Here is a nice link that holds a lot of interesting RefCards. On quite different subject also (C#, Ruby, SOA etc.). Found use of it several times already. Thanks Patrik for the tip.

OK this might be the most misleading error message I’ve seen. I cannot decide on how to describe it… What this means… or what this try to … Actually this happens when one of your mocked objects is mocking a method that returns something and your mocking doesn’t return anything. Eeeeh - that was quite tricky. Got it? Here is an example: When I mock this method: Public Class FacadeObject       Function CreateSomeThing(ByVal aName As String) As Long                End Function         End Class by using the following code to do the mock Expect.Once.On(m_mockadFacadeObject).Method("CreateSomeThing") an exception of RemotingException (ByRef value type parameter cannot be null) will be thrown. Here is another description that you might find easier to understand

I know I will chase this one for ever if I don’t put it up here… We ran into a situation where we needed to tweak the AppSettings-section of an configuration before tests in the build script. Luckily there is help to be found. With the XmlUpdate-task (in the MSBuild Community Tasks) this can be accomplished. IF you know how to write the XPath-query. Here is how (found it here): <XmlUpdate Namespace=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/.NetConfiguration/v2.0” XmlFileName=”$(SourceDir)\Core\ABSuite\ABClient\App.config” Xpath=”//configuration/appSettings/add[@key=’Main.ConnectionString’]/@value” Value=”$(DatabaseConnectionString)” /> Also here is a great site to pick up some XPath-skills.

When we’re doing integration tests we need to find some settings from the exe (yes, we’re batching some stuff - I am sorry ;)) that we are testing. Instead of copying it into the test app.config I discovered a way to read another exe’s configuration - OpenMappedExeConfiguration. Very useful if a tad … ugly maybe.

I have been watching the first three in this series and not only are they a great introduction to ASP.NET MVC, they also introduce TDD in a very methodical and nice way. Follow along here - http://www.asp.net/learn/mvc-videos/#MVCStorefrontStarterKit

I chased this bug for a while - more and more frustrated… This was what happened: I updated a WCF Service Reference and got this error (or actually warning) in the Error List of Visual Studio. Also I saw that the Reference.vb was totally empty. OK - after some trying of my own (why do I do that over and over? Don’t think - steal from others…) I though of searching the Net and of course found the answer in five seconds. Here is a guy that solved it - but the header and description of the post is quite different so I’ll try to give my own explanation here. In the Configure Service Reference… dialog box there is an option “Reuse types in referenced assemblies”. Exactly what that means is hard to grasp (<a href=”http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=” data-reuse+types+in+referenced+assemblies”&meta=” target=” data-_blank”=”“>just try for yourselves</a>) - but I understand it as the tool...

This is problem that has haunted us for the good part of the autumn and winter; early on in our design process we chose to create the WSDL for our services by hand. This decision mainly had to do with that you can express stuff in XSD that WCF-attributes doesn’t support, such as string length etc. Also we were using the ErrorHandlerAttribute found in the excellent book “Programming WCF Services” by Juwal Löwy. What we saw was that even though we had created the wsdl for handling the fault and their details correct, we didn’t get the details over to the client (that is the T of FaultException<T>). We checked the wsdl and the generated client proxy (and it’s wsdl) file over and over, and line by line but just couldn’t find it. And finally it dawned on us… It was Mr Löwy’s fault ;). Seriously - it was the...

To sum up 2008 is not very hard for me - it starts and ends with Abbe (Albert). He was almost a part of our lives at the start of 2008 since he took up considerable space in Elin’s belly. :) He went from: to: In work I don’t think I ever learned so much in one year (TFS, SOA, MSBuild, WCF, Oracle just to mention a few things I have touched during the year). But it come to a cost - where I also lost my ability to leave work at work when I go home. I’ll try to improve that next year - which won’t be hard since I will be home with Abbe for about six months. With the Vasa Band it was also a great year with the recording and release of our CD Priority and a tour of the western parts of Sweden. On top...

Lately I have been asked the question why I have this blog, several times actually. I honestly thought that I wrote that in the first posting I did, but it was very short. Not even when I change into www.marcusoft.net I wrote something about it. But the reason for the blog is, and has always been this simple: I write about things that interest me and when they catches my attention. For several years I did notes in diffrent kind of notebooks at different customers. Always forgot them when I left. So now I have them in one place. I often link to the blog for solutions to problems I have and solve. I then and then write about private stuff also, in the same manner - when it feels good. I write in english to keep my english up to date. So there you have - the reason for...

[UPDATE START] We found a nasty performance bug in the code below. The DeCompress-method copies a string for each turn in the loop. That is a classic problem that creates a new copy of the string for each row. That became a major problem for a 3.8 Mb string… I have now updated the code to use the System.Text.StringBuilder object instead. That took down the speed to about a tenth. Sorry that I didn’t catch that… [UPDATED STOP] We had a quite special need the other day; we wanted to compress a part of our request, namely a XML-string that was sent to us. Most of the examples I found on the net showed how to compress the content of a file. But here is the code that compress a string. The code uses ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib. Here you go: /// <summary> /// Compress strings with ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib /// </summary> public class StringZipper...