Microwave Chocolate Cake In A Mug In 5 Minutes
I don’t normally blog about non-IT related things (although recently i’ve felt that less and less), but food is so much like a second profession to me (the eating part, not the cooking part), that i couldn’t NOT share this link.
i want to try this out now… 
World of Warcraft: It’s entirely possible to drop one of your professions, take up enchanting, and be at lvl 275 enchanting (high enough to d/e Outland blues) in one weekend. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise – i did it.
Only downside is that you’ll spend upward of 1200g. I’m sure i could have easily continued onto lvl 300 (high enough to d/e any game item), but I ran out of money
I was writing a mock test yesterday which had some explicit expectations about the number of times a particular member would get called.
This seemed all too weird at the time. There was nothing different in either case which should cause this problem. The only clue I had was the fact that when running within the debugger, I was getting unexpected results, and when running independently of the debugger, it worked as expected. This lead to the conclusion that the problem is caused by debugging the test. Ie: The act of observing my test run, is changing the test execution itself. Also known as the Observer Principle.
The answer to the problem is far less exciting. I realised after a few minutes of tinkering that I had some of the mocked member fields hooked into my Watch window. So upon each step and execution, the Watch was re-evaluating my members which in turn was eating up my predefined expectations!
It totally makes sense when you realise what’s going on, but until that point this problem exhibits itself in a very weird way…
[UPDATE]
I’ve since discovered that this sort of bug (which changes itself while you probe it) is also known as a Heisenbug
I’ve seen this now twice in about 30 mins, and its bugging me.
One of the developers i work with is writing code like this:
string postingUrl = CmsHttpContext.Current.Posting.Url.ToLower(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
Whats bugs me with this code is that it shows no understanding or care for defensive programming.
Q1: Why do you assume that CmsHttpContext.Current is safe? Sure, within ASP.NET the framework creates a new Context for you upon request, and (in this case) Microsoft CMS wraps the HttpContext and guarantees you a copy of a context for you. Under these known conditions, the CmsHttpContext.Current is safe.
Now that’s been chained onto Posting, which throws the exception. Why assume that you’ve hit a posting? Why assume that there would be a posting at all? This kind of lack of thinking just demonstrates lazy programming, to me.
*grumble*
The great SQL Performance saga continued today, taking a turn for the….ah…..different…
Facts:
This leads me to conclude that the behaviour of the server is fine, and that the system is doing everything expected of it. Which leads me to ask the question why is an index seek taking so long to run off the disk?
Well it turns out there is in fact a way to determine the level of fragmentation of SQL indexes.
I’d written a simple query based on this content to calculate the amount of fragmentation on the live server’s indexes, and needless to say i’m a bit shocked. I sincerely thought this is something that the “qualified” DBA consultant on the other end was capable of doing, however in his defense he might have forgotten to run it and then moved onto the next high-paying job, leaving us to sweep up the shambles.
I’m no DBA….Although if I’m correct i’ll be justified in calling myself one and, i’ll also have a few more letters to add to the end of my job title and hopefully a zero to throw on the end of my salary….all for doing SFA.
FWIW, here is the query which revealed all the gory details:
select i.object_id, i.index_id, i.name, s.avg_fragmentation_in_percent, s.avg_fragment_size_in_pages
from sys.indexes i
JOIN sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats(DB_id('DATABASE_NAME_GOES_HERE'), null, null,null, null) s
on i.object_id = s.object_id
AND i.index_id = s.index_id
where (
s.avg_fragmentation_in_percent > 0
OR s.avg_fragment_size_in_pages > 0
)
AND i.index_id <> 0
I’ve been wondering recently whether it’s important to take a purist line or whether to be practical about the way something is developed or the tools we use…In almost all cases, I agree fundamentally with the purist point of view, but i’m a man of practicality, meaning practicality wins out most times….So why then do I second-guess myself this time around compared to any other time?
The situation I have is that i’m the lead maintainer of a legacy project. I can’t *really* call it legacy, because the client (whom i know reads this blog so i have to tip-toe around here 
) invests money into updating their website and introducing new features. But as far as technologies go, ASP.NET 1.1 is well considered legacy. The website was written originally with no unit testing…at all. In fact, i was lucky enough to introduce TDD and unit testing in particular to my company and at least forge a stream in that direction.
After working on the project for nearly 18 months, and in that time introducing hundreds of unit tests, i’ve come to realise just how much of the test code i’d written was boilerplate Setup/Teardown of database content for unit testing. Remember this is a legacy project, so although IoC/DI are great concepts, breaking dependencies on a large project such as this wont happen with the click of a finger, so some heavyweight unit testing is unavoidable if I wanted to do unit testing at all (which i do).
