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• Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework

  - by ScottGu

  Today we released VS 2013 and .NET 4.5.1. These releases include a ton of great improvements, and include some fantastic enhancements to ASP.NET and the Entity Framework.  You can download and start using them now. Below are details on a few of the great ASP.NET, Web Development, and Entity Framework improvements you can take advantage of with this release.  Please visit http://www.asp.net/vnext for additional release notes, documentation, and tutorials. One ASP.NET With the release of Visual Studio 2013, we have taken a step towards unifying the experience of using the different ASP.NET sub-frameworks (Web Forms, MVC, Web API, SignalR, etc), and you can now easily mix and match the different ASP.NET technologies you want to use within a single application. When you do a File-New Project with VS 2013 you’ll now see a single ASP.NET Project option: Selecting this project will bring up an additional dialog that allows you to start with a base project template, and then optionally add/remove the technologies you want to use in it.  For example, you could start with a Web Forms template and add Web API or Web Forms support for it, or create a MVC project and also enable Web Forms pages within it: This makes it easy for you to use any ASP.NET technology you want within your apps, and take advantage of any feature across the entire ASP.NET technology span. Richer Authentication Support The new “One ASP.NET” project dialog also includes a new Change Authentication button that, when pushed, enables you to easily change the authentication approach used by your applications – and makes it much easier to build secure applications that enable SSO from a variety of identity providers.  For example, when you start with the ASP.NET Web Forms or MVC templates you can easily add any of the following authentication options to the application: No Authentication Individual User Accounts (Single Sign-On support with FaceBook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft ID – or Forms Auth with ASP.NET Membership) Organizational Accounts (Single Sign-On support with Windows Azure Active Directory ) Windows Authentication (Active Directory in an intranet application) The Windows Azure Active Directory support is particularly cool.  Last month we updated Windows Azure Active Directory so that developers can now easily create any number of Directories using it (for free and deployed within seconds).  It now takes only a few moments to enable single-sign-on support within your ASP.NET applications against these Windows Azure Active Directories.  Simply choose the “Organizational Accounts” radio button within the Change Authentication dialog and enter the name of your Windows Azure Active Directory to do this: This will automatically configure your ASP.NET application to use Windows Azure Active Directory and register the application with it.  Now when you run the app your users can easily and securely sign-in using their Active Directory credentials within it – regardless of where the application is hosted on the Internet. For more information about the new process for creating web projects, see Creating ASP.NET Web Projects in Visual Studio 2013. Responsive Project Templates with Bootstrap The new default project templates for ASP.NET Web Forms, MVC, Web API and SPA are built using Bootstrap. Bootstrap is an open source CSS framework that helps you build responsive websites which look great on different form factors such as mobile phones, tables and desktops. For example in a browser window the home page created by the MVC template looks like the following: When you resize the browser to a narrow window to see how it would like on a phone, you can notice how the contents gracefully wrap around and the horizontal top menu turns into an icon: When you click the menu-icon above it expands into a vertical menu – which enables a good navigation experience for small screen real-estate devices: We think Bootstrap will enable developers to build web applications that work even better on phones, tablets and other mobile devices – and enable you to easily build applications that can leverage the rich ecosystem of Bootstrap CSS templates already out there.  You can learn more about Bootstrap here. Visual Studio Web Tooling Improvements Visual Studio 2013 includes a new, much richer, HTML editor for Razor files and HTML files in web applications. The new HTML editor provides a single unified schema based on HTML5. It has automatic brace completion, jQuery UI and AngularJS attribute IntelliSense, attribute IntelliSense Grouping, and other great improvements. For example, typing “ng-“ on an HTML element will show the intellisense for AngularJS: This support for AngularJS, Knockout.js, Handlebars and other SPA technologies in this release of ASP.NET and VS 2013 makes it even easier to build rich client web applications: The screen shot below demonstrates how the HTML editor can also now inspect your page at design-time to determine all of the CSS classes that are available. In this case, the auto-completion list contains classes from Bootstrap’s CSS file. No more guessing at which Bootstrap element names you need to use: Visual Studio 2013 also comes with built-in support for both CoffeeScript and LESS editing support. The LESS editor comes with all the cool features from the CSS editor and has specific Intellisense for variables and mixins across all the LESS documents in the @import chain. Browser Link – SignalR channel between browser and Visual Studio The new Browser Link feature in VS 2013 lets you run your app within multiple browsers on your dev machine, connect them to Visual Studio, and simultaneously refresh all of them just by clicking a button in the toolbar. You can connect multiple browsers (including IE, FireFox, Chrome) to your development site, including mobile emulators, and click refresh to refresh all the browsers all at the same time.  This makes it much easier to easily develop/test against multiple browsers in parallel. Browser Link also exposes an API to enable developers to write Browser Link extensions.  By enabling developers to take advantage of the Browser Link API, it becomes possible to create very advanced scenarios that crosses boundaries between Visual Studio and any browser that’s connected to it. Web Essentials takes advantage of the API to create an integrated experience between Visual Studio and the browser’s developer tools, remote controlling mobile emulators and a lot more. You will see us take advantage of this support even more to enable really cool scenarios going forward. ASP.NET Scaffolding ASP.NET Scaffolding is a new code generation framework for ASP.NET Web applications. It makes it easy to add boilerplate code to your project that interacts with a data model. In previous versions of Visual Studio, scaffolding was limited to ASP.NET MVC projects. With Visual Studio 2013, you can now use scaffolding for any ASP.NET project, including Web Forms. When using scaffolding, we ensure that all required dependencies are automatically installed for you in the project. For example, if you start with an ASP.NET Web Forms project and then use scaffolding to add a Web API Controller, the required NuGet packages and references to enable Web API are added to your project automatically.  To do this, just choose the Add->New Scaffold Item context menu: Support for scaffolding async controllers uses the new async features from Entity Framework 6. ASP.NET Identity ASP.NET Identity is a new membership system for ASP.NET applications that we are introducing with this release. ASP.NET Identity makes it easy to integrate user-specific profile data with application data. ASP.NET Identity also allows you to choose the persistence model for user profiles in your application. You can store the data in a SQL Server database or another data store, including NoSQL data stores such as Windows Azure Storage Tables. ASP.NET Identity also supports Claims-based authentication, where the user’s identity is represented as a set of claims from a trusted issuer. Users can login by creating an account on the website using username and password, or they can login using social identity providers (such as Microsoft Account, Twitter, Facebook, Google) or using organizational accounts through Windows Azure Active Directory or Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). To learn more about how to use ASP.NET Identity visit http://www.asp.net/identity.  ASP.NET Web API 2 ASP.NET Web API 2 has a bunch of great improvements including: Attribute routing ASP.NET Web API now supports attribute routing, thanks to a contribution by Tim McCall, the author of http://attributerouting.net. With attribute routing you can specify your Web API routes by annotating your actions and controllers like this: OAuth 2.0 support The Web API and Single Page Application project templates now support authorization using OAuth 2.0. OAuth 2.0 is a framework for authorizing client access to protected resources. It works for a variety of clients including browsers and mobile devices. OData Improvements ASP.NET Web API also now provides support for OData endpoints and enables support for both ATOM and JSON-light formats. With OData you get support for rich query semantics, paging, $metadata, CRUD operations, and custom actions over any data source. Below are some of the specific enhancements in ASP.NET Web API 2 OData. Support for $select, $expand, $batch, and $value Improved extensibility Type-less support Reuse an existing model OWIN Integration ASP.NET Web API now fully supports OWIN and can be run on any OWIN capable host. With OWIN integration, you can self-host Web API in your own process alongside other OWIN middleware, such as SignalR. For more information, see Use OWIN to Self-Host ASP.NET Web API. More Web API Improvements In addition to the features above there have been a host of other features in ASP.NET Web API, including CORS support Authentication Filters Filter Overrides Improved Unit Testability Portable ASP.NET Web API Client To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/web-api/ ASP.NET SignalR 2 ASP.NET SignalR is library for ASP.NET developers that dramatically simplifies the process of adding real-time web functionality to your applications. Real-time web functionality is the ability to have server-side code push content to connected clients instantly as it becomes available. SignalR 2.0 introduces a ton of great improvements. We’ve added support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) to SignalR 2.0. iOS and Android support for SignalR have also been added using the MonoTouch and MonoDroid components from the Xamarin library (for more information on how to use these additions, see the article Using Xamarin Components from the SignalR wiki). We’ve also added support for the Portable .NET Client in SignalR 2.0 and created a new self-hosting package. This change makes the setup process for SignalR much more consistent between web-hosted and self-hosted SignalR applications. To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/signalr. ASP.NET MVC 5 The ASP.NET MVC project templates integrate seamlessly with the new One ASP.NET experience and enable you to integrate all of the above ASP.NET Web API, SignalR and Identity improvements. You can also customize your MVC project and configure authentication using the One ASP.NET project creation wizard. The MVC templates have also been updated to use ASP.NET Identity and Bootstrap as well. An introductory tutorial to ASP.NET MVC 5 can be found at Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC 5. This release of ASP.NET MVC also supports several nice new MVC-specific features including: Authentication filters: These filters allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller or globally for all controllers. Attribute Routing: Attribute Routing allows you to define your routes on actions or controllers. To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/mvc Entity Framework 6 Improvements Visual Studio 2013 ships with Entity Framework 6, which bring a lot of great new features to the data access space: Async and Task<T> Support EF6’s new Async Query and Save support enables you to perform asynchronous data access and take advantage of the Task<T> support introduced in .NET 4.5 within data access scenarios.  This allows you to free up threads that might otherwise by blocked on data access requests, and enable them to be used to process other requests whilst you wait for the database engine to process operations. When the database server responds the thread will be re-queued within your ASP.NET application and execution will continue.  This enables you to easily write significantly more scalable server code. Here is an example ASP.NET WebAPI action that makes use of the new EF6 async query methods: Interception and Logging Interception and SQL logging allows you to view – or even change – every command that is sent to the database by Entity Framework. This includes a simple, human readable log – which is great for debugging – as well as some lower level building blocks that give you access to the command and results. Here is an example of wiring up the simple log to Debug in the constructor of an MVC controller: Custom Code-First Conventions The new Custom Code-First Conventions enable bulk configuration of a Code First model – reducing the amount of code you need to write and maintain. Conventions are great when your domain classes don’t match the Code First conventions. For example, the following convention configures all properties that are called ‘Key’ to be the primary key of the entity they belong to. This is different than the default Code First convention that expects Id or <type name>Id. Connection Resiliency The new Connection Resiliency feature in EF6 enables you to register an execution strategy to handle – and potentially retry – failed database operations. This is especially useful when deploying to cloud environments where dropped connections become more common as you traverse load balancers and distributed networks. EF6 includes a built-in execution strategy for SQL Azure that knows about retryable exception types and has some sensible – but overridable – defaults for the number of retries and time between retries when errors occur. Registering it is simple using the new Code-Based Configuration support: These are just some of the new features in EF6. You can visit the release notes section of the Entity Framework site for a complete list of new features. Microsoft OWIN Components Open Web Interface for .NET (OWIN) defines an open abstraction between .NET web servers and web applications, and the ASP.NET “Katana” project brings this abstraction to ASP.NET. OWIN decouples the web application from the server, making web applications host-agnostic. For example, you can host an OWIN-based web application in IIS or self-host it in a custom process. For more information about OWIN and Katana, see What's new in OWIN and Katana. Summary Today’s Visual Studio 2013, ASP.NET and Entity Framework release delivers some fantastic new features that streamline your web development lifecycle. These feature span from server framework to data access to tooling to client-side HTML development.  They also integrate some great open-source technology and contributions from our developer community. Download and start using them today! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• TestDriven.Net 3.0 – All Systems Go

