Blog

I had the luck to end last year as speaker on an expert panel in IASA Spain’s latest session about ALM trends and challenges, where we spent the morning talking about, amazing ALM tools, DevOps, People and Emotions. We all know about organizations where designers, developers, testers, operations, security and support work in isolation with minimal or no collaboration at all, having each team in its own functional silo, allowing people to ignore the consequences of their actions.

Continuum is a Canadian science fiction series in which the world, by year 2077, is run by huge hi-tech corporations and is heavily surveilled with few freedoms. The only dissenters are a terrorist organization called Liber-8. When Keira Cameron, a cyber-enhanced cop, attends the execution of a captured group of Liber-8 she’s thrown back in time along with them, to year 2012. Through the 3 seasons you learn that everything the world goes through is consequence of the invention of a wearable bracelet called Halo. A wearable device which measures vital statistics, amount of sleep, food intake, exercise, etc., and also sends signals to the brain to correct any problem it may detect… By year 2077 Halo is used to control the world population.

Recently I’ve been discussing with my friends and coworkers the importance of IT Certifications, which lead us to ask if in today’s highly competitive world, certifications really help Software Developers improve skills or even find their dream job or the rewards they desire. My answer: of course! I studied Chemical Engineering at Universidad Simon Bolivar, Caracas, Venezuela. Throughout my carreer I worked at the university as a programmer. In 1999 I graduated and started to work for a small IT consultant firm and shortly after the first year we had finished the software I was hired to write and it was time to go out to the world install it, give support and the best service we could.

So you’ve deployed your own private NuGet server to IIS but you get this annoying exception trying to push packages: (405) Method Not Allowed Well as stated in many web pages removing WebDAVModule does fix the issue, but be sure you add the configuration in the right section! (not in the elmah section) or the fix wont work!

Recently I’ve been puzzled by the following question: what is the best way to approach networking and to connect with people and companies that will help you survive in this competitive world? I’ve connected with a lot of professionals through social networks (for instance twitter and linkedin), I also collaborate in open source projects in sites such as codeplex and github. The tools provided by those networks allow me connect with people as near as home or as far as another continent, keeping track of any interaction, learning and sharing knowledge.

When you deploy an application to Windowes Azure, your application configuration cannot be changed cause it becomes part of the distributed package. So what can you do if you want to set some dynamic settings (i.e Connection String settings)? First of all you must use the ServiceDefinition.csdef file and add the dynamic settings there.

Recently we performed some test against SQL Azure. We found that our system was throwing an exception cause SQL Azure requires a clustered index in each table (Wanna know why?). So how can you find out what tables are causing the issue? The answer is simple, run the following query and you’ll have the list of tables to fix:

Today I’ve released netDumbster (http://netdumbster.codeplex.com/) netDumbster is a .Net Fake SMTP Server clone of the popular Dumbster (http://quintanasoft.com/dumbster/) netDumbster is based on the API of nDumbster (http://ndumbster.sourceforge.net/default.html) and the nice C# Email Server (CSES) writen by Eric Daugherty. Hope it helps!!! Update: netDumbster source code was moved to a GitHub repo: https://github.com/cmendible/netDumbster

When running a query like the following: var query = nhib-Arms.Where(a => a.LeftHand.Thumb.Length == 1 || a.RightHand.Thumb.Length == 1); Thumb alias was always taken as part of the a.LeftHand association path, therefore leading to wrong results. I’ve worked on patch and test to fix this issue, so Thumb alias is once part of the a.LeftHand association path and once as part of the a.RightHand association path.

Yesterday I had the challenge to redirect – rewrite an url from my public IIS7 server to an internal Apache server. For instance a request to http://www.mysite.com/app handled by IIS should be redirected (using a reverse proxy) to ; http://127.0.0.1:8080/app where the internal Apache is listening. Trying to configure it with the new Application Request Routing (ARR) module from Microsoft was a disappointing task. Once installed, my server stopped serving pages, and I could not find a way to make it work.

Yesterday I found myself stucked with a strange exception while programming a unit test using Rhino Mocks. Supose you have an interface like the following one. public interface ITest { object Freak(); } You can try a mock like the following: var test = MockRepository.GenerateMock(); test.Expect(t => t.Freak()).IgnoreArguments() .WhenCalled(x => x.ReturnValue = "THIS IS A RETURN VALUE") .Repeat.Any(); Calling test.Freak(); will result in a return value of “THIS IS A RETURN VALUE"

I’ve been working on xVal.WebForms for the last month, as a consecuence it’s Project Coordinator John Rummel has decided to add me as an official developer. So now I’m on board. Thanks John. xVal.WebForms Team.

A friend came with two issues concerning my recent post about xVal.webForms ValidationGroups and CausesValidation support. 1.- Supress Validation was being rendered as many times as ModelValidators where in the page. 2.- When more than one ModelValidator control was in place, xVal.AttachValidator script options could be incomplete, specifically the valgroups, cause the loop through page collections was done in the OnInit method of the controls before the page control tree was complete.

In one of our recent projects we needed a behavior like the ASP.Net ValidationGroups and also be able to relay on the CausesValidation of all controls implementing IButtonControl interface control. So the first issue I faced was that jquery-validate plugin version 1.5.1 (The one that xVal.WebForms uses) does not support grouping in an ASP.Net way. I found the solution to this first problem in this article: http://plugins.jquery.com/node/7044. I did some tests on worldspawn work and did not find any problem with the implementation.

I’ve been working for years with CSLA to create business layer objects. Recently I started using XVal 1.0 and XVal.WebForms 0.1 for client side validation. I started enforcing our rules as DataAnnotations and also in CSLA AddBusinessRules() method. So if a property of type string was required I used a StringLength DataAnnotation and also a CSLA.Validation.CommonRules.StringMaxLength rule in our business object.

Recently I found out about xVal.WebForms project at CodePlex.com. Its a good implementation of XVal for ASP.Net WebForms made by John Rummell. I missed Validation Summary support so I upgraded John’s code so it could work with XVal 1.0. I submitted two patches modifying ModelValidator.cs and xVal.jquery.validate.js. These changes are now part of the Trunk repository as you can see here:

We’ve been working with DbLinq for a while now, at HexaSystems and recently using it together with Dynamic Linq and SQLite I programed a call to the Count method of a Queryable object as follows: public static int Count(this IQueryable source) { if (source == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("source"); return (int)source.Provider.Execute( Expression.Call( typeof(Queryable), "Count", new Type[] { source.ElementType }, source.Expression)); } I noticed that when doing so against a DbLInq Table object the following method is called: