Coding Horror: Code Smells

Coding Horror: Code Smells - Great summary of code smells.

MVC3 app_code directory

I just found out from K. Scott Allen’s MVC3 training video on Pluralsight that the app_code directory in MVC3 is alive and well. Basically the Razor helpers here are pre-compiled and can be accessed globally in the application.

Apparently the usage in a Razor page is as follows:

    @Common.Script(“myscript.js”, Url)

Note to self: compare and contrast with shared “editor” partial views.

Note: I composed this post with Windows Live Writer 2011 but it doesn’t seem to play well with Blogger’s own editor. ¡Qué pena!

MVC3 ModelState and overwriting model properties

I will expand this later, I swear.

Caution: when you are using strongly typed models in MVC3 and you modify a property of the model in an Action, that property will get discarded when you create the view unless you clear the ModelState first. When building the view, the model fields are overwritten with values from ModelState, so clearing the ModelState prevents this.

UPDATE 11/10/2011:
This only applies to values passed in via a POST (or a GET?) that you're attempting to override by changing the corresponding fields in the view model.

How To: Reset Identity column in SQL Server

Who knew? How To: Reset Identity column in SQL Server

In a nutshell:

DBCC CHECKIDENT('Company', RESEED, 1)

RegExes for replacing MVC3 hard-coded hrefs with @Url.Content hrefs

I'm posting this here mainly as a memory aid for myself.

My app is sprinkled with lots of links like this:

    <script src="../../Scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.11.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

I'd like them to look like this, since NuGet seems to be cognizant of such references and apparently changes them on upgrades:

    <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.11.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script>

So the following search and replace with RegExes will work:

Find what:	"\.\./\.\.{/[^"]*}"
Replace with:	"@Url.Content("~\1")"

Include the quotes, and be sure to select "Use regular expressions."

Note that the consistent relative path "../../" must be changed as per your circumstances.

UPDATE on 11/2/11:

This "Replace With" parameter might be better:

"@Href("~\1")"

UPDATE on 11/22/11:
Now, according to this article, I see that Url.Content is supposed to be better anyway.

How to display anything in Sharepoint 2010 pop up / modal window | Sharepoint Consultant, Automation & Stuff

How to display anything in Sharepoint 2010 pop up / modal window | Sharepoint Consultant, Automation & Stuff

WCF Notes

To discover WCF services, make sure that https is turned off. This is done in two places, apparently:

• In the binding, on the Security tab, Mode property, make sure the property is not set to “Transport”.
• In the service behaviors, serviceMetadata, make sure httpsGetEnabled is set to false and that httpsGetEnabled is set to true.

When you’re done, turn those things back on again.

Common Design Patterns Resources : Steve Smith's Blog

Steve Smith gave a great talk last night at Bennett Adelson's .NET SIG, with many good links. Here's the link to his blog post on it: Common Design Patterns Resources : Steve Smith's Blog

Irony - .NET Language Implementation Kit.

Wow. Very interesting stuff here. There are links here on how to implement a DSL. Irony - .NET Language Implementation Kit.

Here is one of the links: Writing your first Domain-Specific Language

Cleaning up POSTs in ASP.NET MVC | Jimmy Bogard's Blog

Cleaning up POSTs in ASP.NET MVC | Jimmy Bogard's Blog:

"What we see over and over and over again is a similar pattern of:

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Edit(SomeEditModel form)
{
    if (IsNotValid)
    {
        return ShowAView(form);
    }

    DoActualWork();

    return RedirectToSuccessPage();
}

Where all the things in red are things that change from POST action to POST action."

How to replace all automatic properties of string type with a string type which is never null

I have to do this in a piece of code, so I'm recording this here for my future reference.

In Visual Studio's Find and Replace dialog, type the following in the "Find what:" field:
public string \{:i\} \{ get; set; \}

Type this into the "Replace with" field:
private string _\1;\npublic string \1 \{\nget \{ return _\1 ?? ""; \}\nset \{ _\1 = value; \}\n\}

This pattern of performing a test in the getter versus the setter guarantees that it will never be null, and is the pattern used in the TextBox web control's Text property.

Afterwards you'll want to reformat the code, and possibly rename the backing fields, e.g. _FirstName, to be more camel-cased instead of being Pascal-cased(-like), e.g. _firstName instead of _FirstName.

3 Free E-Books and a Tutorial on Erlang

From ReadWriteWeb: 3 Free E-Books and a Tutorial on Erlang

Date & Time Formats on the Web

Everything you've always wanted to know about date/time formats but were afraid to ask.

Date & Time Formats on the Web: "There are several different formats used in different places in the technologies of the World Wide Web to represent dates, times and date/time combinations (hereafter collectively referred to as “datetimes” unless a distinction has to be made). This document presents a survey of the most significant, details which formats are mandated by the key technologies of the web, and offers advice for deciding what formats you should use in your own web applications."

Josh Reed Schramm - Software Development Thoughts And Opinions - Blog - Unit Testing Role Based Security w/ ASP.Net MVC

When attributes are an integral part of the work flow, testing is a bitch. Luckily I found this code.

Josh Reed Schramm - Software Development Thoughts And Opinions - Blog - Unit Testing Role Based Security w/ ASP.Net MVC: "I took Paul's code and turned it into a series of three controller extension methods which verify if the entire controller requires authorization, a particular method requires authorization or if a particular method requires a given role (i have not yet written the obvious 4th case - an entire controller requires a given role but it should be trivial.)"

Compiling MVC Views In A Build Environment

Compiling MVC Views In A Build Environment: "It turns out we had a bug in our project templates in earlier versions of ASP.NET MVC that we fixed in ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update.
But if you created your project using an older version of ASP.NET MVC including ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM (the one before the Tools Update), your csproj/vbproj file will still have this bug."

Knock Me Out

Knock Me Out: "Ideas, thoughts, and discussion about Knockout (KnockoutJS.com) and related technologies (jQuery and jQuery Templates)"

NIST - Structured Testing: A Testing Methodology Using the Cyclomatic Complexity Metric - McCabe Software

NIST - Structured Testing: A Testing Methodology Using the Cyclomatic Complexity Metric - McCabe Software

Why I Still L.O.V.E. ASP.NET WebForms - John Katsiotis

This guy uses the Model-View-Presenter (MVP) pattern with ASP.NET WebForms. A Microsoft MSDN link is here; a Martin Fowler article here.

Why I Still L.O.V.E. ASP.NET WebForms - John Katsiotis: "We will use the MVP pattern and the open-source project WebFormsMVP to accomplish that! Can’t wait? Download the sample!"

Don't mock HttpContext

Don't mock HttpContext: "It's so easy to take a direct dependency on HttpContext and not even realize it. If you're in the code behind in Web Forms or in a controller action in MVC, it's just right there, tempting you to use it to access session variables, application security, etc.

But don't."

dapper-dot-net - Simple SQL object mapper for SQL Server - Google Project Hosting

Wow. Impressive! Great for quick and dirty stuff, no? It uses dynamic types extensively.

dapper-dot-net - Simple SQL object mapper for SQL Server - Google Project Hosting: "Dapper - a simple object mapper for .Net
Dapper is a single file you can drop in to your project that will extend your IDbConnection interface."

Setting the Text of a ListControl in ASP.NET

If you try the following, it should set the visible text of the dropdown control in question, right?

    listControl.Text = "4 Year College";

Well, unfortunately, no! The "Text" property is named that way for consistency across all ASP.NET controls and refers to the form value that is passed to the server when the page is submitted. So unfortunately for me, the "Text" property silently rejected my attempt to set it and the page did not work.

You may be asking yourself why I am trying to set the visible text and not the value of the control. The reason is that the application I'm working on receives the displayed text from a web service and not the value that is passed in the form variables. Why not create a dictionary, look up the the text string in the dictionary, and pass that to the control?

The answer? I already have a dictionary. It's called the SELECT control itself. The generated HTML for my control is, say, the following:


This control is essentially a dictionary of key-value pairs: the key is the value attribute of the option tag, and the value is the visible text that is displayed for the given item in the dropdown list. So in the spirit of Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY), I wrote a extension function to allow me to set not just the value but also the text. I give you ListControlExtensions.cs:


Here's a typical usage. In this particular scenario, my data should be scrubbed, but if not I log a warning:

Five advanced Git merge techniques : Inside P4

Includes the handy-dandy command: git config --global merge.conflictstyle diff3

Five advanced Git merge techniques : Inside P4: "Five advanced Git merge techniques
by Edward Z. Yang

Have you ever performed a merge in Git and not have it quite turn out the way you wanted it to? For example, you accidentally converted all of your UNIX line endings to DOS line endings, and now the entire file reports a conflict? Maybe you see a conflict that you don't really care about resolving, and want to resolve as theirs? Or perhaps the conflicted file is empty and you can't figure out just what happened there?"

WCF How To’s Index - Alik Levin's - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

WCF How To’s Index - Alik Levin's - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

ASP.NET MVC 3 Roundup of Tutorials, Videos, Labs, and other Assorted Training Materials - Jon Galloway

Terrific resource!

ASP.NET MVC 3 Roundup of Tutorials, Videos, Labs, and other Assorted Training Materials - Jon Galloway

Caffeine-Powered Life - Nested Collection Models in ASP.NET MVC 3

Wow! Caffeine-Powered Life - Nested Collection Models in ASP.NET MVC 3: "We want to create form where I can save information about a person. That person has zero or more phone numbers and zero or more email addresses. The customer would like to edit everything about a person all at once, on a single form. This is a dynamic nested model problem."

IIS Express FAQ : IIS Express : Microsoft Web Platform : The Official Microsoft IIS Site

After I relocated an IIS express application, it stopped working. Even though I re-registered it with Visual Studio, it appeared "stuck" in its old location. The problem is that Visual Studio doesn't tell you that it hasn't really done anything at all when it claims that it's successfully registered your app after you've moved it. After reading this FAQ I was able to delete the broken site registration and then re-add it in Visual Studio. To fix my problem, I ran "%userprofile%\documents\IISexpress\config" from the Windows start menu, did a ctrl-F to find the application name, and simply deleted the configuration node.

IIS Express FAQ : IIS Express : Microsoft Web Platform : The Official Microsoft IIS Site: "Q: Does IIS Express use the same configuration system as IIS 7.x?

A: Yes, IIS Express uses the same applicationhost.config and web.config files supported by IIS 7.x. The key difference is that with IIS Express, the configuration is maintained on a per-user basis. In particular, whereas IIS has a global “applicationhost.config” file, IIS Express maintains a user-specific “applicationhost.config” file in the %userprofile%\documents\IISexpress\config” folder. This lets a standard user run IIS Express and also lets multiple users work on the same machine independently, without conflicting with each other. Some settings require Administrator user rights to set and modify (see question above about running as a standard user)."

