Archives
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VSS Tips & Tricks
I noticed today on Korby Parnell's blog he highlighted a comment I left in regards to a VSS Performance post he made. I actually copied and pasetd that comment straight from an article I had written on VSS a long time ago so, I figured I would post that VSS article in it's entirety for anyone that might like to read more about some useful feaures of VSS. I'll probably include this article with DevCampus content when I add content to the site too. I've personally found the items discussed to be useful to me in my everyday development tasks.
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VSS Tips & Tricks
For most Microsoft development teams, Visual Source Safe (VSS) is chosen as the Source Code Management tool before alternatives (like Vault or CVS) are even compared. What this means is that if you work on one of these teams and you’re managing concurrent development, you’ll likely be doing so with the help of VSS. It’s also fair to say that most developers or de-facto VSS administrators don’t ever get a minute worth of training on how to use the features provided by VSS let alone how VSS works behind the scenes. In this article I will show you how to use VSS to automate certain processes and discuss how to use features you might not know exist.
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Unit Testing and Mock Objects
Last night I read chapter 6 of Pragmatic Unit Testing - In C# with NUnit which covered using mock objects. I found the idea of mock objects interesting but, despite the examples given in the book, had a hard time trying to think of some good cases for using mock objects. Sure, the network could become unavailable, hard drives can fail, memory failures can happen, etc. I'm curious what other NUnit and perhaps DotNetMock users have found to be useful cases for employing mock objects in their unit tests. Anyone care to share their experiences?
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DevCampus status update
This post is for anyone curious about how my DevCampus project is coming along.
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New Unit Testing Books
I picked up a couple of new books recently that cover testing topics related to development.
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What's wrong with this T-SQL? #2
Hint: Today's question is pretty easy if you understand which SQL Server data type are valid for which operations with user-defined functions. What you want to build is a scalar-value function named GetBooleanTextFromInt that returns a boolean text string based on an integer passed to it. So if you pass 0 (zero) to it, it returns the text 'False'. Any other integer value passed to it should return the text 'True'. For example:
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What's wrong with this T-SQL? #1
In an effort to increase my T-SQL skills, and possibly help others learn T-SQL better, I'm kicking off a series of posts today that will show a T-SQL batch that has a problem with it, and after people have had ample time to try to solve the problem, I will post the answer.
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Constructor chaining in VB.NET?
I came across some C# code today where a constructor had a few overloads, all of which contained about 10 lines of the exact same initialization code (for private members). The only difference was that some of the constructors allowed you to pass in values for some of the properties. I refactored the code to use constructor chaining, for example:
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What books should I buy?
Next month, when Amazon's quarterly period for their Associates program ends, I'll be getting a gift certificate for about $70. I figure this is enough to buy at least 2 books, maybe 3. I'd like to get back in the habit of reading some technical books, so I figured I'd ask for some recommendations from my readers. Here are some titles I'm considering:
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Blogs at VBCity.com!
I happened to be checking my blog url (http://weblogs.asp.net/jamauss) tonight over at Technorati (a bit of ego-surfing if you will) and noticed I had an inbound link from the man behind VbCity.com and DevCity.net, Serge Baranovsky. Upon further inspection it turns out that Serge has set up blogs for the VbCity community here, using .TEXT. If you've done VB development with any regularity (like I have) I'm sure you've stumbled across VbCity while finding answers to your problems. Both VbCity and DevCity are great resources and both are part of the CodeWise Community of websites. Give them a look if you haven't already. And if you're interested in keeping up with the latest on VB, subscribe to Serge's blog. I'm sure he'll be posting interesting VB information in forthcoming posts. (Don't worry Serge - no pressure!)
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Cool JavaScript trick
For those of you that worry about spam and your e-mail address being publicly visible on the internet, this one is dedicated to you.