Spikeh'd

I've spent many years debating with my fellow developers across all manor of subjects (I do love to talk), but one subject that comes up time and time again is the usage of the UNIQUEIDENTIFIER data type in SQL Server; especially when they're used as identity and key columns. In fact, I see this more often than you would expect, and misconfigured UNIQUEIDENTIFIER columns can create "hidden" problems that can be difficult to discover and / or rectify, depending on the SQL experience throughout your team. If you care to ask around your colleagues, it's almost guaranteed that you'll get multiple conflicting opinions on why you should or should not use GUIDs in SQL Server, but few developers actually realise the impact of such a design choice. In the interests of science, I'll try and keep this as factual as possible, and I'll focus on the topic at hand, rather than GUIDs / UUIDs in general. Here's a list of common reasons for using a GUID in your d...

My last post expanded on a piece of code I found on Phil Haack's blog that extends Moq to allow you to return different values on each successive call to a method - I also improved it to allow you mock up any of the iterations to throw an exception in place of the return value. This is great for methods that actually return values, but what happens when you want to throw optional exceptions when you invoke void methods in Moq? Well, void methods on Moq mocks return ISetup<TMock> instead of ISetup<TMock, TResult>, which means that you can't use the ReturnsInOrder method to handle exceptions. Normally, you would just append a .Throws() to the respective Setup method, but Throws() has no params[] parameter, and no Action based override (as Returns() does), so the only way to apply this kind of rule is with recursive callbacks, which are both cumbersome and hard to read. This is demonstrated below; I'm mocking up a call to an FTP class. The first and third calls ...

I just ran into a little problem when using Moq - I wanted to be able to mock up the result of a method call, but return a different result each time the mocked method was called (I'm pulling messages out of an MSMQ within a loop). Anyone who's used Moq will know that you usually mock results with the Setup() method - however, Moq has no built in way of achieving this (that I'm aware of). To cut a long explanation short, I found a series of articles on Phil Haack's blog addressing (almost) the same issue. Phil's second post adds exception handling to his original example, but I wanted to return a "null", rather than throw an exception. Here's the code from Phil's blog, slightly rehashed to deal with nulls: public static class MoqExtensions { public static IReturnsResult<T> ReturnsInOrder<T, TResult>( this ISetup<T, TResult> setup, params object [] results) where T: class { var que...

Git is a brilliant, yet peculiar beast. It has the most flexibility of any of the VCS's I've used, and it's extremely powerful and quick once you get used to how it works. Suffice to say that I've fallen in love with it over the past year, for both personal and commercial projects, and online services like github and bitbucket just enhance the overall appeal of it. I therefore want to use it as my VCS of choice when developing games... but those who have tried to get Unity and git working together will probably either be dead by their own hand, or crouched in a corner, rocking back and forth in the foetal position. Unity3D is an entirely different, and possibly more peculiar beast. It's a great tool, and the editor is feature rich, but it's source control compatibility is weak to say the least. I don't know if this is through necessity, or the marketing people at Unity have pressed the developers to make it as complicated as possible in order to sell their...

Anyone who reads my blog regularly will know that when it comes to development, I generally stick to Microsoft or web-based technology, and rarely step outside that comfortable little bubble. I made a promise to myself back in  January  that I'd get into mobile or games development this year, and finally I've found the time to start looking at one of them. I'm no ideas man, but occasionally a spark ignites and the juices start flowing. Armed with an idea that's been rattling around in my head for a few years, I spoke to a friend who's been focusing on indie games development, and he suggested using Unity3D, a fully featured game engine that supports C# and JavaScript out of the box (making my learning curve a little bit easier). I told him my idea, and - as geeks do - we spent the next few hours hashing out concepts, and by the end of the night, we were fully bought into the idea. The next step was seeing how Unity would fit in. So, for the past few months, my ...

I've been doing a lot of database analysis recently, and fortunately I'm one of those people that enjoys it. I'm primarily a .Net developer, but I've spent many years looking after SQL Server databases, helping out (and even educating) DBAs, writing ETL packages and designing both large and complex databases. The database in question was in pretty bad shape; missing, unnecessary, and extremely fragmented indexes, missing primary and foreign keys, bad normalisation, and (the main reason I decided to look into it) undesired table locks during ETL operations. It's a 24/7 system, and live lookups are performed around the clock - data is imported early in the morning (when usage is at a minimum), which is when most of errors occur. Amongst many other pre-emptive actions I've recently performed on the database, I decided to set up regular table index maintenance job to keep queries as quick as possible. Unfortunately the database is SQL Server Standard edition, an...