Just a quick pointer in response to a comment, all of the posts I make are categorised, and those categories can be accessed by hacking the URL. For example, http://colinramsay.co.uk/diary/category/screencasts/ will list all of my screencast posts. The obvious problem with that is that you’d need to know what the categories were in the first place, so as part of an ongoing blog redesign, I’ve included the categories of a post underneath the post title.

You can also hack the URL to browse by date, for example http://colinramsay.co.uk/diary/2008/03 shows all of the posts I made in March this year, and http://colinramsay.co.uk/diary/2007 shows all of the posts from last year.

As I mentioned, I’m in the middle of a redesign, but the main change you should be able to see is in the readability of my posts; I’ve increased the font size and the line height to make it a lot easier on the eyes.

This post specifically refers to the use of the inverse attribute on Many-To-One relationships, such as a Category with many products. That’s simply because it’s the one I’m dealing with right now, and it’s the one I’ve been using most commonly.
(more…)

A big problem we’re having on a current project is ensuring that reports generated by SSRS actually contain the right data. For example, we have some fairly complicated ranking and averaging going on in subtotal columns that can look right on first glance but will be wrong for edge cases. The other problem is that one “fix” can pretty easily result in a regression elsewhere.

My current thought is to simply use SSRS XML export on the reports and use that to run unit tests against. We could push known data to the database, export the report, and run asserts against the average and ranking values in the XML.

However, I’m not sure how happy SSRS will be with this approach; for example, how easy will it be to change the datasource on the fly for these tests? And obviously, when the reports get redesigned or changed, the unit tests could break. I think it’s worth investigating; I wonder if anyone else has experience with such testing?

It surprises me that no-one offers a web-based build server – specify your source control connection details, set up a couple of tasks (build, test, report) and hit “go”. Is there some obvious problem with this idea that I’ve missed?

I want a build server but I don’t want to have to maintain the install or faff around with configs. I’ve tried TeamCity, which seemed ok, but the interface wasn’t great and it doesn’t support MbUnit.

I’ve started using Beanstalk for Subversion hosting, and it works very well indeed, so maybe that’s what’s got my thirst for web-bases apps going.