Here is a nice link that holds a lot of interesting RefCards on various subjects (C#, Ruby, SOA, etc.).

I’ve found it useful several times already. Thanks to 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. Eeeh - 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...

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 Juval 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...