Joshua Flanagan

Teaching AutoMapper about our conventions

I often need to send data from my entities to the client in JSON format to enable rich AJAX functionality. It isn’t practical to serialize the entities directly, so they are first flattened to a data transfer object (DTO) before serialization. For example...

Published Fri, Mar 19 2010 3:32 PM by Joshua Flanagan

Filed under: automapper, conventions

Adding variable output behavior to your FubuMVC actions

Introduction A question I’ve received multiple times now when discussing FubuMVC ’s flexibility: can I make a single controller action render a view, or json, or rss/xml, etc., based on a request header, or some portion of the URL? The short answer is...

Published Sun, Feb 07 2010 10:34 PM by Joshua Flanagan

Filed under: fubumvc

How to resolve a binary file conflict with Git

When performing a merge in git , you might see the message: warning: Cannot merge binary files: HEAD:somefile.dll vs. otherbranch:somefile.dll Auto-merging somefile.dll CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in somefile.dll Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts...

Published Thu, Jan 28 2010 10:47 PM by Joshua Flanagan

Filed under: git

FubuMVC – Define your actions your way

In this post I’m going to try and demonstrate the flexibility that FubuMVC allows in how you build your web applications. While FubuMVC is opinionated about some things (lean on your container as much as possible), it mostly gets out of your way to let...

Published Mon, Jan 18 2010 2:41 PM by Joshua Flanagan

Filed under: fubumvc

Readable Regular Expressions Revisited

Many, many years ago (internet time), I proposed a fluent interface for composing regular expressions . People either loved the idea or hated it (or thought it was just ok). The intention was to try and tackle the opaqueness of regular expressions that...

Published Sat, Dec 19 2009 11:24 AM by Joshua Flanagan

Big Visible TeamCity

Big Visible Cruise is a cool utility for adding a build information radiator to your team room. It makes your Cruise Control build status immediately clear with a large green (good) or red (bad) screen. My (admittedly limited) search for an equivalent...

Published Fri, Aug 28 2009 4:00 PM by Joshua Flanagan

Filed under: teamcity, greasemonkey

How we handle application configuration

We recently overhauled the way we handle configurable settings within our application (server names, email addresses, polling frequencies, etc) . I’m going to present our solution below, but its new enough that I’d like to hear feedback on how others...

Published Sun, Jul 12 2009 8:38 PM by Joshua Flanagan

Filed under: structuremap, infrastructure

Real World Refactoring

If you’ve ever asked, or been asked, for an example to illustrate a software design principle, you know how frustrating it can be to work with a contrived example. There is rarely any depth to the example, and it lines up so neatly with the concept being...

Published Sun, Jun 28 2009 8:35 PM by Joshua Flanagan

Filed under: structuremap, docu, composition, design

Integrating a custom test runner with TeamCity

JetBrains’ TeamCity build server provides a wealth of information about the tests that are run as part of your build. If you use one of the test runners that they support out of the box, you automatically get real-time individual test results, detailed...

Published Wed, Jun 10 2009 8:45 PM by Joshua Flanagan

Filed under: teamcity

Let your Inversion of Control tool work for you

If you are just starting out exploring use of an Inversion of Control tool (IoC), its very easy to go down the wrong path, and make things harder for yourself. Today I had a conversation with a bright developer who was feeling the pain because doing it...

Published Tue, Jun 09 2009 11:58 PM by Joshua Flanagan

Filed under: structuremap, composition

Latest Docu builds available

Docu is a tool to create documentation out of your .NET XML comments, much in the same way we used to use NDoc. If legend has it right, it was created by the prolific James Gregory with the sole goal of generating the documentation for Fluent NHibernate...

Published Tue, May 19 2009 10:29 PM by Joshua Flanagan

Filed under: docu

ASP.NET 400 Bad Request with restricted characters

Today I had to hunt down a reported defect that said our advanced search functionality was returning a Bad Request error. On initial inspection, I was unable to reproduce the issue. After talking to our product manager, I learned that he was trying to...

Published Mon, Apr 27 2009 11:36 PM by Joshua Flanagan

Filed under: mvc

But don’t worry, WebForms is not going away…

I got a kick out of Jeremy’s eye poke at the ASP.NET WebForms “simpler” approach to web development. In the same spirit, remember how convoluted it was to call simple JSON services from WebForms ? Well, my friend and former colleague Shashank Shetty shows...

Published Sun, Mar 08 2009 6:23 PM by Joshua Flanagan

Filed under: jquery, mvc

Auto mocking Explained

What does it do? There is nothing fancy about an automocker. There is nothing scary about an automocker. An automocker is like one of those little classes we all write in order to quickly and easily create objects that we need for our tests. Nice, simple...

Published Tue, Feb 03 2009 8:25 PM by Joshua Flanagan

Filed under: rhinomocks

Solution for monitoring multiple TeamCity servers

Proving yet again that the squeaky wheel gets the grease (this issue rose up to have the second highest number of votes in the TeamCity issue tracker), and what a truly responsive vendor JetBrains is, we now have a solution for the problem of monitoring...

Published Thu, Jan 15 2009 10:23 AM by Joshua Flanagan