I continue to see a trend with most businesses to move away from the self hosted, home grown, monolithic applications and move more to service based software.  While there are some big and well know players, such as Salesforce.com, there are many smaller up and comers offering a wide array of software services that do not require any on site software or custom development.

One compnay in particular, Feed.Us offers a wonderful online content management system (CMS) that in addition to traditional content management, offers many value added services.  The real joy of this system is you can get up and running in minutes.  You can transform your static web site into a dynamic web application with little to no custom development.

I really recommend you check out all of the features they offer...

Recently I added Disqus, a hosted comment system, to a site and wanted to point out a couple of things that were not too clear from the documentation on the Disqus site.  It may have been updated, but as of this post, I was not able to find too much info on the JavaScript implementaion of Disqus. 

Basically the JavaScript implementation will work with any web site technology, for example php, ASP.NET, etc.  In order to get it to work, you first need to sign up for an account.  Once you do this, they will provide you with the "code" that you need to add to your site.  Once you add this code, all of the necessary HTML and comment data will appear on your page. 

When you create an account, you provide your site URL. It is important to understand that if you are developing or testing your site on a server other than the one registered with your domain name, the Disqus comment section will not appear.  So if you are setting things up on your local machine and testing, you will not see the full comment section.  Once you push your code to production, you will then see the full Disqus comment section. 

That is it...it is very easy to set up and use...

I like to do a combination of unit and integration testing with my projects.  When testing code that update the database you need to account for the state of your databse.  If you want repeatable tests, you either need to use stubs or mocks or find a way to return your databse to the state it was in prior to your tests running.

 One approach that I have been using with success is leveraging the System.Transaction name space within my tests that update the database.  Below is some sample code using the NUnit testing framework.  By wrapping the code that updates the database within a transaction (using (...)) the save operation is rolled back:

Hope people find this technique useful.