Working with a legacy codebase using NUnit and .NET Framework, I’ve found that there is a mix of NUnit assertions and assertions using the Should library. This library is rather old and, frankly, limited compared to Shouldly and FluentAssertions. These newer two frameworks are significantly more expressive, with APIs that cover myriad situations elegantly. Questions in front of me:

According to Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy, at his keynote Wednesday morning, I am one of around 53,000 people from all over the world who have come out to the annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. We come together from myriad industries and with interests that span the full range from product development to operations to account management. My personal learning objectives for the week are to deepen my understanding, and think about implications for the Ed-Fi tech stack, of four concepts:

We just wrapped up the 2018 Technical Bootcamp as part of the Ed-Fi Summit. The Bootcamp is a two-day event where we dig into the technical details, provide hands-on training and demonstrations, and get feedback from the technical community on challenges they’d like to address and improvements they’d like to see made. We had a number of sessions geared specifically toward local education agencies (LEA), state education agencies (SEA), and vendors.

Have you ever tried to write a query using the Ed-Fi ODS for reporting or analytics? To say that it is challenging is to use the mildest language. The Data Standard documentation in Tech Docs is top notch. Nevertheless, going from diagrams and definitions to actual query code for, let’s say, each student’s average math grade during a grading period, is not a trivial exercise.

Continuing from Upgrading safnet-directory, part 1, it is time to improve the solution’s unit testing. At the outset, the controllers cannot be unit tested effectively due to their direct dependence on Entity Framework and ASP.NET Identity Framework classes. With application of an in-memory database, they could be integration tested, but not unit tested as I understand and apply the term.

In 2014 I built a quick-and-dirty web application using ASP.NET MVC5 and AngularJS 1.0.2. There are probably millions of web applications, large and small, that are “stuck” on some older tech, often because people are afraid of the work it will take to modernize them. In this series of blog posts, I’ll refactor away the tech debt and polish it up this little app to make it something to be proud of… as much as one can be proud of a simplistic proof-of-concept, anyway.

It is 2018, and I have only just learned about the fantastic FluentAssertions framework. Seems like a nice time for a quick review of unit testing tools for .NET. Personal preferences: NUnit, FluentAssertions, Moq.

There is a positive a trend of developers doing more of their own testing, going beyond unit testing. However, if independent testers are cut out of the loop, then surely many applications will suffer. Case in point: a user unexpectedly entering a decimal temperatures and military time in a citizen science data collection application.

Packer is a cross-platform tool for scripting out virtual machine images. Put another way: use it to create new virtual machines with fully automated and repeatable installations. No clicking around. Some of the benefits:

Recently I installed MongoDb using Chocolatey, and was surprised to notice that the executables weren’t placed into the Chocolately path. Chocolatey uses a shimming process to automatically add executes to PATH. This is really quite nice.