My father-in-law has very limited vision due to Macular Degeneration. As the disease progressed he became unable to use email to contact us from his assisted living facility. We needed to provide a way for him to contact us to let us know he is OK in the morning and afternoon or to call him if needed. For serious issues he has a button on his wrist to alert the local staff.
I had a need to edit a batch of PDF files to remove some sensitive information such as account numbers and replace them with asterisks (*). When looking at some of the programs that are available to edit PDF’s they seemed to be mostly paid programs that didn’t have good batch options.
Writing a program in Python seemed like an interesting option and I did a quick survey of some of the existing packages.
While setting up a Go project for database access using the PostgreSQL database I was looking for an efficient way to quickly unit test different database access functions without a lot of extra setup or time for each test. Also to make the tests more useful it helps if the actual Postgres drivers and database is used.
For this purpose I found an interesting Go package called txdb that’s described as a Single transaction based sql.
I recently wrote about a framework for Versioning ASP.Net Web API. Continuing on the theme of versioning API’s, I researched how to test the different versions of a Web API, both for unit tests and SpecFlow acceptance tests.
Overview As a quick review, the SDammann.WebApi.Versioning package was used for versioning the API and provides methods for selecting the controller that is active for a particular version of the API. At the code level the controller is selected by the name space of the particular version of the controller, e.
One of the important things to consider when building an API is a strategy for versioning the API to manage changes. There are several reasons this is important:
To support users (developers) of the API that are using an existing version so as not to force breaking changes on them. To prevent breaking existing versions of the client applications that are using an existing version of the API. Previous versions of the API will normally be maintained for either a period to allow developers and client applications to upgrade or indefinitely.
I previously wrote about the use of SpecFlow in an ASP.Net MVC application with the SimpleBrowser library. I’ve recently been building a project to utilize the ASP.Net Web API to study the best practices of building a “RESTful” API for an application to save research notes and links about multiple projects.
Approach Since the Web API is intended to be utilized by a number of types of client applications that support the HTTP protocol (smart phones, tablets, desktop applications, as well as browsers), it is convenient to use a library that is well-suited to use the HTTP verbs used by the Web API.
Scott Hanselman recently published a really great podcast on his always-good Hanselminutes show, “On Empathy with Leon Gersing the Ruby Buddha”. They discuss how important it is to maintain empathy when dealing with others on the Internet as well as in real life, and the importance of keeping a direct connection to your end customers and colleagues in your community. It is a good listen for anyone in the software industry.
The SpecFlow project provides a useful way to integrate BDD (Behavior Driven Development) testing into .NET projects using the Gherkin language. The main idea is that the project specs or user stories are written in user language and then are linked to actual tests that are automatically executed as the project is developed. There are several possible ways to implement this with ASP.NET MVC to automate the testing with the browser.
I previously posted about a fix to a problem when the JQuery UI Autocomplete doesn’t play well with the ASP.Net MVC3 Remote validation. Part of the solution included a way to ensure that the remote validation isn’t fired for each key click or change of focus in the text box.
The method for doing this is to change the settings of the validation to not fire onkeyup or onfocusout, but to get there the validator settings must be obtained from the form in question.
Steve brought a lot of greatness to the world. I remember buying my first Apple computer back in early ‘82. It was an Apple II-Plus and I remember how cool it was that it did color graphics with a TV output. My brother and I were playing the Swashbuckler game right after we got it out of the box. It was also fun and easy to program in Applesoft Basic. Then along came the Apple IIc which was small and easy to haul around, although it wasn’t a true laptop.
