A day in the life of...

I am currently developing part of a website where I pass cart information to PayPal to accept payment. PayPal will call back a "secret URL" on my website to allow me to confirm the cart details haven't been tampered with. I hate installing software I don't need. This is especially the case with software like IIS which just feels so intrusive, which is why I use the ASP.NET Development Server when creating websites. The problem with this server is that it only accepts connections from the local machine. My computer is behind a hardware firewall and my web server wont accept remote connections, so how can I test my PayPal IPN call back? Simple. Obviously I have to open a port on my firewall and direct it to my machine. So I opened port 80. Then I used this tool to list on port 80 and redirect all traffic to port 10101 (the port my ASP.NET development server was listening on). The result is that a remote computer can now make a HTTP request to my computer, and I...

I have decided that mocking IEcoServiceProvider is not the way to go. Your controller will use the mocked provider during testing but   You don’t want to have to mock every service the provider may return, it’s a lot of work!   You don’t want your controller using a mocked service, and then the EcoSpace using the real one! At first I was mocking every possible service request. IUndoService, IPersistenceService, IOclService, etc. I get bored typing them out in this blog, so doing it in tests was really annoying me. I decided I would instead only mock the service in question. So if I were ensuring that an action wont save an object with broken constraints I would mock GetEcoService<IConstraintProvider> and ensure that I always got a broken constraint. The problem was that the test to ensure I can save a valid object would then invoke the IPersistenceService.UpdateDatabaseWithList method. In my EcoSpace I have decorated my persistence service so th...

The website I am writing will sell some software I have already written. In addition it will sell "Collateral", which is basically support files for the software. The software itself will only run if it finds a license, which is an RSA signed binary file containing information such as the email address of the licensee. In addition some kinds of collateral will also be RSA signed with the licensee’s email address so that it will only work for that user, but not all collateral types are signed, for example a Character is a custom file format and is signed but a WAV file will not be signed. So this website needs to sell software + provide a license. It also needs to sell collateral, some of which will require signing and some of which will not. Software and Collateral are both types of Product, and you can buy a Product. The problem is how should I deal with the 3 different types of licensing (license file, signed binary, no license)? In addition to this should I real...

This post is really a reminder to myself, so that I can find the information quickly for the next time I reformat my hard drive! To run a website with a root path in Visual Studio 2005 follow these steps: Tools->External tools menu Click Add Title = Webserver Command = C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\WebDev.WebServer.EXE Arguments = /port:8080 /path:$(ProjectDir) Tick "Use output window" Whenever you need the webserver running just open your project and go to Tools->Webserver.

One of the requirements when writing a website I once created was the ability to model object constraints in OCL and then validating the current page against those constraints. The problem with normal validators is that they are designed to validate individual controls rather than a list of constraints on an object. The approach I took was to create a validator which I can place on any web form and add as many errors to as I required. The first step was to create a WebControl which supported IValidator public class MultiValidator : WebControl, IValidator { } I then added a list of strings to hold the error strings, and a method to add an error. private List Errors = new List (); public void AddError(string message) { Errors.Add(message); }//AddError When ASP .net validates a page it enumerates all IValidators within its own Validators property, and called IValidator.Validate(). To determine if the page is valid or not it then checks IValidator.IsValid. To add cu...