Tiny drops of knowledge

Calling one WCF service from another

2009-06-03T14:28:00.002+01:00

Over a year ago I hit this problem, and no amount of work would fix it. A year later, having found myself facing it again, I finally found the solution, thanks to this post.Whilst the solution was simple, I've written my services so they can be unit-tested. Hence references to instances that require the presence of an HttpRequest are not allowed.The picture below shows my eventual solution.

Hiding the WCF .svc extension on IIS 5 or 6

2009-04-29T12:06:00.004Z

If you're setting up a WCF web service, its nicer to present a URL that does not have the .svc extension in it, i.e. http://moviesite.com/movies/123Instead of http://moviesite.com/service.svc/movies/123A simple way of achieving this on IIS versions 5 or 6 is using the free ISAPI Rewrite tool, with the following configuration:# Don't rewrite url's that already contain .svc.RewriteRule .*\.svc.

Load testing a WCF web-service gives a 403 error on IIS 5.1 (XP Pro)

2009-04-28T09:49:00.002Z

If you're hosting a WCF web service using XP Pro's IIS and checking its thread-safety by hitting with > 20 threads, then its likely you'll be seeing some 403 errors.This is unfortunately by design. See Jeff Atwood's article on why and how to get around IIS 5.1's shackles.

Configuring the Identity of an IIS Application Pool

2009-04-23T09:11:00.003Z

If a web-site needs to run under a specific identity, IIS application pools provide a convenient means of achieving this. However, a reoccurring problem I come up against in setting these up is forgetting to ensure the identity is also a member of the local IIS_WPG group. TechNet has the full story.So if you get one of these red icons on your Application Pool, check the IIS_WPG group.

NUnit's EqualTo tolerance modifier

2009-04-21T09:31:00.004Z

Comparing generated DateTime values can always be a bit tricky, but today I discovered NUnit's Within modifier that makes life so much easier:[Test]public void CreatedOnDefaultsToNow(){ SomeClass someObject = new SomeClass(); Assert.That(someObject.CreatedOn, Is.EqualTo(DateTime.Now).Within(new TimeSpan(1000)));}

Dealing with snake bite

2008-11-17T07:51:00.002Z

Before you panic, no, this hasn't happened to me (yet).A kind colleague lent me a very old and rare book recently, that has a great story on the above title. The book, From Cape to Cairo, by Ewan Scott Grogan, tells of the first traverse of Africa from South to North.The next time you have a bite of some description, be glad the treatment isn't what follows:"During lunch a native rushed in,

Help - the Storm Troopers have got me

2008-10-29T21:23:00.003Z

Help - the Storm Troopers have got meOriginally uploaded by visited Visited the Alien Invasion at the Spinnaker Tower recently. The best bit was the Storm Troopers from the UK Garrison. Scarily realistic!

Basil and teddy

2008-10-29T21:20:00.002Z

Basil and teddyOriginally uploaded by lyndsaypFive years of nagging, and we finally do it!Yes, we've got a dog (the one on the right). The kids agreed to give up Christmas presents in exchange for having a dog. He's a Border Collie and is ten weeks old in this picture. Named Basil, after Basil the Brush (the one on the left).House training is going well so far!

Serialising, streams and strings

2008-10-14T11:01:00.012Z

A common operation is to serialise and object to a string. I'm still finding better and better ways of doing this. My current favourite makes use of .Net 3.0's DataContract. It uses a UTF8Encoding and a MemoryStream as this ensures that the output XML is UTF8.Enjoy! using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream()) { DataContractSerializer serializer = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(

Filtering log4net messages

2008-10-14T10:21:00.007Z

I can never remember how to do this: filter out logging message based on where they come from.The solution is to use a LoggerMatchFilter. The code below can be inserted into any appender definition:

Love is ... unconditional (really, truely)

2008-10-07T21:47:00.002Z

I've been a blown away by the book Velvet Elvis. It challenges many assumptions we make about faith, and strips it back to its bare essentials.A quote from the book that particularly struck me was this:"If the gospel isn't good news for everybody, then it isn't good news for anybody.And this is because the most powerful things happen when the church surrenders its desire to convert people and

Redundancy, L=V+E and being a great leader

2008-09-03T20:57:00.004Z

I pleased to read in Clusters words that I often say to others. When describing my aim at work, I often state that I strive to make myself redundant, so that:The team grow to be able to do all that I do, but without me.I can focus on higher-level goals.p.159 of Clusters states that "the intention of a good leader ought to be to do themselves out of a job and to do this they need to be aware of

Accountability in life

2008-09-03T20:32:00.003Z

Was given the book Clusters to read this Summer and thoroughly enjoyed it whilst on holiday. It was a great book to read following on from my trip to Karamoja and then reading Velvet Elvis.The following points stayed with me about being accountable to each other (in a small faith group, or equally at work). Several references were made to the John Wesley Class-meeting System, which would also be

Effective evangelism requires ...