The kind of Setup/Teardown code i’m talking about is pretty intense:
Yes, a lot of this common functionality is encapsulated into helper classes, but some unit tests are still turning out 30-40 lines long. The test code is becoming harder to maintain because there’s just so much of it, and although i’m not quite as anal about using regions, I despise the thought of hiding code in a method with regions (here’s one thing the purist part of me won’t relent over 
). And worse yet, because of all the transactional overhead from inserting/rolling-back and pre/post-checking i’m sure our test-run times are suffering too (probably in the order of 10-20 seconds, but its the purist argument that they should be as fast as possible)
So my solution? To generate a specific database used with the intention of being in a known state for the test fixtures. Then, if i need to prepare the database for some tests, I only need to insert data into the testing database and that’s that. My test is no longer responsible for setting up of a stack of test data and ensuring its perfectly clean afterward. I could hire a new junior developer tomorrow, and it wouldn’t have disastrous side-effects if his unit tests didn’t sweep up after themselves (because they wouldn’t necessarily need to!)
We did this in my last job, and the approach worked pretty well from a practical aspect, however I always felt that it violated the purist argument that a unit test is:
The first two points i’ve talked to death about. It’s the third one which i’ve either made up in my head to try and take away my sleep at night, or it’s really a sounds piece of advice that your test should be self-containing and not relying on anything being pre-configured within it’s environment in order to do whatever it needs to do. Which quite frankly is a right-royal PITA.
So i’m not happy about it…I’ve concluded (again) that practicality will win out and having this database is not such a terrible thing because the long-term benefits it provides such as faster test execution time, and (more importantly) cleaner code far outweigh any unjustified idealism I may or may not hold.
I’ll do it, but i’ll argue with myself about it for a while to come yet…
OMFG.
I think that just about sums up the Fully LINQified Raytracer….I missed this when it hit the blogosphere back in October last year, but wow i’m just gobsmacked….
I found this while reading about Mono’s 100% compliance with .NET 3.0
I feel so suddenly inadequate in what I do…..
I’ve long been noticing the following errors come up at the end of our NUnit testrun, but never had a chance to look into it in detail until now…They’ve never resulted in a broken build, and they do clearly look like something happening outside the scope of our unit test (even if it was caused by our test)
Unhandled exceptions:
1) : System.InvalidOperationException: This action is invalid when the mock object is in verified state.
at Rhino.Mocks.Impl.VerifiedMockState.MethodCall(IInvocation invocation, MethodInfo method, Object[] args)
at Rhino.Mocks.MockRepository.MethodCall(IInvocation invocation, Object proxy, MethodInfo method, Object[] args)
at Rhino.Mocks.Impl.RhinoInterceptor.Intercept(IInvocation invocation, Object[] args)
at ProxyInterfaceSystemSystemObject_System_DataIDataReader_Rhino_Mocks_InterfacesIMockedObject_System_Runtime_SerializationISerializable.Close()
at ExternalDataComponent.Data.DataRecordEnumerator.Dispose()
at ExternalDataComponent.Data.DataRecordEnumerator.Finalize()
Any obvious names have been masked to protect the innocent/stupid.
The error message quite is quite obvious in what the problem is, and leaves little doubt as to where it’s originating from….But the difficulty in this problem is finding out what causes the exception in the first place.
After attaching the VS debugger to NUnit, and turning on “Break On Exception” for the System.InvalidOperationException exception, All i would get is a debugger breaking into a location which was not relevant to any executing code, and the entire call stack consisted of non-managed code.
After a lot of thought, and with a little luck, i realised that what’s happening is that some of our tests are creating a stub object and passing it into the ExternalDataComponent during testing. The ExternalDataComponent is assuming that it is safe to call dispose on the object and thus doing so. The Rhino.Mocks framework then throws an exception when it intercepts the Dispose() method of the mocked interface, because the mock object “is in [the] verified state”.
Unfortunately, we aren’t able to make changes to the ExternalDataComponent i’ve so eloquently disguised, as it’s a dependency library we’re using, so the “solution” is to reset all mocks to the original Record state before calling dispose (which additionally the tests weren’t doing).
The DateTime.Parse() method (and all its derivatives, i assume) are locale sensitive and will assume that the string you provide it is in the standard ISO date format, or in the format for your locale.
The buggy implementation I found in our system was calling DateTime.Parse() with a value of “23-07-2007″, which threw an exception citing that the string was not in the correct format. I dug around a bit with the code and tried different implementations with different results. It was only after i provided it a US date value (which it did not baulk at) I realised that my system’s locale was set to English (US).