NuGet Action Plan - Upgrade to 1.1, Setup Automatic Updates, Get NuGet Package Explorer - Scott Hanselman

NuGet Action Plan - Upgrade to 1.1, Setup Automatic Updates, Get NuGet Package Explorer - Scott Hanselman

Visual Studio Troubleshooting

Article from Microsoft on Visual Studio 2010 Troubleshooting.

The art of simplicity: Load testing with Fiddler

The art of simplicity: Load testing with Fiddler

Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 43 - Out-of-process queries with IQueryable - Jon Skeet: Coding Blog

Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 43 - Out-of-process queries with IQueryable - Jon Skeet: Coding Blog

Interesting stuff throughout, but here's the summary at the end:

"This was really a whistlestop tour of the "other" side of LINQ - and without going into any of the details of the real providers such as LINQ to SQL. However, I hope it's given you enough of a flavour for what's going on to appreciate the general design. Highlights:

• Expression trees are used to capture logic in a data structure which can be examined relatively easily at execution time
• Lambda expressions can be converted into expression trees as well as delegates
• IQueryable and IQueryable form a sort of parallel interface hierarchy to IEnumerable and IEnumerable - although the queryable forms extend the enumerable forms
• IQueryProvider enables one query to be built based on another, or executed immediately where appropriate
• Queryable provides equivalent extension methods to most of the Enumerable LINQ operators, except that it uses IQueryable sources and expression trees instead of delegates
• Queryable doesn't handle the queries itself at all; it simply records what's been called and delegates the real processing to the query provider"

Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 43 - Out-of-process queries with IQueryable - Jon Skeet: Coding Blog

Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 43 - Out-of-process queries with IQueryable - Jon Skeet: Coding Blog

Interesting stuff throughout, but here's the summary at the end:

"This was really a whistlestop tour of the "other" side of LINQ - and without going into any of the details of the real providers such as LINQ to SQL. However, I hope it's given you enough of a flavour for what's going on to appreciate the general design. Highlights:

• Expression trees are used to capture logic in a data structure which can be examined relatively easily at execution time
• Lambda expressions can be converted into expression trees as well as delegates
• IQueryable and IQueryable form a sort of parallel interface hierarchy to IEnumerable and IEnumerable - although the queryable forms extend the enumerable forms
• IQueryProvider enables one query to be built based on another, or executed immediately where appropriate
• Queryable provides equivalent extension methods to most of the Enumerable LINQ operators, except that it uses IQueryable sources and expression trees instead of delegates
• Queryable doesn't handle the queries itself at all; it simply records what's been called and delegates the real processing to the query provider"

Formula for computing how many end users to interview

From http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/customers-observe.php:

"Stalking Customers

When I worked at Intuit (makers of TurboTax, Quicken & QuickBooks) we used a method called "follow-me-home." It was as effective as it was simple in identifying customer problems and needs.  

We went to a customer's house or workplace and watched them do what they do and recorded their behavior and problems they encountered and how they solved them.  Data from follow-me-homes were used for new product ideas and improving existing products. "

Scott Hanselman - Creating a NuGet Package in 7 easy steps - Plus using NuGet to integrate ASP.NET MVC 3 into existing Web Forms applications

Scott Hanselman - Creating a NuGet Package in 7 easy steps - Plus using NuGet to integrate ASP.NET MVC 3 into existing Web Forms applications

Also my comment on how to wire up the resultant .csproj file to have the MVC context menus:

Woot! I added the GUID {E53F8FEA-EAE0-44A6-8774-FFD645390401} to the ProjectTypeGuids node of the .csproj, and it's a bone fide MFC project with context menus in the Solution Explorer.

This is the result, with the new GUID underlined:

{E53F8FEA-EAE0-44A6-8774-FFD645390401};{349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}

The perils of using Func instead of Expression in an IQueryable

This is sort of a LINQ 101 thing, but I haven't had much of an opportunity to use LINQ to SQL yet, believe it or not.

I learned the hard way: when using IQueryable against a database, any predicates handed around should be  Expression<func<type, bool>> instead of just Func<type, bool>. Func<type, bool> is evaluated in memory! That means that the entire table is fetched from the database, then filtered in memory. Bad, bad, bad!

7 Common Project Management Problems (And How to Solve Them)

7 Common Project Management Problems (And How to Solve Them)

Video Series: How To Give Great Presentations

Video Series: How To Give Great Presentations: "UGSS (Microsoft's User Group Support Services) have just published a video series that I recorded last year on How To Give Great Presentations. This free series of 8 videos covers the following subjects:-"

Scaffold your ASP.NET MVC 3 project with the MvcScaffolding package « Steve Sanderson’s blog

Very cool. This thing will generated CRUD support, list views, etc.

Scaffold your ASP.NET MVC 3 project with the MvcScaffolding package « Steve Sanderson’s blog: "I’ve been working with Scott Hanselman lately on an enhanced new scaffolding package called MvcScaffolding. The term “Scaffolding” is used by many software technologies to mean “quickly generating a basic outline of your software that you can then edit and customise”."

How To Use Amazon EC2 as Your Desktop - RestBackup™ Blog

How To Use Amazon EC2 as Your Desktop - RestBackup™ Blog: "In this article, I describe how I use EC2 as my Linux development desktop. I provide detailed instructions for every step of the setup process. This guide assumes that your client machine is Windows."

Scott Hanselman - Link Rollup: New Documentation and Tutorials from Web Platform and Tools

Scott Hanselman - Link Rollup: New Documentation and Tutorials from Web Platform and Tools:

"Intro to ASP.NET MVC 3 onboarding series.

Scott Hanselman and Rick Anderson collaboration and Mike Pope (Editor)

Both C# and VB versions:

• Intro to ASP.NET MVC 3
• Adding a Controller
• Adding a View
• Entity Framework Code-First Development
• Accessing your Model's Data from a Controller
• Adding a Create Method and Create View
• Adding Validation to the Model
• Adding a New Field to the Movie Model and Table
• Implementing Edit, Details and Delete
• Source code for this series"

Michael C. Kennedy's Weblog - 11 Killer Open Source Projects I Found with NuGet

Michael C. Kennedy's Weblog - 11 Killer Open Source Projects I Found with NuGet: "11 Killer Open Source Projects I Found with NuGet

Wednesday, January 19, 2011 5:18:17 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
So maybe I'm late to the party, but I recently started playing with NuGet. It's a killer new way to find, install, maintain, and manage references to open source libraries in Visual Studio 2010. Plenty of people have written about it (Phil Haack and Scott Hanselman for example). Let's just say you should learn about NuGet if you don't know it already.

What I want to talk about is all the cool open source projects I found just by flipping through the pages of the NuGet directory in the Visual Studio 'Add Library Package Reference' dialog."

Kill That Util Class!

According to him, a static "Helper" or "Util" class is an anti-pattern in a language like C#, which has extension methods, so kill it!

Interesting take. I'd agree that it can greatly reduce the incidence of such classes, yes.

Kill That Util Class!: "According to me a Util class is a sign of misplaced responsibility (a missed opportunity to see an abstraction fulfilling that behavior), resulting in poor OO-ness. Often, utility methods are placed in classes with only static methods and disallow instance creation with new. If you listen carefully, these Utility classes cry out loud, telling you to find a home for the homeless child!"

The protocol-relative URL

From Paul Irish: The protocol-relative URL: "There's this little trick you can get away with that'll save you some headaches:

<img src="//domain.com/img/logo.png">

If the browser is viewing that current page in through HTTPS, then it'll request that asset with the HTTPS protocol, otherwise it'll typically* request it with HTTP. This prevents that awful "This Page Contains Both Secure and Non-Secure Items" error message in IE, keeping all your asset requests within the same protocol."

Algorithmia Source Code released on CodePlex - Frans Bouma's blog

This code library is used by the LLBLGen Pro 3.0 designer, so it's stable and tested.

The undo/redo looks intriguing.

Algorithmia Source Code released on CodePlex - Frans Bouma's blog: "One of the main design goals of Algorithmia was to create a library which contains implementations of well-known algorithms which weren't already implemented in .NET itself. This way, more developers out there can enjoy the results of many years of what the field of Computer Science research has delivered. Some algorithms and datastructures are known in .NET but are re-implemented because the implementation in .NET isn't efficient for many situations or lacks features. An example is the linked list in .NET: it doesn't have an O(1) concat operation, as every node refers to the containing LinkedList object it's stored in. This is bad for algorithms which rely on O(1) concat operations, like the Fibonacci heap implementation in Algorithmia. Algorithmia therefore contains a linked list with an O(1) concat feature."

CODE Magazine - Article: Behavior-Driven Development

Uniting XP, Scrum, and BDD.

CODE Magazine - Article: Behavior-Driven Development: "Extreme Programming and Scrum compliment each other, but they weren’t made from the start to fit together hand in glove. Practicing Extreme Programming and Scrum are more effective when practiced together, and even more effective when practiced together as Behavior-Driven Development."

Naïve Bayesian Classification Using C# and ASP.NET

Gonna learn me some Bayesian inference. Maybe.

Naïve Bayesian Classification Using C# and ASP.NET: "THE BAYES RULE

To understand and code for the na ve Bayesian algorithm, we will do some math to understand the procedure. The primary equation for the Bayes rule is:

P(A|B) = (P(B|A) * P(A)) / P(B)"

There's also this: http://nbayes.codeplex.com/

and this: Inference in Belief Networks - CodeProject

InfoQ: Testing Techniques for Applications With Zero Tests

InfoQ: Testing Techniques for Applications With Zero Tests: "Agile techniques recommend having adequate unit and acceptance tests to build a robust test harness around the application. However, in the real world, not all applications are fortunate enough to have a test harness. In an interesting discussion on the Agile Testing group, members suggested ways to test applications which do not have any automated tests."

A six-step approach is outlined.

InfoQ: How To Do Large Scale Refactoring

InfoQ: How To Do Large Scale Refactoring: "Refactoring by definition means changing the internal structure of a program without modifying its external functional behavior. This is mostly done to improve the non-functional attributes of the program thus leading to improved code readability and maintainability. However, refactoring on a large scale often gives jitters to even seasoned Agilists. The Agile community discussed some ways of handling the large scale refactoring."

Strangling was mentioned as a good approach.

This article also discusses the Mikado Method, which is kind of interesting.

InfoQ: Fulfilling the Promise of MVC

Supposedly the original intent of MVC, which has since been bastardized. Check out his PhD dissertation, linked to in the article.

InfoQ: Fulfilling the Promise of MVC

So You Want to Interview for a Senior Developer Position…. « If & Else

So You Want to Interview for a Senior Developer Position…. « If & Else - "When my last company imploded in an epic fiery crash, I quickly found myself moving from Nashville, TN to Chattanooga, TN to become part of a growing team that was recruiting for several senior positions. While I’m the most recent full-time senior member to come aboard, we are still actively seeking senior level talent. Since August, I have sat through countless phone screens, phone interviews and a handful of in-person interviews as part of that search. To say that it has been eye-opening and disappointing would be an understatement. The opinions and observations I’m about to share are my own – and do not reflect the views of my employer (an employer who has been gracious and generous not only to me, but to many candidates, including the ones they’ve flown in from across the country, covering the cost of travel). I don’t intend for this post to be an exhaustive treatment of “what to ask senior architect or developer candidates in an interview” – consider it more a discussion of “the minimum requirements for someone (including you) interviewing for a senior developer or architect position”. I genuinely do not mean to come across as the ‘grumpy, impossible to please’ developer/architect. My frustration will be evident, though, so at least that’s out in the open…."

10 Steps To Become Better .NET Developer - Blog - CQRS and Cloud Computing

10 Steps To Become Better .NET Developer - Blog - CQRS and Cloud Computing: "Here's a list of things you might want to learn about in order to become a better .NET developer. Better developers are eligible to higher paychecks, exciting projects and more freedom in their lifestyles."

UI Integration Testing with CassiniDev and WatiN, not Selenium - Bird Stream

I'll have to give this a try.

UI Integration Testing with CassiniDev and WatiN, not Selenium - Bird Stream

How Microsoft is Helping Web Designers/Developers « Guelph Coffee and Code

To read: How Microsoft is Helping Web Designers/Developers « Guelph Coffee and Code

Jurassic - A Javascript Compiler for .NET

Might this come in handy some day?

Jurassic - A Javascript Compiler for .NET: "What is Jurassic?

Jurassic is an implementation of the ECMAScript language and runtime. It aims to provide the best performing and most standards-compliant implementation of JavaScript for .NET. Jurassic is not intended for end-users; instead it is intended to be integrated into .NET programs. If you are the author of a .NET program, you can use Jurassic to compile and execute JavaScript code.

Features

• Supports all ECMAScript 3 and ECMAScript 5 functionality
  
• Simple yet powerful API
  
• Compiles JavaScript into .NET bytecode (CIL); not an interpreter
  
• Deployed as a single .NET assembly (no native code)
  
• Basic support for integrated debugging within Visual Studio
  
• Uses light-weight code generation, so generated code is fully garbage collected"

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

I'm a cheap bastard without a Mac, so ...

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: "If you know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you already have what you need to develop your own iPhone apps. With this book, you'll learn how to use these open source web technologies to design and build apps for both the iPhone and iPod Touch. Buy the print book or ebook or purchase the iPhone App"

Scrum Alliance - New to User Stories?Written for the Scrum Alliance. A CSP’s perspective on user stories, requirements, and use cases

Good definitions -- comparing and contrasting -- between requirements, use cases, and user stories:

Scrum Alliance - New to User Stories?Written for the Scrum Alliance. A CSP’s perspective on user stories, requirements, and use cases

Ultimate Guide to Website Wireframing

Lots of website wire framing tools listed.

Ultimate Guide to Website Wireframing

Git Source Control Provider

I'll have to try this out too.

Git Source Control Provider: "Visual Studio users are used to see files' source control status right inside the solution explorer, whether it is SourceSafe, Team Foundation Server, Subversion or even Mercurial. This plug-in integrates Git with Visual Studio solution explorer."

FsCheck: A random testing framework

I'll have to check this out.

FsCheck: A random testing framework: "FsCheck is a tool for testing .NET programs automatically. The programmer provides a specification of the program, in the form of properties which functions, methods or objects should satisfy, and FsCheck then tests that the properties hold in a large number of randomly generated cases. While writing the properties, you are actually writing a testable specification of your program. Specifications are expressed in F#, C# or VB, using combinators defined in the FsCheck library. FsCheck provides combinators to define properties, observe the distribution of test data, and define test data generators. When a property fails, FsCheck automatically displays a minimal counter example."

Mockingbird

New (?) UI mockup tool similar to Balsalmiq and another one I can't remember.

Mockingbird

Test with Windows Live Writer

Everyone is telling me that this tool is really the cat’s meow. So far – about 20 words into it – it’s really not half bad.

Let’s insert a photograph, even though this blog isn’t so much of a blog as a glorified collection of bookmarks.

Hmmm, kinda cool!

I wonder if this would work with ScrewTurn Wiki? (Although I would tend to doubt it, but you never know.)

A few thoughts on jQuery templating with jQuery.tmpl | Encosia

I have to create some email templates for use by (gulp) classic ASP. I thought I'd do a bit of reading on templates in order for (1) my template tag convention to be inspired by existing templates and thus be future-friendly, and (2) perhaps if I'm lucky, to find a template I can actually use on the server itself. (PURE, mentioned below, might be a candidate.)

A few thoughts on jQuery templating with jQuery.tmpl | Encosia: "I spent some quality time with Dave Reed’s latest revision of John Resig’s jQuery.tmpl plugin recently, migrating a small project from jTemplates. Since both the jQuery team and Microsoft team have requested feedback on jQuery.tmpl, I decided to write about my experience using it (as I am wont to do with these templating proposals).
Overall, jQuery.tmpl is a great step in the right direction. It’s small, it’s simple, and it’s fast. Overloading append() to allow the append(Template, Data) syntax is phenomenal. That approach feels more like idiomatic jQuery than anything else I’ve used, including jTemplates."

He mentions that it lacks composability, but this article is from May. Has Microsoft added it since then?

From the comments, a few more libraries to consider:

Spark - the new hotness, apparently. Included with the latest Microsoft MVC, if I'm not mistaken.

