If you find yourself writing a lot of the same code (or copy/pasting it) for similar constructs, you should probably consider using generics. It allows you to write a base class full of functionality that is basically the same across all of different classes, but in a way that doesn’t tie you to a specific … [Read more…]
In this post I talked about building out a configuration service that could be split into various areas of concerns so that each piece can be injected where it makes sense (without all of the noise of the rest of the configuration). Previously, the registration looked like this: Reflection With reflection, we can loop through … [Read more…]
Enums are useful because they help you avoid magic numbers. You can write your code in a way that is easy to read and understand from the human’s perspective, which, at the end of the day, is pretty important. Exposing enums on your Web API I want to share my enums with other things, notably … [Read more…]
I’m writing this down because I find that I’ve googled it a couple of times and it always seems to take longer to figure out than I think it should. Say you have a number, but you want it to be padded with leading zeroes. So, 42 => 00042. In my case, I was trying … [Read more…]
In this day and age, you don’t usually need to think about saving memory. Need a whole number? Just use an int! Who really cares if the maximum value will never get above 255? Using a byte is just archaic! Well, if you’re looking at optimizing network traffic or database usage, those bytes could add … [Read more…]
In the last post I talked about using and extending IActionResult to return your preferred HttpStatus code in your ASP.NET MVC controllers. But how do you write unit tests that make sure that you’re returning what you expect? Your controllers will return one of these: IActionResult There’s nothing on this interface that you can easily … [Read more…]
When I’m designing a RESTful API, I like to use the correct verbs for the correct actions, and return HTTP status codes that convey the correct message. Sure, its easy to just return a 200 OK for everything, but its a little more useful to return 204 No Content if your client shouldn’t navigate away … [Read more…]
Recently I had an issue where I was trying to create a stubbed/mocked version of a SOAP service locally. I ran my web application, my client connected, my service got the request, sent back the response and… the client didn’t like it. Not sure why… everything should be working. So I wanted to look at … [Read more…]
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…]