“My browser lost its cookies” has long been one of the most longstanding Support complaints in the history of browsers. Unfortunately, the reason that it has been such a longstanding issue is that it’s not the result of a single problem, and if the problem is intermittent (as it often is), troubleshooting the root cause may be non-trivial.  

Unit testing is an integral part of modern software development. For years, Moq has been a popular choice in the .NET ecosystem for creating mock objects. Recent concerns over Moq’s SponsorLink feature have prompted some developers to consider such a switch. In this article, we delve into why you might consider NSubstitute over Moq and how to make the transition. 

You might think, as a developer, that nothing but the best is good enough as a development database. You might be mistaken. There is a lot to be said for LocalDB, but Ed Elliott argues that every edition has its pros and cons, and you need to consider Cloud-based resources, VMs and Containerised databases too. There is a whole range of alternatives and how you choose depends on the type of database you are developing, but for Ed, LocalDB gets the five-star accolade
 

How you shouldn’t implement base classes

public class Entity<T>
{

  public T Id { get; protected set; }

}

Motivation for such code it pretty clear: you have a base class that can be reused across multiple projects. For instance, if there is a web application with GUID Id columns in the database and a desktop app with integer Ids, it might seem a good idea to have the same class for both of them. In fact, this approach introduces accidental complexity because of premature generalization. 

There is no need in using a single base entity class for more than one project or bounded context. Each domain has its unique path, so let it grow independently. Just copy and paste the base entity class to a new project and specify the exact type that will be used for the Id property. 

Build 2021 is almost here, and Microsoft has published its catalog for sessions that will be ongoing throughout the event. We've rounded up some of the most interesting ones that we think you won't want to miss. Let's dive in! 

Microsoft has announced that the .NET Core 2.0 will be considered "end of life" and thus no longer supported as of October 1, 2018.  .NET Core 2.0 is considered a non-LTS release, and as such Microsoft only commits its support for three months after a successor has been released.  In this case, with .NET Core 2.1 having been released May 31, .NET Core 2.0’s end has come. 

With the release of Free Style 1.0, I figure it's about time to write about Free Style - how it works, why you'd want to use it and little introduction to CSS-in-JS. This has been a long time coming, with my first commit to Free Style over a year ago, and the first commit to Free Style in its current form 10 months ago. This is not a blog post designed to sway decisions - as always, you should use your own fair judgement. 

Six reasons to version control your database