Derik Whittaker

Thoughts on Software Development, .Net, OOP, Design Patterns and all things cool

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Re: Don’t use your email account for testing

Orin (Ayende @ Rahien) has a post about not using your email account for testing (found here). I would go a step further and say don’t use your development teams group address. Recently I was developing a heath check windows service that was designed to poll one of our web services that died all the time.

*** Side bar ***
This service dies when bad data is provided to a unmanaged dll we are using. When this happens it kills the app pool.
*** End side bar ***

When this service noticed that our web service was not responding it would send an email out to our group so that someone could restart the app pool. Well, during my testing I was not resetting my polling timer correctly, so every tenth of a second an email was being sent out to our team. By the time I noticed what was going on I had sent about 1000 emails to the team…. Opps.

So, the lesson learned here was to NOT use either your account or your teams group account.

Till next time,

Published Sep 12 2007, 08:43 AM by Derik Whittaker

Filed under: Humor, Best Practice

Comments

Mike said:

I think many of us have done that kind of thing at some point. :-) It's always fun when you suddenly realize why you're getting 100's or 1000's of emails and scramble to kill the process that's sending them. Of course, it's even more fun when your entire team let's out a collective "WTF?" as they start to receive the emails.

As you said...lesson learned.

# September 12, 2007 10:33 PM

Jim Bolla said:

What we've done on projects is create a dedicated IMAP mailbox so that anyone responsible for the project could check it.

Now that I'm getting more comfortable with log4net, I'm thinking that this could be done via that. This would allow it to be a little bit more dynamic on how it sends the notifications. For production it could be email, for development and testing it would just log to file.

# September 12, 2007 10:38 PM

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About Derik Whittaker

Derik is a .Net Developer/Architect specializing in WinForms working out the northern suburbs of Chicago. He is also believer and advocate for Agile development including SCRUM, TDD, CI, etc.

When Derik is not writing code he can be found spending time with his wife and young son, climbing on his bouldering wall, watching sports (mostly baseball), and generally vegging out.