Thank to Oren Eini, now I have another tool under my toolbelt – ESENT database. Fully transactional database, deployed with all windows, just add managed wrapper and good to go. Moral of this post – there’s so much under my nose that I am not even aware of…

I have always wanted to be able to find free icons for the documents and visual explanations I was putting together, w/o violating any creator rights and yet being able to find quality items. Finally a co-worker of mine, Eliot Negelev, has showed me the site that does it: IconFinder.com Love it!

I previously blogged on afterthoughts on NServiceBus course. Equipped with new powerful knowledge I have approached on of the TODO tasks on my plate – decouple email notification service from the main web application.

First, the problem with the code that needed to be resolved. A customer is submitting content that has to be approved. Once content was submitted, an email is generated to notify approver. Approver either rejects or accepts the content, and notification is sent to the customer. Simple. Yet the original implementation has email notification logic residing within the application. What happens when application explodes or SMTP is down? Out of luck, sorry.

I have attended Enterprise Development with NServiceBus course last week. Interestingly, a lot of questions I had back a while ago where answered. Either I was missing the knowledge, or not asking the right questions. Either way, what I was trying to accomplish a year and something ago with BizTalk could be done ten times simpler with NSB. BizTalk was a great tool for mapping, but definitely neither a services platform nor a bus. Long-term running processes with BizTalk (aka Orchestrations) felt plain wrong. The fact that one was not able to test the bread and butter of a business process w/o having a full end to end integration testing was mind blowing. Creating messages outside of BizTalk has felt like a shameful sin.

I’ve been experimenting with build artefacts versioning for quite a while. Last time I was using major.minor.build.revision – this worked for us well, yet was not really significant for production operations. New place, new rules, and again into reviewing on how things are done. I am questioning the versioning schema I’ve used, and looking into alternatives. The best I have found so far is Semantic Versioning. Why this one? Several reasons.

1. It’s publicly documented

Just a few weeks ago I wrote a small application that would allow a designer to work on markup and CSS and when those are saved, changes automatically uploaded to an FTP and local browser that is usually sitting on the second monitor is refreshed. That was a fun side little app to do.

Today I run into another refresh-option-applicationAutoF5. It solves ASP.NET development issue with making changes to markup and CSS and refresh locally. Check it out, really nice and simple.

A while ago I had a conversation with a gentleman who resisted .NET development on the client side reasoning it that in case .NET framework doesn’t exist, installer won’t fail. WiX 3.6 Beta is out and it solved the “problem”. Reminds me of situation when “business code needs to be efficient to take less memory” situation. We’ve all seen that code die slowly and painfully

Asserting arguments is essentially a healthy practice. What I don’t like, is the fact that since day one ArgumentNullException used a string for argument name, and now with .NET 4.5 almost knocking on the door, there’s still only string option.

In my last post I have described the move from NAnt to PSake that is based on PowerShell. One missing piece for making the whole experience smooth was Visual Studio support for PowerShell syntax and some Intellisense. Gladly, I have run into PowerGUIVsx, that does just that: syntax highlighting, intellisense, and even debugging. Sweet!