Annoyed with INotifyPropertyChanged?

Have you ever been annoyed with having to implement the cumbersome plumbing required for INotifyPropertyChanged ? Well, I have. So I tried to find a way to make authoring bindable objects better. The typical example:

As you can see, it is quite verbose. The event and OnPropertyChanged() method need to be implemented for each […]

Unit testing model validation with MVC’s DataAnnotations

In a previous post, I mentioned that model validation should be tested separately from controller logic. I will demonstrate a way of unit testing the validation of models implemented with System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations. It is actually quire easy to unit test model validation. Models are inherently easy to test separately due to their POD (Plain Old Data) nature. […]

Unit test equality is not domain equality

I came across a question on stackoverflow concerning comparing object for equality in unit test. The poster basically wants to get rid of series of assertions like this:

I agree, this is ugly. The more so if you have multiple tests that assert on the equality of these properties. You can always factor it […]

Asp.Net MVC: Testing your controller actions

I can’t say I like all the aspects of Microsoft ASP.Net MVC. But there is one aspect that I like though is the ability to unit test most of the components of your application. Standard ASP.Net did not prevent you from testing your application. However, the framework and documentation did not encourage you to organize […]

Testing XPathNavigator

In my previous post about XPathNavigator, I explained in what circumstances the default implementation of XPathNavigator is troublesome. I went over the design of the class and highlighted how that design helps us re-implement XPathNavigator to address the issue. Testing XPathNavigator First things first, before attacking the new implementation proper, we want to make sure […]

XPathDocument and whitespaces

Writing code is fun. At least it is for me. But sometimes it gets irritating. You know, you’re busy on something, you write the code, you know it’s right but it doesn’t work… You keep your focus on that one piece of code you just wrote and it keeps on not working. Sometimes, the reason […]

So what’s wrong with XPathDocument ?

This post is the first in a series of posts related to XPathDocument and XPathNavigator. I will highlight the qualities and drawbacks of the standard .Net implementations and go through the design and development of a new implementation that fits better to my needs. First, what is an XPathDocument ? An XPathDocument is used when you […]

Game development irony

The guys at http://www.greenheartgames.com/ pulled a nice trick yesterday. Just the day after they released their game development simulation game Game Dev Tycoon, they also uploaded a cracked version of the game for the pirates. What the heck ! What for ? Well, this cracked version is the same as the original game except the […]

std::unique_ptr semantics

Probably the best feature introduced by C++11 is std::unique_ptr. It will automagically make sure your dynamically allocated objects are deleted when you don’t use them anymore. In previous versions of C++, you needed to rely exclusively on documentation and conventions to ensure dynamically allocated memory was handled properly. With C++11, you can ask the compiler […]

boost::serialization coupling issue

I was evaluating boost::serialization today. Based on the design goals mentioned in the library’s introduction, I felt like boost::serialization would suit my needs. An interesting point is this : 8. Orthogonal specification of class serialization and archive format. That is, any file format should be able to store serialization of any arbitrary set of C++ […]