These days (for the most part) I'm an advocate of using a (micro) ORM for most CRUD operations - delving into SQL usually isn't justified. That said, with clients I've had over the years I've seen a recurrent need for a "bulk data sync" process - essentially take a feed of data from an external system and "merge" it into a table in our database. Any records that are matched should be updated, any records that don't exist should be…

An enterprise app I develop & maintain makes use of ClearScript as an extensibility point: end-users (semi-technical) write financial algorithms in JavaScript and those algorithms are evaluated by the system during batch processing (certain key C# types are exposed that the algorithms can make use of). ClearScript is set up to run the JavaScript against the Chrome "V8" JavaScript engine (the same as NodeJS and, well, Chrome). Some of these algorithms are quite complex and time consuming to write -…

Introduction Even though AngularJS is approaching end-of-life, it's still deployed in loads of production systems. This post describes some techniques I used to have the validation logic entirely defined (and performed) server-side (ASP.NET WebAPI) - whist giving a client-side validation experience. By that I mean, type into a field and see validation errors as you type (rather than only when you submit the form). Why the heck would you want to even do that? Well - for one, there are…

As a relative newcomer to EntityFramework (coming from a background of plain SQL) I often find myself frustrated by the "black box" experience it provides. Of course you're going to tell me to And I do. Sometimes I'll clone my own copy of the source & compile & link against that so that I can debug it in the context (no pun intended) of my application. Recently I discovered a useful extensibility point - DbInterception which (among many other uses) can…

As part of a recent project I was installing NServiceBus as a replacement for Nimbus in an existing legacy system. The system makes use of Autofac for DI and adds various IStartable services to the container (background services etc). The goal - to continue using Autofac as the DI container for both the application and the NServiceBus message handlers, as well as allow the IEndpointInstance (bus) to be injected into / consumed by IStartable services in the container. Removing the…

I had a few hours spare and so thought I'd have a play with the "G-NAF" data set provided free of charge by the Australian government What is G-NAF? G-NAF (Geocoded National Address File) is a trusted index of Australian address information. It contains the state, suburb, street, number and coordinate reference (or “geocode”) for street addresses in Australia. It's worth noting that it doesn't contain personal or business related data - just data on physical addresses in Australia. It…

Ape E Eye http://ape-e-eye.herokuapp.com/ This is a toy project I built to learn Angular JS. It's a configurable dashboard of "searches" (REST API queries) which are periodically updated. It's hosted on GitHub at http://github.com/flakey-bit/ape-e-eye This is what it looks like: The idea is the user sets up one or more searches (REST API calls) and the dashboard will periodically poll that search and display the results. The user must supply the API URL as well as a JavaScript function definition…