Matt Uliasz few small ideas – Page 3 – Skill to do come from doing…

Git aliases I can’t live without

Being still quite new to git (and moving from world of VSS/TFS), I became big fan of Git’s flexibility and configuration. It really boosts productivity and makes developer’s life much easier.

Below I list git aliases I found most useful. For sure this list will grow in future. They need to be added to .gitconfig file in [alias] section:

[alias] cam = commit -am st = status aa = add . ba = branch -a co = checkout hist = log --oneline -10

Alternatively, they can be enabled via git command:

git config --global alias.st status

Unit Testing stack for C#/Visual Studio

After spending some time on digging through unit testing components, I ran into a setup I am finally happy with. This consists of:

https://github.com/AutoFixture – acts as DI container/object factory, significantly improving unit test maintainability

https://github.com/moq – awesome mocking framework, fully integrated with AutoFixture

https://www.nuget.org/packages/SemanticComparison – excellent utility for comparing instances

https://github.com/shouldly/shouldly – great for simplifying assertion statements

https://github.com/xunit/xunit – superb unit testing framework, supporting parameterized tests, multiple test executions and much more

Although each utility is great on it’s own, when combined together, this stack significantly reduces amount of testing code.

Below I include sample config file with latest versions of all packages.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<packages>
    <package id="AutoFixture" version="3.50.2" targetFramework="net461" />
    <package id="AutoFixture.AutoMoq" version="3.50.2" targetFramework="net461" />
    <package id="AutoFixture.Idioms" version="3.50.2" targetFramework="net461" />
    <package id="AutoFixture.Xunit2" version="3.50.2" targetFramework="net461" />
    <package id="Moq" version="4.1.1308.2120" targetFramework="net461" />
    <package id="SemanticComparison" version="3.50.2" targetFramework="net461" />
    <package id="Shouldly" version="2.8.2" targetFramework="net461" />
    <package id="xunit" version="2.1.0" targetFramework="net461" />
    <package id="xunit.abstractions" version="2.0.0" targetFramework="net461" />
    <package id="xunit.assert" version="2.1.0" targetFramework="net461" />
    <package id="xunit.core" version="2.1.0" targetFramework="net461" />
    <package id="xunit.extensibility.core" version="2.1.0" targetFramework="net461" />
    <package id="xunit.extensibility.execution" version="2.1.0" targetFramework="net461" />
    <package id="xunit.runner.visualstudio" version="2.1.0" targetFramework="net461" />
</packages>

T-SQL Tricks

Few useful SQL tricks:

Move table to different schema

ALTER SCHEMA targetSchema TRANSFER sourceSchema.tableName

Rename object

sp_rename 'schemaName.tableName.columnName', 'newColumnName'

Simplest way to restore MSSQL Server database

Here’s a simplest way I found (so far) to restore a database in MS SQL Server. First part lists “logicalnames” from the backup that you want to restore. Modify the path so it points to the actual path where your backup file is:

RESTORE FILELISTONLY FROM DISK = N'C:\[path]\[db_name_backup].bak'
 GO

This shows LogicalName and PhysicalName of the data and log backup files, which have to be used in the following script:

RESTORE DATABASE [db_name]
 FROM DISK = N'C:\[path]\[db_name_backup].bak'
 WITH FILE = 1,
 MOVE N'[data_file_logical_name]' TO N'C:\[restored_db_path]\[data_file_name].mdf',
 MOVE N'[log_file_logical_name]' TO N'C:\[restored_db_path]\[log_file_name].ldf',
 NOUNLOAD,
 STATS = 10
 GO

That’s it. Pretty simple, isn’t it?

How to delete all stored procedures from MSSQL database using cursor

Here is a code for deleting all stored procedures in SQL Server database using cursor.

DECLARE @name varchar(500)
DECLARE @sql varchar(max)
SET @sql = ''

DECLARE cur CURSOR
      FOR SELECT [name] FROM sys.procedures
      OPEN cur

      FETCH NEXT FROM cur INTO @name
      WHILE @@fetch_status = 0
      BEGIN
			SET @sql = 'DROP PROC ' + @name
			PRINT @sql
			EXEC (@sql)			
            FETCH NEXT FROM cur INTO @name
      END
      CLOSE cur
      DEALLOCATE cur

How to close all connections to a MSSQL database

This script closes all connections to MS SQL database

USE master;
GO
ALTER DATABASE dbName
SET SINGLE_USER
WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE;
GO
ALTER DATABASE dbName
SET MULTI_USER;
GO

Animated iPhone-style ImageButton with Silverlight 4

In this article I am presenting a way to create animated iPhone-style ImageButton control in Silverlight 4. Button will have icon on it, rounded corners and will zoom-in/zoom-out on hover. It will be done programmatically, with very minimum amount of XAML.

I start with creating ImageButton class. I use ButtonBase as base class:

I want my button to contain rounded rectangle with shadow and image on it. I add these items in constructor:

Now my control contains rectangle and image laid out over a grid to ensure proper items positioning. Next step is to add animation to enable zoom-in/out on hovering. This can be achieved with storyboards and double animations:

To start animations I need to start animations when mouse cursor enters or leaves control:

Very last step is making ImageSource property “bindable” so you can specify image from XAML. In order to do this I register new dependency property on my class:

The control then can be used in a following way:

And ready controls looks like this:

Using Sets in .Net

Great post by James Michael Hare I came across about using Sets in .Net. Definitely worth taking a look.

http://geekswithblogs.net/BlackRabbitCoder/archive/2011/02/03/c.net-little-wonders-the-useful-but-overlooked-sets.aspx

WCF Custom tool error: Failed to generate code for the service reference.

Very recently, building multi-tier application involving Silverlight front-end inter-operating with WCF back-end, I encountered very odd, yet annoying behaviour of Visual Studio 2010. I was building new functionality using Telerik RadMap for Silverlight control that was to display some spartial data supplied by WCF service. To achieve this my Silverlight application had to reference few Telerik assemblies (Telerik.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization.dll). What is important is fact, that Service Reference for WCF service had been there already, project built and everything was working nicely, until I added extra method to WCF. After using “Update Service Reference” VS command, I started getting following error.

Lack of further details with regards to this error and appropriate feedback from Visual Studio certainly does not help to get to the bottom of the problem, however after some investigation it turned out that one of Telerik assemblies caused this problem. When VS2010 creates service reference, default settings are that it should “reuse” all available types in reference. Excluding certain types from serialization allows service reference to be added successfully.

I hope this helps anybody who got stuck with this problem.

SQL Data Types vs. C# Data Types

This article is just a reference of SQL Data Types to C# Data Types.

SQL Server data type	CLR data type (SQL Server)	CLR data type (.NET Framework)
varbinary	SqlBytes, SqlBinary	Byte[]
binary	SqlBytes, SqlBinary	Byte[]
varbinary(1), binary(1)	SqlBytes, SqlBinary	byte, Byte[]
image	None	None
varchar	None	None
char	None	None
nvarchar(1), nchar(1)	SqlChars, SqlString	Char, String, Char[]
nvarchar	SqlChars, SqlString	String, Char[]
nchar	SqlChars, SqlString	String, Char[]
text	None	None
ntext	None	None
uniqueidentifier	SqlGuid	Guid
rowversion	None	Byte[]
bit	SqlBoolean	Boolean
tinyint	SqlByte	Byte
smallint	SqlInt16	Int16
int	SqlInt32	Int32
bigint	SqlInt64	Int64
smallmoney	SqlMoney	Decimal
money	SqlMoney	Decimal
numeric	SqlDecimal	Decimal
decimal	SqlDecimal	Decimal
real	SqlSingle	Single
float	SqlDouble	Double
smalldatetime	SqlDateTime	DateTime
datetime	SqlDateTime	DateTime
sql_variant	None	Object
User-defined type(UDT)	user-defined type	None
table	None	None
cursor	None	None
timestamp	None	None
xml	SqlXml	None