Learn C# Express yourself - Variables and values Values, constants, variables, operators, objects and functions are, in my mind the most basic building blocks of a modern computer program, and like many other terms in computing, they are borrowed from mathematics.
Learn C# The newbie Hello All, I would like to thank Aaron for bringing myself on board. Being able to offer you years of experience like Aaron I cannot. While this June I will have been working
What When How Computers. You are the Computer Once upon a time, the noun Computer did not refer to the magical machine sitting on my desk, in fact, I would have been the Computer. in early 1600, the word computer first
Learn C# Gravypower Rebooted The last post made on this blog was back in 2015 when I was still living in Belfast since then a lot has changed. My partner and I moved back to Australia, we
Dependencies To check in dependencies or not to check in dependencies I have been playing around in the world of Drupal and Front End development for a while now and have come across a topic of discussion that I thought I had heard the
Sitecore Unit Tetsing and Sitecore I am a big advocate of TDD and would love to see interfaces on all of the Sitecore types, this is a big ask to put to the product team as they have
Heartbleed and Password Safes After reading about the Heartbleed bug last Monday I felt it was time to stop putting off swapping to a password safe. A password safe is a database that generates and stores passwords,
Ncrunch, SharePoint and Microsoft Fakes For the past month I have been working with SharePoint and also neglecting to blog. Today I stop that neglect to share something about TDD and SharePoint. I use a product call NCrunch,
Design Patterns Abstract Factories, shaken not stirred. The abstract factory is one of the Gang of Four creational patterns and as the name implies it is concerned with the abstraction of creating. The factory part of this pattern can be
Design Patterns A new year and a new reason I was lying in bed this morning thinking about what I achieved in 2013. Travelled through Southeast Asia, Japan, and China. Walked the last 200km of the “Camino de Santiago”. Travelled around Ireland.
CMS Continuous Integration through a CMS coloured lens Part I Something that I have come to appreciate is continuous integration, for me it all started with an article by Martin Fowler. The idea is to have everyone working from the main line and
Pseudo Code Back to basics For the past two years I have been striving to become a “Software Craftsman“, this has taken re-education on how I approach programming. It has been a roller coaster ride, learning about programming
Names and Namespaces - my dilemma Writing Gravyframe has been a great learning experience. I have been able to experiment with different ways of doing things, but have been at a bit of a dilemma when it comes to
Dependency Injection Gravyframe For the last few months I have been working on a boilerplate and example of how I think a website should be built on top of a .NET CMS. The basic idea is
Umbraco Examine: Indexing and searching with multipart properties One of the features I am building into Gravyframe is news, and one of the features is that news items can be assigned to more than one category. The approach I have taken
Tests written, time for beer Playing around with the time lapse function on my phone over the weekend. Here is the result.
Umbraco UmbracoExamine Y U use internal static Just spent the evening trying to mock out a custom indexer extended from BaseUmbracoIndexer. I want to add the site to lucene documents so that news can be searched in the scope of
Fluently Mocking an Umbraco Node I posted about Mocking an Umbraco Node and have not been very happy with the syntax of using it. After writing more and more tests where I mock out a node I decided
Umbraco Mocking Examine, an Umbraco index story I have been slaving away for the past three weeks trying to mock Examine, the library that Umbraco uses for indexing. It is based on Lucene and seems to be very easy to
Façade Façades - Helping you mock the UnMockable Most of the time working with existing code is hard when you TDD, unless there is an existing contract. If there is an abstract class or interface, lucky you :). Contracts enable us to
Software Craftsmanship No Test No Beer I tweeted an image a while back and thought I would share it here as well. This is classic and would make for great motivation, but there is a good point behind it.
Abstract Test Fixture For the past 12 months I have been making an effort to write all my code test first. It has been a steep learning curve and I am only just coming out the
Umbraco Mocking an Umbraco Node UPDATE: Fluently Mocking an Umbraco Node For the last few months, I have been working on an example showing that it is possible to produce sites on top of a CMS in a
Dependency Injection Dependency Injection an attempt to explain I was explaining to a friend the other day what dependency injection was, and even though I use this in almost every class I create I could not come up with a simple
Everything starts somewhere This is something that I have been wanting to do for a long time but never had the motivation to get off my ass and just do it. I will be trying to