• It’s time to break out of the OO/RDBMS impedance mismatch
• Ayende is a freaking monster
• It seems the most promising of the document db’s out there

In order to do queries by anything other than an id, you need to create an index. The problem space for this site is theater and here is the code I want to write.


private static readonly IndexDefinition FindByNameIndex = new IndexDefinition
{
Map = shows => from show in shows select new { show.Title }
};

public static void ConfigureIndices(DocumentStore documentStore)
{
var showsIndex = documentStore.DatabaseCommands.GetIndex("ShowsByTitle");
if(showsIndex !=null)
documentStore.DatabaseCommands.PutIndex("ShowsByTitle", FindByNameIndex);
}


What I find odd about the API at this point is that the GetIndex method throws an InvalidOperationException index doesn’t exist (which is fine, no problems there) but that there doesn’t seem to be a way to check if the index does exist, something like:


bool indexExists = documentStore.DatabaseCommands.DoesIndexExist("ShowsByTitle");


I could just wrap the current call in a try/catch, but that seems a little strange for what seems to be a standard use case of checking to see if something exists.

For a couple of years now, I’ve seen posts on The Pomodoro Technique, the 25 minute at a time way to manage daily work.

So far, so good. No matter how it goes, I think I really need to take a lesson from Scott Hanselman. That guy gets tons done in a day and there must be a reason.

I’m not a giant fan of automated UI tests, my brief experience with them has shown them to be brittle. Regardless, I was still excited when the CodedUITest functionality was baked into Visual Studio 2010.

Here’s how things have gone for me so far:

1. Rookie mistake, don’t launch your web application in debug mode. If you do, you won’t be able to generate the code from what you have recorded.

2. Make the first action be to click on the browser to bring it into focus.

3. Like all unit tests, keep the assertions small. The first test I got to run successfully only checked that after I logged in, my name was in the welcome tag.

I’m going to be trying this feature out over the next couple of weeks and hope to post something more substantive on it. Maybe one of those vaunted series of posts all the cool kids do.

So, this is the code I was writing:

string pathToFile =                    Server.MapPath(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings.Get(”SmartCardMaker_PathToPdfForm”));

FileStream _stream = new FileStream(pathToFile,FileMode.Open,FileAccess.ReadWrite);

Seems pretty straightforward, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why the code would run locally and on the dev server, but not on the staging environment, where I was getting a SecurityAccessException. Here’s the catch;

I’m using a WebDeployment Project on this gig (like I nearly always do) with sections of web.config being overwritten based on build configuration. I forgot to add the key for the path to the replacement files and the call to Server.MapPath() was returning the path to the folder of the page that was making the call.

I didn’t find it on the dev box, because I was using the “publish” function rather than the deployment script, so the same web.config file was being used locally and on dev.

It would have been nice if the call to ConfigurationManager.AppSettings.Get had thrown an exception on the missing key item rather than failing silently, but it would have been smarter for me to make the changes to web.config replacement files in the first place.

Some days, I’m a real dummy.

It’s simple, but it works. I’m going to be creating a lot of these custom validators now that I know how easy it is. Let’s go to the code:

public class IsStateAttribute : ValidationAttribute
{
private static string stateAbbreviationsRegex =  @”\A(?:AL|AK|AS|AZ|AR|CA|CO|CT|DE|DC|FL|FM|GA|GU|HI|ID|IL|IN|

IA|KS|KY|LA|ME|MH|MD|MA|MI|MN|MS|MO|MT|NE|NV|NH|NJ|NM|NY|

NC|ND|MP|OH|OK|OR|PW|PR|RI|SC|SD|TN|TX|UT|VT|VI|VA|WA|WV|WI|

WY|AE|AA|AP)\Z”;
public override bool IsValid(object value)
{
if (value == null)
{
return true;
}
var state = (string)value;
if (Regex.IsMatch(state, stateAbbreviationsRegex))
{
return true;
}

return false;
}
}

A couple of things to notice:

1. If there is no entry, the attribute returns true. This is another tidbit I got from Phil, let the RequiredAttribute do its thing. We’re only here to validate if the value is present.

2. For the keen-eyed, there are more than 50 entries in the regex. Why? Because I included U.S. Territories like Guam (Guam is a funny word in and of itself. Back in the stand-up comedy days, I used it more than once in a punchline. Sorry if I’m offending anyone reading this in Guam.) as well as military abbreviations. You don’t have to use them in whatever drop-down you’re filling this field with, I added them for completeness.

Usage is what you would expect:

[IsState(ErrorMessage="Please Enter a Valid State Abbreviation")]
[Required(ErrorMessage = "State is Required")]
public string State { get; set; }

Enjoy!

Because a view doesn’t have a primary key and without one there is nothing to track.

Set a PK, save, and watch the magic happen.

So, since late last year I’ve been back in the game full-time. And now I will be transitioning this blog to more technical matters. For those who like web programming, Agile development practices, and long discussions about how to properly caffeinate oneself for a long night of coding, welcome. For the few of you (and you know who you are), many thanks for the time that you did hang with me here.

There, that feels better already.

Things have dropped more than a little since then, mostly because I have less time to write. But also because I am, in the real world, trying to be less argumentative. Or at least less of a jerk about it.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Howie ol’ boy, but this has nothing to do with courage. This has to do with saving your own ass and the company you built. Here’s a little test for you: go to one of the people you just laid off and tell them how courageous you are for fucking up their life.

I won’t hold my breath.