In April, 1908 the 101st Edmonton Fusiliers were established as Alberta's first infantry regiment.  The first commanding office was Lieutenant-Colonel E.B. Edwards.  The 101st developed slowly, as most in the Edmonton area were attracted to the 19th Alberta Dragoons, a cavalry regiment which had been established in January of 1908. When war broke out in 1914, there was some question about the legality of using the existing militia regiments to fight overseas in Europe.

Thanks to Phil Haack's online poll, there is a bit of controversy over where one's unit tests should reside:  should the unit tests be housed in a separate project and assembly, or do they shack up in the same project as the code that they are testing?  Like Bil, I figured that rather than a big long blog comment, I'd be better of with my post. Way back when I started out with TDD, I used to put the test fixtures in the same file as the class under test, sort of like:

In my last post, I described how easy jQuery makes it to call an ASP.NET Web Service via AJAX. Currently, I'm developing on Windows XP (SP2), Resharper 4 (running inside Visual Studio 2008), and using the Visual Studio Web Server.  We deploy to Windows 2003 R2/IIS6.  When I pushed the code described in my last post to the development server to test it out there, the web service call kept failing with an HTTP Status of 500 (internal error).

Just figured I point out ConnectionStrings.com.  I find this site rather handy because it shows you the syntax for the connection strings of pretty much every database you'd want to use in .NET.

Today I got a new hard drive for my web server, to replace the one that died back in February.  Hopefully the new 750GB drive will serve me as well as (or better) the old 200GB WD Cavair.  I must admit, I was a bit suprised at how cheap it was to get such a big HD. The first order of business was to move my web site off it's current home and onto it's new, more permanent one.

Last night I spent some quality time looking at vincent-vega, aka Continuous Database Integration for SQL Server. This is a pretty simple and handy task for Nant that helps bring continous integration to your databases. I use updateSqlDatabase like as part of my integration tests like so: Drop the database Create a new database Run some SQL scripts to bring my database up to date Run various database integration tests, repeating steps 1 -3 as necessary.

For those getting into .NET 3.5, you might find Mono.Rocks of interest.  I first saw this on Jean-Baptiste Evain blog.  Basically, this is a collection of extension methods for the class libraries.  They are covered under the MIT licence, so you can pretty much use it anywhere.

Once again, appealling to the niche (non-existant?) market, I give you a quick run down on using db4o, and the Castle Windsor db4o facility.  Yes, I know the link for the db4o facility link doesn't work.  That is what prompted me to do this blog post. This is because, a while ago, the db4o facility was pulled from the Castle Project.  Apparently there was a licencing concern.  It's my understanding that this has since been resolved, and I seen now that there is again the db4o facility.

As most Resharpies know, when you're using Resharper you can reformat your code. A nice feature is that you can use this reformat code to also organize and layout your code files the way you like it. For example, Kyle Baley did post on how to how to use the format code to get rid of regions. His techique is a bit unrefined - his revolutionary, dogmatic zeal he will clobber all regions and do nothing else - but still handy.

One of the biggest discussions that I typically get when I try to introduce things like NHibernate (i.e. OSS) on a new contract goes like this: "We're a bit reluctant to use that because it will introduce more code into our code base that isn't ours. Because it's OSS, there's no support, and if there was a bug in it, we'd have to maintain it ourselves. That being case, we'd rather just write our own code, because that way we know what is going on with it and can maintain it better.