.NET

.NET has the ability to auto-generated OpenAPI specifications based on your code. You can use different decorators on your code like ProducesResponseTypeAttribute or ConsumesAttribute to produce more descriptive response details for web API help pages generated by tools like Swagger. What if you didn’t want to use the autogenerated spec, what if you instead wanted to expose an already written spec, perhaps because you follow an API-first approach to building an API instead of a Code-First approach. How would you expose that OpenAPI file? ...

I enjoy writing unit tests and any tools that make writing tests easier are appreciated. For the last year, I have incorporated AutoFixture into all of my unit tests. I have found AutoFixture to be an excellent tool, it changed the way I approach the “Arrange” phase. Previously, my arrange phase involved manually assigning values to properties, in a small class that is referenced by a few tests, you may tolerate manually assigning values. Once you start to deal with a class that has many properties such as nested properties as shown on the “Employee” class below, things get out of hand. ...

If you are writing unit tests in .NET, you may eventually find the need to generate code coverage reports to show how much coverage your project has. The best tool for code coverage reports in my experience has been coverlet because it supports both .NET Framework and .NET Core. NUnit NUnit, the tried and tested framework originally being a port of JUnit. A powerful tool that when combined with coverlet console can be used to generate code coverage reports. To demonstrate, I will create an NUnit test project targeting .NET Framework 4.8 along with a Class Library type project also targeting .NET Framework 4.8 ...

I was recently presented with a unique challenge at work. I needed to create a script that clones repositories from Bitbucket. The problem is that as of June 2022, Bitbucket only supports managing repositories using OAuth via two grant types, the authorization code grant & the implicit grant. I won’t get into the details here but the implicit grant is no longer recommended and is in fact discouraged from ever being used. Regardless of which flow I use I will end up facing the same problem, the browser. In both the implicit and authorization grant, user interaction (3-legged OAuth) is required, the end-user must provide their credentials in order to properly authenticate, in some cases this may even include multifactor authentication. ...

I was recently talking to another developer about the importance of never exposing internal identifiers to the outside world. A well-known example of this is using an auto-incrementing identity field in SQL and exposing that field through an API. A client can look at the highest number to tell how many records exist, in an ordering system this is far from ideal. Now everyone will know how many orders you have created. I recommend watching The Internet of Pwned Things by Troy Hunt for a real-world example. ...