Dan Miser - .NET

MonoTouch

Dan Miser — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 01:48:03 GMT

There is no way I can list everything I learned with MonoTouch over the last couple of months. I'll summarize my experience by saying I'm a very happy customer. There were bumps and bruises along the way, but between the mailing list and the support crew at Xamarin, I heartily recommend investigating MonoTouch if you're a .NET developer that wants to get to the iOS AppStore quickly. I had to take several detours along the way (converted my existing app from Lightspeed to EF4 CodeFirst, converted to use POCOs, had support obligations, and wrote a sync engine to communicate over ServiceStack, but in the end, things lined up pretty well.

Some of the highlights:

I had to write code to essentially mimic the context loading that EF would do for you. This included fixing up object references as well as reading and writing from the SQLite database. Not horribly difficult, but it was something I'd rather I didn't have to do.
I encountered a couple of problems executing various LINQ statements when running on the device. A quick test case, and the devs at Xamarin had me with either workarounds or fresh bits to solve my problems.
Be sure to embrace threading when making web calls - especially on startup. You have 15 seconds to have your app launched on the device, or the device will think it is hung and kill the app.
Deploying to the app store has been written about extensively as a complex and intricate process. It turns out, there's good reason for that. After I got through an error due to linking my release build to ServiceStack.Text.dll, the resulting upload to the app store was failing verification. For some reason, the application name of RouteBoostiPhone.app was not being accepted. I changed the name to RouteBoost.app and it sailed right through. I have no idea exactly why this was required, but there you have it.
MonoTouch.Dialog is a very nice framework for building a line of business app. Be sure to check it out.

When I look back on the road I travelled to get my app to the app store, I'm impressed with how much of the business logic I was able to carry over. The time savings in being able to bring my business logic across as POCOs that have been extensively tested in production over many years was the real reason I went with MonoTouch to begin with. I most definitely do not regret that decision.

Note: I was not compensated or asked to write this post. I am just a happy paying customer of a product that saved me time, and I wanted to share my experience.

Entity Framework CodeFirst: virtual is sort of important

Dan Miser — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:55:59 GMT

I had a class that looked like this:

 public class CollectionDetail { public int Id { get; set; } ... public
MachineField MachineField { get; set; } }

I would then later write LINQ code that would end up retrieving these objects. The problem was MachineField was always set to null. I banged my head on this for a long time looking at everything I could think of. Finally, after looking at the CollectionDetail class one more time, I noticed that other Foreign Key objects were marked with virtual, and I remembered that I removed virtual while I was trying to test whether or not the object's lazy load behavior. All of the documentation clearly states that you need to mark this virtual. Once I added the virtual keyword back, everything worked exactly as it should have.

ActionSheetDatePicker enhancements

Dan Miser — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:13:42 GMT

I found the class ActionSheetDatePicker from the book Developing C# Apps for iPhone and iPad using MonoTouch iOS Apps Development for .NET Developers. It was a very nice and clean implementation that would allow for having an ActionSheet pop up with a UIDatePicker in an iOS application.

It did lack 2 things, though:

The ability to specify a starting default date in the UIDatePicker
The ability to get cleanly launched from a UITextField component (i.e. effectively replace the default keyboard of a text field with this date picker). The original code would leave the default keyboard up when getting called from a UITextField component.

I fixed those things, and you can find the results in this gist.

ServiceStack and MonoTouch

Dan Miser — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 21:27:12 GMT

My company's core applications are written in ASP.NET MVC, and have been well received. But the nature of what those applications can do in limited/non-existent connectivity areas is causing enough problems that I need a native iPhone solution. (HTML 5 offline storage is not enough. I need full access to the brains of calculation engines that are in my business logic on the server, and I wouldn't relish moving that logic to JavaScript. Besides, I found a real nice thermal receipt printer that will work via SDK with a native app!)

I came across MonoTouch, and I really like how it will enable reuse of my hard work over the years. The main obstacle for me was how to get the data out to my iPhone client. I wasn't exactly thrilled with the idea of shoe-horning WCF access from the iPhone, and working with WCF at my day job is a configuration nightmare. REST would be good, but I wasn't happy with the options out there - until I found ServiceStack. I don't know why this thing doesn't get more publicity. It is everything I want: small, fast, actively developed, easy to configure, JSON, REST, DTOs, and works easily with MonoTouch. Well done, guys.

The first snag I hit getting some demo code out there was that if you want to have the client code exist on MonoTouch, be sure to add references to the assemblies found in the MonoTouch-v2.20.zip file on github. I'm curious why this is still labelled as 2.20, and why those assemblies are still dated from June 9, 2011, but for now, things are moving along to convert my ASP.NET MVC application to use services, and expose those services for use on my iPhone client.

Look for more posts about ServiceStack and MonoTouch in the near future.

Replacing iUI with JQueryMobile

Dan Miser — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 21:26:06 GMT

I've had a web application written using iUI for a couple of years now. It's been stable and rock solid, and I really appreciate the leg up that it gave me. However, this weekend I converted away from iUI to jQueryMobile. I have another application in production already using jQueryMobile, and it is absolutely an amazing library.

The reasons I went with this move were:

iOS 5 had substantial changes to Safari and my existing application is broken in many places. Instead of spending time debugging and fixing something 2 years old, I figured I'd take the time to port to jQueryMobile.
I've had to leave iUI at version 0.31 for this entire 2 year period. When they started development on the 0.4 version, they changed form submissions to break if you had multiple form fields with the same name. I absolutely had to have this capability in order to support ASP.NET MVC list binding. I reported the issue in the forums, and it didn't get much attention. Sure, it's open source, but if I have to chase down bug fixing in a framework I'm not intimately familiar with, it's a negative.
There is no easy way with the released version of iUI to do things like jQuery calls, hook events into the page create/show and hide/destroy. Sure, there are code modifications you can find on the web, but it's a forking nightmare and tough to maintain (is this for 0.31, 0.4, or 0.5? does it require other extensions or modifications? etc.).
From a non-technical perspective, the roadmap of iUI has been all over the place. I can't remember for sure, but I think it was originally slated for moving 0.4 in to release status in like June of 2009. It's been pushed out over and over again, trimmed in scope, and there just doesn't seem to be traction or consensus to move the product forward. In contrast, jQueryMobile is looking to have a 1.0 release in the next few weeks with constant releases over the past few months.

How to Exclude Files from VS2010 Find in Files

Dan Miser — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 18:30:45 GMT

At work here, we use generated files with partial classes to get us through the tedium of creating mundane classes. It works well enough, but one of my biggest complaints about this is that if you then need to do a Find in Files, you get hundreds, or maybe thousands, of extra hits when searching for something that would be found inside those generated files.

Today I came across the free tool Ultra Find in the Extensions gallery. It does exactly what I want, namely, lets me focus on the search results that aren't in the generated files.

Thanks, Logan. Very useful!

DataType.EmailAddress doesn't validate

Dan Miser — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 02:31:51 GMT

While creating a view model for an MVC 3 application, I annotated a property with the DataType.EmailAddress attribute. My thinking was that it would validate whether or not the contents of the property was in a valid email format. The attribute does not perform validation, however. This StackOverflow article discusses some ways to add that functionality.

