Web Notes

Problem statement We all want to write clean code and follow best coding practices. This all engineers 'North Star' goal which in many cases can not be easily achievable because of many potential difficulties with converting our ideas/good practices into working solutions.  One of an example I recently came across was about using ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework 5 to store Enum values in a relational database (like Azure SQL). Why is this a problem you might ask... and my answer here is that you want to work with Enum types in your code but persist an integer in your databases. You can think about in that way. Why we use data types at all when everything could be just a string which is getting converted into a desirable type when needed. This 'all-string' approach is of course a huge anti-pattern and a bad practice for many reasons with few being: degraded performance, increased storage space, increased code duplication.  Pre-requirements 1. Status enum type definition

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

A few months ago I decided to learn a big data. This sounds very complex and of course it is. All these strange names which actually tells nothing to person who is new in these area combined with different way of looking at data storage makes entire topic even more complex. However after reading N blogs and watching many, many tutorials today I finally had a chance to try to write some code. As in last week I managed to setup a Hortonworks distribution of Hadoop today I decided to connect to it from my .NET based application and this is what I will describe in this post. First things first I didn`t setup entire Hortonworks ecosystem from scratch - I`d love to but for now it`s far beyond my knowledge thus I decided to use a sandbox environment provided by Hortonworks. There are multiple different VMs available to download but in my case I`ve choose a Hyper-V. More about setting this environment up you can read here . Picture 1. Up and running sandbox environment. Now whe

This was a very long break since I posted my last web note however it`s time to share some fresh experience with the developer community. Today I want to show one of a handy solution which allowed me to simplify a Task chaining in .NET 4.5.1. Let`s start from defining a problem which in this case is a Task.ContinueWith<TResult>  method and the way how it`s designed for a tasks chaining. So if you want to use a chaining by using this function, all the time you need to access a parent task result property which in many cases causes a lot of redundancy in the code. To demonstrate this I use a simple async WebApi2 GET cities  auto-complete function which will query a database and later map result set of entities to collection of data transfer objects (DTO). // !!BADLY DESIGNED CODE!! [ HttpGet ] public   async   Task < HttpResponseMessage > Get( string  query)     {           return   await   this .cityRepository .AutocompleteCityAsync(query) . C

Automated coded UI testing become very popular in the past few years. Its allow developers to create tests which are executed directly on UI level and simulate user actions. At the same time HTML5 become a standard for creating universal modern applications which can be hosts in a native browser controls. New model of creating applications brings a new challenges in the testing fields that's why in this post I want to present my solution (it takes me almost two days to get this working!) which is first step in the process of creation an end-to-end test automation for mobile applications. My solution is prototype of a .NET console application which can be use to control Android emulator and simulate user standard operation like installing app, typing and rotating. This prototype can be use as ' emulator manager ' which controls device emulator on which tests are performed - for example by using   Selenium . As initial requirements to run the project: 1) Install the

In the last few days I spent some time trying to unify structure of one of the project I`m currently working on. Most of the changes were about changing variable types because it`s were not used right way. That is why in this post I want to share my observations and practices with you. First of all we need to understand what ' variable definition ' is and how it`s different from ' variable initialization '. This part should be pretty straightforward:   variable definition  consist of data type and variable name only <data_type> <variable_name> ; for example int i ; . It`s important to understand how variable definition affects your code because it behaves differently depends weather you work with value or reference types. In the case of value types after defining variable it always has default value and it`s never null value. However after defined reference type variable without initializing it has null value by default. variable initialization  is