PURE - seems more decoupled than the others, but at first glance it doesn't seem to support to ubiquitous "${}" convention.

I'm still reading. This is kind of a brain dump for further research at some point when I have more time (i.e. when hell freezes over).

Teach Visual Studio Your Own Language -�Easy! - Journal - Rinat Abdullin

Teach Visual Studio Your Own Language -�Easy! - Journal - Rinat Abdullin: "In this article we'll see how simple it is to extend Visual Studio with a custom language. This language will have a real syntax that will be evaluated and transformed into the C# code on-the-fly, saving a few lines of repetitive code!"

BDD, Fluent Interface Generator, and a new .NET 3.5 Parser generator

StoryQ uses a fluent interface generated by Flit, the Fluent Interface Toolkit, which is turn was developed using Irony, a new development kit for writing parsers in .NET. (However, the last release was almost exactly a year ago, so who knows what's up with it?)

Javascript Libraries and ASP.NET: A Guide to jQuery, AJAX and Microsoft - Articles - MIX Online

Javascript Libraries and ASP.NET: A Guide to jQuery, AJAX and Microsoft - Articles - MIX Online: "When Microsoft announced they would begin providing official support for jQuery, few of us realized how profoundly that announcement would eventually impact client-side development on the ASP.NET platform. Since that announcement, using jQuery with ASP.NET has moved from the obscure, to a central role in ASP.NET MVC’s client-side story, and now to the point of potentially superseding ASP.NET AJAX itself."

NET jQuery Extensions at GitHub

Highlights include:
"Templating – Previously referred to as jQuery.tmpl or jQuery-tmpl, the jQuery Templating feature was Microsoft’s first foray into working with the jQuery team and community. Though its inclusion in jQuery isn’t planned until jQuery 1.5 is released, you can begin using it in plugin form immediately. That plugin is currently available on GitHub: http://github.com/jquery/jquery-tmpl"
and
"Data Linking – The next feature that may be a precursor to more official things to come is the jQuery-datalink plugin, which is also available on GitHub: http://github.com/nje/jquery-datalink. With this plugin, you can “link” JavaScript objects together so that they remain synchronized when changes are made to one or both of them. The canonical example of this is linking a JavaScript object’s properties to corresponding fields in a form, to eventually automate tasks such as change tracking and submission."

More from Scott Guthrie:
"jQuery Templates
The jQuery Templates plugin enables you to create client templates. For example, you can use the jQuery Templates plugin to format a set of database records that you have retrieved from the server through an Ajax request.
You can learn more about jQuery templates by reading my earlier blog entry on jQuery Templates and Data-Linking or by reading the documentation about it on the official jQuery website. In addition, Rey Bango, Boris Moore and James Senior have written some good blog posts on the jQuery Templates plugin:

• Not Using jQuery JavaScript Template? You’re Really Missing Out
• jQuery JavaScript Templates Tutorial: Nesting Templates
• Introducing jQuery Templates
• jQuery Templates in the Wild
• Web Camps Demos: Adding jQuery to the ASP.NET MVC Music store

When the next major version of jQuery is released -- jQuery 1.5 -- jQuery Templates will be included as a standard part of the jQuery library."

New Password Not Enough to Secure Hacked E-mail Account | threatpost

New Password Not Enough to Secure Hacked E-mail Account | threatpost

Javascript MVC frameworks

Sammy.js
http://goutamdey.com/2010/01/02/5-javascript-mvc-frameworks-2/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/386885/is-there-a-javascript-mvc-micro-framework

jQuery Grid Recommendations - Stack Overflow

jQuery grid reference from StackOverflow:

jQuery Grid Recommendations - Stack Overflow: "The best entries in my opinion is Flexigrid and jQuery Grid (1st & 2nd in list). The others are included for completeness.

Flexigrid: http://flexigrid.info/
jQuery Grid: http://www.trirand.com/blog/
jqGridView: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/jqGridView
Ingrid: http://reconstrukt.com/ingrid/
SlickGrid http://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid
I like the jQuery Grid (#2 above) better than Flexigrid mostly because it supports editable cells, and has very good documentation and samples on the website."

How to

Fascinating -- from www.edwardtufte.com, in the section where he criticizes the PowerPoint culture at NASA that contributed to the Columbia disaster in 2001.

"How to make engineers write concisely with sentences? By combining journalism with the technical report format. In a newspaper article, the paragraphs are ordered by importance, so that the reader can stop reading the article at whatever point they lose interest, knowing that the part they have read was more important than the part left unread.

State your message in one sentence. That is your title. Write one paragraph justifying the message. That is your abstract. Circle each phrase in the abstract that needs clarification or more context. Write a paragraph or two for each such phrase. That is the body of your report. Identify each sentence in the body that needs clarification and write a paragraph or two in the appendix. Include your contact information for readers who require further detail.

-- William A. Wood (email), September 8, 2005"

The Marvels of Monads - Yet Another Language Geek - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

The Marvels of Monads - Yet Another Language Geek - Site Home - MSDN Blogs: "With all of the attention that monads get, why am I writing yet another explanation of monads?� Not to compare them to some everyday occurrence or to chronicle my journey to understanding.� I explain monads because I need monads.� They elegantly solve programming problems in a number of languages and contexts."

Mastering the 960 Grid System | Nettuts

Looks a little complicated, but they claim it'll be easy peasy by the end of the article.

