I have heard a lot about REST and RESTful services but never have had the opportunity to work in project that uses that architectural style of working. So sadly I haven’t learned it.

Here is a short and sweet introduction to the subject that explains REST in a good way.

So – as I understand it – it’s just HTTP. The way HTTP is meant to be (URL to each resource, stateless, hyperlinks between resources and usages of the HTTP verbs). I like the simplicity.

I have looked so long for this; a short and sweet description on how to compact Virtual PC images. Here it is: http://kurtsh.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!DA410C7F7E038D!1902.entry

1. Clear out the machine of filler I recommend installing CCLEANER.EXE from http://ccleaner.com which deletes all temporary files from the Windows installation, Internet Explorer cache, the Recycle Bin, and any number of other “garbage”/”temp” directories in the VPC.
2. Disable hibernation If you have hiberation turned on, there’s a colossal sized file called hiberfil.sys in the root of the .VHD.  Go into Power options in Control Panel and disable hiberation to get rid of this file.
3. Capture the Virtual Disk Precompactor .ISO In the menu of Virtual PC windows for your machine, capture the Virtual Disk Precompactor .ISO file which is located at: c:\program files\microsoft virtual pc\virtual machine additions\virtual disk precompactor.iso
4. Run the Precompactor Go to My Computer and double click on the mounted disk.  It will...

Last Thursday I facilitated a Elevate-workshop, Avega on BDD with SpecFlow. It was, as always, a very nice learning experience for me, and hopefully also for the participants.

I wanted to take some time to put down my thoughts and findings about the framework, BDD in general and some other stuff I have ran into.

BDD – Behaviour driven design

I don’t want to go into explaining BDD since it’s been done several times before (I can really recommend the last Steven Sanderson post – excellent!) in a much better ways than I could ever do. Go on and read them if you want – I’ll wait right here.

But I can share some aha-moments and experiences that has surfaced for me when preparing and doing the workshop.

It’s not in the tool

First,...

After my last post I cannot withhold you from this nugget. It’s a guy (Todd) that have created some MSBuild targets to call SOAPUi from a build script. I am about to try it out… I’ll get back to you if I run into problems.

[UPDATED] Yup - it worked! Great! Thanks Todd.

Still have some issues in that the switch /endpoint will override all the endpoints in the SOAPUi project… But I’m on it…

[UPDATED AGAIN]

See this on how to solve the endpoint problem.

I have already blogged about SOAPUi but then it was more me thinking and seeing it was a good idea to use SOAPUi to do testing of service.

Now I have actually done this – and I love it so far. In the last project where we our deliverable was a service I think we spent about 30% of our time creating and maintaining the test client.

Not to speak about all the time we had to spend explaining for the client that “no this is NOT the GUI you will see later on”.

So the thought of a general test client for SOAP services is very compelling. And SOAPUi has done a great job making your job easy and fun… Almost all of the time.

They have an amazing amount of documentation. I guarantee that everything I am about to tell...

I have once again been forced into using VB.NET which I am not very fond of.

My points up to now has been that the language in itself is not that bad. But the support (refactoring etc.) in Visual Studio is much worse than for C#. Also, there is a culture in the VB.NET community (as I understand) to hide complex stuff from your user. So for example you cannot see the references you have in your project until you hit “Show all files”. Another example for the sub-par support you get when using VB.NET.

My final point up to now is that the most common reason to chose VB.NET over C# is that you have VB6-programmers that is to be converted into VB.NET programmers. The problem is that VB.NET automatically (yeah, you can and SHOULD turn it off) include the Microsoft.VisualBasic in all new projects....

I have started to take a look at git. It looks great and all, but I am not a command line guy…

This quick reference made my life a bit easier.

I been looking around for some way of (regression)testing the WCF service we will build in my current project. I will not write another client and be forced to maintain it during the project. This took loads of time the last time I tried it. The thing I will settle on is SOAPUi, which seems just awesome. I have already written about it – but didn’t get the time to try it for real. I sure will now! But there are others – many of the free. Just see for yourself. A nice complement is WSDLDisco that creates a portal for your services. This is a way to open up for ad-hoc testing for project members that not is comfortable with XML or concepts as requests/responses.

I actually thought that this was going to be a small thing. The Unity application block is Microsoft’s IoC-container, part of the Enterprise Library. The Policy Injection application block (PIAB) is Microsoft’s AOP framework, also part of the Enterprise Library.

You’d think that it would be easy to integrate the two… But it’s not… that simple. Actually that is stranger than it first sound because apparently they are calling each other internally.

OK – I want it to be easy to combine them, so I have written two extension methods of UnityContainer that make it easer.

Here is the extension methods:

And here is some tests showing the usage:

Of course I haven’t thought this out by myself. That takes time. I want things fast. So I steal ;). Thanks goes to this blogpost...

This is a bit geeky but it actually has mostly true stuff in it:

Thanks Anders Granåker for a great tip.

But the guys from Rails Envy is not far behind in the geekery…