Patrick Steele's .NET Blog

Lack of updates...

Haven't updated in a while. My time has been spent in tech design at work (not much coding) and enjoying the holidays with my family. Hopefully, everyone else is having a good time too!

Since I've been so busy with tech design, I'd like to echo Roland's reccommendation for unit tests. They're part of our tech design templates and really improve overall design. I can't tell you how many times that I went back and made mods to my original designs because as I wrote the specs for the unit tests, I realized I had made a mistake. Catching a bug before its even coded? Priceless! :)

Unit Testing Abstract classes

Opinions wanted: How do you write unit tests for abstract (MustInherit in VB.NET) classes? Do you derive a simple class off your abstract class in your unit test assembly? Or do you just write unit tests for the derived classes? Hmmm.....

Find all SQL Identity columns

I had a need today to find all columns in a SQL database that were identity columns (across all tables). Thanks to SQL's system tables, it was a breeze:

select o.name + '.' + c.name 
from syscolumns c, sysobjects o
where c.status & 128 = 128
and o.id = c.id
order by o.name

Technology Backlash!

I don't know what's going on here. First, I have a hard-drive crash that takes a bunch of data with it. I actually took it to one of those data recovery places. It was $95 to look it over, but then it would be anywhere from $1300 - $2500 to fix it. Yikes! No way I could justify spending that kind of money. But I forked over the $95 because I was curious as to what went wrong. A few days later they called with the verdict: It's dead. Totally dead. No recovery possible -- which they said is rare these days to see this kind of crash. At least this way, I don't need to agonize over the decision that spending the money could recover the data...

Then the other day, my wife picks up my Prono remote and it won't turn on! I look it over and nothing looks wrong. I get a paperclip out and press a little reset button on the back and nothing. Argh... I set it back on it's charging cradle and walk away. A few seconds later it chirps. I go back and notice it's working. As I pick it up off the charger, the screen fades away and it's dead again. Seems it now only wants to work sitting on the charger!? I seem to have angered the techno-gods. I'm feeling their wrath.