d-fens GmbH
Audit and Consulting of Information Systems and Business Processes
I am a senior auditor and consultant at d-fens for business processes and information systems.
The title of today’s post might sound a little bit provoking, as originally MEF and StructureMap are not meant for the same use cases. However, as there is a great deal of overlapping functionality in StructureMap over MEF (and chances are high one is using an IoC framework anyway), it makes sense to check if we can reduce our arsenal […]
While doing some tests with our new TraceListener and log server I did some tests where I wanted to find out how long the log server would take to start accepting messages. So I started to constantly send messages from the console: When I looked at the server logs I noticed that the arriving messages came in unusually slow. So […]
Recently I started writing a PowerShell binary module in C# (mainly due to facilitate testing and move away from Pester limitations). In this post I will describe the format of […]
When integrating back end systems we very often would like our build server to run integration tests against our test evironments. The problem is that we do not want to […]
Microsoft .NET offers a very flexible logging system exposed via the System.Diagnostics namespace. Unfortunately (and not surprisingly), by default the pre-packaged listeners do not support writing messages to log4net directly. However, we can extend the logging outputs by implementing custom TraceListeners and when asking our favourite search engine for “TraceListener log4net” we find there are already plenty of implementations of […]
One of the cool features of PowerShell script based Cmdlets is the possibility to define default values for Cmdlet parameters. This is typically done like this: Whenever we invoke such a Cmdlet without specifying the Name parameter the PowerShell runtime will insert the value my default value into that parameter. C# based PSCmdlet provide a similar approach to this by […]
For years all our PowerShell modules we released were script modules (i.e. they were written in PowerShell). However, it is certainly possible to write PowerShell modules in C# as binary modules. Of course there are already plenty discussions whether one or the other approach is better. It really depends on the exact requirements. For us the limitations of Pester (especially […]
Before PowerShell 5 we had to revert to reflection to be able to display constructor information in PowerShell (see Get-Constructor Fun for details). And because we used that functionality so often we created a Cmdlet Get-Constructor that is part of our biz.dfch.PS.System.Utilities module. However with PowerShell 5 this is obsolete as it is now built into the language and runtime […]
If you have been working with C# and JSON you mmight probably resorted to Newtonsoft.Json, the defacto standard in .NET for handling JSON related data. However, when it comes to […]
When working with a DataServiceContext from PowerShell you might run into concurrency update situations after updating entities via SaveChanges. This is due to the behaviour of the DataServiceContext ChangeTracker which will not reflect changes performed by the server (as a result of our update operation). Let me illustrate this with a quick example: Suppose we have a Catalogue entity where […]
The other day I was working in a PowerShell session when I suddenly realised that Powershell’s TabCompletion feature was no longer working. That was strange, as it certainly normally and […]
Today’s post will cover the Pester testing framework. If you ever have used Pester for more the sunshine scenarios you will have noticed that the assertion of exceptions is a little bit, hmm, awkward. Pester provides an integrated Throw operator that will parse the exception message. This has some limitations such as when running in non-english environments the message may […]
Today’s post goes rather quick … Telerik JustMock in its commercial (i.e. non-free) version provides you the option to mock static classes, which comes in really handy when you want […]
This blog post is about log4net which switches log configurations within a process as soon as two components are using their own log4net configuration. As you can read from our numerous blogs we are using PowerShell in combination with C# quite extensively. In addition we are heavily relying on log4net for logging puposes (see our PowerShell module biz.dfch.PS.System.Logging (available at […]
Today I ran into a problem when all of a sudden my code contracts stopped working – as it seemed. In reality I was missing a simple override in the implementation of a class that derived from a base class. But now for a a concrete example. Suppose you have the following scenario: ContractClassForIArbitraryObject this class holds the contract for […]
I recently noticed an — at least for me — unexpected behaviour when working with Code Contracts in interfaces. When you define a contract for an interface (via ContractClassFor) and implement a class from that interface that contract is certainly enforced. However when you define additional requirements on that implementation class these contracts are evaluated BEFORE the interface contracts. Here […]
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