The software development group at my office has a shared database that developers connect to for their daily work. In the last few months, the number of developers has doubled, and the practice of using the shared database has not scaled well. It has caused frustration as members of one team make schema changes before another team can consume them. The resulting breakages has led to lost productivity. To make matters worse, the same database serves as a reference for the daily migration process. Read more

In 2007 a different kind of diet book was published that took a concise approach to making the right food choices. Readers of the book were presented with good and bad selections at popular restaurants and told why the good options were better than the others. Eat This, Not That! made changing your diet simple and realistic. No gimmicks like the Atkins diet or the current trend of cleansing. Just real options available in many restaurants. Read more

2014 has been a fantastic year for me professionally. I spent the majority of the year working on a green field project with a great group of co-workers. I was the Scrummaster for a talented team and wrote a lot of Angular.js and Javascript. Ultimately the project was cancelled, and its members were merged into another group. While disappointing, it led me to a new opportunity as a Product Owner and lead architect for a team tasked with creating a test framework built on Specflow. Read more

Have you ever needed to delete a record from a database table only to be thwarted by one or more foreign key violations? Then when you try to delete records from the child tables you find a deep hierarchal relationship bound together by yet more foreign keys? I recently ran into this issue with a SQL Server database. I needed to trim data from several large tables that had deep and wide relationship hierarchies enforced by foreign keys. Read more

Below is a list of useful regular expressions (regex) for annotating SpecFlow bindings. I’m treating this post as a reference and will be updating it with new items from time to time. Singular or Plural Support singular or plural wording. Filter for Enum Values If your binding takes an enumeration for an argument, you can limit the inputs from the Gherkin to just the valid values. In the snippets below, the possible values for the SortOrder argument are limited by the regex (ascending|descending) thus avoiding any runtime exeptions due to a bad value. Read more

Generic types were a great addition to C# 2.0, but they are occasionally overused. There are times where calling object.GetType() or passing the type as an argument are sufficient. A good example can be found in the Specflow source code. The TechTalk.SpecFlow.Assist.InstanceComparisonExtensionMethods class contains a useful extension method CompareToInstance<T>() which takes a table of expected property values and compares them against an object. The generic type is completely unnecessary in this case. Read more