I’m learning a brand new programming language. That should probably say, new for me.Because it’s Python. I haven’t touched it before. Yes yes - I’m slow, old and everything. But I am still learning new things… so I’m not all in all bad.

Ok - Python is for the most part very nice to work with and reading and writing code has been easy so far. Until I saw a backwards for-loop. It just looked… weird.

Turns out it was not a for-loop at all, but rather a list comprehension.

I had the great joy of teaching a course on Next JS 13 this last week. Next has for a long time been a favorite of mine and with version 13 they have really stepped it up a notch. Or three.

But what they still are lacking, and for the life of me I cannot understand why, is a good out-of-the-box testing story.

This caused me and the group I was teaching considerable head-ache - especially when we tried to test the server-side async components that Next.JS is plugging hard.

Therefor I have two goals with this post:

1. Help me (and you?) to easily get started with testing
2. Show a way to test async server components

Let’s do this.

I’m putting together a course where I want students to easily deploy their code. Since the course is on .NET 6 WebAPIs (and Entity Framework (core)) I thought that Azure would make a great choice to deploy to.

And nowadays ARM templates seems to be the way to go (maybe BICEPs but I’m doing ARM for now).

But I ran into problems, and I wanted to share with you those problems and how I overcame it. Just your normal post on this blog in other words.

I just had an aha-experience that shook me; first I found it interesting, and then I was ashamed that I haven’t realized this before.

Here it is:

Plans are theoretical

Let me tell you how I realized this and how I think it is important.

I’m writing a boot camp for .NET core and have started to learn a lot of things that have changed since I last coded C#. One of them was shown to me by my good friend John Magnusson. (I’m downplaying his knowledge and skills a lot here since I was close to tears and he sent me a link that saved by bacon, but hey - I’m telling the story :))

Anyhow - John showed me Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Testing that really tells a nice story when it comes to testing an API. In this post I wanted to show you how I used it.

Also - I ran into problems, since I had a database seeding that didn’t work when I used the suggested solution. I will show you how I solved that too, and in the process, tell you a little thing I picked up about xUnit. And...

I’m enjoying myself at work right now, writing a course in C# and for the .NET core platform. Man - this was some time ago.

Naturally I learn a lot. That’s why I became a teacher. I wanted to share a little nugget (NuGet?) of gold that I found.

In one of the early labs in the course I used Selenium to write some end-to-end tests. And in doing so I need to create Driver object, that is both pretty heavy to start and, if left after the test run, quickly will eat your memory.

Now, I was using xUnit as my testing framework and xUnit doesn’t have a notion of test suites. This was bad since I wanted to create the Driver object on the first e2e test and not tear it down until the last.

My initial attempt looked like this:

I have a big project ahead here at Salt - I’m going to write an entire boot camp from scratch. This is done as a single-person project and all my other colleagues are working on as normal around me.

I wanted to report my progress to them so that they know what’s happening and also that I can get some leeway of keeping my focus.

In this post, I wanted to share a very simple prognosis tool that I created based on the data that my work create. As always, it’s not perfect but it will give an accurate enough feel for where I am and when it will be done

I’m rediscovering my first programming love; .NET. I’m having a blast and .NET core keeps giving.

This post is one of those - I can’t believe that I couldn’t find this post on the net somewhere. Or I didn’t look hard enough.

But I wanted to setup Selenium testing, but only use .NET Core and Visual Studio Code on my Mac. Every example I saw was using older versions of .NET core (I’m writing this on .NET core 5) and/or Visual Studio, which I don’t have.

I rarely get paid to write code these days… or that is people rarely ask me to write code. But since I’m a programmer at heart it is one of the tools in my tool belt, regardless of what kind of tasks I’m given.

Today I got asked:

Could you please list all Open Source Licenses we are using, and all the dependencies all our code is using.

Considering we have 130+ repositories I was what the scientist refer to as a boring task.

Let’s make it more fun with code.

I like to automate repetitive and boring things I do in my daily work. This lead to that me write bash scripts from time to time, but the problem is that I’m a newbie script:er. I’m learning as I go.

And the other day I did a cardinal sin in scripting. Not only that - I decided to show the world. Now that is a point to feel ashamed or to learn. I did both.

In this post, I will tell you about how I made my curl-script a little better and a lot safer, but using an old way that’s been in curl for ages.

The background

I was waiting for the summer part of Salt to start and had an hour over. The weather was amazing and I found a nice tree to sit under. Of course, I flipped up the computer...