Bits of Software Engineering

On Friday, I was trying to use the Bing API to test an issue we were having while using .NET 4.5, LINQ and async/await patterns. While Bing recommends you use their .NET library , I needed to keep my example as a pure core libraries example so people could try to reproduce my issue without having to download any third party library. The Bing API offers Basic authentication or OAuth (to keep track of how much your are using of your monthly quota). So, I had to make a remote call to a web service using Basic authentication (to keep it simple). In .NET 4.5, the recommended way tot access remote resources is to use HttpClient . I spent a fair bit of time researching this online and either it is so simple or nobody ever tried, but bottom line was that nobody has a clear and simple example There are several key elements to a successful Bing query using HttpClient. Header info According to the RFC 2617 , basic authentication information is passed as an HTTP header. Fortunately, the Htt...

Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4 templates) are a very powerful asset when used appropriately. Their main advantage is their ability to generate large amount of repetitive code over and over, at the click of a button and with a Swiss watchmaker’s precision. My current project, Responder , an Outage Management System, contains dozens of xml files to define its data model and for configuration. Until a few months ago, adding a new column to a data table was a several hours process. It involved a lot of manual editing of XML files, updating SQL scripts, updating of code classes used to manipulate data, etc.. Errors were frequent and the simplest typo could prove dramatic if not caught on time by manual testing. This all started changing with a T4 template. By generating all the necessary code straight out of the XML file, we removed most of the hand-coding, making the code (our RxDb.* and ArchivesDb.* structures for those who know) a perfect translation of the content of the ori...