Moving from LightSpeed to Entity Framework

Dan Miser — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:39:06 GMT

The conversion is finally on. I've had a lot of praise for LightSpeed over the years. The guys writing it are wicked smart, and Ivan is a rockstar on the support forums. They've solved a lot of bugs for me while I've been a customer, but the time has come to move on.

I've become quite proficient with LINQ, and use it all over the place in my code. Having to drop down and execute loops and run suboptimal queries because I have to execute an intermediate ToList() just to get around projection and grouping errors has taken its toll on me.

I truly wish the guys at Mindscape continued success, but the time has come to move on to the company that provides a MSSQL LINQ provider that is completely fleshed out.

TeamCity for Continuous Integration of .NET projects

Dan Miser — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 01:36:26 GMT

I've been ussing CC.NET for probably the last 5 years with good success. At work, we recently migrated to TFS 2010 (installation and configuration are brutal, but it's sort of nice when it all works). I figured I'd take this time to look around and see what I've been missing on the continuous integration scene for my personal projects. The 2 leading contenders were TeamCity and Bamboo. I went with TeamCity since I use ReSharper, and think the JetBrains guys are pretty top-notch.

Installation was drop-dead simple. Configuring was pretty straight-forward, but I had an assist from StackOverflow, which led me to this amazing article/series by Troy Hunt. After following Troy's instructions, and slightly adjusting for the obvious version differences, I had things up and running, with a completed build inside 15 minutes.

I also configured the Build Triggering step because I want the build to fire off each time I checkin. I've got a few things to take care of (notifications of broken builds, code coverage, etc.), but it looks like this is a much easier application to configure than CC.NET.

FastCGI install hangs when called from Web Platform Installer

Dan Miser — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 04:04:52 GMT

The Web Platform Installer (WPI) is really nice when it works. But when it doesn't, it's a battle to the death to get things to work. Case in point: I was trying to install php on my Windows 2008 Server through WPI, but it would go on forever during the FastCGI install step. I looked at logs and the Event Viewer, and searched google. A lot of people reported a similar problem, but there was no definitive recipe to get past the problem.

In the end, I just clicked on the link for FastCGI in the installation details window of WPI, and installed that piece manually. It went through without a hitch. After a restart (which the FastCGI installer required), I installed php from WPI, and it installed the 4 remaining pieces without a hitch, and it did so quickly. So just a note that if WPI starts acting up, just install the problematic piece manually and then let WPI continue.

Thoughts on RedGate and .NET Reflector

Dan Miser — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 23:09:12 GMT

First things first: .NET Reflector is, and always has been, an amazing piece of technology. Any .NET developer that has worked for any length of time has benefited from the original vision of Lutz Roeder. Secondly, I don't blame him in the least bit for selling to RedGate to profit on his effort and talent. He more than earned it.

But let me get this straight: According to the CEO of RedGate, they made a mistake buying it. There's no other way to put it. They hoped it would lead to increased sales of their overpriced tools, and it didn't. They hoped that it would lead users to purchase premium versions of Reflector, and it didn't. Gee, I'm sure no one could have possibly predicted that! (Yes, that was sarcasm). Only someone completely out of touch with developers would think "I know! I'll make inroads to the development community by just buying out a product that used to be free, and start charging for it". Let me know how that works out for you. You bought Reflector as a loss-leader and to buy your way in to the community. Live with the consequences of your incompetent decision.

The issue is not the $35. I've spent more for worse tools. But when I've done that, it's almost always been to support the effort of a one-man shop working his butt off. It is not going to happen in order to have some corporate entity try to recoup losses on a bad business decision. They knew all along that Reflector didn't align with the tools that they sell.

Taking away the free version simply shows that RedGate management is clueless. As for me, I'll put $100 towards the next free/open reflector to come along instead of rewarding RedGate with a sale.

ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM bug fixes

Dan Miser — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 07:25:35 GMT

Rather than another "me too" post on the release of ASP.NET MVC 3, which Hanselman, Haack, and Guthrie have covered in-depth, I thought I'd post the good news that a couple of bugs that have bothered me are fixed in this version.

There was a problem when using auto-detecting view engines when compiling under release mode. Basically, if you hit the site with your desktop browser first, and then come in with the mobile phone, you would still be presented the desktop version. This is now fixed.
I posted about a problem with binding with the RC2 release. This also appears to be fixed.

Throw in the new scaffolding support, and 2011 is shaping up to be a great year for MVC.

WebDeploy setup

Dan Miser — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 16:12:24 GMT

I recently moved away from shared hosting, and went to a virtual private server in order to scale a site out better. Unfortunately, this meant that I needed to take on more administration of the server to do things that are done for me in a shared hosting environment. One feature that I have come to rely on is one click publishing from VS.NET 2010. In order to make this work, you need to have WebDeploy set up properly.

I found the steps from this page to be very helpful. Another good guide can be found here.

Be careful if you install Web Deploy via the Web Platform Installer. For some reason, when I did this, the Management Service Delegation feature was not installed. I ended up uninstalling and then installing straight from the official site, and the feature was available.

I initially had some settings wrong, and was getting back HTTP 401 and 550 errors. The log files didn't provide much help, but you can add tracing to help diagnose the cause of most issues.

ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2 binding errors

Dan Miser — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 02:29:59 GMT

I updated my web sites to ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2, and started receiving exceptions when model binding. If you want the short version, visit this forum post for the answer. While my errors weren't caused by the same issue that was originally reported in that thread, the fix does work. To sum up even further, just add this line of code in your Global.asax Application_Start method:

 ModelMetadataProviders.Current
= new DataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider();

The longer story is that I have a pretty involved multi-step (think "wizard"), deep-level object graph built up over many pages, so I immediately feared that I was unknowingly exploiting some loophole that just got fixed for RC2. I built a test case, so in the interest of not having to build that test case up from scratch again, it looked like this:
Model

 public class Foo { private List<Bar> _bars; private
List<Baz> _bazs; public Foo() { _bars = new List<Bar>(); _bazs = new List<Baz>();
} public List<Bar> Bars { get { return _bars; } set { _bars = value; } } public
List<Baz> Bazs { get { return _bazs; } set { _bazs = value; } } } public class
Bar { public int Amount { get; set; } } public class Baz { public int Value { get;
set; } }

Controller

 public ActionResult Index() { var foo = new Foo(); foo.Bars.Add(new
Bar { Amount = 4}); foo.Bars.Add(new Bar { Amount = 23 }); foo.Bars.Add(new Bar {
Amount = 30 }); foo.Bazs.Add(new Baz { Value = 100 }); foo.Bazs.Add(new Baz { Value
= 200 }); TempData["foo"] = foo; return View(foo); } [HttpPost] public ActionResult
Index(IList<Bar> bars, IList<Baz> bazs) { Foo foo = (Foo) TempData["foo"];
foo.Bars.Clear(); foo.Bars.AddRange(bars); foo.Bazs.Clear(); foo.Bazs.AddRange(bazs);
TempData["foo"] = foo; return RedirectToAction("Summary"); } public ActionResult Summary()
{ Foo foo = (Foo)TempData["foo"]; return View(foo); }

View

 <% using(Html.BeginForm()) { %> <% int barid = 0;
foreach (var item in Model.Bars){%> 