Mastering the 960 Grid System | Nettuts: "We’re already familiar with the 12- and 16-column variants of 960.gs, but did you know that a 24-column alternative exists too? In this article, you’ll master the 960 grid system by dissecting the 24-column version demo. If you’ve only used 960gs before for Photoshop mockups, consider this your lucky day. By the end of this article, you’ll be able to convert your designs to HTML and CSS in no time at all."

Don’t let jQuery’s $(document).ready() slow you down | Encosia

Don’t let jQuery’s $(document).ready() slow you down | Encosia: "... what if $(document).ready() is slowing you down? In this post, I’m going show you specific instances where postponing startup code until the document’s ready event slows perceived page load time, could leave your UI needlessly unresponsive, and even causes initialization code to run slower than necessary."

Fiddler Extension – Request to Code | Chad Sowald

Who knew? Fiddler Web Debugger - Useful Extensions

This one is particularly cool:

Fiddler Extension – Request to Code | Chad Sowald: "This Fiddler extension generates C# or VB.NET code to duplicate a web request. �You simply drag one or more Fiddler sessions into the newly created “Code” tab and the extension will produce appropriate code that you can copy and paste into your program that reproduces those requests."

There's also this: JSON Viewer

Scott Hanselman - How to Post Code To Your Blog and other Religious Arguments

Scott Hanselman - How to Post Code To Your Blog and other Religious Arguments: "If you've got a programming blog, chances are you'll want to post some code snippets. Posting code sounds easy but it's surprisingly tricky if you consider all the ways that people will be reading your blog. There's a number of ways. Here's a few and their pros and cons."

Commonly Confused Bits Of jQuery

Commonly Confused Bits Of jQuery: "The explosion of JavaScript libraries and frameworks such as jQuery onto the front-end development scene has opened up the power of JavaScript to a far wider audience than ever before. It was born of the need — expressed by a crescendo of screaming by front-end developers who were fast running out of hair to pull out — to improve JavaScript’s somewhat primitive API, to make up for the lack of unified implementation across browsers and to make it more compact in its syntax."

A few git tips you didn't know about

A few git tips you didn't know about -- This site is *great*!

4 Types of Bloggers:

4 Types of Bloggers:: "

"

Musings of a Software Developer: Using .NET 3.5 (CLR 2.0) DLL inside Visual Studio 2010 for a .NET 4.0 Project/Application

Will this be the solution to my problem?

Musings of a Software Developer: Using .NET 3.5 (CLR 2.0) DLL inside Visual Studio 2010 for a .NET 4.0 Project/Application

Six Things Every jQuery Developer Should Know

Wow -- great article! I love the section about jQuery data, which I didn't know anything about.

Six Things Every jQuery Developer Should Know

Cookieless Session Problems in ASP.NET

A web app needs to embed my web app in an IFrame. IE doesn't trust cookies from inside the IFrame, thus necessitating cookieless browsing. The caveats of cookieless browsing are discussed in this article.

Cookieless Session Problems in ASP.NET

Git Reference

Wow -- this is great. From GitHub, an essential Git reference. Their documentation tends to rock.

Git Reference

Parameterized unit tests using Pex - reducing code written

Peli's Farm - Pex, Stubs, Moles, QuickGraph, MbUnit, Reflector Addins - Test Driven Development With Parameterized Unit Tests: "The key difference is the shortcut from step 4 (generating unit tests) to 3 (fix the code), without passing through step 1 (write a new test). This is illustrated by the yellow feedback loop in the diagram below:"

Erlang compared to F#

Interesting. Learning Erlang - Erlang Gaining Momentum - Matthew Podwysocki's Blog

Debugging classic ASP web application with Visual Studio 2010

If you Google that, you should be referred instead to Monster.com or to a mental health clinic.

Why, oh why, do people still use classic ASP?

Custom Configuration Section Handlers : Steve Smith's Blog

Nice treatment.

Custom Configuration Section Handlers : Steve Smith's Blog

Steve Smith is the guy who brings you Hudson Software Craftsmanship, who meet once a month in Hudson, OH.

20 Tools to Make the Life of a Web Developer Easier | Nettuts - StumbleUpon

Very cool. I like the 960 grid thing.

20 Tools to Make the Life of a Web Developer Easier | Nettuts - StumbleUpon

Using .NET: Tame Your Software Dependencies for Flexible Apps

It's from Microsoft, right, so it must be authoritative?

This uses Castle Windsor and Binsor, a Boo (!) DSL for wiring up dependencies.

Using .NET: Tame Your Software Dependencies for Flexible Apps

Silverlight 4 Training Kit - ScottGu's Blog

This rates being noted here to be able find this permanently!

Silverlight 4 Training Kit - ScottGu's Blog

Git autocrlf problem revisited -- and solved!

Sometimes when switching from one branch to another, Git will pick a seemingly random set of files and complain that they've changed, when it's just line endings that apparently it doesn't like. The key symptom here is that "git diff" shows a ton of files whose entire contents have changed, while "git diff -w" shows no changes in those same files.

The following commands, issued in a row, will work:

git add -u
git config core.autocrlf false
git reset
git config --unset core.autocrlf

This assumes that you've got core.autocrlf normally on by default in the global settings file. If you do not, then replace the last line with the following:

git config core.autocrlf true

Or, to consolidate in one command, the first version is:

git add -u && git config core.autocrlf false && git reset && git config --unset core.autocrlf

while the second is:

git add -u && git config core.autocrlf false && git reset && git config core.autocrlf true

MSLinqToSQLGenerator fails when there's a partial class having a Using at the top of the file | Microsoft Connect

Finally. Resolution!

