Community developer blogs

Paul Ingles

Recent Posts

• Testing ActionMailer and ActionController Interaction in Rails

  Posted: 26 Jan 2006 at 20:21 by Paul

  As the final iteration of the first release winds down for Sureboss, one thing I’ve been trying to do recently is to test that some action is performed on a controller, there is some interaction with other participating classes. In my case, it was testing that when an administrator of the shop

• Updating Typo

  Posted: 25 Jan 2006 at 08:07 by Paul

  I’m sure everyone will be glad to know I’m up and running with the latest trunk revision of Typo – the blogging software I’m using. Although it was far easier than expected, here’s a little guide to how I did it (in case others aren’t so familiar with Subversion).

• ASP.NET Developers, how important is Control testability to you?

  Posted: 23 Jan 2006 at 14:09

  A while ago, Avi posted a message to the Test Driven Development Yahoo! groups list entitled “Testing form validation in ASP.NET”. He was working around the Model/View/Presenter pattern, and was trying to discover a way to test form validation on the client-side. Although one could imple

• Multi-Object Validation with Rails

  Posted: 17 Jan 2006 at 01:00

  Another late night, and I’ve been working on getting validation working correctly this evening, and it’s something that’s been a little bit confusing for most of the time. However, I’ve finally now made some progress and think my experiences will be useful to others. Firstly,

• Of Is and As (Operators in C#)

  Posted: 11 Jan 2006 at 20:01

  It’s been a while since I made any .NET posts, but here’s one that’s been bubbling up for too long! I have to confess to being a little bit ‘militant’ to certain things I see in code. Blindly catching Exception is one thing that gives me shivers, using the as operator e

• Access to my CodeProject code in Subversion

  Posted: 11 Jan 2006 at 15:37

  It’s been a while since I last posted, and it’s been even longer since I posted about anything .NET-related – I’ve been knee deep in freelancing work playing with Ruby on Rails. But, after an email from someone using some of my old CodeProject code I figured it was time to ge

• Loving Rails' functional testing

  Posted: 03 Jan 2006 at 22:47

  The one thing I’ve never quite managed to get the hang of in ASP.NET development has been writing functional tests. Those that can exercise a control within it’s GUI environment. I’ve used a couple of tools, to various depths and with varying success. For instance, with NUnitAsp it

• Lighty config

  Posted: 29 Dec 2005 at 20:39

  After attempting to get URL rewriting in lighttpd and failing miserably, I’m going to run lighttpd through Apache 2’s mod_proxy. At present, requests for www.oobaloo.co.uk are being served through lighttpd. It should also make it easier to keep separate site instances running. At first I

• I'm on lighty!

  Posted: 29 Dec 2005 at 13:04

  I’m now getting to the point where I can release an early iteration of the Sureboss shopping cart into production. So it’s only natural I started to consider the production environment a little more. I’ve done some reading, and although I’m currently running Apache 2.x and FC

• I'm on lighty!

  Posted: 29 Dec 2005 at 13:04

  I’m now getting to the point where I can release an early iteration of the Sureboss shopping cart into production. So it’s only natural I started to consider the production environment a little more. I’ve done some reading, and although I’m currently running Apache 2.x and FC

• Problems with typo and del.icio.us

  Posted: 29 Dec 2005 at 09:15

  Unfortunately I’ve had to remove the del.icio.us item from the sidebar. It appears that there’s some bad timeout values set in typo for retrieval of del.icio.us content - longer than the FastCGI process timeout. This was resulting in the server becoming unstable, and causing machine load

• Problems with typo and del.icio.us

  Posted: 29 Dec 2005 at 09:15

  Unfortunately I’ve had to remove the del.icio.us item from the sidebar. It appears that there’s some bad timeout values set in typo for retrieval of del.icio.us content - longer than the FastCGI process timeout. This was resulting in the server becoming unstable, and causing machine load

• XP and the Slack practice

  Posted: 28 Dec 2005 at 09:30

  This morning whilst waiting for everyone else to arrive in the office I took the time to catch up on emails and read through the various mailing lists I subscribe to. One of which, Extreme Programming had a large number of posts regarding a single thread – regarding the XP practice of “S

• XP and the Slack practice

  Posted: 28 Dec 2005 at 09:30

  This morning whilst waiting for everyone else to arrive in the office I took the time to catch up on emails and read through the various mailing lists I subscribe to. One of which, Extreme Programming had a large number of posts regarding a single thread – regarding the XP practice of “S

• PayPal IPN Notes

  Posted: 26 Dec 2005 at 18:00

  I did finally get bored around boxing day so got back into the rails development, fortunately, with IPN now working. So here’s how I did it! After checking through the application logfile and reading PayPal’s own IPN Notes I managed to get to the bottom of things. Turns out my account wa

• PayPal IPN Notes

  Posted: 26 Dec 2005 at 18:00

  I did finally get bored around boxing day so got back into the rails development, fortunately, with IPN now working. So here’s how I did it! After checking through the application logfile and reading PayPal’s own IPN Notes I managed to get to the bottom of things. Turns out my account wa

• Rails adventures and PayPal IPN

  Posted: 26 Dec 2005 at 08:12

  I’m happy I’ve managed to prevent the application from dying on me – looks like it was because I was missing declarations such as the following: FastCgiServer /var/www/sureboss_html/shop/dispatch.fcgi -initial-env RAILS_ENV=production -processes 2 -idle-timeout 600 This ensures tha

• Rails adventures and PayPal IPN

  Posted: 26 Dec 2005 at 08:12

  I’m happy I’ve managed to prevent the application from dying on me – looks like it was because I was missing declarations such as the following: FastCgiServer /var/www/sureboss_html/shop/dispatch.fcgi -initial-env RAILS_ENV=production -processes 2 -idle-timeout 600 This ensures tha

• Leaves on the Rails

  Posted: 24 Dec 2005 at 14:29

  It seems it’s not quite so easy getting Rails running fine. I’ve given up trying to get Typo working with the latest release of Rails, along with numerous problems getting the correct MySQL gem working with the version of MySQL on my machine. This wasn’t even what I was trying to d

• Leaves on the Rails

  Posted: 24 Dec 2005 at 14:29

  It seems it’s not quite so easy getting Rails running fine. I’ve given up trying to get Typo working with the latest release of Rails, along with numerous problems getting the correct MySQL gem working with the version of MySQL on my machine. This wasn’t even what I was trying to d