If you have a Not Null column in SQL Server and you want have a default value you can add that at any time. The most difficult situation I have seen is doing it when you want the default to be the current date.
In the example below I have a table called Person and a column CreatedDateTimeUtc that I want to default to the current utc date if the value is null. This will occur on both update and insert.
ALTER TABLE [dbo].[Person] ADD DEFAULT (GetUtcDate()) FOR [CreatedDateTimeUtc]
I am simply amazed how much effort I had to go through to figure out how to test asynchronous calls in Visual Studio 2010 (VS2010). In the end, I was able to figure it out with the help of some blogs that I read.
VS2010 ships with integrated Unit Testing which I would like to take advantage of. I am writing a Silverlight application that calls a Windows Workflow Foundation service that I implemented using the WCF Workflow Service Application. I really like it, but I want to be able to unit test the workflow service.
The only way I found to test a WCF Workflow Service Application that I could find was to add a Service Reference to my Unit Test project. This is good for me because that is how Silverlight will call it. The problem is that the WCF Workflow Service Application can’t be called synchronously. So, we have to call it Asynchronously. The problem is that the Unit Test framework used in VS2010 does not support Asynchronous calls in a Unit Test. Well, it runs, but doesn’t wait for the response to the Async call, so the test is pretty worthless.
Now that you know what I am trying to do, here is what I found as solutions.
Here is a class I created to simplify the process of make an asynchronous call appear to be synchronous.
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;
namespace MyApp.Tests
{
public class AsyncTest
{
// max number of milliseconds to wait for an asynchronous call
int timeout = -1;
public AsyncTest()
{
// if debugging, make it a much larger like infinity
if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached)
{
timeout = -1; // infinity (wait for ever)
}
else
{
timeout = 20 * 1000; // 10 seconds
}
}
public AsyncTest(int timeout)
{
this.timeout = timeout;
}
// we'll use this to make the current thread wait until our asynchrous call finishes
ManualResetEvent block = new ManualResetEvent(false);
// we'll use this to flag if/when our async call finishes
bool isAsyncDone = false;
public void Done()
{
isAsyncDone = true; // flag that we are done (do NOT do this after calling block.Set() this will cause race conditions!!!!)
block.Set(); // tell the calling / this thread that it can continue now.
}
public void Wait()
{
block.WaitOne(timeout, false); // wait until block.Set() is called or the timeout expires (which ever comes).
Assert.IsTrue(isAsyncDone, "Test took too long"); // if it took too long then report it to the test framework.
block.Reset(); // set the event to non-signaled before making the next asynchronous call.
}
}
}
Here is an example of how you would use it to create a method that acts like a synchronous method, but calls an asynchronous WCF Service.
public GetWorkflowStatusCompletedEventArgs GetWorkflowStatus(long requestID)
{
AsyncTest at = new AsyncTest();
GetWorkflowStatusCompletedEventArgs returnedArgs = null;
// setup our service reference and callback for when it is done
ServiceClient wf = new ServiceClient();
wf.GetWorkflowStatusCompleted += delegate(object sender, GetWorkflowStatusCompletedEventArgs e)
{
returnedArgs = e;
at.Done();
};
wf.GetWorkflowStatusAsync(requestID);
at.Wait();
return returnedArgs;
}
I created one of these methods for each of the asynchronous methods I wanted to test. In fact I created a helper class to hold them. Now, in my class that has all my tests in it, I just call the methods on this helper class which are synchronous. Now the test run properly.
For completeness, here is what the unit test (testmethod) would look like.
[TestMethod]
public void TestCanGetWorkflowStatusTwiceInARow()
{
var status = Helper.GetWorkflowStatus(1234);
Assert.AreEqual<long>(status.RequestID, requestData.RequestID, "The wrong request id was returned.");
Assert.IsTrue(status.RequestID > 0);
}
First off, when you start to create a WCF Service in Visual Studio 2010 or 2008 for that matter, you can choose WCF Service, but if you are using Silverlight as the client, you do NOT want to select this. You want to select, Silverlight-enabled WCF Service. If you don’t or didn’t you can follow the instructions here to make sure a few things are in place and then you will be in the same position as if you had selected the Silverlight-enabled WCF Service.
All I want to do is get the username of the user that is using my Silverlight application. Note, this also opens the door to ASP.NET roles.
Alot of what I read said that if I mess with my app.config and turn on transport or message security then I can get the user if I go to System.ServiceModel.ServiceSecurityContext.Current. Well, maybe that was for a Self-Hosted WCF service or some other scenario, but I could not get it to work in my tests with Silverlight with IIS hosted WCF Service. I think my biggest difficulty with these docs were that all the configuration tags that I expected to see in the web.config (they had an app.config) were not there, but yet I had a working (without security) WCF Service.
I had to assume it uses some defaults. I figured out that I was right. If you read A Developer's Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation 4 you will understand much better. It is a fairly lengthy read, but well worth it. There is actually a section on Workflow Foundation 4, but the first part of the article is most excellent in describing the defaults and how they work. For instance search it for ProtocolMapping to see that the defaults include basicHttpBinding, netTcpBinding, netNamedPipeBinding, and netMsmqBinding. They are defined in the Machine.config. WCF 4 also support inheritance / merging of configuration items. Very cool.
I am using an IIS hosted WCF service. I want to use Windows Authentication for authentication. Nothing fancy. What I found works well and quite easily is ensure the following things are in specified and in synch with each other. They must all agree!
<system.web>
<authentication mode="Windows"/>
<authorization>
<deny users="?"/>
</authorization>
</system.web>
<serviceHostingEnvironment multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true"/>
[AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode=AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)]
And now the moment of glory. You can now get the user just like you would in ASP.NET.
System.Web.HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name
References: A Developer's Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation 4
