Unit testing can be annoying. Sometimes it feels like setting up a delicate house of cards in just the right way and hoping that nobody opens a window to let a breeze knock the whole thing over. If you’re using inversion of control (and you should be), its a little easier because you can use … [Read more…]
Timers are pretty useful. They allow you to define a block of code that will execute on a given interval. It’s the C# version of JavaScript’s setInterval. There’s a lot of different reasons for using a timer, such as persisting updates to a database. Since database calls can be slow, maybe you want to build … [Read more…]
Recently I had an interesting MongoDB query that I wanted to write. I had a document that contained a list, and I wanted to query a specific item out of the list, returning only the fields that I wanted. Here’s a similar dataset: In this example, many different records may be created under the same … [Read more…]
MongoDB is a pretty cool document database that allows you to just toss data into a database without worrying too much about a schema. It’s not quite that easy, of course, because your code might be looking for specific properties, but its simpler than being stuck to a rigid schema. Lists and stuff Recently I … [Read more…]
D3.js is a super cool and very powerful library for creating some really interesting visualizations. One of the problems that I ran into recently was regarding the “this” keyword in D3 functions. For example, in regular old javascript you would do: Which is fine. “this” is scoped to the function, so it would point back … [Read more…]
Recently I was having an issue where a parameter being passed in to my WebAPI call was not being populated correctly. Theoretically all you need to do is add [FromBody] to the route, and it will automatically populate the object from the HTTP message’s body… but that wasn’t working for me Turns out this IS … [Read more…]
Recently I had several small arrays in Javascript that I wanted to combine into one array. It would be easy enough to write a function to accept two arrays, push the values from one into the other, and return the resulting array, but ECMAScript 6 introduced the spread operator (<—a lot more examples in this … [Read more…]
In the last blog post I talked about how to use Moq’s built in SetupSequence to create a “chain” of actions to execute for subsequent calls of the same mocked method. This works great for the simple case, but falls down when you have to do something a little more complicated like, say, issue a … [Read more…]
Say that you’re unit testing and you want a mocked interface to behave differently for different calls to the same method. I was trying to test a TCP listener loop – a TcpListener waits for an incoming connection, does something with it, and then goes back to listening. In essence, the loop will last until … [Read more…]
Sometimes I want to unit test the pieces of my code that are close to the transport layer, but often they are so close to the metal that it is hard to separate them. There’s really not a great way to abstract out the communication layer, so you just have to bite the bullet and … [Read more…]