<%= Html.Hidden("Bars.index", barid) %> Bar:<%= Html.TextBox("Bars[" + barid
+"].Amount", item.Amount) %> <% barid++; }%> <% int bazid = 0; foreach
(var item in Model.Bazs) {%> <br /> <%=Html.Hidden("Bazs.index", bazid)%>
Baz: <%=Html.TextBox("Bazs[" + bazid + "].Value", item.Value)%> <% bazid++;
}%> <p /> <input type="submit" value="Next" /> <% } %>

I would receive the following call stack when trying to submit the form:

 The
parameters dictionary contains an invalid entry for parameter 'bazs' for method 'System.Web.Mvc.ActionResult
Index(System.Collections.Generic.IList`1[MvcApplicationRC2.Models.Bar], System.Collections.Generic.IList`1[MvcApplicationRC2.Models.Baz])'
in 'MvcApplicationRC2.Controllers.HomeController'. The dictionary contains a value
of type 'System.Collections.Generic.List`1[MvcApplicationRC2.Models.Bar]', but the
parameter requires a value of type 'System.Collections.Generic.IList`1[MvcApplicationRC2.Models.Baz]'.
Parameter name: parameters Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the
execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information
about the error and where it originated in the code. Exception Details: System.ArgumentException:
The parameters dictionary contains an invalid entry for parameter 'bazs' for method
'System.Web.Mvc.ActionResult Index(System.Collections.Generic.IList`1[MvcApplicationRC2.Models.Bar],
System.Collections.Generic.IList`1[MvcApplicationRC2.Models.Baz])' in 'MvcApplicationRC2.Controllers.HomeController'.
The dictionary contains a value of type 'System.Collections.Generic.List`1[MvcApplicationRC2.Models.Bar]',
but the parameter requires a value of type 'System.Collections.Generic.IList`1[MvcApplicationRC2.Models.Baz]'.
Parameter name: parameters Source Error: An unhandled exception was generated during
the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location
of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below. Stack Trace:
[ArgumentException: The parameters dictionary contains an invalid entry for parameter
'bazs' for method 'System.Web.Mvc.ActionResult Index(System.Collections.Generic.IList`1[MvcApplicationRC2.Models.Bar],
System.Collections.Generic.IList`1[MvcApplicationRC2.Models.Baz])' in 'MvcApplicationRC2.Controllers.HomeController'.
The dictionary contains a value of type 'System.Collections.Generic.List`1[MvcApplicationRC2.Models.Bar]',
but the parameter requires a value of type 'System.Collections.Generic.IList`1[MvcApplicationRC2.Models.Baz]'.
Parameter name: parameters] System.Web.Mvc.ActionDescriptor.ExtractParameterFromDictionary(ParameterInfo
parameterInfo, IDictionary`2 parameters, MethodInfo methodInfo) +484514 System.Web.Mvc.<>c__DisplayClass1.<Execute>b__0(ParameterInfo
parameterInfo) +18 System.Linq.WhereSelectArrayIterator`2.MoveNext() +85 System.Linq.Buffer`1..ctor(IEnumerable`1
source) +325 System.Linq.Enumerable.ToArray(IEnumerable`1 source) +78 System.Web.Mvc.ReflectedActionDescriptor.Execute(ControllerContext
controllerContext, IDictionary`2 parameters) +133 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionMethod(ControllerContext
controllerContext, ActionDescriptor actionDescriptor, IDictionary`2 parameters) +27
System.Web.Mvc.<>c__DisplayClass15.<InvokeActionMethodWithFilters>b__12()
+55 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionMethodFilter(IActionFilter
filter, ActionExecutingContext preContext, Func`1 continuation) +263 System.Web.Mvc.<>c__DisplayClass17.<InvokeActionMethodWithFilters>b__14()
+19 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionMethodWithFilters(ControllerContext
controllerContext, IList`1 filters, ActionDescriptor actionDescriptor, IDictionary`2
parameters) +191 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeAction(ControllerContext
controllerContext, String actionName) +343 System.Web.Mvc.Controller.ExecuteCore()
+116 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerBase.Execute(RequestContext requestContext) +97 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerBase.System.Web.Mvc.IController.Execute(RequestContext
requestContext) +10 System.Web.Mvc.<>c__DisplayClassb.<BeginProcessRequest>b__5()
+37 System.Web.Mvc.Async.<>c__DisplayClass1.<MakeVoidDelegate>b__0() +21
System.Web.Mvc.Async.<>c__DisplayClass8`1.<BeginSynchronous>b__7(IAsyncResult
_) +12 System.Web.Mvc.Async.WrappedAsyncResult`1.End() +62 System.Web.Mvc.<>c__DisplayClasse.<EndProcessRequest>b__d()
+50 System.Web.Mvc.SecurityUtil.<GetCallInAppTrustThunk>b__0(Action f) +7 System.Web.Mvc.SecurityUtil.ProcessInApplicationTrust(Action
action) +22 System.Web.Mvc.MvcHandler.EndProcessRequest(IAsyncResult asyncResult)
+60 System.Web.Mvc.MvcHandler.System.Web.IHttpAsyncHandler.EndProcessRequest(IAsyncResult
result) +9 System.Web.CallHandlerExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute()
+8841105 System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously)
+184

MobileCapableWebFormViewEngine update

Dan Miser — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 02:04:33 GMT

With the near-release of ASP.NET MVC 3, I've been looking at the new Razor view engine. It's quite nicely done and removes the constant "context switching" between code and layout.

In my web site, I used Scott Hanselman's auto-detecting view engine, and it has served me extremely well. However, with the relentless march of technology releases, a couple things should be pointed out:

If you want to use Razor on the mobile side, you just need to inherit his original class from RazorViewEngine instead of WebFormViewEngine. (Obviously you should probably do this in a new class, or else the original class name of MobileCapabeWebFormViewEngine will not exactly match up to what the class actually does).
The original Mobile Device Browser File project has disbanded. Very sad news, as this was a nice project that kept on top of new smart phones as they were released. It looks like 51 degrees has stepped up to give us an alternative. I opened up an issue to request providing this as a NuGet package. I'll definitely sign up to take this task on if it gains traction, and they want the help.

LINQ to SQL: Semantics of NULL

Dan Miser — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 17:41:07 GMT

Given a method like this, with the following LINQ to SQL statement in it:

 public
void DisplayReport(UserStatusEnum? userStatus) ... from user in DBContext.Users where
userStatus == null ? true : userStatus.Value == user.Status select user

I end up with the error "Nullable object must have a value". Matt Warren (one of the original developers on the LINQ to SQL team, and a wicked smart guy), came up with the idea to use object.Equals(userStatus, user.Status), but that doesn't work for me at all in the case where userStatus is NULL. What worked for me was to do this:

 from user in DBContext.Users
where userStatus == null || userStatus == user.Status select user

The thing is, as one commenter in the linked thread mentioned, LINQ to SQL should be a unifying syntax. We shouldn't have to distinguish between NULL and values just because the underlying provider makes a distinction between the two. I think this is a huge hole, but alas, one that will most likely never be plugged since LINQ to SQL is getting deprecated. Time to check what happens in EF4...

