I’m currently contracting over @OnTrees, @OnTrees we use raygun.io for error logging. If you don’t know what raygun is – raygun logs errors and produces excellent trending reports. It’s a great tool because lets be honest no matter how good your test coverage is exceptions happen.

We use it in production to help prioritise and pinpoint exceptions, raygun is brilliant for this as it shows you a count and when the exception last occurred, everything you need for prioritisation decisions. Raygun is clever enough to know when a exception has been resolved or if it has been reintroduced by a new build which is a neat feature.

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I ran into the rock and hard place .NET configuration situation again recently. The way we use the web.config or app.config via System.Configuration hasn’t really changed since .NET 2.0. Like most .NET developers I want the flexibility of appSettings with the benefits of using a strongly typed class, which you traditionally get from inheriting System.Configuration.ConfigurationSection .

Basically I want all of the advantages of appSettings and ConfigurationSection without any ceremony, friction, monkey casting or magic strings. Naturally I want to use Json in my config files not Xml, but I still want to store my config with the rest of my config in my web.config/app.config files.

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Updated 01 Oct 2012 for version 1.0.960

About a month ago now I used RavenDB for the first time in a ‘real’ application. I think it’s awesome, frictionless and easy to get up and running. However I’ve heard from fellow developers that they think there is a high barrier to entry when compared to a traditional RDBMS approach such as SQL server. Yes when learning anything new there is a learning curve, but this post is to dispel the myth that setting up RavenDB is hard and to show you what you get for pretty much zero effort.

There are two flavours of RavenDB server and embedded. I’m going to show you in this post how to set up RavenDB embedded inside your MVC application.

Prerequisites

All you need installed is MVC 3 (steps are the same for MVC 4) and NuGet.
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I’ve been making use of the JsonValueProviderFactory a lot lately. The JsonValueProviderFactory was released as part of MVC 3 and is a really easy way to introduce Json into your web application. In fact all MVC 3 websites support posting Json off the bat with no code changes. Phil Haack wrote an excellent blog post introducing the JsonValueProviderFactory.

One limitation I’ve found with the current JsonValueProviderFactory is when you have a property in your model that is a dynamic type. Unfortunately the JsonValueProviderFactory is unable to bind deserialized Json to a dynamic property. Example below:

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Updated 03 Feb 2016

I’ve been using Git for almost a year now (Thanks to @robcthegeek for introducing Git to @JustGiving). Before using Git I preferred SVN I’ve also suffered The Fail Server (TFS). The zero friction workflow and performance achieved with Git made me realise the friction of centralized version control systems. This post is a step by step guide for anyone using Windows who wants to get up and running on Git.

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