Validating your data and your feelings with IE 10 and HTML 5

On a recent project I ran into an unexpected issue while testing with IE 10. The site that I was working on has out of the box ASP.Net validators and custom ASP.Net validators. When I navigated to the page that contains the validators and attempted to submit the form, multiple validators fired.

No ELMAH, forget about it!

If you haven't heard of ELMAH you need to check out the following links pronto!

ELMAH - Home
Scott Hanselman on ELMAH

I highly recommend using ELMAH whenever you can when developing custom applications. There are very few things that you can "bolt-on" to your application that will provide so much functionality with so little effort.

But what happens when you can't use ELMAH? If for some reason you can't use ELMAH in your application (like, for say... you work with an old school architect who just doesn't get it, and doesn't want to try to get it) then what do you do? What you do is forget about it, and write your own!

Using Pete Montgomery’s Universal Predicate Builder with a generic repository

I gave a presentation the other day that included a generic repository class that I created and use in many of my Entity Framework projects. I like the implementation because it is flexible and easy to extend. I've created a blog post about the RepositoryBase class here:

A Generic Repository for the Entity Framework

After the presentation I was asked how I utilized the repository's Select methods. In this case, the Select Method is overridden a few times to match the select pattern used by ASP.Net ObjectDataSources. Essentially, I can create a repository class that will map 1 to 1 to an ObjectDataSource to enable paging and sorting.

A Generic Repository for the Entity Framework

Note: In this post I am going to be demonstrating techniques that depend on the Entity Framework 4.1 or higher.

Recently I’ve been using a simple Repository oriented architecture for my Entity Framework projects. Coupled with the new DbContext class and the entity code generation items added in the Entity Framework 4.1 release you can quickly scaffold up a data layer and business layer for your application.

To start, let’s define an interface for our repository:

public interface IRepository : IDisposable
{
    void Insert<E>(E entity) where E : class;

    void Update<E>(E entity) where E : class;

    void Delete<E>(E entity) where E : class;

    IQueryable<E> Select<E>() where E : class;

    E Select<E>(object key) where E : class;

    int SaveChanges();

    int SaveChanges(bool validateEntities);
}

Automate your test data with Red Gate SQL Data Generator

Just about every developer out there has encountered a scenario where they need to load test the application they are creating, but simply cannot come up with enough load to make it happen. I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole that is load testing an application in this post, but I do want to talk about one component of load testing, which is working with a lot of data. I seem to always run into the situation where I'm developing an application for a client, and when it comes time to test the application in a real world scenario and need real world data, the only viable solution is to back up data from a production server and massage it to "fit" into my applications database. Bad idea. Yes, there are times when this is unavoidable, but in general, do you really want to make multiple copies of sensitive data? Also, in most cases I cannot just copy and paste the data into my database. In the past I've created a number of data migration utilities, data population scripts, and used a number of tools just to populate my application with data that I can use to test it. All of this takes time, and effort.

In contrast, there is Red Gate's SQL Data Generator. The SQL Data Generator is aptly named, because that is what it does, it generates data. And good data in fact. I downloaded the product trial recently when trying to hand jam a data population script for over 1,000,000 rows of data in multiple keyed tables. Needless to say, I became a little frustrated and started looking for alternatives. I downloaded the tool to my machine, installed it, and generated 1,000,000 rows of data for all of my tables in under 10 minutes. Nice. In addition to simply generating data, the SQL Data Generator is smart enough to create records that enforce referential integrity, that match data types, and in some cases, even provide data reflective of the column name. In one case, I have a column that is of type VARCHAR named STATE. The data created included all 50 US State names.