Using ORM frameworks like Entity Framework and NHibernate has become standard practice for many developers. POCO using Entity Framework also supports test-driven-development nicely since we can create tests for our business domain objects without having a dependency on the repository used to store them. Entity Framework also supports LINQ queries which allows us to avoid defining every conceivable query necessary for our application ahead of time, instead letting the code that uses the domain objects construct a […] Read more »
Don’t Base64 encode things that users should enter
Base64 encoding is great for converting binary data into a string representation which can be transported over text based protocols like soap or json. Unfortunately Base64 uses a character set which is difficult for humans to interpret so for any data that needs to be human interpretable, like binary representations added to urls, base64 can be a real problem. Douglas Crockford solved this issue years ago with his special Base32 encoding scheme which uses a […] Read more »
Remove Byte Order Mark from a BizTalk 2006 outgoing messages
The BOM is a two to four byte sequence at the start of an encoded file which tells the recipient if the characters are encoded using big-endian or little-endian byte order. In BizTalk generally the byte order mark is added when a file is UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoded using an XML assembler in a send pipeline. Sometimes applications cannot handle the initial bytes and you don’t want them to be added to your message. I […] Read more »
SFTP Adapter authentication for BizTalk
There is a nice little SFTP adapter for BizTalk on CodePlex http://www.codeplex.com/SftpAdapter/. I have been trying this out for a couple of days and it works quite nicely. I have been using freeSSHd as SFTP server and WinScp as a client to see that the SFTP functionality works. WinScp comes with PuttyGen for generating key pairs for authentication and there are a couple of guides on the web which offer clues as to how this […] Read more »
Where to store documents in TFS
I have had several discussions with people I work with about where to put your documents when using Team Foundation Server. Obviously there are several places to put documentation depending on what sort of document it is. There are at least three places that make sense to me: In the SharePoint Portal In the Version Control repository As attachments on Work Items Each of these places has their advantages and disadvantages. I have found two […] Read more »
Talk on Migrating ASP.NET 1.x to ASP.NET 2.0 at DevDays 2006
A couple of days ago I did my first big talk, a colleague and I held a 50 minute session on migrating from ASP.NET 1.x to ASP.NET 2.0 at DevDays 2006 in Stockholm. Luckily it was a big success! I credit our success almost entirely (obviously we had some part in it…) to Scott Hanselman, we found many tips and links on the topic of public speaking on Scott’s blog. The most important tip and […] Read more »