaving the database untouched. If you want to isolate your tests in their own assembly, you're going to need to add an attribute to your business layer so you can gain access to some of the internals of the business layer:
1: [assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("Northwind.Tests")]
This gives us the ability to call one of the internal overloads on Save() where you can pass in a helper. This ensures the Save will participate in the existing transaction, and not create its own (which it does when you call Save() with no parameters). Here's an example that would test being able to insert a customer:
1: [Test]
2: public void CanInsertCustomer()
3: {
4: Customer customer = Customer.CreateCustomer();
5: customer.CustomerId = "jross";
6: customer.FirstName = "Joel";
7: customer.LastName = "Ross";
8:
9: using (SqlHelper helper = new SqlHelper())
10: {
11: try
12: {
13: helper.BeginTransaction();
14: customer.Save(helper);
15: Assert.That(customer.IsNew == false, "customer.IsNew was true but should have been false.");
16: }
17: finally
18: {
19: helper.Rollback();
20: }
21: }
22: }
The difference between this code and the code you would normally use is that you wouldn't manage your own helper and you'd call customer.Save(), not customer.Save(helper). If you dig into the guts of Save() with no parameter, you'll see it does essentially what I'm doing here. It creates a SqlHelper and opens the transaction. The difference is that if the insert works, the transaction is committed, and here the transaction is always rolled back, ensuring that the database isn't affected and leaving it in a known state for other tests.
I'm still new to automated testing, but it definitely does make being able to change existing code much easier and give me more confidence when I am doing that. And seeing all of the green lights in NUnit feels pretty good too.
Oh - the NuSoft Framework has a logo now (the one at the top of this post). What do you think of it?
Category: Development, C#, RCM Technologies
Grand Rapids Tech Lunch – Monday July 7th
posted on 07/01/08 at 09:26:45 am by Joel Ross
The second Grand Rapids Tech Lunch has been announced, and it'll be at the Grand Rapids Brewing Company on July 7th at 12:00 PM. We have their private room reserved, so it should be a bit quieter than last time, and maybe we'll all fit around the same table!
I'll be there, and hope to see a few people from the West Michigan area there as well!
Tags: GRTechLunch
Category: General
The Saga of the Dell D820 and 4 Gigs of RAM
posted on 06/30/08 at 09:35:29 pm by Joel Ross
Two summers ago, I got a new laptop - the Dell Latitude D820, a nice dual core machine that works great for what I do - software development. The only issue I had with it was RAM. It came with 2 GB, but that wasn't enough for me. I do all of my development in Virtual PC, and sometimes have 2 or 3 open at a time. Even with only dedicating 512 MB RAM to the virtual machine, my laptop would grind to a halt.
So I upgraded to 4 GB - the price was great ($200 for 2 2 GB sticks). After installing it, I was a bit disappointed to see that the BIOS only exposed 3.325 GB to the OS, but still - I had an extra 1.325 GB of RAM, and I could run 2 VMs, with each getting 1 GB RAM - and the machine still responded well. I figured eventually there'll be a BIOS update or something that would allow me to get that last bit of RAM!
Well, a couple of weeks ago, that BIOS update was supposedly released. It wasn't verified, but word was that the A09 revision could give you access to the full 4 GB. After a bit of a hassle (Ok - it was a MAJOR hassle, but that's not the point here), I got it installed.
So did it work? I honestly don't know yet. I checked Task Manager, and this is what I see:
I saw this (Total still at 3.325 GB), and was mildly disappointed. Not shocked, but disappointed. I found an article that talked about enabling PAE, and then it showed (after you enabled it) a screen shot that you can get by right clicking on "My Computer" that shows the full 4 GB. So I tried that. This is what I see:
So now, I'm confused. Do I have 4 GB or not? I know what I want to believe, but what's the reality?
NuSoft Framework Now Included with CodeSmith 5.0
posted on 06/29/08 at 08:00:00 pm by Joel Ross
CodeSmith announced recently that version 5.0 is in beta, and one of the features listed is that it now includes the NuSoft Framework right in the download! That's pretty exciting, as we never expected that when we first started writing our templates.
There's actually a whole bunch of templates included now, including NHibernate and .NetTiers ones. I've found that the templates are a great source of sample code to write your own templates - mess around with them and figure out exactly how someone else solved the problem you're trying to solve.
The feature I'm really excited to try out is the source control integration - that running CodeSmith projects from within Visual Studio will cause checkouts to occur. That's a nice change, and will make it easier to keep my generation right inside of Visual Studio - something that I hadn't been doing.
It's still in beta, but I plan to give it a go soon - and provide feedback for one of my favorite development tools.
via Rob Howard
Tags: CodeSmith | Code Generation | NuSoft Framework
Category: Development, Software, RCM Technologies
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