  - by Jamie Cansdale

  I’m pleased to announce that TestDriven.Net 3.0 is now available. Finally! I know many of you will already be using the Beta and RC versions, but if you look at the release notes you’ll see there’s been many refinements since then, so I highly recommend you install the RTM version. Here is a quick summary of a few new features: Visual Studio 2010 supports targeting multiple versions of the .NET framework (multi-targeting). This means you can easily upgrade your Visual Studio 2005/2008 solutions without necessarily converting them to use .NET 4.0. TestDriven.Net will execute your tests using the .NET version your test project is targeting (see ‘Properties > Application > Target framework’). There is now first class support for MSTest when using Visual Studio 2008 & 2010. Previous versions of TestDriven.Net had support for a limited number of MSTest attributes. This version supports virtually all MSTest unit testing related attributes, including support for deployment item and data driven test attributes. You should also find this test runner is quick. ;) There is a new ‘Go To Test/Code’ command on the code context menu. You can think of this as Ctrl-Tab for test driven developers; it will quickly flip back and forth between your tests and code under test. I recommend assigning a keyboard shortcut to the ‘TestDriven.NET.GoToTestOrCode’ command. NCover can now be used for code coverage on .NET 4.0. This is only officially supported since NCover 3.2 (your mileage may vary if you’re using the 1.5.8 version). Rather than clutter the ‘Output’ window, ignored or skipped tests will be placed on the ‘Task List’. You can double-click on these items to navigate to the offending test (or assign a keyboard shortcut to ‘View.NextTask’). If you’re using a Team, Premium or Ultimate edition of Visual Studio 2005-2010, a new ‘Test With > Performance’ command will be available. This command will perform instrumented performance profiling on your target code. A particular focus of this version has been to make it more keyboard friendly. Here’s a list of commands you will probably want to assign keyboard shortcuts to: Name Default What I use TestDriven.NET.RunTests Run tests in context   Alt + T TestDriven.NET.RerunTests Repeat test run   Alt + R TestDriven.NET.GoToTestOrCode Flip between tests and code   Alt + G TestDriven.NET.Debugger Run tests with debugger   Alt + D View.Output Show the ‘Output’ window Ctrl+ Alt + O   Edit.BreakLine Edit code in stack trace Enter   View.NextError Jump to next failed test Ctrl + Shift + F12   View.NextTask Jump to next skipped test   Alt + S   By default the ‘Output’ window will automatically activate when there is test output or a failed test (this is an option). The cursor will be positioned on the stack trace of the last failed test, ready for you to hit ‘Enter’ to jump to the fail point or ‘Esc’ to return to your source (assuming your ‘Output’ window is set to auto-hide).  If your ‘Output’ window isn’t set to auto-hide, you’ll need to hit ‘Ctrl + Alt + O’ then ‘Enter’. Alternatively you can use ‘Ctrl + Shift + F12’ (View.NextError) to navigate between all failed tests.   For more frequent updates or to give feedback, you can find me on twitter here. I hope you enjoy this version. Let me know how you get on. :)

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• Passing parameters between Silverlight and ASP.NET – Part 1