The code was wrong to assume the current system locale is the expected input data format, in the first place, but this one tripped me up for a little while.
This evening I wanted to get back to my old habits of creating silly spike projects which just test out a particular piece of functionality/feature.
Tonight I have mixed together some WPF forms and binding with some LINQ queries i was learning.
Part 1 – WPF Forms and Binding
What I wanted to learn from this was to create my own ListBox with a custom drawn ListItem, and bind it to a simple List<String>. The catch was I wanted to do this without looking it up on the net thereby forcing myself to learn the framework and in particular the syntax around the Binding interpreter because there’s no IntelliSense for any Binding properties. The result XAML is below:
1: <StackPanel>
2: <Button Click="Button_Click">Find With Vowels > 5Button>
3: <Button Click="Button_Click_1">Find Specific FileButton>
4: <Button Click="Button_Click_2">Find with GroupingButton>
5: <TextBlock>TextBlock>
6: <ListBox ItemsSource="{Binding}" Height="326">
7: <ListBox.ItemTemplate>
8: <DataTemplate>
9: <Label Content="{Binding Path=.}" />
10: DataTemplate>
11: ListBox.ItemTemplate>
12: ListBox>
13: StackPanel>
Part 2 – LINQ Basics
Although I was watching the video, I went off and did my own thing for the most part, and was playing around with using LINQ to select a list of directories which matched a certain criteria. This sample demonstrated how to add any method as part of the filter condition for a LINQ query, and a brief touch on ordering.
1: private void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
2: {
3: var files = from d in new DirectoryInfo(@"C:\Program Files").GetDirectories()
4: where d.Name.Contains("Microsoft")
5: && NumberOfVowels(d.Name) > 5
6: orderby d.Name.Length descending
7: select d;
8: this.DataContext = files;
9: }
10: Â
11: private int NumberOfVowels(string directoryName)
12: {
13: char[] vowelArray = new char[] { 'a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u' };
14: var vowels = from ch in directoryName.ToLower()
15: where vowelArray.Contains<char>(ch)
16: select ch;
17: return vowels.Count<char>();
18: }
Part 3 – LINQ Objects
This idea is to use LINQ to return an anonymous type which is defined inline of the LINQ query itself. (ignore the bad naming convention, here )
1: private void Button_Click_1(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
2: {
3: var files = from d in new DirectoryInfo(@"c:\program files").GetDirectories()
4: from f in d.GetFiles()
5: where f.Name == "readme.htm"
6: select new { fileName = f.Name, dirName = d.Name };
7: Â
8: this.DataContext = files;
9: }
Part 4 – LINQ Grouping
This exercise was to play around with grouping of LINQ queries and the ways that you can select out of the grouped query result. I still haven’t got the knack of this one, just yet….
1: private void Button_Click_2(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
2: {
3: var files = from d in new DirectoryInfo(@"c:\program files").GetDirectories()
4: from f in d.GetFiles()
5: group f by new { ext = f.Extension, fullName = d.FullName } into items
6: orderby items.Count() descending, items.Key.ext ascending
7: select new { ext = items.Key.ext, dirName = items.Key.fullName, Count = items.Count() };
8: Â
9: this.DataContext = files;
10: }
That just about wraps it up for tonight….Not a bad way to spend my time offline
I posted the following message on a developer list. I’m so frustrated by the lack of alternatives to nCover…..
We’ve been using the free version of NCover in a number of our projects (v1.5.8), and for the most part, we’re happy with what it does.
However we’ve recently come to realise that the free download for nCover doesn’t work on x64 machines (incompatibility when it tries to register the profiling DLL). This prompted me to have a look for another free/OSS product which would work in the same or similar manner as nCover….and i’m coming back empty-handed.
Am i the only person who has questioned why i should need to purchase the enterprise version of the product, just for x64 support? And more importantly, how come there is a complete drought of alternatives for nCover? I’ve found PartCover, but haven’t used it and it doesn’t look to be as complete as nCover….
I’m shocked, given that the OSS community seems mad about creating alternatives and derivatives for toolsets (think NUnit vs MBUNit vs xUnit or NMock vs Rhino Mocks vs Moq …). There seems to be a number of alternatives for other TDD tools, but as far as coverage goes, is nCover really the only thing out there?
If you know any, i’d like to hear about it….
My wife would disagree.
I’m currently in the process of building my source repository at home – after well over a decade of neglect i’m importing everything into SVN and organising my little spike projects from various languages, environments, project, you name it.
