An NHibernateMARE on Elm Street

We use (and generally like) the ORM NHibernate for MS SQL Server data access, but we understand why you might not. Ohhhh, the things we have seen! We’d like to share some of our favorite horrors, so that you can avoid them. Originally, our Repository<TEntity> base class implemented IEnumerable<TEntity>. This allowed us to do clever things… Read More

uShip at HackTX Fall 2015

Here at uShip, we love hackathons. Recently, some us went down to the University of Texas at Austin’s annual hackathon, HackTX, hosting over 750 students from all over the state. As a company sponsor, we acted as mentors for the student hackers, helping them solve a wide range of problems – anything from general Android… Read More

End to End WebApi Configuration, Part 1: StructureMap

At uShip we’re slowly migrating to a microservice architecture from our existing massive monolith which consists of a large legacy Web Forms project, a Web Api project, and an MVC project. This has a lot of benefits, one of which is that we get to take the lessons we learned setting up the monolith and… Read More

Actionable RESTful API Errors

No matter how hard your API clients try, they will eventually get back errors from your API. apigee has an excellent blog post describing the reasons why detailed error messages are incredibly important for API client developers when starting to consume your API. When designed and used appropriately, these errors can be immensely useful to… Read More

.NET Web Applications Running in Docker

Here at uShip, we love to try interesting things during our hackathons. Recently, Greg Walker and I decided to try to get one of our front-end solutions up and running in a docker container. Since docker containers have to run on Linux, that meant getting the project running on Mono first. Installing Mono To start,… Read More

Unit Testing Around Singletons with OCMock

Whether you agree with the use of singletons or not, you can’t completely avoid them as an iOS developer. Apple provides some critical functionality through singletons exposed in its iOS SDK, but it can be quite difficult to write unit tests around code that accesses them. In this article, I will describe a couple of… Read More