  - by mohanbrij

  While working with Silverlight applications, we may face some scenarios where we may need to embed Silverlight as a component, like for e.g in Sharepoint Webpars or simple we can have the same with ASP.NET. The biggest challenge comes when we have to pass the parameters from ASP.NET to Silverlight components or back from Silverlight to ASP.NET. We have lots of ways we can do this, like using InitParams, QueryStrings, using HTML objects in Silverlight, etc. All these different techniques have some advantages or disadvantages or limitations. Lets see one by one why we should choose one and what are the ways to achieve the same. 1. InitParams: Lets start with InitParams, Start your Visual Studio 2010 IDE, and Create a Silverlight Application, give any name. Now go to the ASP.NET WebProject which is used to Host the Silverlight XAP component. You will find lots of different tags are used by Silverlight object as <params> tags. To use InitParams, Silverlight provides us with a tag called InitParams which we can use to pass parameters to Silverlight object from ASP.NET. 1: <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%"> 2: <param name="source" value="ClientBin/SilverlightApp.xap"/> 3: <param name="onError" value="onSilverlightError" /> 4: <param name="background" value="white" /> 5: <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="4.0.50826.0" /> 6: <param name="initparams" id="initParams" runat="server" value=""/> 7: <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" /> 8: <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=4.0.50826.0" style="text-decoration:none"> 9: <img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161376" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style:none"/> 10: </a> 11: </object> Here in the code above I have included a initParam as a param tag (line 6), now in the page load I will add a line 1: initParams.Attributes.Add("value", "key1=Brij, key2=Mohan"); This basically add a value parameter inside the initParam. So thats all we need in our ASP.NET side, now coming to the Silverlight Code open the code behind of App.xaml and add the following lines of code. 1: private string firstKey, secondKey; 2: private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e) 3: { 4: if (e.InitParams.ContainsKey("key1")) 5: this.firstKey = e.InitParams["key1"]; 6: if (e.InitParams.ContainsKey("key2")) 7: this.secondKey = e.InitParams["key2"]; 8: this.RootVisual = new MainPage(firstKey, secondKey); 9: } This code fetch the init params and pass it to our MainPage.xaml constructor, in the MainPage.xaml we can use these variables according to our requirement, here in this example I am simply displaying the variables in a Message Box. 1: public MainPage(string param1, string param2) 2: { 3: InitializeComponent(); 4: MessageBox.Show("Welcome, " + param1 + " " + param2); 5: } This will give you a sample output as Limitations: Depending on the browsers you have some limitation on the overall string length of the parameters you can pass. To get more details on this limitation, you can refer to this link :http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/urllength.html 2. QueryStrings To show this example I am taking the scenario where we have a default.aspx page and we are going to the SIlverlightTestPage.aspx, and we have to work with the parameters which was passed by default.aspx in the SilverlightTestPage.aspx Silverlight Component. So first I will add a new page in my application which contains a button with ID =btnNext, and on click of the button I will redirect my page to my SilverlightTestAppPage.aspx with the required query strings. Code of Default.aspx 1: protected void btnNext_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3: Response.Redirect("~/SilverlightAppTestPage.aspx?FName=Brij" + "&LName=Mohan"); 4: } Code of MainPage.xaml.cs 1: public partial class MainPage : UserControl 2: { 3: public MainPage() 4: { 5: InitializeComponent(); 6: this.Loaded += new RoutedEventHandler(MainPage_Loaded); 7: } 8: 9: void MainPage_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 10: { 11: IDictionary<string, string> qString = HtmlPage.Document.QueryString; 12: string firstName = string.Empty; 13: string lastName = string.Empty; 14: foreach (KeyValuePair<string, string> keyValuePair in qString) 15: { 16: string key = keyValuePair.Key; 17: string value = keyValuePair.Value; 18: if (key == "FName") 19: firstName = value; 20: else if (key == "LName") 21: lastName = value; 22: } 23: MessageBox.Show("Welcome, " + firstName + " " + lastName); 24: } 25: } Set the Startup page as Default.aspx, now run the application. This will give you the following output: Since here also you are using the Query Strings to pass your parameters, so you are depending on the browser capabilities of the length of the query strings it can pass. Here also you can refer the limitation which I have mentioned in my previous example for the length of parameters you can use.   3. Using HtmlPage.Document Silverlight to ASP.NET <—> ASP.NET to Silverlight: To show this I setup a sample Silverlight Application with Buttons Get Data and Set Data with the Data Text Box. In ASP.NET page I kep a TextBox to Show how the values passed to and From Silverlight to ASP.NET reflects back. My page with Silverlight control looks like this. When I Say Get Data it pulls the data from ASP.NET to Silverlight Control Text Box, and When I say Set data it basically Set the Value from Silverlight Control TextBox to ASP.NET TextBox. Now let see the code how it is doing. This is my ASP.NET Source Code. Here I have just created a TextBox named : txtData 1: <body> 2: <form id="form1" runat="server" style="height:100%"> 3: <div id="silverlightControlHost"> 4: ASP.NET TextBox: <input type="text" runat="server" id="txtData" value="Some Data" /> 5: <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%"> 6: <param name="source" value="ClientBin/SilverlightApplication1.xap"/> 7: <param name="onError" value="onSilverlightError" /> 8: <param name="background" value="white" /> 9: <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="4.0.50826.0" /> 10: <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" /> 11: <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=4.0.50826.0" style="text-decoration:none"> 12: <img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161376" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style:none"/> 13: </a> 14: </object><iframe id="_sl_historyFrame" style="visibility:hidden;height:0px;width:0px;border:0px"></iframe> 15: </div> 16: </form> 17: </body> My actual logic for getting and setting the data lies in my Silverlight Control, this is my XAML code with TextBox and Buttons. 1: <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White" Height="100" Width="450" VerticalAlignment="Top"> 2: <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 3: <ColumnDefinition Width="110" /> 4: <ColumnDefinition Width="110" /> 5: <ColumnDefinition Width="110" /> 6: <ColumnDefinition Width="110" /> 7: </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> 8: <TextBlock Text="Silverlight Text Box: " Grid.Column="0" VerticalAlignment="Center"></TextBlock> 9: <TextBox x:Name="DataText" Width="100" Grid.Column="1" Height="20"></TextBox> 10: <Button x:Name="GetData" Width="100" Click="GetData_Click" Grid.Column="2" Height="30" Content="Get Data"></Button> 11: <Button x:Name="SetData" Width="100" Click="SetData_Click" Grid.Column="3" Height="30" Content="Set Data"></Button> 12: </Grid> Now we have to write few lines of Button Events for Get Data and Set Data which basically make use of Windows.System.Browser namespace. 1: private void GetData_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 2: { 3: DataText.Text = HtmlPage.Document.GetElementById("txtData").GetProperty("value").ToString(); 4: } 5:  6: private void SetData_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) 7: { 8: HtmlPage.Document.GetElementById("txtData").SetProperty("value", DataText.Text); 9: } That’s it so when we run this application my Form will look like this. 4. Using Object Serialization. This is a useful when we want to pass Objects of Data from our ASP.NET application to Silverlight Controls and back. This technique basically uses the above technique I mentioned in Pint 3 above. Since this itself is a length topic so details of this I am going to cover in Part 2 of this Post with Sample Code Example very soon.

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• error X3501: 'main': entrypoint not found

  - by Pasha

  I am trying to learn DX10 by following this tutorial. However, my shader won't compile. Below is the detailed error message. Build started 9/10/2012 10:22:46 PM. 1>Project "D:\code\dx\Engine\Engine\Engine.vcxproj" on node 2 (Build target(s)). C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0\bin\x86\fxc.exe /nologo /E"main" /Fo "D:\code\dx\Engine\Debug\color.cso" /Od /Zi color.fx 1>FXC : error X3501: 'main': entrypoint not found compilation failed; no code produced 1>Done Building Project "D:\code\dx\Engine\Engine\Engine.vcxproj" (Build target(s)) -- FAILED. Build FAILED. Time Elapsed 00:00:00.05 I can easily compile the downloaded code, but I want to know how to fix this error myself. My color.fx looks like this //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Filename: color.fx //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// ///////////// // GLOBALS // ///////////// matrix worldMatrix; matrix viewMatrix; matrix projectionMatrix; ////////////// // TYPEDEFS // ////////////// struct VertexInputType { float4 position : POSITION; float4 color : COLOR; }; struct PixelInputType { float4 position : SV_POSITION; float4 color : COLOR; }; //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Vertex Shader //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// PixelInputType ColorVertexShader(VertexInputType input) { PixelInputType output; // Change the position vector to be 4 units for proper matrix calculations. input.position.w = 1.0f; // Calculate the position of the vertex against the world, view, and projection matrices. output.position = mul(input.position, worldMatrix); output.position = mul(output.position, viewMatrix); output.position = mul(output.position, projectionMatrix); // Store the input color for the pixel shader to use. output.color = input.color; return output; } //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Pixel Shader //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// float4 ColorPixelShader(PixelInputType input) : SV_Target { return input.color; } //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Technique //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// technique10 ColorTechnique { pass pass0 { SetVertexShader(CompileShader(vs_4_0, ColorVertexShader())); SetPixelShader(CompileShader(ps_4_0, ColorPixelShader())); SetGeometryShader(NULL); } }

