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 forever if I don’t put it up here…

We encountered a situation where we needed to tweak the AppSettings section of a configuration before running tests in the build script.

Luckily, there is a solution available. With the XmlUpdate task (from the MSBuild Community Tasks), you can accomplish this—if you know how to write the XPath query.

Here’s how to use it (I found this example 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)" />

Additionally, if you need to brush up on your XPath skills, check out this XPath tutorial for some great examples.

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 and got increasingly frustrated. Here’s what happened: I updated a WCF Service Reference and encountered the error (or actually a warning) in the Error List of Visual Studio. Additionally, the Reference.vb file was completely empty.

After some experimentation and frustration (why do I always try things myself before searching for a solution?), I decided to look online. Fortunately, I found the answer quickly.

Travis Spencer’s blog provided a solution. Although the title and description of the post were quite different, the solution was what I needed.

In the “Configure Service Reference” dialog box, there is an option called “Reuse types in referenced assemblies.” This option is a bit vague in its purpose—essentially, it means the tool attempts to download the assemblies that the service is referencing.

To solve the issue, you don’t need to fully understand this setting. Simply uncheck...

This problem 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 was mainly due to the need to express details in XSD that WCF attributes don’t support, such as string length.

We were also using the ErrorHandlerAttribute from the excellent book “Programming WCF Services” by Juwal Löwy.

What we observed was that, even though we had created the WSDL for handling faults and their details correctly, we didn’t get the fault details over to the client (i.e., the T of FaultException<T>). We checked the WSDL and the generated client proxy (and its WSDL) file over and over, line by line, but just couldn’t find the issue.

Finally, it dawned on us… It was Mr. Löwy’s fault. Seriously, it was the use...

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. :)

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 came at a cost—I 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 of that, we did two great Christmas concerts at...

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 -...

[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…

[UPDATE STOP]

We had a quite special need the other day; we wanted to compress a part of our request, namely an 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 compresses a string. The code uses ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib. Here you go:

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