SpecFlow is a BDD library for .NET that aimsto add testing capabilities that are similar to Cucumber — that is,specifications are written in human readable Gherkin Format. From theproject site: 

SpecFlow aims at bridging the communication gap between domain experts and developers by binding business readable behavior specifications to the underlying implementation.

In theory, I really like that domain experts could write the specifications but I would be interested in seeing how that works out.

So what exactly is this Gherkin format?

According to the Gherkin project on github, 'Gherkin is the language that Cucumber understands. It is a Business Readable, Domain Specific Language that lets you describe software’s behaviour without detailing how that behaviour is implemented.' In other words, its a common DSL for describing the required functionality for a given system. 

This functionality is typically broken down by feature and each feature has a number of scenarios. A scenario is made up of 3 steps: GIVEN, WHEN and THEN (which seems to somewhat loosely correspond to Arrange, Act, Assert) and in a simplistic world, looks a little like this:

GIVEN an admin user
WHEN user requests top secret data
THEN return the list of data

If you want to learn more about the Gherkin format check out Engine Yard's Introduction to BDD with Cucumber by Dave Astels or Given-When-Then by Aslak Hellesøy

Quick Synopsis

I've recently started to move my blog over to a new server and a new root domain name; this could have an adverse affect on inbound links. In order to make sure this move was successful, I wanted to write an app to perform 301 redirects from the old URL to the new one.

There are a number of examples out there already for performing 301s but I wanted to make sure I was testing the code — It seemed like a great opportunity to get a little more use out of SpecFlow.

Initial Setup

1. Download and run the SpecFlow installer
2. Create a new Project and add a reference to SpecFlow and NUnit Framework
3. Add references to your mocking framework (this example is using Moq)

On with the code!

After all the references are sorted out add a SpecFlow feature.

The feature file is where we're going to define our specifications. I want to make sure that when a request is made to the old root it will get redirect to the new root url. So here is what the feature looks like initially:

Feature: Redirection
    In order to not upset the google
    As a blogger who almost never has the time to blog
    I want to redirect my old url to my new one

Scenario: Redirect root request
    Given I have entered a request to http://www.frickinsweet.com/ryanlanciaux.com
    And the old url is frickinsweet.com/ryanlanciaux.com
    And my new url is ryanlanciaux.com
    When the request is made
    Then the response url is http://www.ryanlanciaux.com
    And the response has a 301 in the status

Notice that over in the Solution Explorer window you can expand the feature to reveal a .cs file.

The class is an auto-generated file that updates when the .feature file is changed. We can run this through our test runner to watch it fail and get some extra information as to why it failed.

The tests are failing because there is no real definition to the scenario steps. We can almost directly copy and paste the output from the test runner dialog to a new class and fill in the code for the methods with standard unit testing code. Like I said before, I treat everything that is a GIVEN statement like an arrange section of a standard test; WHEN and THEN like act and assert respectively.

We could hardcode these tests to be specifically run against the urls specified in the scenario but this approach feels brittle and does not encourage code reuse. In order to use these these same steps in our future scenarios we can add wildcard mappings rather than specifying a single url in the attribute definition. The wildcard mapping is the familiar .* surrounded by parenthesis.

   24         [Given(@"I have entered a request to (.*)")]

Also note now that when we have a wildcard mapping, we can pass in a parameter to that ScenarioStepDefinition

public void GivenIHaveEnteredARequestToHttpWww_Frickinsweet_ComRyanlanciaux_ComPage2(string url)

The final result is a lot of code but it is broken down into small, reusable sections.

[TestFixture]

[Binding]

public class RedirectTest

{

    private string oldUrl;

    private string newUrl;

    private string requestedUrl;

    private string finalUrl;

    private RedirectHandler _handler;

    private Mock<HttpContextBase> mockContext;

    private Mock<HttpResponseBase> mockResponse;

    [Given(@"I have entered a request to (.*)")]

    public void GivenIHaveEnteredARequestToHttpWww_Frickinsweet_ComRyanlanciaux_ComPage2(string url)

    {

        var uri = new Uri(url);

        requestedUrl = url;

        mockContext = new Mock<HttpContextBase>();

        mockContext.Setup(x => x.Request.Url).Returns(uri);

    }

    [Given(@"the old url is (.*)")]

    public void GivenTheOldUrlIsFrickinsweet_ComRyanlanciaux_Com(string url)

    {

        oldUrl = url;

    }

    [Given(@"my new url is (.*)")]

    public void GivenMyNewUrlIsRyanlanciaux_Com(string url)

    {

        newUrl = url;

        //now that we know both old and new url do a replace on httpcontexts' url

        //setup what we expect the called url to be and throw a callback on the mock so we can verify later

        mockResponse = new Mock<HttpResponseBase>();

        mockResponse.SetupProperty(x => x.Status);

        mockResponse.Setup(x => x.AddHeader("Location", requestedUrl.Replace(oldUrl, newUrl)))