WCF NotFound error

Dan Miser — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 19:05:27 GMT

There are many reasons WCF will toss the generic "The remote server returned an error: NotFound" error, along with a meaningless call stack. The easiest way to identify what specifically is causing you pain is to enable tracing on the WCF service. To do this, add this in your web.config after your <system.serviceModel> element:

 <system.diagnostics>
<sources> <source name="System.ServiceModel" switchValue="Information, ActivityTracing">
<listeners> <add name="traceListener" type="System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener"
initializeData= "c:\dev\log\WcfTrace.svclog" /> </listeners> </source>
</sources> </system.diagnostics>

After you run your application and error out, just double click on the c:\dev\log\WcfTrace.svclog file. This will bring up the Microsoft Service Trace Viewer. It's a really nice tool that highlights errors in red, so just double-click on red items and you'll eventually get to the root exception which should give you all of the information you need to fix things up.

For the record, the error I was getting that started all of this was due to trying assign an invalid value to an enum. Live and learn.

ASP.NET MVC list binding differences between TextBox and TextBoxFor

Dan Miser — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:12:13 GMT

I use list binding in my ASP.NET MVC applications in several places. When it works, it is truly magnificent. When it doesn't, it's just maddening. Here's a quick heads up for those of you that use list binding in MVC. You would expect the following 2 lines to render the same HTML, but they don't. To get list binding to work, you need the HTML to read something like this (I'm just listing the attributes in question here):

 <input name="Results[0].Score" />

The old TextBox helper works fine, since you're assigning the name attribute:

 Html.TextBox("Results["+id+"].Score", Model.Score)

This code, however:

 Html.TextBoxFor(r => r.Score, new { name = "Results["
+ id + "].Score" })

produces the following output, which means the Score property won't get bound properly.

 <input
name="Score" />

The problem is that in the TextBoxFor code, the name attribute is ignored. To be more precise, the custom name is added, but the attribute is then replaced by the name derived from the model.

ASP.NET MVC 2 RC Changes

Dan Miser — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 02:52:39 GMT

I just updated my ASP.NET MVC 1.0 application to use ASP.NET MVC 2 RC. It was a pretty painless process. Be sure to follow the Release Notes on the download page, and many applications will be ready to go. Here are some extra things that might help get you unstuck:

If you're using the ASP.NET MVC Futures (Microsoft.Web.Mvc) assembly, be sure to download the new one that works with ASP.NET MVC 2.
If you're using the Telerik ASP.NET MVC components, be sure to download version BETA 2009.3.1218 or later.
Way, way, way back in the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 beta days, they had a very nice mechanism to update lists of items by tying UI fields to index numbers, so you could use primary key identifiers to help keep track of what fields were modified where. In the 1.0 RC release, Microsoft changed how it worked to do things sequentially instead. I was using the IndexModelBinder found in that thread with great success ever since then. However, Microsoft added back in the index support to ASP.NET MVC 2 RC. This means that you will have to delete the old IndexModelBinder since it won't compile anymore. Thankfully, I didn't have to change a line of my code. Nice job of code compatibility!!

LINQ: Query body must end with a select OR groupby clause

Dan Miser — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:30:01 GMT

Consider this code fragment:

var list =

from tx in Transactions

group tx by new {tx.TransactionType, tx.ClientTypeID};



foreach (var item in list)

{

Console.WriteLine(item.Key.TransactionType);

Console.WriteLine(item.Sum(tx => tx.Amount));

foreach (var item2 in item)

Console.WriteLine(item2.TransactionID);

}

After executing the query, we now have an IGrouping<AnonymousType, Transaction> that lets us run through all of the grouped objects, while still having access to the original objects in the inner loop. We can accomplish the exact same thing with this alternative LINQ statement, but the first version seems cleaner to me:

var list =

from tx in Transactions

group tx by new {tx.TransactionType, tx.ClientTypeID} into g

select g;

Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC

Dan Miser — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:00:21 GMT

Telerik just released an extremely impressive library of components (Grid, Menu, TabStrip, and MenuBar), written for MVC. They are truly first-class, from the architecture, to the development experience, to the finished screens that your user sees. They released them as open-source, and even better, these controls are written from the ground up to support ASP.NET MVC.

Be sure to check out this awesome write up on how to Use the grid in a CRUD scenario. Very nicely done.

I'm not a fan of the whole "Edit/Delete" action column. I'd much rather just have a link on the column to take me to the detail screen. Here's the way I solved that:

 <%
Html.Telerik().Grid(Model) .Name("Grid") .PrefixUrlParameters(false) .Columns(columns
=> { columns.Add(o => o.CollectionDate).Template(c => { %> <%= Html.ActionLink(c.CollectionDate.ToShortDateString(),
"View", new { Id = c.Id })%> <% }).Width(40); columns.Add(o => o.Location.Name).Width(40);
}) .Scrollable() .Sortable() .Pageable() .Filterable() .Render(); %>

LINQ GroupBy requires object equality

Dan Miser — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:14:18 GMT

Given a collection of players that were constructed like this:

 private
static IList<Player> LoadPlayers() { Player favre = new Player { Id = 1, Name
= "Favre", Team = new Team { Id = 1, Name = "Vikings" } }; Player peterson = new Player
{ Id = 2, Name = "Peterson", Team = new Team { Id = 1, Name = "Vikings" } }; Player
rodgers = new Player { Id = 3, Name = "Rodgers", Team = new Team { Id = 2, Name =
"Packers" } }; Player driver = new Player { Id = 4, Name = "Driver", Team = new Team
{ Id = 2, Name = "Packers" } }; List<Player> players = new List<Player>
{favre, peterson, rodgers, driver}; return players; }

And the following LINQ query:

 var query = from p in LoadPlayers() group
p by p.Team into g select g;

We will see the following output:

 Vikings Vikings Packers Packers

The reason this is happening is that we created new Team objects for each and every Player, and when LINQ tries to group, it does so based on object equality. The solution to this is to override the Equals() and GetHashCode() methods in the Team class. After doing that, the LINQ query will be able to group the objects up properly and just display each team name once. Resharper has a nice code generation template to create solid implementations of these methods (press Alt+Ins to bring up the code generation menu).

The example here is obviously contrived. We could create each team object once, and then use the same instance during the property assignment, and if we did that, things would work just fine. However, I ran into a more generalized version of this problem when using WCF and a lot of custom code generation. The underlying lesson is still the same: LINQ and GroupBy need to have object equality defined properly in order to make things work as you would expect.

Why AJAX posts go to a new page instead of updating UpdateTargetId

Dan Miser — Sun, 31 May 2009 16:38:24 GMT

Given a set up like this (where ExpenseSummaryData returns some arbitrary HTML fragment) :

 <%using
(Ajax.BeginForm("ExpenseSummaryData", new AjaxOptions { UpdateTargetId = "result"
})) { %> <label for="startDate">Start Date:</label> <%= Html.TextBox("startDate")
%> <br /> <label for="endDate">End Date:</label> <%= Html.TextBox("endDate")%>
<br /> <input type="submit"/> <br /> <span id="result"/> <%
} %>

If that is all your page does, you will notice that you get taken to a new page when pressing Submit. The data on the new page is the HTML fragment returned by the AJAX call, but that's all it contains (e.g. no master page), and it's clearly not replacing the result span.

