Dotnet Lightweight Databases
My popular dotnet-blazor-crud project has long used the EF Core InMemory database provider for data persistence. While this hasn't caused me any issues -- ever, I've been aspiring to move to a relational database versus an in-memory provider. SQLite is the obvious contender here, without going to a full out-of-process database. Getting started with SQLite and EF Core is pretty easy. The real question for me was how much work it would take to swap out the in memory provider for SQLite.
Web Hosting Provider Cutover
I feel like I’m in the homestretch of my migration off of my current hosting provider – FullControl. Nothing against these guys; they’ve been an absolute stellar service provider. I just don’t need the dedicated virtual server I was paying for with them. It’s a short story that came down to rightsizing my hosting provider to align with my current needs. I’ll tell the somewhat longer version of the story in this blog post though since there are a couple of interesting corollaries along the way.
Generating Production Volume Data with SQL Data Generator
I’m sure if I had a nickel for each time a software project was impacted by introducing production volume data into the testing life cycle either too late, or worse even – not at all, I’d be a rich man and wouldn’t be writing this blog entry. When you think about it, it’s really no wonder that we find ourselves in this situation. Developers new to the craft have no experience to draw on dealing with millions of rows of data. Experienced developers and DBAs often pass on war stories of hand crafted scripts and the perils of migrating data from production to lower environments, further reinforcing the belief that emulating production volumes of data is work restricted to the gods of IT.
The Virtue of Static IIS Machine Keys
Having non-static machine keys when hosting on IIS is just one of those things that’s just bound to cause trouble eventually. This holds true equally for single server hosting environments and load balanced web farm environments. Especially if your goal is to shield your users from any knowledge of IIS lifecycle activities (e.g. application pool recycles), the use of static machine keys is to be strongly recommended. The implications of static versus dynamic keys are enumerated for several different hosting situations below:
VisualSVN
I’ve been contemplating the move towards a self-hosted Subversion repository for quite a while. My earlier attempts worked but left me with a lot of inconvenient and sometimes quirky side effects. These experiences always led me back to hosting Subversion on Linux, which is really where it works most naturally. Recently, however, I decided to retry my luck with Subversion hosting on Windows and I made the call to go with a “package” instead of doing the Apache / Subversion integration myself.
Functional Testing Attachment_Fu
I was performing functional tests on my models that employed Attachment_Fu this morning and thought it would be worthwhile to share the code since it was a bit of a hassle pulling it together. Kudos to Mike Subelsky for his introduction to functional testing Attachment_Fu. It got me going in the right direction. What proved difficult once again was the multi-model controller. Once I got over that hump, I was on my way. As you can see from all the detail in the HTTP POST below, that was not an entirely easy task.
Attachment_Fu on Windows
Continuing my Rails on Windows thread, I’m going to spend a bit of time on something that’s brought me both some substantial gains and some minor woes lately, running the Attachment_Fu plugin on Windows. I’ll start off with some general Attachment_Fu information and then get into some of the quirks, which are, as expected, mostly specific to the Windows environment.
Podcast Creation from Rails
I’ve been putting a good deal of time recently into converting GeoGlue from .NET to Rails. One of the things that I’m looking to get into the alpha release is the dynamic creation of podcasts. This is really nothing special since a podcast is little more than a special case of an RSS feed that points at external media files (i.e. audio or video).
Creating GeoRSS Feeds in C#
The recent announcement that Google will support GeoRSS in addition to KML as a data format for geographic content in Google Maps is long overdue. This is one of those rare areas where Google trailed both Microsoft and Yahoo and did not seem at all willing to budge. Google’s announcement also seals the deal on GeoRSS as the way to syndicate geo-specific data. However, despite the obvious importance of GeoRSS, there is little written material on producing GeoRSS feeds.
Hosting Flash Video
I finally got around to adding videos to the site that I’ve been accumulating over the last couple of years. I’ve blogged about investigating Flash video a number of times before. After putting a number of videos on YouTube and being disappointed with the quality of the end product after their compression and resizing process was completed, I decided to go it on my own.