            .Callback(() => finalUrl = requestedUrl.Replace(oldUrl, newUrl));

        mockContext.Setup(x => x.Response).Returns(mockResponse.Object);

    }

    [When(@"the request is made")]

    public void WhenTheRequestIsMade()

    {

        _handler = new RedirectHandler();

        _handler.ProcessRequest(mockContext.Object, oldUrl, newUrl);

    }

    [Then(@"the response has a 301 in the status")]

    public void ThenTheResponseHasA301InTheStatus()

    {

        Assert.That(mockContext.Object.Response.Status == "301 Moved Permanently");

    }

    [Then(@"the response url is (.*)")]

    public void ThenTheResponseUrlIsTheNewUrl(string expectedUrl)

    {

        Assert.AreEqual(expectedUrl, finalUrl);

    }

    [Then(@"301 is not in the headers")]

    public void Then_301IsNotInTheHeaders()

    {

        Assert.IsNull(mockResponse.Object.Status);

    }

}

Since we are using wildcards instead of raw urls in the step definitions we can easily write other tests that will just work with out adding any extra code.

Scenario: Redirect to correct path on new url
    Given I have entered a request to http://www.frickinsweet.com/ryanlanciaux.com/page2
    And the old url is frickinsweet.com/ryanlanciaux.com
    And my new url is ryanlanciaux.com
    When the request is made
    Then the response url is http://www.ryanlanciaux.com/page2
    And the response has a 301 in the status

This project, in its entirety, is hosted on GitHub. Check it out if you are interested in seeing SpecFlow in the context of the whole (tiny) application. Make sure that you add all the files from the lib dir into your references the first time you run it or you will receive all kinds of errors — additionally, I wrote this quickly for myself so there is no real warranty / guarantee that the code is free from defects — use at your own risk.

Download Project from GitHub

Visit the SpecFlow homepage 

Pass it along

---

          

• Simone's site 
• Keyvan's site

jQuery
Now
you could go ahead and program a full fledged data grid or WYSIWYG
editor, however, unless you have a bit of time to spare this is not the
ideal solution. As most may realize, jQuery fits very nicely to fill in
the gaps left by the absence of user controls. For the most part, the
controls are not going to let you just drag-and-drop, type in a dataset
and profit but a lot of the pain is kept to a minimum.

Examples
Ingrid

If
you’re looking for a data grid there are a number of options available
pictured above is Ingrid. Flexigrid is another good one that people
have used with the MVC framework, however, their site appears to be down at the moment.
Treeviews are available

Radio Buttons / Check Boxes

Check out the jQuery plugin database.

Getting Started
So,
if you’ve decided you want to look more into using jQuery plugins — a
couple of tips that may make the transition a little easier:

• Obviously,
  familiarize yourself with jQuery. Some of the plugins will work with
  almost 0 configuration but it’s much better to actually know what’s
  going on. View more info on getting started with jQuery

• The JsonResult is your friend — learn it well.

• Read up on what people using different languages are doing. I’m
  not saying that you should necessarily go out and learn Rails or
  CakePHP/CodeIgniter (although, it is beneficial). but at least look at the
  techniques that programmers from that realm of things are doing — see how they are implementing their controls.

What tips do you have for creating robust user interfaces with the MVC framework?

I apologize about the lapse in memory — The regular expression needed a + at the end to signify that it was more than one character whoops   For more information on Routes check out Justin Etheredge's post on routing

Oxitis [oks - ahy - tis]
-Noun

Acute or chronic anxiety toward sharing code online; this anxiety is usually caused by fear of public ridicule or excessive criticism regarding imperfections in code.

Origin: 
2008, Josh Schwartzberg (n.); Oxitephobia; avoidance of placing imperfect code online; initially referring to Microsoft Oxite

"nice post!!thanks for the info..that's great and cool"
                                               -Random Spammer

As
a web developer / someone who has a blog, I understand dealing with
spam is one of the necessary evils of having a comments enabled on my
site. For the most part, my site has remained far enough under the
radar that most spammers do not waste their time. More recently,
however, there has been a gradual influx of comment spam with a title
something along the lines of "[Company Name] SEO Test." There is worse
spam for sure but it was definitely annoying.

A quick Google
search pointed me to a Web Development and Search Engine Optimization
company hosting an SEO competition. I checked the rules and sure enough,
there was a rule stating that only Ethical SEO Techniques would be
permitted. Quickly, I emailed the organization one of the comments
(with url, ip, email, etc) exepecting the offending parties would be
removed from the competition, eliminating additional garbage comments.
I was shocked to receive their reply.

Unfortunately
this is not against the rules of the competition – I would encourage
you to remove the spamming links for your website to discourage this
behaviour but as I said I can’t actually penalise this person
for making posts on other peoples websites.