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• MvcExtensions – Bootstrapping

  - by kazimanzurrashid

  When you create a new ASP.NET MVC application you will find that the global.asax contains the following lines: namespace MvcApplication1 { // Note: For instructions on enabling IIS6 or IIS7 classic mode, // visit http://go.microsoft.com/?LinkId=9394801 public class MvcApplication : System.Web.HttpApplication { public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); routes.MapRoute( "Default", // Route name "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults ); } protected void Application_Start() { AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas(); RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); } } } As the application grows, there are quite a lot of plumbing code gets into the global.asax which quickly becomes a design smell. Lets take a quick look at the code of one of the open source project that I recently visited: public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); routes.MapRoute("Default","{controller}/{action}/{id}", new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" }); } protected override void OnApplicationStarted() { Error += OnError; EndRequest += OnEndRequest; var settings = new SparkSettings() .AddNamespace("System") .AddNamespace("System.Collections.Generic") .AddNamespace("System.Web.Mvc") .AddNamespace("System.Web.Mvc.Html") .AddNamespace("MvcContrib.FluentHtml") .AddNamespace("********") .AddNamespace("********.Web") .SetPageBaseType("ApplicationViewPage") .SetAutomaticEncoding(true); #if DEBUG settings.SetDebug(true); #endif var viewFactory = new SparkViewFactory(settings); ViewEngines.Engines.Add(viewFactory); #if !DEBUG PrecompileViews(viewFactory); #endif RegisterAllControllersIn("********.Web"); log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator.Configure(); RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); Factory.Load(new Components.WebDependencies()); ModelBinders.Binders.DefaultBinder = new Binders.GenericBinderResolver(Factory.TryGet<IModelBinder>); ValidatorConfiguration.Initialize("********"); HtmlValidationExtensions.Initialize(ValidatorConfiguration.Rules); } private void OnEndRequest(object sender, System.EventArgs e) { if (((HttpApplication)sender).Context.Handler is MvcHandler) { CreateKernel().Get<ISessionSource>().Close(); } } private void OnError(object sender, System.EventArgs e) { CreateKernel().Get<ISessionSource>().Close(); } protected override IKernel CreateKernel() { return Factory.Kernel; } private static void PrecompileViews(SparkViewFactory viewFactory) { var batch = new SparkBatchDescriptor(); batch.For<HomeController>().For<ManageController>(); viewFactory.Precompile(batch); } As you can see there are quite a few of things going on in the above code, Registering the ViewEngine, Compiling the Views, Registering the Routes/Controllers/Model Binders, Settings up Logger, Validations and as you can imagine the more it becomes complex the more things will get added in the application start. One of the goal of the MVCExtensions is to reduce the above design smell. Instead of writing all the plumbing code in the application start, it contains BootstrapperTask to register individual services. Out of the box, it contains BootstrapperTask to register Controllers, Controller Factory, Action Invoker, Action Filters, Model Binders, Model Metadata/Validation Providers, ValueProvideraFactory, ViewEngines etc and it is intelligent enough to automatically detect the above types and register into the ASP.NET MVC Framework. Other than the built-in tasks you can create your own custom task which will be automatically executed when the application starts. When the BootstrapperTasks are in action you will find the global.asax pretty much clean like the following: public class MvcApplication : UnityMvcApplication { public void ErrorLog_Filtering(object sender, ExceptionFilterEventArgs e) { Check.Argument.IsNotNull(e, "e"); HttpException exception = e.Exception.GetBaseException() as HttpException; if ((exception != null) && (exception.GetHttpCode() == (int)HttpStatusCode.NotFound)) { e.Dismiss(); } } } The above code is taken from my another open source project Shrinkr, as you can see the global.asax is longer cluttered with any plumbing code. One special thing you have noticed that it is inherited from the UnityMvcApplication rather than regular HttpApplication. There are separate version of this class for each IoC Container like NinjectMvcApplication, StructureMapMvcApplication etc. Other than executing the built-in tasks, the Shrinkr also has few custom tasks which gets executed when the application starts. For example, when the application starts, we want to ensure that the default users (which is specified in the web.config) are created. The following is the custom task that is used to create those default users: public class CreateDefaultUsers : BootstrapperTask { protected override TaskContinuation ExecuteCore(IServiceLocator serviceLocator) { IUserRepository userRepository = serviceLocator.GetInstance<IUserRepository>(); IUnitOfWork unitOfWork = serviceLocator.GetInstance<IUnitOfWork>(); IEnumerable<User> users = serviceLocator.GetInstance<Settings>().DefaultUsers; bool shouldCommit = false; foreach (User user in users) { if (userRepository.GetByName(user.Name) == null) { user.AllowApiAccess(ApiSetting.InfiniteLimit); userRepository.Add(user); shouldCommit = true; } } if (shouldCommit) { unitOfWork.Commit(); } return TaskContinuation.Continue; } } There are several other Tasks in the Shrinkr that we are also using which you will find in that project. To create a custom bootstrapping task you have create a new class which either implements the IBootstrapperTask interface or inherits from the abstract BootstrapperTask class, I would recommend to start with the BootstrapperTask as it already has the required code that you have to write in case if you choose the IBootstrapperTask interface. As you can see in the above code we are overriding the ExecuteCore to create the default users, the MVCExtensions is responsible for populating the  ServiceLocator prior calling this method and in this method we are using the service locator to get the dependencies that are required to create the users (I will cover the custom dependencies registration in the next post). Once the users are created, we are returning a special enum, TaskContinuation as the return value, the TaskContinuation can have three values Continue (default), Skip and Break. The reason behind of having this enum is, in some  special cases you might want to skip the next task in the chain or break the complete chain depending upon the currently running task, in those cases you will use the other two values instead of the Continue. The last thing I want to cover in the bootstrapping task is the Order. By default all the built-in tasks as well as newly created task order is set to the DefaultOrder(a static property), in some special cases you might want to execute it before/after all the other tasks, in those cases you will assign the Order in the Task constructor. For Example, in Shrinkr, we want to run few background services when the all the tasks are executed, so we assigned the order as DefaultOrder + 1. Here is the code of that Task: public class ConfigureBackgroundServices : BootstrapperTask { private IEnumerable<IBackgroundService> backgroundServices; public ConfigureBackgroundServices() { Order = DefaultOrder + 1; } protected override TaskContinuation ExecuteCore(IServiceLocator serviceLocator) { backgroundServices = serviceLocator.GetAllInstances<IBackgroundService>().ToList(); backgroundServices.Each(service => service.Start()); return TaskContinuation.Continue; } protected override void DisposeCore() { backgroundServices.Each(service => service.Stop()); } } That’s it for today, in the next post I will cover the custom service registration, so stay tuned.

