Jason Mauss' Blog Cabin

Every now and then I read something or have a thought that affects the way I think about something so greatly that I feel compelled to tell others about it. Since this blog is the only way for me to tell those that might care, (I don't think any close friends or family care about different ways of managing SCM repositories) I'm doing it here.

For the piece of software I'm about to build, I need a way of implementing licensing. I've read product information about XHEO's Licensing components, and they seem to fit my needs pretty well. I just thought I'd throw the question out there to others reading this post - do you know of other licensing products that work well with .NET software?

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.

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.

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?

This post is for anyone curious about how my DevCampus project is coming along.

I picked up a couple of new books recently that cover testing topics related to development.

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: