Ten Tips for a Happy Upgrade to Visual Studio 2008 (Release)

 

The blog post, Ten Tips for a Happy Upgrade to Visual Studio 2008 (Release) from Jon Galloway has some great recommendations and suggestions for upgrading from Beta 2 of VS 2008 to the Release version. If you are getting ready to make that jump, check this out to make sure it goes as smoothly as possible.

Patterns: MVC, MVP & PAC - Explained

 

Our group is currently looking at MVP and MVC as we move our application towards an object model design and this article is a great read on the differences between the patterns. I have found it is difficult to understand (and explain) the differences between the patterns, but this post, Ctrl-Shift-B: Interactive Application Architecture Patterns does a great job of explaining all of that! I highly recommend reading this article.

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Released - ScottGu's Blog

Please see the post below from Scott Guthrie for details about the release of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Framework. Please note that if you are doing any Silverlight 1.1 development or using the Web Deployment Project add in, you will need to stick with the Beta 2 bits until these two components have been  updated for use with the release version of VS2008.

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Released

Minesweeper with Silverlight 1.1

The Minesweeper Game Done in Silverlight 1.1 is a very cool example by some of the folks over at Telerik that displays some of the power and flexibility of Silverlight 1.1. They have been gracious enough to make the source code for this app available as well. Go check it out!

Writing Testable Code Is About Managing Complexity

 

Writing Testable Code Is About Managing Complexity is a recent blog post by Phil Haack. He provides some good insight into the benefits of writing testable code. My group is getting ready to kick off a project using Agile practices and writing testable code is going to be key to our success, so this was very timely information for me. Phil summarizes with the results (or side effects) below. Please check out his article for more details.

1. A nice suite of regression tests.
2. Well separated code that helps manage complexity.
3. Well separated code that helps enable concurrent development.

.NET Tip of The Day: Speed up Visual Studio 2005

If you like me, are in Visual Studio a good portion of your day, then this list of tips is for you. These are some good tips that will help you to not be so frustrated with how slowly VS runs. I just applied these this morning and already I have noticed a difference. Obviously, your mileage may vary, but at least consider trying them out to see if they make a difference.

.NET Tip of The Day: Speed up Visual Studio 2005

Combine multiple stylesheets at runtime

 

Mad Kristensen (founder of BlogEngine.Net) has written a great article titled Combine multiple stylesheets at runtime. In the article he outlines the process of combining multiple stylesheet references from the head tag on a page into one http request instead of the multiple ones and he also throws in some performance gains via whitespace removal and browser caching.

The ability to combine stylesheet requests is something that I have looked at in the past for one of our applications and never quite found the right solution. However, this solution looks very promising for the following reasons:

• Provides the ability to reference a stylesheet inclusion in the normal HTML markup (note that your head tag must have the runat='server' attribute applied).
• Efficiently leverages browser caching without the need for modifying content expiration via Http Headers on files/directories within IIS.
• Satisfies Best Practice #1 Make Fewer Http Requests of the Yahoo Developer Network Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site. (Note you can grade the performance of your web site using YSlow for FireFox.)
• Provides a file dependency for all of the scripts that make up the caching of the generated combined script so you can update those files dynamically as needed.

Granted there is the initial IO overhead the first time of the combined requests needs to be generated, but I think that is a small price to pay for longer term performance increases in your web application.

VS 2008 Multi-Targeting Issue & FxCop

Krzysztof Cwalina (one of the Microsoft CLR designers) points out that while VS 2008 Mutli-Targeting Support is a great thing, there are some limitations/situations where you could build and test an application on a machine with VS 2008 (and thus .NET 3.5, 3.0 & 2.0) installed and compile and run that code without issue. However, if you run (or even compile) that code on a machine with only .NET 2.0 installed you will receive a run-time error because it is using members that are not present in the .NET 2.0 framework. He was kind enough to create a set of FxCop rules that can detect this issue and warn you before you go throwing run-time errors when you deploy your application.

Please reference Krzysztof's article FxCop Rule for Mutli-Targeting for a more thorough discussion of the issue as well as a link to download the FxCop rules.

Source Control & Branching

As Jeff Atwood points out in his article Software Branching and Parallel Universes, branching within source control software is a feature that is rarely used. I know I personally do not completely understand the power and benefits of branching; and as a result I have been reluctant to use branching. However, after reading this article and studying the examples I feel that I have a better understanding of the benefits and approaches to branching. This is a good read for anyone that uses source control (which should be all developers).

CopySourceAsHtml and VS 2008

The CopySourceAsHtml Visual Studio add-in is an invaluable tool for me, especially for creating blog posts. However, I was concerned that I would not be able to use it with Visual Studio 2008. That is, until I did a quick Google search and found that Andreas Erben posted Using CopySourceAsHtml with Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. The steps are very easy, if you use this tool and want VS 2008 support, it is well worth the few minutes of your time.

Software Estimation - Lessons & Insight

I found the two blog posts below extremely interesting, insightful and especially timely; considering that I am currently doing estimates for a project at my company. Both of these articles raise very good points about software development and estimation. I have included my key takeaways from these articles as well. I would encourage you to take the time to read both articles.

NOTE: Please keep in mind that Steve McConnell is one of the industry leading authorities on software development estimation.

Steve McConnell in the Doghouse by Jeff Atwood

"Steve got subsumed in the unpredictable details. This completely mirrors my software project experience. Often, you can't even begin to accurately estimate how long something will take until you start doing it. At least some of it. That's why so many teams turn to agile, iterative development techniques; part of each iteration involves exploring all those unknowns and turning them into slightly-less-unknowns for the next iteration. The faster we iterate, the closer we get to an accurate estimate, and the more work we get done along the way. We plan by doing."

Building a Fort: Lessons in Software Estimation by Steve McConnell

"1. Numerous unplanned problems collectively added up.

2. Underestimation of unfamiliar tasks. My estimates weren't too far off for a lot of the work that I'd done before. But some things, like mapping out the site for the footing holes, I assumed would be 15-30 minute task ended up taking several hours.

3. Not decomposing big tasks into smaller subtasks. I'd planned out my project in whole days. At a birds eye view nothing seems obviously wrong with planning "frame the fort in one day." But when you break it down and say, What's involved in each of the 4 walls, and then you realize that one wall includes a door, another wall includes an angled top plate, a third wall includes an angled top plate and a window, and so on, and then you think about what's involved in each one (measuring, cutting, checking for square, recutting anything that wasn't quite right, tilting the wall up, checking again for plumb and square, attaching and then removing the temporary supports, etc.), you start thinking, can I really do a whole wall in 2 hours? If the answer's even close to "no," then you start to realize that the whole estimate for that big task is probably wrong.

3. Using overly round time units.  Using round units like "1 day" contributes to not thinking hard enough about decomposing large tasks into smaller tasks.

4. Substituting a target for an estimate. I had 7 days to do the project, and my estimate turned out to be 7 days. That's a little suspicious, and I should have known better than to make that particular mistake!"

Fiddler2 - Connection to localhost failed

I am currently doing so research and development that involves working with the MS ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Extensions and the Ajax Control Toolkit. Anyhow, after I created a couple of pages, I wanted to see how "heavy" they were on the client side. Basically, checking to see how much content (html markup, js files, css files, etc.) is being sent down to the client browser. So I fired up Fiddler2 to begin analyzing and was met with the following error in my browser:

[Fiddler] Connection to localhost failed.
Exception Text: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.

So I jumped out to the Fiddler discussion forums and found the following post : New 2.0 Build - localhost refused. It turns out that Fiddler will try to use IPv6 if it detects it and my local IIS is not bound to IPv6.

The option to turn off the use of IPv6 is available from Tools->Fiddler Options on the General tab. As soon as I turned this off, everything was working again as expected. So if you are using Fiddler2 and run into this issue, turn off IPv6.

Generic List Sorting

I have a custom entity that I have created within my web application and I am binding it to my DataGrid (I know I should be using a GridView, but that change will come later...). Previously the data was being retrieved into a DataTable, so when I needed to sort, I could just apply a DataView to the DataTable passing the appropriate sort filter and I was set. But with the Generic list, it was not that simple. I did a little research on Delegates and Predicates to maybe solve my problem, but then I was creating custom code for each and every list that I needed to perform this on. However, in my Google searching I discovered this article, Sorting GridView Using IComparer by TheDotNetGuy and he is a using a GenericComparer class to do exactly what I wanted. I really liked the flexibility that this solution provided.

using System;

using System.Web.UI.WebControls;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Reflection;

public class GenericComparer<T> : IComparer<T>

{

    private SortDirection _sortDirection;

    private string _sortExpression;

    /// <summary>

    /// Direction in which to sort.

    /// </summary>

    public SortDirection SortDirection

    {

        get { return this._sortDirection; }

        set { this._sortDirection = value; }

    }

    public GenericComparer(string sortExpression, SortDirection sortDirection)

    {

        this._sortExpression = sortExpression;

        this._sortDirection = sortDirection;

    }

    public int Compare(T x, T y)

    {

        PropertyInfo propertyInfo = typeof(T).GetProperty(_sortExpression);

        IComparable obj1 = (IComparable)propertyInfo.GetValue(x, null);

        IComparable obj2 = (IComparable)propertyInfo.GetValue(y, null);

        if (SortDirection == SortDirection.Ascending)

        {

            return obj1.CompareTo(obj2);

        }

        else return obj2.CompareTo(obj1);

    }

}

As an example, I could sort a list of personnel by last name as follows:

    List<MyApp.Entities.Personnel> personnel = MyApp.Entities.Personnel.Load();

    personnel.Sort(new GenericComparer<MyApp.Entities.Personnel>("LastName",SortDirection.Ascending);

ASP.NET AJAX Roundup

I ran across the following ASP.NET AJAX links over the last couple of weeks that I found interesting and useful, so I thought I would pass them along.

