Dot Net Tricks

Deleting all records in all tables in the entire database using NHibernate

2010-01-19T14:43:00Z

This is a great little code snippet I thought I'd share. Before each one of my NUnit or NBehave tests, I clear out all the records from the database using NHibernate. Unfortunately, NHibernate's HQL doesn't seem to do cascade deletes, so you have to delete your tables in the right order. Otherwise you'll get referential integrity errors such as " The DELETE statement conflicted with the FOREIGN KEY constraint" and the query will fail. I didn't want to have to explicitly...(read more)

ASP.NET MVC - Multiple buttons on a single form.

2009-05-06T20:08:00Z

I haven't posted in a while do to being busy with my new job, but I thought I'd just share this code snippet. In the new asp.net mvc framework, you often have the need for a single form, but multiple buttons that each post to a different controller action. In webforms you didn't have to worry about this as all forms did a postback and asp.net created event wiring magic to wire up each button to an event handling method. But with MVC, we're forced to go a little old school. So I created...(read more)

Giving up on the community

2009-02-15T02:34:00Z

I know nobody reads my blog anyway, but I still feel the need to comment (rant) to the blogosphere. The back story goes like this. Joel Spoelsky said some pretty irresponsible things in an interview, calling SOLID principles bureaucratic and saying "(code) quality doesn't matter." Jeff Atwood more or less agreed with him and posted the Ferengi Programmer . There has been a lot of outrage and debate and even Jeffrey Palermo has commented on his blog as well as various codebetter people...(read more)

Introducing SNARF

2009-02-02T23:10:00Z

I'm now part of two open source project, although this one I really want to be hands off. So if anyone is interested in taking it over, feel free. Here's a description from google code: SNARF (Simple, Nhibernate, ActiveRecord Framework) This is a C# .NET class library and set of Codesmith templates for generating code using the ActiveRecord pattern. It uses NHibernate for the underlying persistence in a fashion similar to Castle ActiveRecord. However, it differs in that the database generates...(read more)

I'm part of an open source project!

2009-01-08T00:37:00Z

I'm contributing to the Wilson O/R Mapper project which is now open source and on google code. I'm adding fluent mappings for WORM in the same manner as Fluent NHibernate. Exciting stuff! http://code.google.com/p/wilsonormapper/source/browse/#svn/branches/FluentMappings/Wilson.ORMapper/FluentMappings...(read more)

Found some good code today

2008-12-21T22:01:00Z

I'm hoping this won't offend any of you out there, but most of us developers write crappy code. I'm not fully sure why this is, but even if the database isn't a steaming pile of horse poo, the code usually is. There's often a lot of code duplication, methods and property names that don't make much sense, large, "god-like" classes , massive amounts of nested "if" or "case" statements, etc. I'm not even getting into ORMs, design patterns, DI...(read more)

Die Code-Behind DIE!!!

2008-12-19T15:37:00Z

As mentioned in previous episodes, my team is standardizing on the ASP.NET MVC Framework for web development. One thorn in our sides has been that by default, Visual Studio would create a code-behind for your views automatically, and if you wanted a view that used a strongly typed model, such as ViewPage<Person> or ViewPage<ProductCollection> then you had to create a code-behind file. There were CLR hacks to do this in the code in front, but they were just awful. In webforms, code-behind...(read more)

For the love of God, Normalize you databases!

2008-12-13T02:45:00Z

Despite that stupid presentation about "normalization is for sissies" that went around the net for a while, I'm very pro-normalization. Normalization and the standard Third Normal Form (3nf) simplify data management and application development greatly. This is especially true when writing object-oriented code or using an ORM, but I normalized long before I knew what an object was. For SOME reason, there's developers still out there that choose not to normalize. I ran into this problem...(read more)

TDD + Resharper Payoff - Refactoring

2008-12-11T23:36:00Z

So the project i mentioned the other day in my last post has had minimal need for refactoring. Part of that is because I'm such a super badass developer who always gets things right the first time (yeah right), and part of it is that the project is small enough and young enough that there isn't need for massive changes yet. But today, there was some stuff that had been bugging me, so I decided to do some cleanup, aka refactoring. Specifically: I changed the names of 4 classes. I changed the...(read more)

My current architecture

2008-12-10T14:22:00Z

For the six or seven of you in the world that actually read my blog, you've noticed that i've been pretty quiet lately. So while i'm chomping down breakfast before work, I thought I'd give you a rundown on what i've been doing lately. I'm working on a medium size project that eventually may blow into something larger, which given the current economy would be great. Its a front facing, product catalog, type web project, but there will soon be a comprehensive suite of admin...(read more)

ASP.NET Sucks and It DOES Matter

2008-08-04T01:13:00Z

This is partially in response to this somewhat infamous article by Jeff Atwood: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001119.html In this Jeff mentions that although PHP as a language and platform sucks, it doesn’t matter. Its low barrier to entry has allowed PHP to become the defacto standard for major and minor websites all over the internet, as well as many decent software packages, such as shopping carts and Content Management Systems. The fact is there is a lot of great software written...(read more)

sql server management studio has “backup sets” and “destinations on disk” disabled

2008-05-20T19:56:00Z

I ran into this little gotcha a little while ago, so I thought I’d share it and break my blog silence. One of our clients hosts their own sql server (express) and website, and I kept noticing that there was no way to do a backup. When I went into sql management studio and tried to add a backup destination, it didn’t give an option for file name, only tape. And the “Backup device” section was disabled. Even running the “backup” command from t-sql didn’t work. It gave me an access error. This was my...(read more)

FWDNUG Meeting Notes and Slides

2008-03-25T13:56:00Z

Thanks to Stephen and the other members at the Fort Worth .NET User Group for having me speak. I enjoyed it and hopefully my audience did too. I'm sorry this has taken a while to post, but as promised I have all the slides and a list of resources like Fowler's POEA book in a big zip file. Also there is a VS 2008 solution with a code snippet using ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3. You can download the whole thing here: http://www.dotnettricks.com/downloads/orm_presentation.zip Finally, Kevin...(read more)

I'm speaking at the Fort Worth .NET user group

2008-03-12T13:11:00Z

On March 18th I'll be speaking at the Fort Worth .NET user group at Justin Brands. The topic will be a favorite of mine: O/R Mapping Patterns and Tools. Come by say hello or throw tomatoes. Info is below: http://fwdnug.com/blogs/meetings/archive/2008/03/11/march-2008-meeting.aspx...(read more)

Warn3d By CrueLSaw

2008-03-10T22:37:00Z

Today I got a very interesting request from my boss. There was one of our sites that had suddenly been defaced with the following text: "Warn3d By CrueLSaw" After some research by one of our Senior Developers (Thanks Pete) he found that this CrueLSaw guy was very busy hacking into and defacing classic asp and even a few PHP websites. It was our old friend sql injection--the guy had found the admin part of our site, and plopped in some sql into the password text box like this: ' OR 0...(read more)