Generic Enum Attribute Caching

Attributes are wonderful for decorating your Enums with additional markup and meta data. However, looking up attributes via reflection is not always a fast operation in terms of performance. Additionally, no one likes typing that code over and over again.

Well not to worry, just use the following extension methods to help cache your Enum attribute look ups, and increase your application's performance! But how much faster is this? Good question...

Iterations	Average Elapsed Ticks		Difference
	No Cache	With Cache
2	1182.00	3934.00	4x Slower
10	20.10	7.10	3x Faster
100	13.07	1.37	10x Faster
1,000	13.27	1.40	10x Faster
10,000	13.56	1.45	10x Faster
100,000	13.02	1.33	10x Faster

XUnit.PhantomQ v.1.2 Released

Want to run client side QUnit tests from Visual Studio or your build server? Now it is easier than ever; just grab newly updated XUnit.PhantomQ v1.2 from NuGet!

XUnit.PhantomQ will allow you to execute your QUnit tests as XUnit tests. It supports both library and web projects, and features the ability to easily specify test files and their dependencies by real relative path from the root of your project.

XUnit.PhantomQ on NuGet
XUnit.PhantomQ Source on GitHub

Change Log for v1.2

My thanks to James M Greene and the other authors of the PhantomJS Runner; their work served as the model for this version's improved test result information.

• Significantly improved test result information and error details.
• Added console.log support.
• Added test timeout configuration support.
• Added QUnit module support.
• Added QUnit result details to QUnitTest.Context

jQuery Mobile: Touch Events Only

jQuery Mobile touch events are awesome.

In a recent project I did not need ALL of the features that the jQuery Mobile framework had to offer; I only needed the excellent touch events. While jQuery Mobile does not offer a custom feature build that includes only the touch system, it is actually quite easy to create your own build.

Just download the following files and include them in your project; but be sure to delete the define method wrapper (the first and last line of each file), as you do not need them with the complete jQuery build.

1. jquery.mobile.ns.js
2. jquery.mobile.vmouse.js
3. jquery.mobile.support.touch.js
4. touch.js

...that's it, you can now use only jQuery Mobiles touch events!

Bootstrap 3, LESS, Bundling, and ASP.NET MVC

Until Twitter Bootstrap v3, I would have recommend that you use dotLess to compile and bundle your LESS files. However, it is now a known issue that the current build of dotLess does not support Bootstrap 3, or more specifically that it does not support LESS 1.4; and worse yet, there is no fix in sight.

So, how can you use Bootstrap LESS with MVC?

I recommend using BundleTransformer. It is an amazingly feature rich set of extensions for System.Web.Optimization. The BundleTransformer.Less extension provides easy to use LESS transformations (already up to LESS 1.5) and bundling support that wires up straight into your pre-existing BundleCollection configuration. For more information about everything that BundleTransformer has to offer, check out this article.

Now here is how you setup Bootstrap 3 and BundleTransformer for ASP.NET:

Required NuGet Packages

1. Twitter.Bootstrap.Less
2. BundleTransformer.Less
3. BundleTransformer.MicrosoftAjax
4. JavaScriptEngineSwitcher.Msie

Unit Testing and Dependency Injection, with xUnit InlineData and Unity

Inversion of control is great because it makes your code more testable; but you usually still have to write tests for each implementation of your interfaces. So what if your unit testing framework could just work directly with your container to make testing even easier? Well, xUnit can!

Below we define a custom data source for our xUnit theories by extending the InlineDataAttribute. This allows our data driven unit tests to resolve types via a container, and then inject those resolved objects straight into our unit tests.

Bottom line: This allows us to test more with less code!

The rest of post is very code heavy, so I strongly recommend that you start out by taking a look at sections 1 and 2 to get an idea of what we are trying to accomplish. :)

1. Example Interfaces and Classes
2. Example Unit Tests
3. IocInlineDataResolver
4. UnityInlineDataAttribute

Check Properties of a Dynamic Object in .NET

How can you avoid a RuntimeBinderException when working with dynamics?

In JavaScript, checking if an object implements a property is easy; so why can't it be that easy to check dynamics in C#? Well, it sort of is!* If you are using an ExpandoObject, you need only cast it to a Dictionary and check and see if it contains the desired key.

* Offer only valid with ExpandoObject. **
** See sample code for participating interfaces.***
*** Visit your local Visual Studio installation for details.

Unshelve to a Different Branch in TFS

Love it or hate it, TFS has a lot of features; some are just more discoverable than others.

Team Foundation Server has the ability to unshelve between branches, but it requires Microsoft Team Foundation Server Power Tools to do so. Once you have installed these, simply follow these two steps to move a shelveset from one branch to another:

1. Navigate to the root of your project.
2. Fill in and execute the following command:

Unshelve Command:

tfpt unshelve "[ShelveSetName]" /migrate /source:"[SourcePath]" /target:"[TargetPath]"

Example:

cd c:/code/
tfpt unshelve "Demo Shelveset" /migrate /source:"$/DemoProject/branch" /target:"$/DemoProject/trunk"

Enjoy,
Tom