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• Google I/O 2010: Google TV Keynote - Introducing Google TV

  Google I/O 2010: Google TV Keynote - Introducing Google TV Due to licensing and permissions issues, we are unable to show the full Google TV demonstration from the Day 2 keynote at Google I/O. Until we are able to get these permissions, please check out these clips. For Google I/O session videos, presentations, developer interviews and more, go to: code.google.com/io From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 30 1 ratings Time: 06:55 More in Science & Technology

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• Downloading a file over HTTP the SSIS way

  This post shows you how to download files from a web site whilst really making the most of the SSIS objects that are available. There is no task to do this, so we have to use the Script Task and some simple VB.NET or C# (if you have SQL Server 2008) code. Very often I see suggestions about how to use the .NET class System.Net.WebClient and of course this works, you can code pretty much anything you like in .NET. Here I’d just like to raise the profile of an alternative. This approach uses the HTTP Connection Manager, one of the stock connection managers, so you can use configurations and property expressions in the same way you would for all other connections. Settings like the security details that you would want to make configurable already are, but if you take the .NET route you have to write quite a lot of code to manage those values via package variables. Using the connection manager we get all of that flexibility for free. The screenshot below illustrate some of the options we have. Using the HttpClientConnection class makes for much simpler code as well. I have demonstrated two methods, DownloadFile which just downloads a file to disk, and DownloadData which downloads the file and retains it in memory. In each case we show a message box to note the completion of the download. You can download a sample package below, but first the code: Imports System Imports System.IO Imports System.Text Imports System.Windows.Forms Imports Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime Public Class ScriptMain Public Sub Main() ' Get the unmanaged connection object, from the connection manager called "HTTP Connection Manager" Dim nativeObject As Object = Dts.Connections("HTTP Connection Manager").AcquireConnection(Nothing) ' Create a new HTTP client connection Dim connection As New HttpClientConnection(nativeObject) ' Download the file #1 ' Save the file from the connection manager to the local path specified Dim filename As String = "C:\Temp\Sample.txt" connection.DownloadFile(filename, True) ' Confirm file is there If File.Exists(filename) Then MessageBox.Show(String.Format("File {0} has been downloaded.", filename)) End If ' Download the file #2 ' Read the text file straight into memory Dim buffer As Byte() = connection.DownloadData() Dim data As String = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(buffer) ' Display the file contents MessageBox.Show(data) Dts.TaskResult = Dts.Results.Success End Sub End Class Sample Package HTTPDownload.dtsx (74KB)

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• Cleaner HTML Markup with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms - Client IDs (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series)

  - by ScottGu

  This is the sixteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post is the first of a few blog posts I’ll be doing that talk about some of the important changes we’ve made to make Web Forms in ASP.NET 4 generate clean, standards-compliant, CSS-friendly markup.  Today I’ll cover the work we are doing to provide better control over the “ID” attributes rendered by server controls to the client. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Clean, Standards-Based, CSS-Friendly Markup One of the common complaints developers have often had with ASP.NET Web Forms is that when using server controls they don’t have the ability to easily generate clean, CSS-friendly output and markup.  Some of the specific complaints with previous ASP.NET releases include: Auto-generated ID attributes within HTML make it hard to write JavaScript and style with CSS Use of tables instead of semantic markup for certain controls (in particular the asp:menu control) make styling ugly Some controls render inline style properties even if no style property on the control has been set ViewState can often be bigger than ideal ASP.NET 4 provides better support for building standards-compliant pages out of the box.  The built-in <asp:> server controls with ASP.NET 4 now generate cleaner markup and support CSS styling – and help address all of the above issues.  Markup Compatibility When Upgrading Existing ASP.NET Web Forms Applications A common question people often ask when hearing about the cleaner markup coming with ASP.NET 4 is “Great - but what about my existing applications?  Will these changes/improvements break things when I upgrade?” To help ensure that we don’t break assumptions around markup and styling with existing ASP.NET Web Forms applications, we’ve enabled a configuration flag – controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion – within web.config that let’s you decide if you want to use the new cleaner markup approach that is the default with new ASP.NET 4 applications, or for compatibility reasons render the same markup that previous versions of ASP.NET used:   When the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag is set to “3.5” your application and server controls will by default render output using the same markup generation used with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5.  When the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag is set to “4.0” your application and server controls will strictly adhere to the XHTML 1.1 specification, have cleaner client IDs, render with semantic correctness in mind, and have extraneous inline styles removed. This flag defaults to 4.0 for all new ASP.NET Web Forms applications built using ASP.NET 4. Any previous application that is upgraded using VS 2010 will have the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag automatically set to 3.5 by the upgrade wizard to ensure backwards compatibility.  You can then optionally change it (either at the application level, or scope it within the web.config file to be on a per page or directory level) if you move your pages to use CSS and take advantage of the new markup rendering. Today’s Cleaner Markup Topic: Client IDs The ability to have clean, predictable, ID attributes on rendered HTML elements is something developers have long asked for with Web Forms (ID values like “ctl00_ContentPlaceholder1_ListView1_ctrl0_Label1” are not very popular).  Having control over the ID values rendered helps make it much easier to write client-side JavaScript against the output, makes it easier to style elements using CSS, and on large pages can help reduce the overall size of the markup generated. New ClientIDMode Property on Controls ASP.NET 4 supports a new ClientIDMode property on the Control base class.  The ClientIDMode property indicates how controls should generate client ID values when they render.  The ClientIDMode property supports four possible values: AutoID—Renders the output as in .NET 3.5 (auto-generated IDs which will still render prefixes like ctrl00 for compatibility) Predictable (Default)— Trims any “ctl00” ID string and if a list/container control concatenates child ids (example: id=”ParentControl_ChildControl”) Static—Hands over full ID naming control to the developer – whatever they set as the ID of the control is what is rendered (example: id=”JustMyId”) Inherit—Tells the control to defer to the naming behavior mode of the parent container control The ClientIDMode property can be set directly on individual controls (or within container controls – in which case the controls within them will by default inherit the setting): Or it can be specified at a page or usercontrol level (using the <%@ Page %> or <%@ Control %> directives) – in which case controls within the pages/usercontrols inherit the setting (and can optionally override it): Or it can be set within the web.config file of an application – in which case pages within the application inherit the setting (and can optionally override it): This gives you the flexibility to customize/override the naming behavior however you want. Example: Using the ClientIDMode property to control the IDs of Non-List Controls Let’s take a look at how we can use the new ClientIDMode property to control the rendering of “ID” elements within a page.  To help illustrate this we can create a simple page called “SingleControlExample.aspx” that is based on a master-page called “Site.Master”, and which has a single <asp:label> control with an ID of “Message” that is contained with an <asp:content> container control called “MainContent”: Within our code-behind we’ll then add some simple code like below to dynamically populate the Label’s Text property at runtime:   If we were running this application using ASP.NET 3.5 (or had our ASP.NET 4 application configured to run using 3.5 rendering or ClientIDMode=AutoID), then the generated markup sent down to the client would look like below: This ID is unique (which is good) – but rather ugly because of the “ct100” prefix (which is bad). Markup Rendering when using ASP.NET 4 and the ClientIDMode is set to “Predictable” With ASP.NET 4, server controls by default now render their ID’s using ClientIDMode=”Predictable”.  This helps ensure that ID values are still unique and don’t conflict on a page, but at the same time it makes the IDs less verbose and more predictable.  This means that the generated markup of our <asp:label> control above will by default now look like below with ASP.NET 4: Notice that the “ct100” prefix is gone. Because the “Message” control is embedded within a “MainContent” container control, by default it’s ID will be prefixed “MainContent_Message” to avoid potential collisions with other controls elsewhere within the page. Markup Rendering when using ASP.NET 4 and the ClientIDMode is set to “Static” Sometimes you don’t want your ID values to be nested hierarchically, though, and instead just want the ID rendered to be whatever value you set it as.  To enable this you can now use ClientIDMode=static, in which case the ID rendered will be exactly the same as what you set it on the server-side on your control.  This will cause the below markup to be rendered with ASP.NET 4: This option now gives you the ability to completely control the client ID values sent down by controls. Example: Using the ClientIDMode property to control the IDs of Data-Bound List Controls Data-bound list/grid controls have historically been the hardest to use/style when it comes to working with Web Form’s automatically generated IDs.  Let’s now take a look at a scenario where we’ll customize the ID’s rendered using a ListView control with ASP.NET 4. The code snippet below is an example of a ListView control that displays the contents of a data-bound collection — in this case, airports: We can then write code like below within our code-behind to dynamically databind a list of airports to the ListView above: At runtime this will then by default generate a <ul> list of airports like below.  Note that because the <ul> and <li> elements in the ListView’s template are not server controls, no IDs are rendered in our markup: Adding Client ID’s to Each Row Item Now, let’s say that we wanted to add client-ID’s to the output so that we can programmatically access each <li> via JavaScript.  We want these ID’s to be unique, predictable, and identifiable. A first approach would be to mark each <li> element within the template as being a server control (by giving it a runat=server attribute) and by giving each one an id of “airport”: By default ASP.NET 4 will now render clean IDs like below (no ctl001-like ids are rendered):   Using the ClientIDRowSuffix Property Our template above now generates unique ID’s for each <li> element – but if we are going to access them programmatically on the client using JavaScript we might want to instead have the ID’s contain the airport code within them to make them easier to reference.  The good news is that we can easily do this by taking advantage of the new ClientIDRowSuffix property on databound controls in ASP.NET 4 to better control the ID’s of our individual row elements. To do this, we’ll set the ClientIDRowSuffix property to “Code” on our ListView control.  This tells the ListView to use the databound “Code” property from our Airport class when generating the ID: And now instead of having row suffixes like “1”, “2”, and “3”, we’ll instead have the Airport.Code value embedded within the IDs (e.g: _CLE, _CAK, _PDX, etc): You can use this ClientIDRowSuffix approach with other databound controls like the GridView as well. It is useful anytime you want to program row elements on the client – and use clean/identified IDs to easily reference them from JavaScript code. Summary ASP.NET 4 enables you to generate much cleaner HTML markup from server controls and from within your Web Forms applications.  In today’s post I covered how you can now easily control the client ID values that are rendered by server controls.  In upcoming posts I’ll cover some of the other markup improvements that are also coming with the ASP.NET 4 release. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Box Selection and Multi-Line Editing with VS 2010