The reason for this is that I forgot to add the following lines to the <head> section in the original page:

 <script src='<%=ResolveUrl("~/Content/js/MicrosoftAjax.debug.js")%>'
type="text/javascript"></script> <script src='<%=ResolveUrl("~/Content/js/MicrosoftMvcAjax.debug.js")%>'
type="text/javascript"></script>

After adding those declarations in, the content in the span tag is properly updated and it looks like a real AJAX call.

Social networking

Dan Miser — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 17:08:10 GMT

I've been on Facebook for a while, and I just added Twitter to the mix. I'm trying to keep communications on those sites much more informal and fairly non-technical. If you want to follow me, search for dmiser@wi.rr.com on Facebook or danmiser on Twitter. Hope to see you over there.

Looking for work

Dan Miser — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:29:54 GMT

Are you looking for a strong developer/architect with a serious passion for all things technical and a unique blend of experience? If so, feel free to email me. My main focus over the past couple of years has been on things ALT.NET-ish (e.g. ASP.NET MVC, NHibernate, Spring.NET, etc.) while I have delved into a variety of other technologies as well (e.g. Mindscape LightSpeed, LINQ, Dynamic Data, Delphi, etc.). If you know of an opening - contract or full-time - please keep me in mind. I'd prefer to remain in the Milwaukee area, but occasional travel wouldn't be the end of the world.

Until the next technical post here, take care and thanks in advance.

Quartz.NET trigger updates

Dan Miser — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 04:47:18 GMT

The first time you load an assembly of Quartz.NET jobs, it populates the database with the current trigger information (cron vs. simple, timings, etc.) that it finds in the configuration file. It appears that this information does not get updated once it's in the database. So if you want to make a change to set the trigger time to be every minute instead of the original version of "run every day at 2am", you will be waiting for a loooong time to see that trigger fire (unless you start at 1:59am :)).

Since I'm using Migrator.NET to control my database schema, I can easily drop the tables and recreate them. This isn't a big deal because once I have things tested, I won't need to change the trigger information, but it did trip me up for a bit so I thought I'd share.

NHibernate NonUniqueException

Dan Miser — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 02:06:02 GMT

I came across this exception today when inserting multiple objects through an NHibernate SessionScope:

 NHibernate.NonUniqueObjectException: a different object with the same
identifier value was already associated with the session: 0, of class: Foo.Entity.Bar
at NHibernate.Impl.SessionImpl.DoSave(Object obj, Object id, IEntityPersister persister,
Boolean useIdentityColumn, CascadingAction cascadeAction, Object anything) at NHibernate.Impl.SessionImpl.SaveWithGeneratedIdentifier(Object
obj, CascadingAction action, Object anything) at NHibernate.Impl.SessionImpl.Save(Object
obj)

I didn't see much out there on this, but Geoff Lane picked up on it pretty quickly. It turns out that my Bar.hbm.xml mapping file had set the id generator incorrectly to "generated", which was a problem because it was actually a MSSQL IDENTITY field. The mapping should have looked like this:

 <id name="Id">

  <generator class="native" />

</id>

Luckily for me, I had run my tests by trying to insert 2 entities inside the session so the error bubbled up right away.

Spring.NET 1.2.1 breaking change

Dan Miser — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 19:02:30 GMT

Yesterday, I had to upgrade from Spring.NET 1.1 to Spring.NET 1.2 in order to use Quartz.NET. After doing that, I started to get InvalidCastException errors in my unit tests that told me I couldn't convert an int to a Nullable<int>. Things like this were broken:

 void TestMe(int? id) { // do testing here } // and elsewhere, we call
it like this TestMe(42);

Very strange. It turns out that this is a known (and fixed) issue due to using Nullable types through AOP. I grabbed the latest nightly build and all of the tests passed again.

However, when running, I found a breaking change in the post-1.2.0 code that I needed to correct, namely:

Overriding the SessionFactoryObjectName in web.config no longer uses Spring.Data.NHibernate.Support.OpenSessionInViewModule.SessionFactoryObjectName as the key. Now, you need to use Spring.Data.NHibernate.Support.SessionScope.SessionFactoryObjectName. e.g.

<add key="Spring.Data.NHibernate.Support.SessionScope.SessionFactoryObjectName"
value="NHibernateSessionFactory" />

Now everything is upgraded and working again.

Heading out to PDC

Dan Miser — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:22:41 GMT

I'll be out in L.A. for PDC 10/25-10/30. If you're going to be there, too, drop me an email!

Adding Membership Provider to WebHost4Life web apps

Dan Miser — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:12:01 GMT

If you want to add Membership Provider features to your WebHost4Life application, I've found that you can't use the aspnet_regsql wizard UI. Instead, use the following code at the command prompt:

 aspnet_regsql -C "Data Source=sqlNNN.mysite4now.com;Initial Catalog=yourdb;User
Id=yourUserName;Password=yourPwd" -A mr

Replace NNN with your assigned address, and obviously replace the other elements of the above connection string, too. :-)

Programmatic ASP.NET Login

Dan Miser — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:24:17 GMT

Problem: I have written my own membership provider to store and validate user information. Further, I have a web page that allows a user to come and sign up with a username, password, and a whole host of other client-related data. When the user submits that data, I would like to have them logged in.

Solution: Since I'm using Forms authentication for the ASP.NET website, it appears that the following code-snippet does what I want:

if (Membership.ValidateUser(u.UserName,
u.Password)) FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie(u.UserName, false);

Updated TaskList for Preview 2 - Ajax and MVC

Dan Miser — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 18:21:14 GMT

Nikhil Kothari wrote a brilliant blog post titled Ajax with the ASP.NET MVC Framework. In that post, he built a demonstration TaskList application that used Ajax and the ASP.NET MVC framework that Microsoft is working on. Microsoft is doing a good job in releasing more frequent updates to this framework, but that means that there will be pain when moving from one release to the next. The ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 release was no exception to this rule. There were a list of documented, tedious and manual steps that one needed to follow to get their old code running with preview 2: update web.config, change the route description, update assembly dependencies, etc.. There were also other items that were not so well-documented: add ProjectTypeGuids to the csproj file, methods that fell out of the preview 2 release (e.g. ViewFactory.CreateView), etc.

I updated Nikhil's code, and some basic testing shows me that it's working with the preview 2 bits. Download the updated code here. Please leave a comment or send me an email if you see any errors that need to be corrected.

ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 looks rushed

Dan Miser — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:30:33 GMT

ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 was released yesterday. I've had a chance to install and play with it, and I hate to report that I am underwhelmed. My thinking leads me to believe that MS rushed this release out the door just to be able to say they shipped something at MIX. While there has been good progress made on several issues (e.g. medium-trust support, public methods are callable by default, and route setup is improved). However, I find several other things lacking, referenced from ScottGu:

Source code is not released. Sure, it might be coming "soon", but why not have everything coordinated and ready to go? Hitting an arbitrary deadline of "ship while at MIX" is less important to me than having answers to questions like these.
Dynamic Data (scaffolding) will not work with Preview 2. It is almost always inexcusable to take functionality and features away. The ability to scaffold is one of the coolest things in Rails. Having something similar in ASP.NET was a welcome treat. Now it's gone. Again, I'm sure there is something that will be released "soon", but why not have everything ready to go? I hate not only playing catch up years later, but having a taste of it, only to have it yanked a few weeks later.
The "choose your unit testing framework" feature that was hyped up ships with only MSTest enabled. I understand that MS is working to enlist support from the various unit testing groups to add their tool to the list, but it seems disingenuous to post mocked up screen shots with test frameworks in a combo box that were never developed.
Others have pointed out some more detailed issues that need solving to help with testability (e.g. see here and here).

