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Runtime generated objects serialization

If you think in a generic way about all well implemented RESTful APIs you will find a pattern that can be easily described and stored in metadata. Most RESTful API is just a combination of the following elements: Resource location (URL) HTTP method Header information Input parameters (required and optional) Content type Output parameters Business logic description Today I would like to discuss an interesting problem that I came across recently. Imagine for a second that you need to implement a RESTful API client which uses a combination of metadata which describes API and a user input in order to make a HTTP calls.  In such a scenario you will quickly realize that for a subset of API calls you will need to develop a custom classes in order to have  them later serialized (to JSON or XML) in runtime so that you can send it via POST or PUT requests. This rises a question. Do I really need to implement N - 1 classes that represent all types that some API(s) expect(s) as a

Deep dive in unit testing

These days each product reaching market is labelled as top quality - no matter if it`s a toy or a car or an application. Everyone talk about quality, quality is everywhere and at the same time quality by nature is a tricky thing to define and measure. To give you an example, imagine a two new brand cars from a two different car manufacturers like for example BMW and Fiat. Dealers of both brands will tell you that their cars are top quality and in fact that is true! The problem starts when you try to understand what top quality means for both car manufacturers - what are their standards of quality. What Fiat can consider as top quality might be completely not acceptable for BMW. From client perspective what really important is to understand how to measure quality in a standards driven way. As an example let's compare a European car safety performance assessment rating for both brands (NCAP is rated from 1 to 5 stars where 5 stars is given for most safety cars). In this rating ca

Creating API with MVC ApiController part 1 (with introducing to MVC design pattern)

Introduction to MVC In the last few years a software architecture changed very heavily. From desktop (forms) application which were very popular in Windows XP users move to SOA and now completely start using web based solution hosting in a cloud . Of course such evolution is not something bad, just the opposite in my opinion because web based application are highly scalable, better secured and available from each place in the Earth where user has an Internet connection. Such a big changes in software architecture cause that also programming model has to change. As response for this need, IT companies start working for on new technologies and improving existing ones. APIs became very popular tool  in a developer hands and whole communication became much more lightweight (by switching from XML to JSON) - mainly because the emerging market of mobile devices. In a new MVC version 4 also Microsoft introduce some improvements which allow developers creating web services (APIs) in well kn