174 posts tagged with "technology"

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.

The TERN data collection application supports the Texas Estuarine Research Network's citizen science efforts on the Gulf coast of Texas and has been in operation since 2016. The code and testing were 99% all on my own, in spare time on weekends. I had tried to recruit some help with this open source project, but other than a couple of early code commits, I was unsuccessful in that regard.

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:

1. Startup fresh virtual machines from a pre-created, Packer-based image in seconds instead of hours.
2. Use the same scripts to create a local VM, a VWMARE instance, or a cloud-based virtual machine.
   • in other words, you can test your virtual machine creation process locally
3. Helps you maintain a strategy of infrastructure-as-code, which can be version-conrolled.

Problem​

I had just upgraded NuGet packages - a seemingly innocent thing to do. Everything compiles fine and I tried to run my ASP.NET WebAPI service. Testing in Postman works fine, but when I try to let the browser call an endpoint (any endpoint), I get a mysterious 500 server error with a rather unhelpful payload message of {"message":"An error has occurred."}. However, even with Chrome accessing the service, a breakpoint in the endpoint showed me that the code was executing fine. The problem is clearly occurring inside the ASP.NET engine when trying to send the response back to the browser.

The API for FlightNode is essentially structured along the lines of the onion architecture concept. Follow that link for a full description of the concept. Because my graphics toolkit is currently limited, my diagram for FlightNode has boxes instead of concentric onion-looking circles...

This release candidate nearly wraps up the user management and volunteer work tracking functionality. There are a small few "should have" features that will be added in a future release. So what's new?

The .NET projects for FlightNode were created in several different Git repositories, thus giving us several small, well-contained, and re-usable projects. These small projects would be installed into the Service project as NuGet packages, which also makes for a faster compile in each discrete solution:

1. FlightNode.Common
2. FlightNode.DataCollection
3. FlightNode.Identity

But… this has approach has caused problems.

The first beta release of FlightNode is now alive and in the hands of testers. So what's been delivered?

Wow, you'd think nothing had been happening for the past two months. But that's not the case at all. There are now 6 different GitHub repositories (perhaps a few too many). November and December were heads-down coding months. But now the product is almost ready for an MVP launch... and that has me thinking about error handling. Specifically, logging.

Originally I decided to look into NLog for .NET logging, a product I've never used before. I have experience with the Enterprise Library logging block and with Log4Net, and find them both to be useful but not as... pleasant... as I would like. They don't have the interface I would prefer. But they work. It turns out NLog has basically the same interface, and the same tedious configuration.

In order to run FlightNode locally:

1. Retrieve all Repositories​

Make local copies of all the repositories mentioned in the Architecture page. Be sure to configure an upstream remote and follow the workflow described in Git Tutorials, Workflow, and GUI.

2. Start the Identity API​

Open the FlightNode.Identity solution in Visual Studio 2015. Open the Package Manager Console (menu: Tools > NuGet Package Manager > Package Manager Console).

Tutorials​

Git is a fabulous tool for source control management. While incredibly powerful, it can be a little daunting to learn at first. The following tutorials will help. They are organized from basic to more advanced.