I look forward to seeing these issues addressed ASAP because I absolutely LOVE the promise that the MVC bits hold.

ALT.NET Milwaukee, recap of meeting 1

Dan Miser — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:35:55 GMT

All in all, I was very pleased with the inaugural meeting of the Milwaukee ALT.NET group. We had a turnout of 10 people, which exceeded my expectation in quantity, and the quality was quite good, too. We talked about general architecture topics for about 45 minutes, and then Todd Penland led the group in discussion on persistence and the Unit of Work pattern. We talked about various alternatives to building this yourself (e.g. NHibernate), and talked about the pros and cons of this approach (i.e. requiring a topological sort to deal with database changes properly (something near and dear to my heart from when I was writing code for MIDAS/DataSnap and BDP), handling object graphs, requiring a MarkDirty() call in the property setters, etc.). It was a very engaging discussion. Thanks to everyone who showed up, and to SpiderLogic for providing the refreshments.

Here are the details for next month:

When: Wednesday, April 9, 2008 @ 7pm
Where: 10000 Innovation Drive, Suite 260 (SpiderLogic office)
What: Dan Piessens (who is on the advisory panel for Unity and EntLib 4.0) will cover Unity and EntLib 4.0

I'm looking forward to it, and hope you are, too. If you're planning on being there, please send me an email to dmiser@distribucon.com, or leave a comment here. That way I can plan the food and refreshments accordingly. Feel free to drop me a line on topics you'd like to see covered, too.

Updated to change the date to April 9th. This date change will allow us to hopefully get more exposure thanks to Scott Isaacs and the WI .NET User Group. Thanks, Scott!

Using ObjectDataSource with an Inversion of Control Container

Dan Miser — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:36:54 GMT

A co-worker of mine, Brian Kapellusch, is working on a web framework to give us a garden path for ASP.NET applications. The code that he's writing (and the code to use it) is trés elegant. One of the underpinnings of this framework is his use of the ObjectDataSource class (ODS). I am making heavy use of NHibernate and Spring.NET in this application as well. My understanding of the ODS told me that if I wanted to control how the source object was created, that I simply needed to handle the ObejctCreating event and assign the desired object instance in that event to e.ObjectInstance (see here for some more usage examples).

However, it turns out that is not enough to fully control when an object gets created. If you set the TypeName property to a concrete class, ODS will also create a new object behind the scenes - even if you have handled the ObjectCreating event. This becomes very problematic when using an IoC container to automatically build up and inject properties into your class.

The bottom line is this: If you see one version of your object that has things built up properly (because the IoC container was used properly), and one version that has null properties (because, in essence, ODS called "new MyClass()" for you, which doesn't let the IoC container do it's job), you should change the TypeName to point to the interface type instead of the concrete class type. Much thanks to Brian for this one.

Generating NHibernate mapping files

Dan Miser — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 13:57:18 GMT

I'm using NHibernate a lot more lately, and it's been working great. One of the downsides, though, is the fact that you need to build up the mapping files by hand. Well, no more. I stumbled upon the open source project, active-record-gen, on Google Code. One of the templates that it provides is one that will generate NHibernate mapping files for tables in an MSSQL database. I tried this on a couple of databases and it works rather well.

A few small suggestions:

Implement a better pluralization/singularization strategy by using Inflector.NET.
Work with more databases than just MSSQL.
Allow for the connection string to be built up with more options. Right now, it requires SSPI integration, and attached databases don't work as well as they should. See here for more details.

Unit testing with VS.NET 2008 Pro

Dan Miser — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:01:31 GMT

This link explains the unit testing tools available in VS.NET 2008 Professional. My take after reading that section is that Microsoft doesn't get it. Here is my list of observations about this section. Feel free to leave a comment to tell me where I'm wrong.

I feel like this is nothing more than an upsell to get me to go and buy VS.NET TeamSystem. Sorry, that's not going to happen. TeamSystem is way too expensive (both initially and in setup/maintenance time for a TFS server). Besides, we have an existing development infrastructure setup since we use multiple (non-MS) languages/platforms here.
It looks like MS wants to ignore the thriving and long-standing community of open source unit testing tools. I'm willing to bet that NUnit (and MbUnit, etc.) has more code using it than Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting. Yet, if I want to use the integrated Test menu in VS.NET, I need to rewrite my unit test code to use near-identical attributes for my unit tests (e.g. [TestMethod()] vs. [Test]).
Code coverage is not available in VS.NET Pro. I guess code coverage isn't something that developers should be doing - well, unless they shell out tons of money to get it done. Thankfully, there are free alternatives, with cheap upgrades to the latest version.
I want to easily run and debug my unit tests. I know Resharper can do this, but I haven't installed that in VS.NET 2008 due to the number of issues I had with it. (Yes, I know an EAP is coming out soon, but I also have CodeRush and Refactor, which work fine with 2008.) I like TestDriven.net, but I'd like to be sure that it doesn't go away.
The documentation is too cluttered. If you're going to give me a list of what's included and what's not included in the Pro version, then why not just separate the documentation to make it easier for me to see what capabilities I have (and what I don't).

In short, it's disappointing that MS has chosen to force people to one specific way of writing unit tests that is against industry norms. ASP.NET has shown me that they do understand the provider model, so why not use it here to allow me to run and debug my unit tests using whatever tools I want.

ALT.NET UserGroup, Milwaukee Chapter

Dan Miser — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:46:14 GMT

I would like to take it upon myself to announce the formation of the Milwaukee chapter of the ALT.NET UserGroup. It will meet the first Wednesday of every month, with the first meeting to take place on 3/5/08 @ 7pm at 10000 Innovation Drive, Milwaukee, WI. Pizza and drinks will be served, and the event will be free to attend. Thanks to SpiderLogic for sponsoring the first meeting.

This group will cover agile development tools and techniques with .NET, best practices for architecture and coding, emerging technologies, and anything else the group decides to cover. For more backstory on ALT.NET, read this post. The use group will be a very participant-driven group. I will not look to lead this group in any significant way, other than to call this group to order, and get people involved in sustaining it. I've learned from other user groups that if a group is too dependent upon one person, it is a matter of time before it fails.

For the first meeting's agenda, I propose we get some volunteers to take on some minimum responsibilities and then break into an OpenSpaces format, where technical topics will be presented by anyone who wants to present. I don't want this to be yet another 1-way presentation medium for 1-2 hour topics, so be prepared to be engaged, discuss, and share (bring your laptop to showcase code and/or slides). I'll take a swipe at talking about ASP.NET MVC this first meeting. If you have something you want to see covered, or especially if you want to cover something, post a comment, and we'll get it on the agenda.