• Why ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanels are dangerous - an article that warns of the overhead associated with using ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanels to add "instant" AJAX capability to your website. Describes the use of JSON and PageMethods as a better performing alternative.
• How to improve ASP.NET AJAX error handling - shows how to create more robust and meaningful error messages than the standard popups within ASP.NET AJAX.
• AJAX Automated Testing and Debugging Tools - great list of options to consider for assisting with testing and debugging of AJAX applications. Please let me know via the comments of any experiences you have had with tools on this list.
• Force update of an ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel using JavaScript - How to manually force an UpdatePanel to update from JavaScript.

AJAX Patterns

If you are doing any web development and have or will be implementing AJAX, you should check out the AJAX Patterns site for some good guidance. This Wiki site has a lot of great content and resources about AJAX, here is an excerpt from the site:

There are 70+ Ajax patterns here, most linking to the original draft version for the design patterns book. Foundational Technology Patterns are lower-level patterns and a suitable introduction for people learning Ajax for the first time. Programming Patterns explain how these components are combined in a maintainable, performant, manner. Functionality and Usability Patterns guide on user-interface and usability concepts. Development Process Patterns look at typical developer activities like testing and debugging.

There is also information about Frameworks, Tools, JavaScript, etc. Whether you are new to AJAX or a seasoned veteran, there is probably something new/useful that you can find at this site. Check it out.

P.S. - I found this site via July 2007 MSDN Magazine article, Cutting Edge: Context-Sensitive Feedback with AJAX by Dino Esposito.

Useful .NET Utility Classes

Phil Haack just posted a great article, The Most Useful .NET Utility Classes Developers Tend to Reinvent Rather Than Reuse. This is a list of classes that you may not be aware of, but can sure make your life a lot easier. Here are the main classes that he discusses:

• System.Path.IO
• System.Web.VirtualPathUtility
• System.Web.HttpUtility
• System.Enviornment

If you are not familiar with these classes I would highly suggest that you read the article and try them out. I have used some of the System.Path.IO methods (like Combine) to make creating filenames a whole lot simpler. Also check out the comments as there are a couple of other good ones mentioned as well.

Run MS ASP.NET AJAX Extensions from web site Bin directory

When you install the MS ASP.NET AJAX Extensions and create a new Ajax enabled web site, by default your web.config file is configured to run the MS AJAX Extensions from the GAC; where they were installed. However, you may want to run the extensions locally when you deploy your web site. Please follow the steps below to setup your web site to run the MS AJAX Extensions from the Bin folder of your web site.

1. Copy the MS AJAX Extensions assemblies to your Bin Directory. The path listed below is the default installation location for the AJAX Assemblies.

C:\Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions\v1.0.61025
- System.Web.Extensions.Design.dll
- System.Web.Extensions.dll

2. Modify the <pages> section of web.config. You do not need to reference the assembly by version, culture and publickeytoken now since it will not be accessed from the GAC.

Before:

<pages>

<controls>

<add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.UI" assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>

controls>

pages>

After:

<pages>

<controls>

<add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.UI" assembly="System.Web.Extensions"/>

controls>

pages>

3. Modify the <compilation> section of web.config removing the following entry from the <assemblies> node. This is what was telling your web to look in the GAC for the MS AJAX Extensions assembly.

<add assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"/>

And that should do it. Now your site will reference the MS AJAX Extensions from the Bin directory of your web site and not from the GAC.

Programmer Personality Test

What type of programmer you are? Take this Programmer Personality Test. Be sure to answer honestly ;-) My results are listed below.

Your Programmer personality type is:

DHSC

You're a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.

You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.

You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There's no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.

You are a Conservative programmer.
The less code you write, the less chance there is of it containing a bug. You write short and to the point code that gets the job done efficiently.

I think that is a fair assesment. However, I feel that I *really* need to work at moving more towards the following traits:

Planner - There is a lot to be said for proper planning, it can sure save you a lot of headaches and extra work down the road, plus it makes future changes much easier. I have always been a doer and switching contexts is hard, but IMHO well worth it.

Team - The power of many. I work with a really great team at my company and would be lost without them. We had a really big and difficult project last year that we would not have been able to pull off unless we worked as a team. I need to learn to leverage that type of power more in my day to day routine, not just crunch time.

You can view the entire personality key here.