  - by ScottGu

  This is the twenty-second in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. I’ve already covered some of the code editor improvements in the VS 2010 release.  In particular, I’ve blogged about the Code Intellisense Improvements, new Code Searching and Navigating Features, HTML, ASP.NET and JavaScript Snippet Support, and improved JavaScript Intellisense.  Today’s blog post covers a small, but nice, editor improvement with VS 2010 – the ability to use “Box Selection” when performing multi-line editing.  This can eliminate keystrokes and enables some slick editing scenarios. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Box Selection Box selection is a feature that has been in Visual Studio for awhile (although not many people knew about it).  It allows you to select a rectangular region of text within the code editor by holding down the Alt key while selecting the text region with the mouse.  With VS 2008 you could then copy or delete the selected text. VS 2010 now enables several more capabilities with box selection including: Text Insertion: Typing with box selection now allows you to insert new text into every selected line Paste/Replace: You can now paste the contents of one box selection into another and have the content flow correctly Zero-Length Boxes: You can now make a vertical selection zero characters wide to create a multi-line insert point for new or copied text These capabilities can be very useful in a variety of scenarios.  Some example scenarios: change access modifiers (private->public), adding comments to multiple lines, setting fields, or grouping multiple statements together. Great 3 Minute Box-Selection Video Demo Brittany Behrens from the Visual Studio Editor Team has an excellent 3 minute video that shows off a few cool VS 2010 multi-line code editing scenarios with box selection:   Watch it to learn a few ways you can use this new box selection capability to optimize your typing in VS 2010 even further: Hope this helps, Scott P.S. You can learn more about the VS Editor by following the Visual Studio Team Blog or by following @VSEditor on Twitter.

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• Fitting it together, database, reporting, applications in C#

  - by alvonellos

  Introduction Preamble I was hesitant to post this, since it's an application whose intricate details are defined elsewhere, and answers may not be helpful to others. Within the past few weeks (I was actually going to write a blog post about this after I finished) I've discovered that the barrier I'm encountering is one that's actually quite common for newer developers. This question is not so much about a specific thing as it is about piecing those things together. I've searched the internet far and wide, and found many tutorials on how to create applications that are kind of similar to what I'm looking for. I've also looked at hiring another, more experienced, developer to help me along, but all I've gotten are unqualified candidates that don't have the experience necessary and won't take care of the client or project like I will. I'd rather have the project never transpire than to release a solution that is half-baked. I've asked professors at my school, but they've not turned up answers to my question. I'm an experienced developer, and I've written many applications that are -- very abstractly -- close to what I'm doing, but my experiences from those applications aren't giving me enough leverage to solve this particular problem. I just hope that posting this article isn't a mistake for me to write. Project Description I have a project I'm working on for a client that is a rewrite of an application, originally written in Foxpro 2.6 by someone before me, that performs some analysis (which, sadly, I'm not allowed to disclose as per of my employment contract) on financial data. One day, after a long talk between the client and I -- where he intimately described his frustrations with all the bugs I've been hacking out of this code for 6 months now -- he told me to just rewrite it and gave me a month to write a good 1/8 of this 65k LOC Foxpro monstrosity. this 65k line of code foxpro monstrosity. It'll take me a good 3 - 6 months to rewrite this software (I know things the original programmer did not, like inheritance) going as I am right now, but I'm quickly discovering that I'm going to need to use databases. Prior to this contract I didn't even know about foxpro, and so I've had to learn foxpro on the fly, write procedures and make modifications to the database. I've actually come to like it, and this project would be rewritten in Foxpro if it were still a supported language, because over the past few months, I've come to like the features of Foxpro that make it so easy to develop data-driven applications. I once perfomed an experiment, comparing C# to Foxpro. What took me 45 minutes in C# took me two in Foxpro, and I knew C# prior to Foxpro. I was hoping to leverage the power of C#, but it intimidates me that in foxpro, you can have one line of code and be using a database. Prior to this, I have never written any serious database development from scratch. All the applications that I've written are in a different league. They are either completely data-naive or data-naive enough that I can get away with not using a database through serialization or by designing algorithms that work with the data in a manner that is stateless, so there is no need to worry about databases. I've come to realize, very quickly, that serialization and my efficacy with data structures has been my crutch all these years that's prevented me from adventuring into databases, and has consequently hindered my success in real-world programming. Sure, I've written some database stuff in Perl and Python, and I've done forms and worked with relational databases and tables, I'm a wizard in Access and Excel (seriously) and can do just about anything, but it just feels unnatural writing SQL code in another language... I don't mind writing SQL, and I don't It's that bridge between the database and the program code that drives me absolutely bonkers. I hope I'm not the only one to think this, but it bothers me that I have to create statements like the following string sSql = "SELECT * from tablename" When there's really no reason for that kind of unchecked language binding between two languages and two API's. Don't get my wrong, SQL is great, but I don't like the idea that, when executing commands on a SQL database, that one must intermix database and application software, and there's no database independence, which means that different versions of different databases can break code. This isn't very nice. The nicest thing about Foxpro is the cohesiveness between programming language and database. It's so easy, and Foxpro makes it easy, because the tool just fits the task. I can see why so many developers have created a career with this language, because it lowered the barrier of entry to data-driven applications that so many businesses need. It was wonderful. For my purposes today, with the demands and need for community support, extensibility, and language features, Foxpro isn't a solution that I feel would be the right tool for the job. I'm also worried about working too heavy with the database, because I've seen data-driven .NET applications have issues with database caches, running out of memory, and objects in the database not being collected. (Memory leaks) And OH the queries. Which one, how, and why? There are a plethora of different ways that a database can be setup, I think I counted 5 or 6 different kinds of database applications alone that I can chose from. That is a great mountain for me to climb when I don't even know where to begin when it comes to writing data-driven applications. The problem isn't that I don't know SQL or that I don't know C#. I know both and have worked with both extensively. It's making them work together that's the problem, and it's something I've never done in C# before. Reports The client likes paper. The data needs to be printed out in a format that is extensible, layered, and easy to use. I have never done reporting before, and so this is a bit of a problem. From the data source comes crystal reports, and so there's a dependency on the database, from what I understand. Code reuse A large part of the design decision that I've gone through so far is to break the task of writing a piece of this software into routines and modular DLL's and so forth such that much of the code can be reused. For example, when I setup this database, I want to be able to reuse the same database code over and over again. I also want to make sure that when the day comes that another developer is here, that he/she will be able to pick up just where I left off. The quicker I develop these applications, the better off I am. Tasks & Goals In my project, I need to write routines that apply algorithms and look for predefined patterns in financial data. Additionally, I need to simulate trading based on predefined algorithms and data. Then I need to prepare reports on that data. Additionally, I need to have a way to change the code base for this application quickly and effectively, without hacking together some band-aid solution for a problem that really needs a trauma ward. Special Considerations The solution must be fast, run quickly on existing hardware, and not be too much of a pain to maintain and write. I understand that anything I write I'm married to -- I'm responsible for the things that I write because my reputation and livelihood is dependent on it. Do I really need a database? What about performance? Performance was such a big issue that I hand wrote a data structure that is capable of performing 2 billion operations, using a total of 4 gigs of memory in under 1/4 of a second using the standard core two duo processor. I could not find a similar, pre-written data structure in C# to perform this task. What setup do I use in terms of database? What about reporting? I'd prefer to have PDF's generated, but I'd like to be able to visually sketch those reports and then just have a ReportFactory of some sort, that when I pass some variables in, it just does that data. About Me I'm a lone developer for a small business in this area. This is the first time I've done this and I've never had the breadth and depth of my knowledge tested. I'm incredibly frustrated with this project because I feel incredibly overwhelmed with the task at hand. I'm looking for that entry level point where I can draw a line and say "this is what I need to do" Conclusion I may have not been clear enough on my post. I'm still new to this whole thing, and I've been doing my best to contribute back to the community that I've leached so much knowledge from. I'd be glad to edit my post and add more information if possible. I'm looking for a big-picture solution or design process that helps me get off the ground in this world of data-driven applications, because I have a feeling that it's going to be concentric to my entire career as a programmer for some time. Specifically, if you didn't get it from the rest of the post (I may not have been clear enough) I really need some guidance as to where to go in terms of the design decisions for this project. Some things that'll be useful will be a pro/con list for the different kinds of database projects available in VS2010. I've tried, but generating that list has been as hard as solving the problem itself... If you could walk a developer writing a data-driven application for the first time in C#, how would you do that? Where would you point them to?