Please pass this notice around to anyone you think will be interested! If you plan on attending, I would appreciate either a comment on this blog or email to dmiser@distribucon.com, just so we can gauge how much food and drink to have on hand. I am really excited about this, and look forward to seeing everyone there!!

Making the Encoding property upper case during XmlSerialization

Dan Miser — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:23:57 GMT

I have a .NET application that generates an XML file via serialization (through XmlTextWriter) and submits the data via https. Recently, they changed something on their end to only accept an upper cased UTF-8 encoding, like this:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

Unfortunately, using the .NET classes mentioned above, it generates the encoding string in lower case. I could find one mention of this on google, and they said to have the other company change (not an option here), or override XmlTextWriter. I went with that approach, making heavy use of Reflector along the way. I started by looking at the WriteStartDocument method, but realized that the private StartDocument is the thing that generates the output. It also gets called by the overloaded WriteStartDocument, so I'd need to override that method, too. However, in the private StartDocument method, it uses a bunch of private variables and generates output via another private method, InternalWriteProcessingInstructions. Ugly. At this point I realize that XmlTextWriter is not a class made for inheriting.

Back to Reflector, and I notice that the Encoding.WebName is the property used to write out the encoding string. I now create a descendant class of UTF8Encoding. The class is listed below. Now I just call XmlTextWriter, passing in UpperCaseUTF8Encoding.UpperCaseUTF8 for the Encoding type, and everything works perfectly.

    public class UpperCaseUTF8Encoding : UTF8Encoding  { public override string WebName
{ get { return base.WebName.ToUpper();
} } public static UpperCaseUTF8Encoding UpperCaseUTF8
{ get  { if (upperCaseUtf8Encoding
== null) upperCaseUtf8Encoding = new UpperCaseUTF8Encoding(); return upperCaseUtf8Encoding;
} } private static UpperCaseUTF8Encoding upperCaseUtf8Encoding
= null; }

VB.NET to C# conversion

Dan Miser — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 15:36:42 GMT

I had a need to move some VB.NET code to C# today. We're still not at the point where we can just mix and match languages within an assembly, and in this case, it would be more work than I wanted to separate things out. I looked around the net, and the best code converter that I found (read: it successfully converted everything I threw at it, where others failed) was this one.

Things I Don't Like About LINQ to SQL

Dan Miser — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 18:23:26 GMT

To be sure, this is an incomplete list, but it is a good start. Here's what I don't like about LINQ to SQL:

It only works with MSSQL. Yes, this point has been beaten to death, but it is entirely justified. Third party solutions don't cut it. LINQ to SQL intentionally seeks to exclude a sizeable population because of this hair-brained decision.
No way to easily specify adhoc LINQ queries. This doesn't count. I know the benefits of design-time queries, but I should also be allowed to shoot myself to get the added flexibility if I so choose. Building up expression trees is not a viable option for every day development.
The constant labeling of LINQ to SQL as an OR/M. That label considerably overstates what this technology does. One to one mapping between a table and a class is not really OR/M. It seems like they want to force you to change your database by writing stored procs and views to make your object model better.
There is no automated way to easily pick up changes to the database schema.
There is no easy way to preserve changes to the generated code. e.g. I change the name of the automatically generated class from collection_details to CollectionDetails, but I evolve the schema of the table. When I re-add the table, I need to set all of the custom properties again. I know I shouldn't change generated code, but see the next point.
Speaking of collection_details, it would be much better if the underlying class generator had some options to clean up legacy table names (e.g. remove underscores, camel case resulting table and column names).
No many-to-many support. In short, when you have an junction table (aka associative table or cross-reference table), you will need to write code like this: User.UserPermissions[0].Permission vs. User.Permissions[0]. Until we see LINQ to Entity (if ever), we do have this, but you can't use the new entity in a LINQ query.
There is no built-in solution to using LINQ across tiers. I don't want to expose my LINQ classes (see the point above about the tight coupling between database and objects) as I may want to change my database, and I don't want that cascading to all of the places that use it. There is also no diffgram, so even if I did it, I would have to write my own change tracking and resolving support. I went to an OpenSpaces meeting on this very topic during CodeMash, and the consensus was not flattering.

In short, it seems like this part of LINQ was released way before it was ready. But it does demo well...

Feel free to add your own grievance to the comments.

VB XML Literal support in C#

Dan Miser — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 23:02:25 GMT

I have been reading Dustin Campbell's series, The 12 Days of Refactor! X-mas, with interest. He's a very good writer, and has broken down a bunch of Developer Express features into easy to digest chunks of information.

The episode I linked to above touched on the XML Literal support that shipped with VB in Visual Studio 2008. The one sentence summary of this technology is that it lets the VB compiler translate raw XML in the source code into strongly-typed code using XML classes under the hood. It's a very nice idea, and I encourage you to look at the links to learn a little more about it.

While the VB team thought this was a good idea and added the feature, Anders and the C# team believed that it was superfluous to add such a thing to the C# side. I haven't really made up my mind which group I side with yet. However, Anders is benevolent :-), so he gave us the little-documented PasteXmlAsLinq addin that will take XML on the clipboard and paste it into a file in C# syntax building the XML up using classes like XElement.

In a default install of VS2008, open C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Samples\1033\CSharpSamples.zip and extract the LinqSamples\PasteXmlAsLinq files. There is a Readme.html file in there that tells you how to build, install and use the addin.

While this isn't the same as VB's support for XML Literals, it does make things easier to work with.

ASP.NET MVC CTP released

Dan Miser — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:40:56 GMT

At the risk of another "Me, too!" post, I thought I'd highlight several links that I have found to be helpful, and for a value-added bonus, talk about why this release matters to me. Back in the day (oh boy, does that make me sound old!), I learned how to program for the Internet by using straight HTML and Delphi to create CGI and ISAPI extensions. In order to do this, you needed to be quite aware of how the actual protocols worked, and what to do to make things behave as you'd expect. I stayed with web development up until I was using COM objects (again, written in Delphi) from an ASP page. After that, I wasn't into the web development scene much on a full-time basis.

ASP.NET 1.0 and 2.0 came along, and I found them to be quite daunting. It seemed as if it was framework built upon framework, layered with add-ins to do what I thought used to be simple things.

It appears to me that there has been a resurgence to move away from the barrage of constant abstractions, and to instead embrace the simplicity of the web (see the popularity of REST, Rails, and the buzz around ASP.NET MVC for some examples of this).

So for me, the reason I am excited is that not only can I once again utilize my knowledge about how the web works, but I can use it in new ways that will make my applications even better (e.g. TDD, scaffolding, etc.). At any rate, here's the set of links that I think matter for ASP.NET MVC:

ASP.NET Extensions download - including the MVC bits
MVC Toolkit - extra download to help with scaffolding (aka dynamic data controls)
Scott Guthrie's series of tutorials: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4
Scott Hanselman's video tutorial on the MVC framework
Phil Haack's blog (good posts on dependency injection and TDD, among others)
Rob Conery's blog (check out the posts on the MVC UI helpers and REST)

CodeMash

Dan Miser — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 20:26:22 GMT

I wanted to attend CodeMash last year, but waiting until the last minute worked against me. This year I made sure to commit to the event early, so I just signed up and got my hotel reservations sorted out. The sessions look to be pretty deep for a smaller conference, and I'm excited about going there to talk shop.

