March 2012 Archives

Test Naming Convention

March 30, 2012

Historically I've advocated naming test methods after the method under test, in order to help find the tests when you need to modify them. Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests has shown me that this is a relic of a code-first mentality rather than good application of test driven development, primarily in the section "Test Names Describe Features" (ch 21). "Test driven" development implies that we do not know the name of the method we're going to test. But we do know the functionality (feature) that we are going after, and that knowledge should be used when writing out a test name. For example:

SSIS Deployment Headache

March 18, 2012

For years I've had problems with SSIS deployments to production. In fact, I completely abandoned SSIS packages because it was so difficult to deploy to production (in SQL Server 2005): I always ended up with errors that would require me to hand-edit the file and hard-code paths. That, despite the fact that my config files have the database connection strings and file paths in them. And despite the fact that my packages usually work fine on the test server but fail in production. After years of this problem, it suddenly occurred to me that one piece in particular is probably at fault. But given that I do not have access to production such that I can investigate, it will always be a hypothesis: using a template that sets various properties with the help of variable expressions.

Entity Framework Connection Strings

March 11, 2012

This is a shout out to an agony-saving explanation of the connection string used for Entity Framework: Troubleshooting Entity Framework Connection Strings.

About this Archive

This page is an archive of entries from March 2012 listed from newest to oldest.

February 2012 is the previous archive.

April 2012 is the next archive.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Categories

Pages

OpenID accepted here Learn more about OpenID
Powered by Movable Type 5.12