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 geeky world…

OK – this was almost driving me crazy.

For demonstration purposes I had used the auto mapping feature of Fluent NHibernate.  In a very standard way – I used all of the conventions out of the box.

Except… I forgot to check the conventions. For example for primary keys the convention is to name it Id. Exactly that! Not ID or id or anything.

I ran into this problem when I tried to re-open a solution I did a while back when labbing with Fluent NHibernate and SQLite.

Behind the cryptic error message lies and easy solution; I was running the 32-bit version of the SQLite-driver and runtime. That’ doesn’t fly on my Windows 7 64-bit machine.

Here is a more through description and here is a link to the latest version of SQLite that will get you all the version (32 and 64 bits) of the SQLite.

OK – VB.NET is on the subject again. As I remember there was two things that led to big arguments and confusions: Casting and arrays.

I’ve already blogged about how arrays are handled here.

Here is an article that describes how casting is done in VB.NET. It also compares with C# which great for understanding.

And here is the points in short:

And just for the record… VB.NET delenda est…I don’t like using it - but I have to.

I’m back with Visual Studio 2008 after a few months only doing Visual Studio 2010 stuff. And… you miss some stuff. Things get old so fast. Sad.

Here’s some nifty tools that get you a bit closer; PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008.

Aah – now it feels a bit better.