Brian Hartsock's Blog

Is it possible? Yes, and it is actually relatively easy. The hardest part can be figuring out how to mock/stub out certain functionality so your testing small units as opposed to full acceptance testing. The line can get blurry, but I don’t really care. Testing is half the battle. But to be clear, the focus of my testing is to test how a snap-in is working. It sounds like an integration test, and maybe it is, but there is no reason you couldn’t test any powershell script using some of the steps outlined here. »

Today I gave a talk about Cloud Computing, and was posed with an interesting question. How can we sell cloud computing to the non-technical decision makers? I wasn’t really prepared for the question, because I was trying to sell it to technical people. But it is a very valid question, because the IT department of many businesses must go through others to get decisions approved. The first thing that came to mind wasn’t cost, or ease of use, it was who else is using it? »

Ever get this error message? Exclusive access could not be obtained because the database is in use. RESTORE DATABASE is terminating abnormally. You can’t do a restore will connections to that database still exist! If you have jobs that do restores of databases for one reason or another, I bet you have seen this message. I have a job to do a nightly restore of a backup, but some users just never disconnect even though I continually shake my finger. »

Stop trying to hack my blog with SQL injection attacks. If I wasn’t so tired, I would block your IP, but I am confident enough to wait till tomorrow. PS - Why I am even nice enough to blur the IP address I don’t even know. »

Lately, I have been doing a lot of thinking, and talking, about Cloud Computing. Describing it to technical and non-technical people alike can be hard. One great resource I have used is Graham Weston’s post on Cloud Confusion, which gives a great analogy to help clarify the definition of cloud computing. Today, few of us generate our own power. Instead, we buy it from power companies. These companies generate and distribute electricity from massive centralized power plants that can cost over $1bl to build. »

Yesterday, I took the plunge, changed my DNS, and am now on Mosso. Dreamhost was getting slow, and having intermittent outages, so I needed the switch. Not to mention Mosso is another division of Rackspace, just like Mailtrust. I am super happy with Mosso so far. The blog is faster than ever, and I have had almost no problems. What’s even crazier is I am using CDN Tools to host a lot of my static content on the Cloud Files CDN. »

Today I used this function for the first time. Somehow, I have never needed this before. It is super simple and very useful though. It is basically the inverse of DateTime.ToString(“yyyy-mm-dd”). It allows you to parse a custom date/time format. So, for example a Pound proxy log has a date in the format 12/Mar/2009:05:00:36 -0400, which isn’t a standard format in .NET. Using ParseExact, parsing it was a piece of cake. »

There are a million reasons someone might start using Twitter. For the longest time, I stayed away from it. Now I am a fairly active Tweet’er. Why you might ask? I was the outsider. I know, I am a wuss. I am fine with it. Cameron and Pat finally convinced me I was missing out on something big, and I was. I signed up, and started Twittaling. To my surprise, I started liking it. »

I attended my first Code Camp this past weekend. Overall, it was a great experience, although for a few reasons you might not expect. I learned a little about new .NET features, but the biggest benefit for me was the networking. My code community, for the most part, revolves around Mailtrust. Through Code Camp, blogging, and Twitter (I will blog on this later, since you might remember my last Twitter post) I have joined a community of developers much larger than Mailtrust’s. »

User Access Control is a good feature. Prohibiting implicit changes to administrative settings is good. Linux has done this for a long time with sudo. But Vista made a good thing annoying. You have to click Ok every time instead of it realizing you know what your doing. Sudo can remember for a certain amount of time. Although I complain, I can actually live with this downside. It is ugly and slow. »