2008-09-03T20:07:00.003Z

Went to a great talk at New Wine by David Parker on what evangelism requires. It is based on Mark 14. Here are the key points I took away:Effective evangelism requires:Self-denial - personal sacrifice for the good of others.A broken heart for the lost.Demonstrative love: "evangelism is an outward demonstration of all other gifts".Consistency in:Friendly contact.Meaningful connections.Significant

SQL errors don't cause exceptions if nocount is off

2008-08-14T11:25:00.006+01:00

We had a strange problem today: an end-user was getting unexpected results (no data), but no exceptions were occurring.The cause was traced to incorrect database permissions, i.e.Server: Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure xyz, Line 123SELECT permission denied on object 'abc', database 'pqr', owner 'dbo'.The question was, why did this not cause an exception? A possible cause is our use of

God sees you now as one day we could be

2008-08-12T22:30:00.002+01:00

These were the words of Brother Andrew, spoken at this year's New Wine Summer conference my family attended. These words are echoed by Paul and Rob Bell, in his book Velvet Elvis that I'm really enjoying at the moment.A truly inspirational speaker.

Deciding between ref and out

2008-07-17T12:51:00.007+01:00

C# defines two keywords for parameter passing modes: ref and out. For a full discussion of why this is, see this msdn article, from where the below examples are taken. This is a summary of which to choose and why.When to use neitherref and out are used for methods that pass back two or more values to the caller. This is often a code smell indicative of the need for a new encapsulating struct or

URL rewriting with multiple websites

2008-06-13T11:17:00.004+01:00

Less exciting than my previous posts I'm afraid (safely back in the UK now).I recently consolidated a number of websites onto a single Windows 2003 server. One such site (dokuwiki) used url-rewriting via ISAPI Rewrite to present user-friendly URLs. Unfortunately our original rewriting configuration broke the other websites as it tried to re-write their url's also!Although I'm happy to pay the $99

You know you're in Africa when ... (Kotido, Kachiri, Kaabong)

2008-05-18T13:35:00.005Z

We've been in Kachiri Monday - Friday, Kaabong this Saturday and Sunday and Kotido in-between.I hope the following gives a taste of what we've seen and done....You know you're in Africa when ...10:30 am actually means 12pm, or maybe 1 or 2 pm.It rains for less than an hour and everywhere is flooded. But the people are over-joyed.The local church is just a tin roof.You have four armed police men

Arriving in Kotido

2008-05-11T13:27:00.005Z

We left Kampala on the 7.30 am MAF flight to Karamoja.Flying from Kampala in the South to Karamoja in the North-East was uneventful, but mind-blowing. As we crossed the Nile, and got closer and closer to Karmoja, the land went from being lush and green to dry and brown. River beds were very visible, with not water to be seen. I asked Laurie, the pilot, how long they stayed wet for. His reply was

First impressions of Uganda

2008-05-08T18:42:00.007Z

We've done a fair bit of driving around Kampala today, what with needing to buy some wireless routers to take to Karamoja, plus visiting various sights and markets. When I say driving, I fortunately mean "being driven", as for a Westerner, the traffic is a nightmare! From what the others say though, Kampala is fairly typical of a large, 3rd-world city: busy, noisy, smelly and lots and lots of

Flickr photo stream of Uganda trip

2008-05-08T18:28:00.003Z

Modern technology rocks! Although I can't claim responsibility for any of these snaps, they were taken by various members of the team...Flickr slide showFlickr image list

First post from Kampala

2008-05-08T06:06:00.003Z

I'm writing this post from Namirembe Guest House, in the capital of Uganda, Kampala. It still feels a bit surreal to be here, and inside I'm feeling very wobbly, like my head is not connected to my body!I'm here with nine other Christians from Church of the Good Shepherd, Four Marks, as part of its Mission 2008 program. The basic idea is that we're celebrating the church's 100th anniversary by

Test run initialisation code

2008-02-20T12:10:00.003Z

The problem of enabling log4net under NUnit required some unit test code that ran once at the start of a test run. Note that this code requires once-per-run execution, not per test or test-fixture.After much puzzling and googling, I finally found the answer: SetupFixture. The NUnit documentation says it all.Hurrah!

Browser shortcuts

2008-01-16T09:41:00.000Z

Condensed version of Coding Horror's excellent article:Alt+D - address barCtrl+E - search boxAlt+Enter (with cursor in address bar or search box) - open item in new tabMiddle mouse click - open/close a tab