Humanizer is a nice library to get human readable representations for strings, numbers and dates in .Net. Cutting strings down to a certain size or turning a TimeSpan into "an hour" isn't magic. Nevertheless, trying to do all that work on your own will take time that Humanizer has already spent. Let's look on a few use cases where this library has proven to be a great help.
Not every design decision for your database will pass the test of time. Better names pop up or sometimes you just created a table in the wrong place. You could throw everything away and start from scratch, but a much better approach is just to fix what is wrong. If you want to move a table to another schema, you can use this SQL Server command:
With every newly installed Windows Server, I run into the same problem:
A quick demo on how schema migrations works in DbUp took an interesting turn as we tried to insert some values into our database:
Beginning database upgrade
Fetching list of already executed scripts.
Executing SQL Server script 'DBMigration.Scripts.Script0004.sql'
Upgrade failed due to an unexpected exception:
System.InvalidOperationException: Variable a4 has no value defined
at DbUp.Engine.Preprocessors.VariableSubstitutionPreprocessor.ReplaceToken(Match match, IDictionary`2 variables, Match commentMatch) in C:\projects\dbup\src\DbUp\Engine\Preprocessors\VariableSubstitutionPreprocessor.cs:line 62
I am currently learning the xUnit.net framework as part of a new project I work on. For the last years I used NUnit for my unit and integration tests. Conceptually those two libraries aren't that different. However, the naming of attributes and what is possible in sharing setup & clean-up code makes it worth to take a deeper look.
StyleCop can be a great help to ensure that every developer in a project formats code the same way. However, what is great for production code may not be what you want for your little throw away experiments. Let’s look on our options to disable StyleCop when we don’t need it.
From time to time I get my development database in a state where I need to get rid of all rows in a table. SQL Server offers two ways to do that: DELETE and TRUNCATE. When you need to remove all rows use TRUNCATE, it is the faster option:
I am currently learning the ins and outs of the FakeItEasy mocking framework. I know my way around Moq, a simple and easy to use framework for the same purpose. This cheat sheet has examples for the most common use cases and explains the differences to Moq.
Aggregate functions (like Min(), Max(), Sum(), etc.) are often used to calculate values in a SELECT statement. Instead of loading all the data and calculate the values for yourself, you let the database give you the answer. That is a lot faster and requires less typing. Aggregate functions are mostly used on rows. But did you know that SQL Server lets you use them on columns as well? This post shows how it is done what could be a simple solution for some tricky questions.
As a .Net developer you use NuGet packages daily: You add them to projects and can use the functionality they offer without much effort. Adding those packages is one thing, updating them another. Especially with solutions containing many projects it’s common to forget one or another package. There is a simple solution to that problem: Solution wide management of NuGet packages.