Little Architecture Huddle

"This is octalforty Wizardby, a powerful yet easy to use database continuous integration & schema migration framework primarily targeting .NET. The latest release is Alpha 3. "

"Fluent Assertions is a set of .NET extension methods that allow you to more naturally specify the expected outcome of a TDD or BDD-style test. We currently use it in all our internal and client projects, and it is used in many open-source projects."

"I began writing tests around 8 years ago and I must say this revolutionized my way of developing code. In this blog post, I'd like to group and share several non-trivial feedbacks gained over all these years of practicing real-world testing."

"There are quite of lot of things that I want to put into the framework, but it is functional in its current state. One of the goals for Nancy is to make it run on other environment and platforms, other than ASP.NET / IIS and there are spikes taking place to run it on Mono with FastCGI, making it possible to run on a bunch of other platforms. However, although this is the goal, the current source code does not provide any helpers to make that possible. Right now it only ships with an IHttpHandler that acts as an adaptor between ASP.NET / IIS and the Nancy engine."

"Summary: In this paper we'll look at the new Entity Framework 4 that ships with .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010. I'll discuss how you can approach it's usage from a model-first perspective with the premise that you can drive database design from a model and build both your database as well as your data access layer declaratively from this model. The model contains the description of your data represented as entities and relationships providing a powerful approach to working with ADO.NET, creating a separation of concerns through an abstraction between a model definition and its implementation."

"PetaPoco is a tiny, fast, single-file micro-ORM for .NET and Mono. Like Massive it's a single file that you easily add to any project Unlike Massive it works with strongly typed POCO's Like Massive, it now also supports dynamic Expandos too - read more Like ActiveRecord, it supports a close relationship between object and database table Like SubSonic, it supports generation of poco classes with T4 templates Like Dapper, it's fast because it uses dynamic method generation (MSIL) to assign column values to properties"

"Bad data always seems to appear when, and where, one least expects it. Sam explains the great value of a defensive approach based on constraints to any team that is developing an application in which the data has to be exactly right, and where bad data could cause consequential severe financial damage. It is perhaps better seen as creating a test-driven database"

"Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, html and prose. You'll love the slick user interface and extraordinary features."

"In todays programming IDEs, web development and JavaScript were little more than an afterthought. With their roots dating back to the 90's, they haven't adjusted to the current needs of internet application development, they are difficult to extend and they use far too many resources. Cloud9 is a state-of-the-art IDE that runs in your browser and lives in the cloud, allowing you to run, debug and deploy applications from anywhere, anytime. A complete game-changer that will change the way we develop applications forever."

"This post reflects on the steps I needed to perform to create my first Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) application from zero to Hello World. It can serve as a bootstrap for starting developing Claims-Aware ASP.NET application using Windows Identity Foundation (WIF). "

"Imagine a world where you don't have to worry about authentication. Imagine instead that all requests to your application already include the information you need to make access control decisions and to personalize the application for the user. "

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"State machines. State charts. Automata. Whatever name you may have heard them called, they are a great tool for some situations."

"2 Want to build a successful web app? Then it's time to Get Real. Getting Real is a smaller, faster, better way to build software. Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics, wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing."

" Julie Lerman is recognized as the foremost expert outside of Microsoft on Microsoft's ADO.NET Entity Framework."

"A large number of the world's applications manipulate money values. Here is a convenient, high-performance money structure for the CLR which handles arithmetic operations, currency types, formatting, and careful distribution and rounding without loss."

"Why are so many sites vulnerable to these well-known holes? Probably because it's insanely hard for programmers to solve the fundamental "strings problem" at the heart of these vulnerabilities. The problem itself is easy to understand, but we humans aren't equipped to carry out the solution. Simply put, we just plain suck at keeping a bazillion different strings straight in our heads, let alone consistently and reliably rendering their interactions safe whenever they cross paths in a modern web application. It's easy to say, "just escape the darn things," but it's hard to get it right, every single time."

" I would be willing to place a bet that most computer programmers have, on multiple occasions, expressed an opinion about the desirability of certain kinds of type systems in programming languages. Contrary to popular conception, that's a great thing! Programmers who care about their tools are the same programmers who care about their work, so I hope the debate rages on. "

"We've all seen the statistics[1], and likely experienced first-hand, the reality of project failure. The majority of software projects continue to be classified as failures. In thinking about this situation we can see that there are a few different ways in which a project can fail (clearly this is not an exhaustive list!):"

"SafePeak is a plug-and-play Dynamic Database Caching Solution, designed to improve data access performance for Applications built on SQL Server. It offloads the read queries and stored procedures which perform "Select" by dynamically caching in-memory result sets, thereby reducing read response time and overall database load."