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.

I am so proud. My evil scheme to keep my calendar(s) in sync got tested for real today.

Got to new customer. Installed Outlook to Google Calendar. Started Outlook. Viola! All my events from my other calendars in place with the ones from my customer. So now they will not book me on days when I have other assignments etc.

The only thing is that you cannot think to much about it because it will drive you mad. My customer Outlook is synched with Gmail, my Avega outlook is also synched with the same account to Gmail. My phone synchs to Gmail… But it works. ‘Nuff said.

One thing that I really love being on a contract is that you’re almost immediately is forced to find solutions, whereas on a leisure project you rather do something else…

Here is another great tool; AutoMapper. It’s a framework that do all of that tedious mapping code you’re doing in for ViewModels or Messages in services. Boring and tedious to write and test. AutoMapper takes care of that – using a lot of Conventions.

Be sure to see the screencast that introduce a lot of the possibilities.

In my previous post, I shared my frustrations with TDD and how to effectively start with it. BDD (Behavior Driven Development) seems to be the answer, but the .NET frameworks available for BDD can be quite perplexing. Many either have unconventional syntax or are built on top of other tools that are hard to work with.

SpecFlow appears to be a more approachable solution. It’s designed with inspiration from RSpec, Cucumber, and Ruby, but tailored for the .NET and C# environment. It offers a more familiar style for .NET developers.

Check out the SpecFlow website for more information. You can find a silent screencast that introduces its syntax and workflow, as well as great resources to get started.

Interestingly, SpecFlow even seems to support Swedish, as noted here. Kudos to the SpecFlow team for their excellent work!

I plan to explore SpecFlow further as...

I’ve been experimenting with ASP.NET MVC and StructureMap (an IOC container), and the integration has been quite smooth. For guidance on combining StructureMap with ASP.NET MVC, check out Elijah Manor’s blog post. Be cautious of the favicon issue.

I’m also using NHibernate and Fluent NHibernate for a cleaner configuration compared to XML. If you need to set specific properties in Fluent NHibernate, this Stack Overflow thread provides a helpful example. Additionally, the TekPub NHibernate series and Kona project examples are great resources.

Now, onto the topic of TDD. While I appreciate TDD as my preferred coding method, I’m grappling with its application at a higher level. For example, how do I decide when to introduce a repository or an IOC container, and should I TDD the IOC code?

I’ve sought advice from the Swedish ALT.NET group and found that BDD and the concept of...

I happened to run into a feature I didn’t know of… Visual Studio 2010 (beta still… soon RC) includes a function for managing different .config-files for different environments. And support for transforming them on build/publish.

Here is a MSDN-article that introduces the concept and use it. And here is an article on the subject.

Pretty cool since up to now you’ve had to do it manually with build-tasks… Not so trivial.