Entries by Guido van Loon

I love the Microsoft SQL Server profiler tool. This tool can be used for a lot of things but I like to use it to trace which stored procedures are called from my application and the parameters values that where used. Today I needed something similar for Oracle. Unfortunately this seems not as easy as it is with SQL Server. This is why I don't like Oracle everything is made so difficult...

There is a tool, however, that can trace the sql statements passed to the Oracle RDBMS. It's called OraTracer and can be found on the following website: http://www.aboves.com.

It is not as advanced as the SQL Server profiler tool but then again it's free! Before we get too excited I must point out OraTracer does not trace connections made from ASP.NET or BizTalk. I'm still trying to figure out why. Perhaps it has something to do with these processes not running under the normal user account...

I like Microsoft Sql Server, I like it a lot. But there are times when you are forced to work with an other RDBMS like Oracle. I had to rewrite a stored procedure for Oracle using PL/SQL developer. One cannot do without this tool when working with Oracle! When I write complicated stored procedures for Sql Server I like to write the query as a select statement first. I can declare variables and use them in my select statement so I can easely convert the query to a stored procedure later:

I was looking for a similar approach for Oracle with PL/SQL Developer but had a hard time finding one. After some time fiddeling with declare statements and test scripts I found substitution variables. With PL/SQL Developer, in a Sql window, you can use so called substitution variables. By specifying &deptno in the SQL text, you will be prompted for a value for this variable. You can even set default values by specifying &<name="deptno" default="102">.

Google has decided to celebrate their 8th birthday today. This is my 28th birthday as well! I think it's a funny coincidence.

C# has nullable types. This gives us the ability to assign null to value types:

Microsoft writes the following in the C# Programming Guide about nullable types: "The ability to assign null to numeric and Boolean types is particularly useful when dealing with databases and other data types containing elements that may not be assigned a value. For example, a Boolean field in a database can store the values true or false, or it may be undefined."

Then why is it that the Typed DataSet generator in Visual Studio 2005 doesn't use nullable types in it's typed DataRow classes for columns that could be null? Instead we're still stuck with the IsNull() and SetNull() methods. This really is a missed opportunity imho. Perhaps they've had good reasons not to implement nullable types for typed dataset rows but I can't think of any. Leave me a comment if you know why.

After watching a video of Anders Hejlsberg explaining how LINQ works I decided it was time to check out the may 2006 LINQ preview myself. I downloaded and installed the bits on my laptop and started Visual Studio. I started a new project and looked for the LINQ project types that should have been installed by the preview but they weren't there! How could this have happened?

I searched the known issues to find a solution to my problem. And there it was or wasn't it? The symptom description looked fair enough: "LINQ project types do not show up in the New Project dialog" This must be my problem or wouldn't it? It seems that when de default location for the templates has been changed, the installer will still install the templates at the default location. Well yeah, but I didn't change the location of my project templates!

After fiddling around with the template files, copying them around to and from all kinds of template directories I took another glance at the list of known issues.

Almost at the top of the issue page there was an other issue marked with the word "new". It's description read "After the CTP is installed no new LINQ-specific project or item templates are added." Aha! Why didn't I see this before? Did they just add this? Well I must have overlooked it the first time but now I know the real cause of the problem at hand. The installer simply assumes that the Visual Basic language service is present in your Visual Studio install location. Well, at my install location the wasn't any Visual Basic language. I wanted to safe some hard disk space back then when I was installing Visual Studio... Unfortunately the workaround for this little inconvenience is to install the Visual Basic language and then reinstall the LINQ preview.

At work the other day I had some trouble using the TestDriven.Net 1.0 plugin for Visual Studio 2003. When I ran my tests using TestDriven, no test results where shown in the test output window. Instead I got stuck with a dozen or so test output windows, all of them empty... I tried re-installing the tool and repairing my Visual Studio installation but non of the things I tried really helped.

I was still able to debug my code using te "run with debugger" option but to see some test results I had to use NUnit, which is a separate tool outside the IDE. This was not too big of a deal but it was decreasing productivity and I wanted it fixed.

While I didn't expect too much of it I decided to send an email to the TestDriven.Net support. It didn't take long before I had an anwser from Jamie Cansdale, the creator of TestDriven, with some suggestions of what to try. Unfortunately his suggestions didn't help either but Jamie wouldn't give up. He really cared about the problem at hand and that alone was enough for me. We exchanged quite some emails that day but still without any result. Nonetheless I want everybody to know TestDriven.Net really knows how to give support. After all it's the experience that counts! A positive experience it was!

Unfortunately I was unable to test the newer version of TestDriven because we don't have any licenses for it. It would most likely have solved the problem... With Visual Studio 2005, unit testing is build into the IDE. Running tests and viewing test output is done in a nice way but I miss being able to right click a test method and just run it from there with the debugger. With TestDriven.Net 2.0 comes support for Visual Studio Test projects. When I'm able to fully swith to VS 2005 someday, I will still love to have TestDriven.Net just for running my test directly from the code window.

A while ago someone showed me this movie of a presentation on Identity 2.0. Today I attended a presentation about Microsoft Card Space (Aka Info Card) when I remembered this wonderfull presentation by Dick Hardt. He has a very special style, but it works real nice. You must see it to understand what I'm talking about...

Perhaps you did already know of the DataSet Quick Watch Visual Studio plugin for watching the contents of a DataSet in debugging mode. Well there have been some improvements on this little tool. Check out the Enhanched DataSet Quick Watch on The Code Project.

Today someone showed me WebServiceStudio. A nifty little tool to invoke webservice methods. This tool generates a .Net proxy from a WSDL endpoint and helps you to invoke the methods on the service by creating the request message. All you have to do is give the values for the different element of the request. Once the webmethod is executed you can examine the repsonse message.

This may come in handy when testing or debugging a webservice. WebServiceStudio 2.0 exists for quite some time now, I don't know how I could have missed this one!

Anyway here is the link: WebServiceStudio 2.0 at gotdotnet.

The people over at http://www.cakephp.org/ have restyled their website. But that's not all. They also have a stable release available for download!

Today I found a Windows version of the PSP game Lumines. For the people who don't know what Lumines is. Lumines is a puzzel music games for the PlayStation Portable. Some Chinese fellow has created a Windows version of this highly addictive game. He made it in such a way that people can add their own skins and music. I wonder how many skins there are out there, the PSP version has a lot. The game can be downloaded from the authors website.

I'm excited about my new usenet provider eweka.nl from wich I finally get the speed I deserve.

The graph shows a download from a binary group with a stable 833,5 kB/s! This is the first download I do from eweka but it's already so much better than speedxs.nl I was using! It's even a little better than usenetserver.

Here is a little Mock super class we've used in one of our projects. It may come in handy when you don't want to bring out the big Mock frameworks... (credits go to TimV for punching up this code)

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I got some hands-on experience unit testing with mock objects recently. I must admid I'm very positive about it. The project I'm working on is getting bigger and it is becoming harder to set up the environment in order to test a small piece of functionality. This is a problem that comes with the so called "state testing" that we were using. With mock objects an other way of testing known as "interaction testing" is becoming possible. This way you don't have to set up an entire environment to test a small piece of functionality.

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