Brian Nipper

As I have been writing consistently for a bit now I've already found myself referring back to things I've posted, which has prompted me to try and post items which have taken a bit of time to work out. It seems that the act of "writing it down" causes me to remember information better. Perhaps it's all the thought into attempting to write something useful. This post includes two details which took me more than a few hours to sort out so I hope to help others who have a similar need. Funny enough it could be me in the future after I've forgotten this information. First up is a little detail that I know I've forgotten and looked up more than once, and depending on the google/bing results I find sooner or later. Setting up IIS Express to host a site via HTTPS When configuring your site to run in IIS Express using Visual Studio it's fairly trivial to set the attribute to use SSL (i.e. HTTP over SSL which is HTTPS) as it's just an ...

I was recently reminded that order of operation can byte you when trying to troubleshoot intermittent unit test failures. First, I’ll be the first to admit that if you want to avoid problems with unit testing it’s best to avoid any dependency outside of your actual code base, things like databases, API and even the file system are best avoided in execution of your unit tests. That last one, the file system, in some applications is really hard to avoid. If you happen to be using MSTest, a helpful attribute for your test is DeploymentItem. This particular attribute allows you to define a file within your unit test project assuming it’s marked as “Copy Always”. With this attribute in place you can then combine this with TestContext.DeploymentDirectory to find this sample file and then do what you need to do. In my particular case I was having an issue with the unit tests failing on the build machine but not locally. After stumbling around for a bit I finally feel back to t...

It often amazes me at how often I find myself apologizing to others for rashly commenting on a problem before I have all the facts. In fact, after so many years as a professional in the IT space and dealing with countless critical situation/severity one problems (a.k.a. Sev1, crit-sit) I would be able to react in a more appropriate and beneficial manner. The sad truth is that, as I write this post. I JUST "did it wrong" on a Sev1 from earlier in the day and found myself sheepishly apologizing for my brash response. Perhaps by writing this down and publishing for others to read I can obtain the positive results of public shame to result in my correcting my behavior. At least there is a chance someone else can read this and benefit from my mistakes. The fundamental problem I seem to have is that I hear a few pieces of information or even just the subject line of an e-mail or short text message and immediately jump to a conclusion. Having done a bit of a personal post-morte...

Twilight Zone: The Eye of the Beholder I've always enjoyed science fiction work that intended to make the onlooker reflect on their world view, you know, really make you think about yourself. A wonderful example of that is the classic Twilight Zone: The Eye of the Beholder. Although I don't think it's needed at this point I will mention there are spoilers about this particular episode. The story outlines the tragic plight of a woman who has been horrible disfigured and all other attempts to make her look "normal" have failed until this final last ditch attempt. Through out you don't see the woman or the faces of the other characters. That is until the end when they unveil the woman by removing the bandages and you see, what at the time of filming, would have been considered an attractive movie star and as the camera pans around you also realize that everyone else appears to be "disfigured" according to what the vast majority of humans look l...

One of my favorite tools in my 10 in 1 screwdriver. The appeal is that in a single tool, just by flipping some pieces around you have just what you are looking for. In many minor jobs around the house I can do everything needed just with this single tool. When writing software you can find similar valuable tools and one such valuable tool is http://httpbin.org Like with most tools, the simplicity can be deceptive because how hard could it be to have an API that just echo's back what you sent. But then that is what is so great about httpbin, it's done and it's very robust. By way of example, when building a front-end you may find that the API isn't complete and thus you want to "stub out" the calls. With httpbin you can send a call such that it echo's back what you want and thus you are wiring up to an actual HTTP call. On the server side you might have the same need to wire up to a service that isn't something you are allowed to call fr...

So the teaser I'll lead off with is, at the end of this post you'll know how to watch Star Wars A New Hope in ASCII art form (i.e. text based graphics)... So let's begin. Recently I found myself working on a legacy application such that I had to redeploy the multi-node application into in Infrastructure running in Azure. Two of the models communicate via a WCF binding over net.tcp. While I was operating under the impression that the firewall had been opened up to allow the communication I was a bit stuck on how to validate that the communication was working. So I wandered up to the networking area to chat with our Network Architect. As I often find, chatting with those who have an expertise different than your own requires patience and effort in the area of translation. Even though we both work in the IT field we each have our jargon to deal with, but the price of admission is well worth it. In just a few minutes of explaining my challenge I had been provided wi...

*See attribution of image at the bottom. One of the greatest tricks I have had the pleasure of participating in is that of helping someone solve a problem simply by listening. I'm sure there is a more accurate description of this phenomenon, but in the world of programming it's called Rubber Duck Debugging . I was first introduced to this idea from listening to Jeff Atwood podcasts/interviews as well as reading his blog under CodingHorror.com  he wrote about the topic under the title Ruber Duck Problem Solving . Why the term Rubber Duck? Really it has nothing to do with the rubber duck, the intent is to encourage someone to solve their own problems by working through the very difficult challenge of describing what the problem actually is. It is often surprising to people when they discover that simply the act of attempting to describe a problem helps them to find the answer they were looking for. So my approach to assist others is by asking questions that I often ask...