If you'll be going, drop me a line via comment here, and we'll be sure to sit down and have a beverage or 2. If you're in the Milwaukee/Madison area, and want to chat ALT.NET, it might be a good place to formally plan and launch the Milwaukee meetup.

Hope to see you there!

CC.NET: NCover.Console exited with code 1

Dan Miser — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 04:21:48 GMT

If you see an error like the following:

MSB6006: "NCover.Console.exe" exited with code 1. in build.proj(93, 3)

be sure to check that you are using the correct version of CoverLib.dll. In older versions of NCover (e.g. 1.5.8), by default, this dll should be registered every time the NCover task is run. I haven't found that to be true, though. I had an older version of NCover installed somewhere else on the build machine, and I kept on having my build fail because version 1.5.8 of NCover.Console.exe was loading version 1.5.5 of CoverLib.dll.

By manually registering the correct version of CoverLib.dll, I got the build working again.

Why MSBuild sucks

Dan Miser — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:45:29 GMT

Here is my quick and dirty laundry list of issues that I've been having with MSBuild over the past few days.

You can't detect which target is being executed, therefore conditional execution of tasks cannot be driven by targets. Instead, you need to start a crazy chain of adding targets and updating properties and adding the new target to DependsOnTargets for the original target. No wonder the build file becomes unwieldy so quickly.
It is very unintuitive and cumbersome to update property values. If I want to set a property one way in one case, and another way in a different case, it is not easy. Besides, the syntax for the CreateProperty task is way more complex than it needs to be to simply update a property.
Brutal gymnastics are required to get around customizing build properties outside of the confines of the Configuration mechanism for a given project. For example, let's say I want to change the DocumentationFile parameter used in csc.exe, or change the NoWarn directive. If you're calling an MSBuild task on your solution, you need to specify those command-line parameters as /p: parameters from the command-line or track what you want to do and add the actual command-line parameters to the Properties attribute. It should be as simple as overriding the default build properties that exist in the csproj file, but that doesn't work.
It lacks a way to list descriptive tags for all defined targets (c.f. "nant -projecthelp").

Apparently, I'm not the only one who sees this as a problem. I think Martin's idea of using a lightweight/script language to control the build is the way to go. Granted, I'm coming to this conclusion 4 years after he is, but the point is still valid today. I'd like to have more language elements in my build process to deal with branch, loop and flow so I can react better than I can with an XML file.

My bottom line: MSBuild may be a good tool for VS.NET to use because it can tightly control the format, but it is not a generic solution for controlling a medium-to-big size build process.

Pragmatic.NET

Dan Miser — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:54:09 GMT

I've had some conversations with people about the label of ALT.NET. They are of the opinion that it causes controversy by setting up the "elitist" vs. "everyone else" mentality. This is not a new observations (see here and here, e.g.).

I'd like to propose that the divisiveness of the ALT.NET moniker be abolished as quickly as possible. To that end, my proposal for the name is Pragmatic.NET. It's both a state of mind and an homage to the Pragmatic Programmer series that touches on several of the topics important to this group.

Discuss...

ALT.NET, Milwaukee Chapter

Dan Miser — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:02:04 GMT

I'm more than a little disappointed that I missed the ALT.NET conference in Austin, but I'm extremely happy that it looks like the movement has crystallized and gained enough momentum to be a legitimate option for .NET developers. Steve Kronsnoble made an analogy to the Agile Manifesto, where it took a bunch of informal participants and related ideas and turned them into industry standards. Hopefully, when looking back on this event years from now, people will be able to identify this as the genesis of .NET.

I really like the idea of ALT.NET, and it maps to discussions I've had with many developers about trying to find a "Garden Path" of .NET development. Some percentage of .NET developers will use whatever Microsoft tells them to without question. That's fine, but that's not how I think. I like to grab the best technology no matter where I find it (Open Source, other languages, etc.) . I want to talk about things like NHibernate, Spring.NET, Subsonic, the new ASP.MVC framework, Domain Driven Design, Test Driven Design, Unit Testing, and on and on. To me, that's the excitement of ALT.NET.

To do my part, I'd like to start a discussion on where and when to hold a local Milwaukee version of this OpenSpace conference. If you're passionate about .NET development and want to help shape this new movement in the Milwaukee area, please leave a comment so we can find a way to move the ball forward.

Using ObjectBindingSource for master/detail scenarios

Dan Miser — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 05:26:17 GMT

I've been working more with data-binding and the ObjectBindingSource component that I wrote about here. Here is some stripped-down sample code to help investigate more data-binding concepts.

class Customer { int Id; BindingList
Orders; } class Order { int OrderNumber; Product ProductInfo; } class Product { string
Vendor; Product Self; }

Assume that we want individual GUI components for the Customer object, and a grid to display the associated orders, with the related Product information displayed along with the Order. Here are some quick pseudo-code tips to get things wired up properly.

CustomerObjectBindingSource.DataSource = typeof(Customer)
CustomerObjectBindingSource.BindableProperties.Add("Orders"). (If you don't do this, the detail ObjectBindingSource won't work later on.)
OrdersObjectBindingSource.DataSource = CustomerObjectBindingSource and OrdersObjectBindingSource.DataMember = "Orders"
OrdersObjectBindingSource.BindableProperties.Add("Product")
DataGridView.DataSource = OrdersObjectBindingSource
Modify the DataGridView column for Product by setting:
- column.DataSource = ProductsBindingSource
- column.DisplayMember = "Name"
- column.ValueMember = Self
**IMPORTANT** - Use the same object references everywhere for the product objects (i.e. in the DataGridView column and where you access them in your code). In the sample, I use the productBindingSource component for both the lookup in the grid and the way to lookup individual Product instances. Another alternative that I tested is to use a singleton class for the collection. If you don't do this, you will get the dreaded "DataGridViewComboBoxCell value is not valid" error when the grid tries to populate the Product value.

For concrete details, download this project. I look forward to your comments.

Displaying Nested Objects in a DataGridView

Dan Miser — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 03:59:37 GMT

Subtitle: How to force .NET Grids to respect Object-Oriented designs

Microsoft clearly intended the DataGridView to be used with databases and primitives. With the company inventing .NET making it difficult to write GUIs with a proper domain model, it's no wonder that the majority of .NET code out there is littered with data-access metaphors.

Take the following code (yes, I know there are fields here, but it takes less space):

 



public class County


{


    public County() {}


    public string name;


    public double taxRate;


}





public class CountyTax


{


    public CountyTax() {}


    public County County;


    public double Amount;


}

There is no way out of the box to get a DataGridView to display and edit the CountyTax object's County and Amount fields. I'd like to have a combo box to display a list of county names, select one, and then enter an amount. Later, I can calculate the tax by multiplying the TaxRate for the selected county and the Amount I entered. In other words, I want to employ good domain design principles.

Here are a couple of solutions, depending on whether or not you want to add extra code to each grid, and use reflection or get some design-time support in a fairly encapsulated solution with faster-than-reflection performance.

I haven't had a chance to check out Orcas, but I can only hope that Microsoft has finally seen the light and will treat object-oriented developers to a fully functioning grid.