Binarymist

I had a good friend visit from AU this weekend.
He’s the Technical Lead for Fairfax Media.
We got talking about lots of technologies.

I decided to do a little research on top of our discussions.
Following is a bit of a mash-up of the technologies we talked about.
Predominantly focused on low resource hardware and hand held devices.
Most of the detail is taken from other posts.

Code coverage

MSTest has a very handy tool that grabbed my attention and looked like it would be very useful for the unit tests we were writing at work.
Mentions in the above link that it’s a pain in the ass to set up.
Not so.
My friend has set this up for his company, and has had good success with the process.
It provides a visual interface of your code and how much of it is covered.
Also provides other views and useful statistics.
Could be good for where we are planning on going with unit testing at my work.
Visual Studio Ultimate and possibly Premium has this.
Here’s a quick overview of getting it set-up.

Then there’s TeamCity 6 which has dotCover included.

There is also NCover, but it’s not free.

Caching

Memcached
Free, light weight, high performance and open source.
If security is needed, must be provided on top.
Microsofts AppFabric previously known as Velocity… Microsofts answer to Memcached.
I’ve used AppFabric in a WCF project, but not for caching.
Plenty of info on the wiki.

SQLite

Serverless, open source.
Any process that wants to access the database, reads and writes directly from the database files on disk.
There is no intermediary server process.
Implements a database-wide multiple-readers-single-writer lock.
SQLite is transactional and fault tolerant.
More deployments of SQLite in use than any other SQL database engine.
Many low resource mobile devices using.
SQL Language used omiting a few features and adding a few of it’s own.
Support for most languages incl C/C++, C#
If you’re still using flat file databases on your mobile devices, I’d see this as an excellent replacement.

Nginx

Free, Open source, high-performance HTTP server, reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy server.
Written in C.
hosts nearly 7.5% of all domains.
http://nginx.org/en/
http://wiki.nginx.org/Main
Runs on most platforms.
Features.
Web hosting providers have reported 50,000 simultaneous connections using Nginx.
Examples.

nuget

A package repository.
I think nuget would be really helpful in consolidating all the dependencies on internal and/or external libraries.
Also providing a single repository for API’s supplied to clients.
Looks like TeamCity (build server) can deploy to a package repository.
Point your Visual Studio Package Manager at the package source rather than adding references from all over the place.

http://nuget.codeplex.com/
Overview

A couple of ways to find and install nuget packages

Using the Add Library Package reference dialogue box.
Using the Package Manager Console

Hosting Your Own NuGet packages
Creating and hosting packages
Hosting package feeds
Packaging your libraries

This entry was posted on January 30, 2011 at 20:52 and is filed under Tech Mash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.