Since ASP.NET 1.0, output caching has is being used to store the generated output of pages and controls. On subsequent requests ASP.NET can serve the HTML content more quickly from memory instead of generating the output from scratch. However this approach has the limitation that the generated output always has to be stored in memory and if the website experiences heavy traffic the memory requirements can be drastic....
These days it can be hard not to feel downright oppressed as a native code developer—it seems like the developers using the Microsoft® .NET Framework get all the cool tools!...
ASP.NET 2.0 makes dynamic themes really easy. No need to envy someone having cool multiple themes, you can have your own instantly! This article gives you step by step instructions on how to make dynamic themes in C#. You can try this code out with the Personal Web Site Starter Kit....
Consider the general problem of determining a best option from a list of choices, where the decision-making process is performed by a group of people rather than by a single person or by a purely quantitative technique. Examples of this type of activity include the residents of a state voting for the state's governor from a list of candidates and the board of directors of a large company determining which of several smaller companies to target for acquisition. In essence, the group must rank its...
Recently, in conversations with software engineers and managers at Microsoft and other software companies, I have heard the same message repeatedly: finding really good software testers has always been difficult, but it seems to have become much more difficult in the past few years....
Don't adjust your dial; this is still a column about software design fundamentals. This time around I'd like to talk about testability, both as an important quality of your designs and as another tool you can use to create and think through designs. There is undeniable value in doing automated testing, but the question is whether the benefits of automated testing are worth the time and manpower investment. The benefits and costs of automated testing are greatly affected by design and architectur...
All software projects face risks. A risk is an event, which may or may not occur and which causes some sort of loss. The relationship between risk and software testing is straightforward. Because, except in rare situations, you cannot exhaustively test a software system, risk analysis reveals issues that can cause the most loss. You can use this information to help prioritize your testing effort. In this month's column, I present practical techniques you can use to identify and analyze the risks...
"That's not what we asked for!" I'm sure most developers have heard this cry from a customer shortly after delivering the latest build. The customer could be yelling at the poor developer for various reasons—maybe the requirements were not correctly understood or part of the system simply did not work....
The Python scripting language has features that make it an excellent choice for performing several types of software testing. There are several implementations of Python available including CPython, the most common implementation on machines running UNIX-like operating systems, and IronPython, an implementation released in late 2006 that targets the Microsoft .NET Framework. In this month's column I'll demonstrate how to use IronPython to test .NET-based modules from both the Python command line...
Within the realm of Test-Driven Development (TDD), mock objects can help you discover the roles that objects should play within a system, emphasizing how the objects relate to each rather than their internal structure. This technique can be employed to support good object-oriented design. Using mock objects as an aid to design turns out to be much more interesting than the common practice of using them simply to isolate a system from external dependencies....
Have you ever created a WebControl in MVC and though “Gee, it sure would be nice if I could add a stylesheet/script to the header of my page.” It’s not as easy as it used to be. This post goes over some code that can help you bridge that gap....
Here's how to configure an asp.net 2.0 web application as a SUB APPLICATION of an existing asp.net 1.1 application. By design the root website, “inherit down” the config file to all sub applications. When the sub application loads, the runtime loads the config file from the root application and inherits down to all sub applications. This can be useful, sub apps can now inherit from the configuration of the root application, But this usefulness sometimes can cause us a problem when the web.config...
