Will Beattie's Blog

  Recently Microsoft released a new App Fabric SDK 2.0 CTP including some great new features, You can grab all the bits and pieces from here and/or read the release notes . Some of the highlights include:  Publish/Subscribe which are called Topics Message Queues Visual Studio Tools AppFabric Application Manager Support for running WCF & WF The part that interested me the most is the Queues feature and that is what I’m going to be exploring in this post. Overview of Queues Message Queues are not a new concept allow for more reliable and scalable communication between distributed systems than pure request/response. Solutions like MSMQ, NServiceBus already exist to solve this problem for locally connected systems.  What the Queues API provides is that it provides similar features but the messages are being transported across the internet and persisted in the cloud.   There is currently a Message Buffer available in Azure b...

After completing my Scrum Master course I felt it was high time I review some of our existing engineering practices and consider ways to improve. Whilst we practice strict test-first TDD and have 100% code coverage as part of our “definition of done” the one area that we’ve been missing is automated UI testing and acceptance testing. After all, high code coverage doesn’t mean a thing if the requirements are not met. ATDD & BDD This motivated me to rediscover what is known as Acceptance Test Driven Development or ATDD which is about defining automatable tests from a customer perspective that closely reflect the requirements described in the User Stories . This is also associated to Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD). The cool kids in the Ruby world caught on to this way back when we were still doing web forms development. Some of the Tools available in this space are: RSpec (Ruby) Cucumber (Ruby) Robot Framework (Java & Python)   FITNESSE W...

  I just received a bug report about the infamous Internet Explorer Security Warning for one of the pages in our application that serves video content over HTTPS.   After viewing the source I found the offender which turned out to be the codebase attribute set to http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab . < object id ="videoObject" classid ="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" codebase ="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab" width ="330" height ="292"> < param name ="src" value ="https://securedomain/video.mp4" /> < param name ="controller" value ="true" /> < param name ="autoplay" value ="False" /> < param name ="scale" value ="aspect" /> < param name ="cache" value ="true"/> ...