Michael James - Developer

Deploying Websites and Web Applications has changed massively over the years, I have seen the likes of FTP, Copy & Paste over RDP (why!!) etc but there has always been a degree of, did I copy the correct files, did I miss any, did I upload the correct client config etc. Since VS2010 I have been a big fan of always publishing my applications to either a local folder and then upload or directly to the server, depending on the setup. One thing I have always struggled with is publishing files that aren't part of my project, and ensuring the correct client config settings are uploaded. Now I'm running VS2012 full time I decided it was time to put to bed these issues and ensure I could use one click, or as near to one as possible, to deploy stage configurations of my applications as well as live. VS2012 has tweaked publishing again, it now includes a much fuller publish model, with WebDeploy amongst the usual FTP, FileSystem etc. The Package / Publish process is just an ext...

Tonight I started a small project and I thought I'd take the opportunity to explore the new Microsoft.QualityTools.Testing.Fakes library. In case you don't know this library basically allows you to "easily" mock out those pesky sealed classes within the .Net Framework, I've only used it to do System.IO tonight but it does do more. I have a feeling though System.IO will be used heavily with it. What the library allows you to do is to generate a shim version of each sealed class within a dll. So what is a shim? MSDN at the moment says the following: Shim types allow detouring of hard-coded dependencies on static or non-overridable methods. What this means to you and I is you get to create a wrapper type, ShimDirectoryInfo for example, you then set delegates for each method and property that you are going to use on the type and let these return your expected values. When your real code then goes to use the original type, DirectoryInfo in our example, it will...