Entity Framework Schema Translations

You should have different setup environments, right. Normally something like dev, test (or staging) and production. This implies to have different DBs as well. At work we have Oracle databases and there we don't really have different DB "instances" but different schemas, depending on the environment we deploy to. This post presents an approach of allowing to dynamically "rewrite" the schema defined in the EF mappings in an easy to use way.

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Testing and the Single Responsibility Principle

Automated testing is hard! Therefore, if you're about to learn it, just keep going. Resist the initial learning curve as afterwards it'll allow you to adopt a completely different programming style. A common problem I've observed is that (mainly) "testing newbies" tend to create huge, bloated tests cases which quickly start to get unmanageable. Usually this discourages them and they abandon their tests. So what's the key?

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UX: Why GitHub for Windows is better than VS TFS Integration

Did you already try GitHub for Windows? It's created in a modern Win8 looking style. Initially it actually feels a little bit odd, but the more I use it, the more I like it...I even start to slowly abandon the so much loved Git Shell again. Is that good? Anyway, yesterday I had just committed a piece of source in GitHub for Windows and then a couple of seconds later in VS2010 using TFS. The experience is much worse. Why?

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An Example of Test-Driven Bugfixing

Unfortunately many people still don't use a test-driven approach during development. That's sad given the bunch of advantages automated tests give you. One of my favorite is regression testing. Since I just spotted a bug in my codebase, I'll take the opportunity to quickly document the bugfixing approach I'm usually applying.

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Why $.extend(someObj, anotherObj) might be dangerous!

You often have the need to merge two objects. A common use case is that of combining parameters for a $.ajax call. jQuery has a nice function for that, namely jQuery.extend. The function definition is something like jQuery.extend(target, [object 1], [object 2]). But attention, this might have dangerouse side effects if not used properly!

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IE8 Trouble Continued...Hangs on Dropdown Selection

The trouble seems to continue. In one of our apps, when clicking on a dropdown list, IE8 hang up completely. I quickly searched for similar problems and apparently IE has its issues with dropdowns. Anyway, here's a quick guide to a fix that worked for me.

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Strange Error When Downloading File in IE8 from SSL Site

A couple of days ago, one of our clients called indicating that he wasn't able to download a file from our server. The file was basically generated on the fly from our ASP.net MVC backend. I tried it and obviously it "worked on my machine". After quite some investigation it turned out that nice, lovely IE played his role again.

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Setting up my Developer Machine

Developers need to have fast machines! Today I just returned from a week of holidays at Kos (Greece). Amazing! So you might imagine that returning to work is usually less pleasant ;), but that changed when I opened Outlook and saw the email from our systems department that my new developer machine setup was ready.

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