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• Google I/O 2010: Google TV Keynote - Android Apps On Google TV

  Google I/O 2010: Google TV Keynote - Android Apps On Google TV Due to licensing and permissions issues, we are unable to show the full Google TV demonstration from the Day 2 keynote at Google I/O. Until we are able to get these permissions, please check out these clips. For Google I/O session videos, presentations, developer interviews and more, go to: code.google.com/io From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 8 0 ratings Time: 03:18 More in Science & Technology

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• GPU Debugging with VS 11

  - by Daniel Moth

  With VS 11 Developer Preview we have invested tremendously in parallel debugging for both CPU (managed and native) and GPU debugging. I'll be doing a whole bunch of blog posts on those topics, and in this post I just wanted to get people started with GPU debugging, i.e. with debugging C++ AMP code. First I invite you to watch 6 minutes of a glimpse of the C++ AMP debugging experience though this video (ffw to minute 51:54, up until minute 59:16). Don't read the rest of this post, just go watch that video, ideally download the High Quality WMV. Summary GPU debugging essentially means debugging the lambda that you pass to the parallel_for_each call (plus any functions you call from the lambda, of course). CPU debugging means debugging all the code above and below the parallel_for_each call, i.e. all the code except the restrict(direct3d) lambda and the functions that it calls. With VS 11 you have to choose what debugger you want to use for a particular debugging session, CPU or GPU. So you can place breakpoints all over your code, then choose what debugger you want (CPU or GPU), and you'll only be able to hit breakpoints for the code type that the debugger engine understands – the remaining breakpoints will appear as unbound. If you want to hit the unbound breakpoints, you'd have to stop debugging, and start again with the other debugger. Sorry. We suck. We know. But once you are past that limitation, I think you'll find the experience truly rewarding – seriously! Switching debugger engines With the Developer Preview bits, one way to switch the debugger engine is through the project properties – see the screenshots that follow. This one is showing the CPU option selected, which is basically the default that you are all familiar with: This screenshot is showing the GPU option selected, by changing the debugger launcher (notice that this applies for both the local and remote case): You actually do not have to open the project properties just for switching the debugger engine, you can switch the selection from the toolbar in VS 11 Developer Preview too – see following screenshot (the effect is the same as if you opened the project properties and switched there) Breakpoint behavior Here are two screenshots, one showing a debugging session for CPU and the other a debugging session for GPU (notice the unbound breakpoints in each case) …and here is the GPU case (where we cannot bind the CPU breakpoints but can the GPU breakpoint, which is actually hit) Give C++ AMP debugging a try So to debug your C++ AMP code, pull down the drop down under the 'play' button to select the 'GPU C++ Direct3D Compute Debugger' menu option, then hit F5 (or the 'play' button itself). Then you can explore debugging by exploring the menus under the Debug and under the Debug->Windows menus. One way to do that exploration is through the C++ AMP debugging walkthrough on MSDN. Another way to explore the C++ AMP debugging experience, you can use the moth.cpp code file, which is what I used in my BUILD session debugger demo. Note that for my demo I was using the latest internal VS11 bits, so your experience with the Developer Preview bits won't be identical to what you saw me demonstrate, but it shouldn't be far off. Stay tuned for a lot more content on the parallel debugger in VS 11, both CPU and GPU, both managed and native. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Downloading a file over HTTP the SSIS way

  This post shows you how to download files from a web site whilst really making the most of the SSIS objects that are available. There is no task to do this, so we have to use the Script Task and some simple VB.NET or C# (if you have SQL Server 2008) code. Very often I see suggestions about how to use the .NET class System.Net.WebClient and of course this works, you can code pretty much anything you like in .NET. Here I’d just like to raise the profile of an alternative. This approach uses the HTTP Connection Manager, one of the stock connection managers, so you can use configurations and property expressions in the same way you would for all other connections. Settings like the security details that you would want to make configurable already are, but if you take the .NET route you have to write quite a lot of code to manage those values via package variables. Using the connection manager we get all of that flexibility for free. The screenshot below illustrate some of the options we have. Using the HttpClientConnection class makes for much simpler code as well. I have demonstrated two methods, DownloadFile which just downloads a file to disk, and DownloadData which downloads the file and retains it in memory. In each case we show a message box to note the completion of the download. You can download a sample package below, but first the code: Imports System Imports System.IO Imports System.Text Imports System.Windows.Forms Imports Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime Public Class ScriptMain Public Sub Main() ' Get the unmanaged connection object, from the connection manager called "HTTP Connection Manager" Dim nativeObject As Object = Dts.Connections("HTTP Connection Manager").AcquireConnection(Nothing) ' Create a new HTTP client connection Dim connection As New HttpClientConnection(nativeObject) ' Download the file #1 ' Save the file from the connection manager to the local path specified Dim filename As String = "C:\Temp\Sample.txt" connection.DownloadFile(filename, True) ' Confirm file is there If File.Exists(filename) Then MessageBox.Show(String.Format("File {0} has been downloaded.", filename)) End If ' Download the file #2 ' Read the text file straight into memory Dim buffer As Byte() = connection.DownloadData() Dim data As String = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(buffer) ' Display the file contents MessageBox.Show(data) Dts.TaskResult = Dts.Results.Success End Sub End Class Sample Package HTTPDownload.dtsx (74KB)

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• C# 4.0: Named And Optional Arguments

