I needed a way to get a list of specific scheduled tasks running on a server. The main problem is that the command-line tool, schtasks.exe, is horrid. There is no ability to filter data. You get all of the data, or you get none. This is the Powershell script that I eventually settled on after piecing together a bunch of StackOverflow and blog entries. The key is the convertfrom-csv cmdlet that turns the result into objects that can be queried on, instead of a list of strings.

It's my first time using Powershell, and I don't know quite what to think. While it helped me solve my objective, and is quite powerful and extensible, it just doesn't feel natural to me. I'm sure that would change over time if I decide to invest time and energy to grok it. If anyone knows of a less awkward LINQ syntax, please let me know because that would turn me around on Powershell in a heartbeat.

schtasks /query /v /fo:csv | convertfrom-csv | where {$_.'Task To Run' -like '*MyProcess.exe*' }

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.

The iPhone app that I'm writing uses ServiceStack to communicate with an existing ASP.NET MVC app that I've had in production for a long time. The way I have things set up is that I'm doing my iPhone development on MonoTouch on the Mac side, and I use VMWare Fusion to run Windows as a guest OS. This blog will highlight a few of the tips that I found to be handy.

1. Getting IIS Express to work from an external server (even the Mac OS host) is theoretically possible. I found articles lying around the net saying it could work, but it never worked for me. I ended up going back to Cassini (WebDev.WebServer40.exe) and using tcpTrace to listen externally on port 8080 and forwarding to my local port (e.g. 1234).
2. In order to get VMWare Fusion using NAT to talk to my Windows OS on a consistent IP address, I added this section at the bottom of /Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/dhcpd.conf (replacing the MAC address of the Macintosh and the IP address from the Windows machine)

   
   host winguest {
   	hardware ethernet xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;
   	fixed-address 172.16.123.123;
   }
   

3. In order to get external devices (e.g. my iPhone connected to the same wireless network) to see in to the Windows OS, I set up port forwarding to route requests coming in to the Mac on port 80 to point to port 8080 on the Windows machine. I did this by modifying this section in /Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/nat.conf:

   
   [incomingtcp]
   80 = 172.16.123.123:8080
   

After all of that, I can communicate from my iPhone through my Mac into the VMWare-hosted Windows machine to get at the data.

I have an HTML form that allows users to fill out a bunch of different parameters, and then it will display the result on the same page via an AJAX call. Pretty standard, and it works great. I had a request to allow for exporting the data in Excel format. Unfortunately, just returning a File ActionResult won't work from within the context of an Ajax form. There were some workaround posted out there (e.g. hidden iframe, duplicate the form on the page, etc.). I found the following approach to be a nice compromise and DRYs things up considerably. The key is that by putting the onclick on the Export button to do this.form.submit(), it forces the request to be a standard POST and not an AJAX call.

View.cshtml

@using(Ajax.BeginForm("ReportData", new AjaxOptions {UpdateTargetId="result"})) {
  ... other input elements here
  <input type="submit" value="Display" />
  <input type="submit" value="Export" onclick="this.form.submit();">
}

Controller.cs

public ActionResult ReportData(... parameters go here ...) {
  if (Request.IsAjaxRequest()) {
    // Do the normal behavior here to build up a string
    return Content(s);
  }

  // I actually stream the result with a custom ExcelResult action, 
  // but this shows how to just return a file.
  return File(@"c:\library\report.xls", "application/vnd.ms-excel");
}

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.

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:

1. The ability to specify a starting default date in the UIDatePicker
2. 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.

What's the difference between these 2 methods?

Html.ActionLink(string linkText, string actionName, object routeValues, object htmlAttributes)
Html.ActionLink(string linkText, string actionName, RouteValueDictionary routeValues, IDictionary htmlAttributes)

Yes, they have the same number of parameters. Yes, they even have the same parameter names. So in essence the intent of calling either of these methods is to build up a link with the passed in route values and HTML attributes. Yet the difference between these 2 methods couldn't be more pronounced.

Take this line of code:

@Html.ActionLink("Back to List", "Index", TempData["SavedRouteValues"], null)

What I wanted was an easy way to retain the settings of a Telerik ASP.NET MVC Grid and build up a link to bring me back to the correct state. This line of code does that. However, it generates a link similar to this (word-wrapped here for clarity):

http://www.foo.com/Grid?Count=3&Keys=System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary%602%2BKeyCollection%5BSystem.String%2CSystem.Object
%5D&Values=System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary%602%2BValueCollection%5BSystem.String%2CSystem.Object%5D

Brutal. Ugly.

To fix this, just use this code (a simple typecast) to force the correct overloaded method to be picked:

@Html.ActionLink("Back to List", "Index", (RouteValueDictionary)TempData["SavedRouteValues"], null)

The moral of the story? If you're an API desiger, don't make overloaded methods lightly. Make sure they add value and distinction. A strong type vs. an object reference doesn't pass that test. If you do violate that rule, however, then at least be sure that the overload fulfills the intent and implied contract of that method.

Martijn Boland provides us with a nice way to display message banners in an ASP.NET MVC application. I highly recommend checking out his blog post and code sample.