Sorry about the spam.

Gaming the System
In
my opinion, Search Engine Optimization should be about perfecting a
website and the website's content; not tricking google into thinking
more people find your content useful than actuality. Optimizing tags
and titles is one thing but gaming the system to garner search ranking is wrong
and is detrimental to the web as a whole. Just because commenting is
legal and allowable does not make it ethical. Unfortunately, this
practice will continue to exist as long as it gets results and
organizations act as enablers to those who would use these tactics for
financial gain (not to mention increased search engine ranking for the
enabling organizations).

Link Spam is Digital Graffiti

Imagine
for a second if companies condoned this practice outside of the Web –
what if McDonalds or Nike paid for their logos to be spray painted on
other's property? To make matters worse what if after receiving
numerous complaints they held a press conference and said "soap and
water removes the paint" or "just hire some guards and the problem will
go away."? I think it's safe to assume that practice would not be
received so kindly (h/t Matt Braun on the graffiti analogy)!
Fortunately a link is not as hard to remove as paint but the concept is
similar.

Solutions anyone?
Social networks such as
Digg, DotNetKicks and DZone have always been plagued by those who would
try to circumvent the rules for personal gain. Where honeypots and
captcha systems would traditionally help against
bots, an increasing number of spammers seem to be actual people. The
administrators of these social networks are constantly coming up with
more sophisticated ways to combat spam but what should small blogs and
websites do?

Currently,
there are a number of methodologies for preventing blog spam that work
with varying degrees of effectiveness but none are ideal. Obviously,
you can moderate comments — this works okay but is painful if you are
getting a lot of spam or a lot of comments. Also, make sure your
comment links have a rel="nofollow" attribute (h/t Simone Chiaretta). Google
does not take nofollow links into account when calculating page rank.
Although this does not reward the spammer, it does not prevent spam.

What I would like to see is a centralized comment system like Disqus or
IntenseDebate that lets a user login with OpenID, Google Friend
Connect, Microsoft LiveID, Facebook Connect (whichever the user wants).
There would be a standard vote up / down vote for every comment a user
makes where the overall votes across all sites would determine the
users rating. Casting a down vote would remove a minimal amount of
points from the voter to prevent someone from going on a down vote
rampage (exactly how StackOverflow works). Site owners could set
restrictions that would prevent users with a rating less than a
specified number from posting on their site. This may be idealistic and
introduce a new realm of privacy concerns but if done properly, I think it
would help eliminate a great deal of spam.

Wrapping things up
Although there are many less-than ethical tactics to increasing a
site's ranking, site structure and site content are the best methods of
SEO. I would love to hear your thoughts, ideas and any suggestions you
have in eliminating link spam.

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I've added a couple different method definitions for various parameters. You can pass in just an e-mail address, an e-mail and gravatar parameters (see here for more info on gravatar parameters) or an e-mail address, gravatar parameters and html attributes. A quick usage summary is listed below (I'm using my brother Joel's gravatar in the examples)

<%= Html.Gravatar("email@email.com") %> Base Gravatar Helper
<%= Html.Gravatar("email@email.com", new  { s = "128", r = "pg" })%> Gravatar helper with optional Gravatar Parameters
<%= Html.Gravatar("email@email.com", null, new  { style = "border:5px solid" })%>   Helper with HTML attributes. Please note, this is still expecting the Gravatar parameters — you can pass in null if you want to just grab the default image with no additional properties.
<%= Html.Gravatar("email@email.com", new { s = "128", r = "pg" }, new { style="border:5px solid;"})%> Helper with both Gravatar parameters and HTML attributes

Anyways, I've posted the class file below. Hopefully you find it useful — I would love to hear what your thoughts are or of any changes you would like to see.
GravatarHelper.cs (2.72 kb)

In the near future, I have a web project coming out that I've been working on for the past month or so. I'm not going to give too much detail on that just yet, however, in working on this project, I had to come up with a way for users to have profile images. I would rather not host these images on my server, I decided to leverage Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatars).

There are a couple pre-existing options for dealing with gravatar in the .NET framework, however, I'm using the MVC framework — standard ASP.NET controls are out of the question. After a brief look on the Gravatar site (specifically the page dealing with how the URL is constructed), it seemed like this would be a pretty easy task to write a class that I could use to get gravatar image paths. Below is the main part of the class I created to retrieve gravatar information based on an e-mail address:

All we're really doing is creating a URL based on the Gravatar path, an MD5 encrypted version of an e-mail address and some user specified parameters. For the methods, Size is how many pixels the image should be (up to 500) and defaultImagePath is the url to use as an alternate image if the user does not have a Gravatar image. There is a rating parameter also but for my site, I'm setting it to PG always.

This is not all that difficult but hopefully useful. I plan to continue writing examples as I make progress on the web application I mentioned.