Life's too short for blogging...

Custom WCF security token

2011-11-21T19:53:00.001Z

This has been hanging around in my drafts for a while. I have just been looking at Secure Token Services and decided to dust this off before posting any of my findings with STS’s. A while back I was involved in a smart client application for a customer that used a mixture of WCF and Microsoft Synchronization Framework for downloading offline data from our system. One of the interesting aspects

Hosting a Mock as a WCF service

2011-09-28T18:48:00.000+01:00

There are a number of times where I have wanted to fire up a dummy WCF service that can be used in unit tests and be able to run some assertions against. Previously I use to write a wrapper class for my mock with the same interface and proxy all the calls to the mocked object as per the following example. [ServiceBehaviour(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single)

yUML–> A web based tool for generating simple UML diagrams for use in blogs, forums and wikis

2011-06-28T18:28:00.001+01:00

I came across yUML viewing someone's answer on Stack Overflow. It allows you to generate quick diagrams using a simple syntax that can then be presented in a blog. With just a few lines of syntax you can generate a diagram and a url that can be inserted into a blog post or forum. [Customer{bg:orange}]+1->*[Order{bg:green}] [Order]++1-items >*[LineItem{bg:red}] using (var streamWriter = new StreamWriter(memoryStream , Encoding.UTF8)) { streamWriter.Write(

Using the IMapper interface with the System.Converter delegate

2010-06-16T17:18:00.000+01:00

Recently I wrote a post about using a standard mapping interface for your mappers which gave the added benefit of providing an easy way to write an extension method for mapping enumerable. As it turns out it also has the added benefit in fitting in with the System.Converter delegate signature in that the signature of the Map method of the IMapper interface is the same as the System.Converter

Support SQLCE BinaryBlob and StringClob in NHibernate without depending on System.Data.SqlServerCe

2010-06-16T10:00:00.001+01:00

Out of the box NHibernate 2 does not support the BinaryBlob or StringClob sql types for SQL Server compact 3.5. This results in NText and Image fields being truncated. One of the common workarounds you can find on the web is to override the existing SqlServerCeDriver and cast the parameter to an SqlCeParameter and manual set the parameter types to NText and Image. using System.Data;

Taking the pain out of parameter validation

2010-06-10T18:38:00.001+01:00

One of the biggest pains I find when writing API components is validating parameters. Now don’t get me wrong I don’t mind validating a parameter and failing quickly to ensure that your component works correctly it’s the tediousness of the code that bothers me. Take the following method signature for example. public void SomeMethod(SomeObject someObject, int maxValue) { <

Configuration ignorance

2010-06-10T11:11:00.001+01:00

A good friend of mine, Stephen Oakman, did a post on how to hide your dependencies on a particular configuration implementation (Using a configuration provider). I wanted to touch on the basics of the post and show how that can be achieved with a complex implementation of a configuration structure using the System.Configuration namespace objects and builds on my original post of Generic

Automatic collection mapping for your mappers

2010-06-09T17:41:00.002+01:00

I was going through our code base the other day and found a large number of mapper objects and their related interfaces. They all looked something like this: public class SomeObjectMapper{ public ObjectA Map(ObjectB source) { //Perform mapping and return. } public IEnumerable MapAll(

Fed up with writing methods to copy one stream to another

2010-06-09T15:45:00.004+01:00

I constantly find myself writing static methods in my applications to copy one stream into another so I finally decided to add an extension method to our internal library. There is a method on the MemoryStream class called WriteTo which does this but I wanted it to be available to all instances of Stream. public static void CopyTo(this Stream input, Stream output, int bufferSize)