Previous posts: Part 0 of 4: Introduction Part 1 of 4: Testing the Service Testing the Client So far, I outlined how to test your WCF service. I simply took advantage or the WCF architecture and tested the service directly outside of the actual service harness. Now I need to set my sights on the client. This becomes a bit more difficult, but I wouldn't say that it is necessarily hard. I will start by giving a typical textbook example of hooking up to our service, and then I will tell you what is...

Previous posts: Part 0 of 4: Introduction Testing the Service Of the four posts, testing the service is by far the easiest. One of the most beautiful things about the WCF framework is the way it was designed to be more testable than ASPX services. When you design your WCF interface, you are mostly just designing an interface with the WCF ServiceContract attributes. The WCF framework uses your interface to determine the actual contract and transport mechanism so you don't have to. This is the key...

When you are writing automated tests for your application, it is important that the tests do not rely on the file system or external services. The only problem is that when you write applications using WCF, you are writing code that relies on external services. It is very tempting to create service references in your test DLL and test against them, but please refrain. There is a better way, I promise! This series will focus on testing every part of your application -- including round-trip functional...

It is official. I have registered for CodeMash '09. I have been told that this is the single-most important conference to go to. Many people have told me this. I have also been told that all the cool kids will be there. In fact, almost everyone I know in the community is planning to go...I HAVE to see what all the hype is about. The neat thing about this conference is how focused it is on being unfocused. There are a ton of languages and platforms being talked about... lots of hands-on labs... Open...

Back in July, I posted an article on how to mock out the database in ActiveRecord. The approach is simple, but is not mocking in the strict sense. I use SQLite in "memory" mode, creating a temporal database for testing. My colleague, Jay Harris, has updated my code to allow for configuration in two ways. He has preserved my "drop-in" mode via the "useDynamicConfiguration" flag but when the flag is false, you can use a configuration from the app.config file. Here is the newest version of the code:...

Although Microsoft will claim that it is "not possible to have a memory leak in managed code", most seasoned .NET developers will laugh at that statement. It turns out that it is very easy to leak memory -- just keep a referencing object around longer than the referenced object, and you can leak. There at least two tools on the market that are designed specifically to seek out memory leaks of this kind (Scitech and ANTS). The most common case of this happens with events in C#. Take the following...

I will be speaking at GLUG.NET Lansing on November 20th, 2008. My topic will be a talk I have given once before -- Castle Active Record (Don't Get Good at a CRUDy Job). Thanks to Jeff McWherter for signing me up for this gig. I look forward to meeting those in the Lansing area