Today I began integration testing my SqlRepository while I experiment with an MVC prototype. I tried googling for a simple base class for integration testing a LINQ to SQL DataContext that would provide automatic rollback between each test, but after (minimal) searching, decided to simply write my own. Perhaps this will help someone. This base class was written for MS Test, but simply renaming the attributes accordingly would yield the same results on nUnit, xUnit, etc. The Code Simply inherit your test class from this base class and any changes done via the internal Context property will be...

LINQ and Expression Trees have enabled a ton of possibilities for us as developers, particularly in establishing some code-reducing convention based querying. I have found myself playing with Expressions in C# since their inception and will hopefully be publishing a few other posts I have queued up. For now, this post will simply demonstrate how to take advantage of a popular convention whereby each database table always has a single integer primary key named “Id” By taking advantage of this primary key convention I can save myself a ton of boilerplate code to query a table by ID. ...

A project I am now working on is using the Web Client Software Factory (WCSF) from the patterns & practices team. It is basically an elaborate MVP-based framework that currently sits on top of ASP.NET Webforms. One of the components it ships with is the ObjectContainerDataSource which is a lot like the ObjectDataSource that ASP.NET provides. I admittedly have little experience with either of these controls, since I am not a huge fan of declarative data binding in larger applications. It does however offer better integration with the MVP pattern, simplifying the “bubbling” of DataSource events up to...

A couple months ago I wrote a basic set of extension methods to handle automatic auditing in LINQ to SQL. Well I have received a large number of emails regarding this particular project so I have decided to focus on cleaning up my v2 API and releasing it on CodePlex. There was a lot of room for improvement from version 1 and today I am going to post the all new LINQ Audit Trail code. This new version is significantly enhanced in the previous version. Objective Automatic auditing of all inserts/updates/deletes for any table in your database with...

UPDATE: This post is outdated and has significantly enhanced with a new version. Please see LINQ Audit Trail V2  In a project I am currently working on, we had a fairly common requirement of recording an Audit Trail of any data changes. The requirements were typical, provide a running log of any changes in the database, including: What table was modified? What fields changed? Who made the change? When did it occur? Naturally, there are many ways to tackle this...