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…]
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…]
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…]
Have you ever wanted to have a web server to just return 200 OK no matter what it is fed? Basically, a web server to just say: No matter what? Recently I was working on a solution that was logging to a server that I didn’t have access to because I wasn’t inside of the … [Read more…]