MSLinqToSQLGenerator fails with partial class having a Using at the top of the file | Microsoft Connect: "If you add a partial class declaration to a Linq-To-SQL Data Classes context object, and then put a 'using' statement at the top of the file outside the namespace declaration, the following error occurs when you run the custom tool:

'The custom tool 'MSLinqToSQLGenerator' failed. Unspecified error'

Also, Visual Studio will then delete the corresponding '.designer.cs' file for your data context and nothing will compile after that point."

Belarc Advisor - Free Personal PC Audit

Lost your MS Office activation key? Find it with this utility, recommended by a Microsoft MVP: Belarc Advisor - Free Personal PC Audit

Jeffrey rambles about Rx, .NET and programming in general. : Time flies like an arrow in Script#

Jeff Van Gogh of Microsoft demonstrates Reactive Extensions for Javascript (RxJS) and Nikhil Kothari's Script#

Jeffrey rambles about Rx, .NET and programming in general. : Time flies like an arrow in Script#: "Time flies like an arrow in Script#

As kouPhax requested this on the Rx forum, I decided to post a port to Script# of the Time flies like an arrow sample that ships with Rx for JavaScript.

Rx for JavaScript already ships with a binding for Script#, so that will make our lives a lot easier (you can find the binding in \Redist\ScriptSharp\RxJs.dll)"

How to share data between stored procedures

How to share data between stored procedures

Very cool article. Gives a table summarizing the methods.

Tsung

Tsung: "It can be used to stress HTTP, WebDAV, SOAP, PostgreSQL, MySQL, LDAP and Jabber/XMPP servers. Tsung (formerly known as IDX-Tsunami) is a free software released under the GPLv2 license.

The purpose of Tsung is to simulate users in order to test the scalability and performance of IP based client/server applications. You can use it to do load and stress testing of your servers. Many protocols have been implemented and tested, and it can be easily extended. WebDAV, LDAP and MySQL support have been added recently (experimental).

It can be distributed on several client machines and is able to simulate hundreds of thousands of virtual users concurrently (or even millions if you have enough hardware ...).

Tsung is developed in Erlang, an open-source language made by Ericsson for building robust fault-tolerant distributed applications.

Tsung is supported by Process-One"

Create a self-signed SSL certificate with IIS 6.0 Resource Kit SelfSSL

Create a self-signed SSL certificate with IIS 6.0 Resource Kit SelfSSL: "The IIS 6.0 Resource Kit version 1.0 was released 5/30/2003. It contains a utility called SelfSSL.exe for instantly creating and installing a self-signed testing certificate into IIS. The resource kit is freely downloadable from the Microsoft website. Although the tool is intended for IIS 6.0, it works just as well on IIS 5.1. It is so simple to use that no instructions are required beyond the pointer to the download."

[#LOG4NET-27] Rolling files on date/time boundaries doesn't support a maximum number of backup files. - ASF JIRA

A patch for deleting log4net RollingFileAppender files based on date.

[#LOG4NET-27] Rolling files on date/time boundaries doesn't support a maximum number of backup files. - ASF JIRA

Why won't my ASP pages work in IIS 6.0?

I still have to use Classic ASP at work, so I need this article.

Why won't my ASP pages work in IIS 6.0?

Introducing SelectorGadget: point and click CSS selectors

Danny Burkes showed this in a demo today.

Introducing SelectorGadget: point and click CSS selectors: "SelectorGadget is an open source bookmarklet that makes CSS selector generation and discovery on complicated sites a breeze. Just drag the bookmarklet to your bookmark bar, then go to any page and press it. A box will open in the bottom right of the website. Click on a page element that you would like your selector to match (it will turn green). SelectorGadget will then generate a minimal CSS selector for that element, and will highlight (yellow) everything that is matched by the selector. Now click on a highlighted element to remove it from the selector (red), or click on an unhighlighted element to add it to the selector. Through this process of selection and rejection, SelectorGadget helps you come up with the perfect CSS selector for your needs."

Glimmer: a jQuery Interactive Design Tool - Home

I heard about this on April 29, 2009, but I'll blog about it now.

Glimmer: a jQuery Interactive Design Tool - Home: "Without having to touch a piece of JavaScript code, harness the power of the jQuery. With Glimmer: a jQuery Interactive Design Tool, easily create interactive experiences and use the tool to discover ways to add animation and other effects to your site in new and unexpected places. Glimmer is a Windows application which generates jQuery, XHTML and CSS. If jQuery is the “write less, do more” JavaScript library, then Glimmer is the “write none, do more” jQuery design tool."

Quick and Dirty Guide to Configuring Log4Net For Web Applications

This line of code is a gem:
private static readonly ILog Log = LogManager.GetLogger(MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod().DeclaringType);

Quick and Dirty Guide to Configuring Log4Net For Web Applications


My code:

private static readonly ILog Log { get; set; }

static ClassConstructor()
{
    Log = log4net.LogManager.GetLogger(MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod().DeclaringType);
    log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator.ConfigureAndWatch(new FileInfo(HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/log4net.config")));
}

The Kayak Framework: An easy way to speak HTTP with .NET

I'll have to look into this. It's like a thttpd for .NET/CLR.

The Kayak Framework: An easy way to speak HTTP with .NET: "Kayak is a lightweight HTTP server for the CLR, and the Kayak Framework is a utility for mapping HTTP requests to C# method invocations. With Kayak, you can skip the bulk, hassle, and overhead of IIS and ASP.NET. Kayak enables you to do more with less syntax, and is easy to configure to work in any way you care to dream up."