In any event, my development machine is a virtualised Windows XP running on a Windows XP host (connected using NAT) with VirtualBox. My laptop has a direct cross-over cable connecting it to my server, so the throughput should be at best 100Mbps. When importing content into the repos, i was concerned by how slow the import felt to take. It was transferring 1MB in about 30-40 seconds, which by all right should have been virtually instant.
Fortunately I was able to find the program iperf which runs on both Linux and Windows. Set-up the server on linux and connected to it from the windows client and was shocked to learn I was achieving (get this) less than 90kbps.
Yes, jaw-drop and all that.
I found these two tickets on the VirtualBox support site which identify it as a limitation of running vbox under NAT, which if you ask me is pretty silly considering i can’t run bridged networking over WiFi.
not happy jan.
Well I could tell a lie and say that I knew how to do this, but i dont – so i’ve done a little bit of research and i’m now taking an educated guess as to how I would approach this problem. This might get me disqualified from the comp, but when i was doing interviews, i didnt care so much if someone didn’t know the answer to a problem if they could show that they had the capabilities of working the problem out themselves
Either way, i’m not convinced this is the most efficient nor is it the best way to solve this problem…There would be a mathematically more appropriate way without all the fussing around.
http://www.dev102.com/2008/08/05/a-programming-job-interview-challenge-14-2d-geometry/
Your input:
1. List of points in a 2D space. If you draw lines between one point to the next one, a closed polygon is created (can be either concave or convex).
2. A single point in a 2D space.You need to determine whether the given point is inside or outside the given polygon.
According to wikipedia (this is the part i cheated on), we can use the ray-casting algorithm to determine whether a point is inside or outside a polygon.
So my algorithm (this is all my doing) for this process would be:
Not so simple, and i don’t feel it’s elegant enough just yet.
i’ll submit it anyway – better to be in it and lose, than never try.
I’ve recently been getting my hands dirty with WPF as a successor to WinForms, and one thing is for sure – its like i’m starting from ground zero, all over again…
What I’ve recently wanted to do was to learn the details of animation in WPF. I’ve read a lot about the animation frameworks built into WPF, and the fact that they can be programmed directly into the XAML is quite interesting. Seems that it XAML is a whole lot more than a mark-up language. It’s so expressive it is almost like code.
<window x:Class="WPFAnimatingPath.Window1"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300">
</window><window .Resources>
<storyboard x:Key="pointAnimation">
<pointanimation From="55, 10" To="55, 150" RepeatBehavior="Forever" AutoReverse="True" Storyboard.TargetName="seg1" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Point1" AccelerationRatio="0.5" DecelerationRatio="0.5" Duration="0:00:10" />
<pointanimation From="105, 150" To="105, 10" RepeatBehavior="Forever" AutoReverse="True" Storyboard.TargetName="seg2" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Point1" AccelerationRatio="0.5" DecelerationRatio="0.5" Duration="0:00:05" />
</storyboard>
</window>
<grid>
<button Name="btnAnimate" Margin="0,37,0,0" Click="btnAnimate_Click">
<stackpanel Height="200" Width="160">
<textblock TextAlignment="Center" Height="40" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" FontSize="16">Click me</textblock>
<path Stroke="BlueViolet" StrokeThickness="2" Width="160" Height="160">
</path><path .Triggers>
<eventtrigger RoutedEvent="Path.Loaded">
<beginstoryboard>
<storyboard>
<doubleanimation Storyboard.TargetName="rotation" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Angle" From="-30" To="30" Duration="0:0:05" RepeatBehavior="Forever" AutoReverse="True" AccelerationRatio="0.5" DecelerationRatio="0.5" />
</storyboard>
</beginstoryboard>
</eventtrigger>
</path>
<path .RenderTransform>
<rotatetransform x:Name="rotation" CenterX="80" CenterY="80" Angle="0" />
</path>
<path .Data>
<pathgeometry>
</pathgeometry><pathgeometry .Figures>
<pathfigure StartPoint="0, 80">
<linesegment Point="30, 80" />
<quadraticbeziersegment x:Name="seg1" Point1="55, 10" Point2="80, 80" />
<quadraticbeziersegment x:Name="seg2" Point1="105, 150" Point2="130, 80" />
<linesegment Point="160, 80" />
</pathfigure>
</pathgeometry></path>
</stackpanel>
</button>
</grid>
What i’ve written here is a simple application which displays a button on the page. Like my last post about XAML and the mindset change, this code allows me to embed whatever i want into the content of the Button, and in this case, i have 2 bezier arcs which form a pseudo SINE wave. when you click the button, the arcs animate and flow in a throbbing fashion.
These are the basics which demonstrate:
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