Blog about software development
Quite some time ago I blogged about rendering pdf reports in c#. Recently we have added excel reports into jsreport and it was released with a little delay also into .NET. This means you should be able to use both html-to-xlsx and xlsx recipes to create excel files from your .NET environments now.
Such a very common thing like adding an existing external volume to Amazon elastic beanstalk is not easily supported out of the box. The official blog mentions only how to attach a snapshot or how to attach and overwrite a new volume every time the service starts. It took me a while to make the config file actually adding an existing volume without formatting it every time so I share it here with you...
The best practice when adding email notifications feature to your system is to separate as much as you can from email body assembling to email sending outside of the core system. The emails templates quite likely often changes and you don't want to deploy the system because of every single notification change. The best is to just separate everything into an external system and give the access to your PR or Marketing department so they change emails as the time goes without affecting the core system.
NHibernate still rocks! Even with quite a bit old code base it is still at the top of the c# frameworks we daily use. Especially the framework extensiblity is tremendous. Now I am going to show you how we use NHibernate in the multitenant fashion.
At the very beginning when I started to work on jsreport I decided to give it a standard based API. The decision was based on the fact I didn't want to design my own API syntax for doing queries like give me an entity by name, give my the top five last modified entities or give me just entity ids. For this kind of requests OData has already very nice syntax with bunch of clients in bunch of languages so the work for the consumers is very simple. The other stuff what OData provides like batching requests or entity relationships is rather too much for me but the plain queries are very nice so why not use it.
You may find yourself in a situation when you want to visualize data from SharePoint lists in form of a pdf document. It can be for example a monthly summary report with some tables and charts or it can be a simple pdf invoice. You can handle such a task using Excel pdf export but you will soon realize there are way too many limitations in this approach. Especially if you need to follow specific document layout or automate this task. Another SharePoint native approach is to use Sql Server Reporting Services (SSRS). This may give you more options to automate creating pdf document. On the other hand it is more difficult to design document structure. The first trouble is that you need to install a SSRS desginer on your desktop. The next annoyance is the designer itself. It is very limited in designing actual document. For example you have just couple of chart types or tables you can use and everything feels very unnatural for a software developer. Now we have exhausted SharePoint native options and it is time to check out the Office Store.
It is a practice to open with a definition. Unfortunately there is no satisfying definition out there so I decided to put short one together.
Software as a service is a great deal. It's saving work to the developers and decreasing costs as well. There are plenty of services making a developer life easier and their number is recently rapidly increasing with expansion of the cloud computing.
jsreport is a quite complex platform for doing pdf reports but it can be easily used also in very simple use cases like html to pdf conversion. You just need to do one function call and it will spin for you a phantomjs webkit worker and print html into pdf.
With recent jsreport announcements of visual studio reporting extension and .net embedded reporting it should be pretty easy to generate pdf reports from any c# application. I decided to take a shot and extend official asp.net MVC 5 Contoso University example with reporting capabilities using jsreport.
NHibernate has very powerful syntax for doing sql queries. It's QueryOver syntax is the biggest reason for using NHibernate instead of Entity Framework for me.
One of the session/transaction handling technique in NHibernate is called session/transaction per request. The name of this technique is self explanatory.
In the last post it was explained how to prepare unit test hierarchy for writing tests interacting with database. In this post I will concentrate
In the last post was proposed using state testing rather than behavior mock testing when it’s not necessary. This means testing results of methods
Using mocks and behavior testing is a great idea. Especially when you are dealing with complicated dependencies and business logic. But some
I remember the first time I saw the using statement in c#. It was actually used when reading file content.
Quite some time ago I blogged about rendering pdf reports in c#. Recently we have added excel reports into jsreport and it was released with a little delay also into .NET. This means you should be able to use both html-to-xlsx and xlsx recipes to create excel files from your .NET environments now.
Such a very common thing like adding an existing external volume to Amazon elastic beanstalk is not easily supported out of the box. The official blog mentions only how to attach a snapshot or how to attach and overwrite a new volume every time the service starts. It took me a while to make the config file actually adding an existing volume without formatting it every time so I share it here with you...
The best practice when adding email notifications feature to your system is to separate as much as you can from email body assembling to email sending outside of the core system. The emails templates quite likely often changes and you don't want to deploy the system because of every single notification change. The best is to just separate everything into an external system and give the access to your PR or Marketing department so they change emails as the time goes without affecting the core system.
Hi! My name is Jan Blaha. I'm software developer and startup enthusiastic. See my current work.
janblaha.net