Archives
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Finally! Entity Framework working in fully disconnected N-tier web app
Entity Framework was supposed to solve the problem of Linq to SQL, which requires endless hacks to make it work in n-tier world. Not only did Entity Framework solve none of the L2S problems, but also it made it even more difficult to use and hack it for n-tier scenarios. It’s somehow half way between a fully disconnected ORM and a fully connected ORM like Linq to SQL. Some useful features of Linq to SQL are gone – like automatic deferred loading. If you try to do simple select with join, insert, update, delete in a disconnected architecture, you will realize not only you need to make fundamental changes from the top layer to the very bottom layer, but also endless hacks in basic CRUD operations. I will show you in this article how I have added custom CRUD functions on top of EF’s ObjectContext to make it finally work well in a fully disconnected N-tier web application (my open source Web 2.0 AJAX portal – Dropthings) and how I have produced a 100% unit testable fully n-tier compliant data access layerfollowing the repository pattern.
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Munq is for web, Unity is for Enterprise
The Unity Application Block (Unity) is a lightweight extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection. It’s a great library for facilitating Inversion of Control and the recent version supports AOP as well. However, when it comes to performance, it’s CPU hungry. In fact it’s so CPU hungry that it makes it impossible to make it work at Internet Scale. I was investigating some CPU issue on a portal that gets around 3MM hits per day and I found unusually high CPU. Here’s why:
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Keep website and webservices warm with zero coding
If you want to keep your websites or webservices warm and save user from seeing the long warm up time after an application pool recycle, or IIS restart or new code deployment or even windows restart, you can use the tinyget command line tool, that comes with IIS Resource Kit, to hit the site and services and keep them warm. Here’s how:
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Do not use “using” in WCF Client
You know that any IDisposable object must be disposed using using. So, you have been using using to wrap WCF service’s ChannelFactory and Clients like this:
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Step by Step screencasts to do Behavior Driven Development on WCF and UI using xUnit
I am trying to encourage my team to get into Behavior Driven Development (BDD). So, I made two quick video tutorials to show how BDD can be done from early requirement collection stage to late integration tests. It explains breaking user stories into behaviors, and then developers and test engineers taking the behavior specs and writing a WCF service and unit test for it, in parallel, and then eventually integrating the WCF service and doing the integration tests. It introduces how mocking is done using the Moq library. Moreover, it shows a way how you can write test once and do both unit and integration tests at the flip of a config setting.
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Rescue overdue offshore projects and convince management to use automated tests
I have published two articles on codeproject recently. One is a story where an offshore project was two months overdue, my friend who runs it was paying the team from his own pocket and he was drowning in ever increasing number of change requests and how we brainstormed together to come out of that situation.