  - by Paulo Morgado

  As part of the co-evolution effort of C# and Visual Basic, C# 4.0 introduces Named and Optional Arguments. First of all, let’s clarify what are arguments and parameters: Method definition parameters are the input variables of the method. Method call arguments are the values provided to the method parameters. In fact, the C# Language Specification states the following on §7.5: The argument list (§7.5.1) of a function member invocation provides actual values or variable references for the parameters of the function member. Given the above definitions, we can state that: Parameters have always been named and still are. Parameters have never been optional and still aren’t. Named Arguments Until now, the way the C# compiler matched method call definition arguments with method parameters was by position. The first argument provides the value for the first parameter, the second argument provides the value for the second parameter, and so on and so on, regardless of the name of the parameters. If a parameter was missing a corresponding argument to provide its value, the compiler would emit a compilation error. For this call: Greeting("Mr.", "Morgado", 42); this method: public void Greeting(string title, string name, int age) will receive as parameters: title: “Mr.” name: “Morgado” age: 42 What this new feature allows is to use the names of the parameters to identify the corresponding arguments in the form: name:value Not all arguments in the argument list must be named. However, all named arguments must be at the end of the argument list. The matching between arguments (and the evaluation of its value) and parameters will be done first by name for the named arguments and than by position for the unnamed arguments. This means that, for this method definition: public static void Method(int first, int second, int third) this call declaration: int i = 0; Method(i, third: i++, second: ++i); will have this code generated by the compiler: int i = 0; int CS$0$0000 = i++; int CS$0$0001 = ++i; Method(i, CS$0$0001, CS$0$0000); which will give the method the following parameter values: first: 2 second: 2 third: 0 Notice the variable names. Although invalid being invalid C# identifiers, they are valid .NET identifiers and thus avoiding collision between user written and compiler generated code. Besides allowing to re-order of the argument list, this feature is very useful for auto-documenting the code, for example, when the argument list is very long or not clear, from the call site, what the arguments are. Optional Arguments Parameters can now have default values: public static void Method(int first, int second = 2, int third = 3) Parameters with default values must be the last in the parameter list and its value is used as the value of the parameter if the corresponding argument is missing from the method call declaration. For this call declaration: int i = 0; Method(i, third: ++i); will have this code generated by the compiler: int i = 0; int CS$0$0000 = ++i; Method(i, 2, CS$0$0000); which will give the method the following parameter values: first: 1 second: 2 third: 1 Because, when method parameters have default values, arguments can be omitted from the call declaration, this might seem like method overloading or a good replacement for it, but it isn’t. Although methods like this: public static StreamReader OpenTextFile( string path, Encoding encoding = null, bool detectEncoding = true, int bufferSize = 1024) allow to have its calls written like this: OpenTextFile("foo.txt", Encoding.UTF8); OpenTextFile("foo.txt", Encoding.UTF8, bufferSize: 4096); OpenTextFile( bufferSize: 4096, path: "foo.txt", detectEncoding: false); The complier handles default values like constant fields taking the value and useing it instead of a reference to the value. So, like with constant fields, methods with parameters with default values are exposed publicly (and remember that internal members might be publicly accessible – InternalsVisibleToAttribute). If such methods are publicly accessible and used by another assembly, those values will be hard coded in the calling code and, if the called assembly has its default values changed, they won’t be assumed by already compiled code. At the first glance, I though that using optional arguments for “bad” written code was great, but the ability to write code like that was just pure evil. But than I realized that, since I use private constant fields, it’s OK to use default parameter values on privately accessed methods.

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• SharePoint and COMException (0x80004005): Cannot complete this action

  - by Damon

  I ran into a small issue today working on a deployment.  We were moving a custom ASP.NET control from my development environment into a SharePoint layout page on a staging environment .  I was expecting some minor issues to arise since I had developed the control in an ASP.NET website project, but after getting everything moved over we got an obscure COMException error the that looked like this: Cannot complete this action. Please try again. 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.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: Cannot complete this action. [COMException (0x80004005): Cannot complete this action. .Lengthy stack trace goes here. Everything in the custom control was built using managed code, so we weren't sure why a COMException would suddenly appear. The control made use of an ITemplate to define its UI, so there was a lot of markup and binding code inside the template. As such, we started taking chunks of the template out of the layout page and eventually the error went away.  It was being caused by a section of code where we were calling a custom utility method inside some binding code: <%# WebUtility.FormatDecimal(.) %> Solution: It turns out that we were missing an Assembly and Import directive at the top of the page to let the page know where to find this method.  After adding these to the page, the error went away and everything worked great.  So a COMException (0x80004005) Cannot complete this action error is just SharePoint's friendly way of letting you know you're missing an assembly or imports reference.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 22, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, March 22, 2010New Projects[Tool] Vczh Non-public DLL Classes Caller: Generate C# code for you to call non-public classes in DLLs very easily.Artefact Animator: Artefact Animator provides an easy to use framework for procedural time-based animations in Silverlight and WPF.cacheroo: Cacheroo is a social networking community that will make it easier for people who love geocaching to get connected.Data Processing Toolkit: An utility app to collected data from different sources (i.e. bugzilla bug reports) in a structured way. We are currently setting up the site. Mo...eXternal SQL Bridge (PHP): The eXternal SQL Bridge (XSB) allows you to bridge two websites together in a secure manner through pre-shared keys. XSB is resilient against repla...'G' - Language to Define Gestures for Touch Based Applications: A cross plat form multi-touch application framework with a language to define gestures. The application is build on Silverlight 4.0 and the languag...IIS Network Diagnostic Tools: Web implementation of "looking glass" like services (ping, traceroute) as HTTP modules for Internet Information Services.Interop Router: This project establishes a communication framework and job dispatcher for a mixed operating system cluster environment.L2 Commander: L2Commander makes it easier for both new and old l2j users to manage your server.You no longer have to waste time on finding the files you need and...MediaHelper: A utility to help clean up empty/unwanted files and folders in your filesystem.mhinze: matt hinze stuffOneMan: Focus on Silverlight and WCF technology.Rss Photo Frame Android Widget: RSS Photo Frame Android Widget permits showing pictures from any RSS feed on your Android device's desktopSingle Web Session: Web Tool Kits Current project provide developer with different tools that help to enhance web site performance, security, and other common functio...Work Item Visualization: Use DGML to visualize and analyze your TFS Work Items. Included is the ability to perform basic risk/impact analysis. It helps answer the question,...New Releases[Tool] Vczh Non-public DLL Classes Caller: Wrapper Coder (beta): Click "<Click Me To Open Assembly File>", WrapperCoder will load the assembly and referenced assembly. Check the non-public classes that you want...APS - Automatic Print Screen: APS 1.0: APS automatizes the tasks of paste the image in Paint and save it after print screen or alt+print screen. Choose directory, name and file extension...BTP Tools: e-Sword generator build 20100321: 1. Modify the indent after subtitle. 2. Add 2 spaces after subtitle.Combres - WebForm & MVC Client-side Resource Combine Library: Combres 2.0: Changes since last version (1.2) Support ignore Combres pipeline in debug mode - see issue #6088 Debug mode generates comment helping identify in...Desafio Office 2010 Brasil: DesafioOutlook: Controlando um robo com o Outlook 2010dylan.NET: dylan.NET v. 9.4: Adding Platform Invocation Services Support, full Managed Pointer Support, Charset,Dllimport,Callconv setting for P/Invoke, MarshalAs for parametersFamily Tree Analyzer: Version 1.3.2.0: Version 1.3.2.0 Add open folder button to IGI Search Form Fixes to Fact Location processing - IGIName renamed to RegionID Fix if Region ID not fou...Fasterflect - A Fast and Simple Reflection API: Fasterflect 2.0: We are pleased to release version 2.0 of Fasterflect, which contains a lot of additions and improvements from the previous version. Please refer t...IIS Network Diagnostic Tools: 1.0: Initial public release.Informant: Informant (Desktop) v0.1: This release allows users to send sms messages to 1-Many Groups or 1-Many contacts. It is a very basic release of the application. No styling has b...InfoService: InfoService v1.5 - MPE1 Package: InfoService Release v1.5.0.65 Please read Plugin installation for installation instructions.InfoService: InfoService v1.5 - RAR Package: InfoService Release v1.5.0.65 Please read Plugin installation for installation instructions.L2 Commander: Source Code Link: Where to find our source.ModularCMS: ModularCMS 1.2: Minor bug fixes.NMTools: NMTools-v40b0-20100321-0: The most noticeable aspect of this release is that NMTools is now an independent project. It will no longer tied to OpenSLIM. Nevertheless, OpenSLI...SharePoint LogViewer: SharePoint LogViewer 1.5.3: Log loading performance enhanced. Search text box now has auto complete feature.Single Web Session: Single Web Session: !Single Web Session! <httpModules> <add name="SingleSession" type="SingleWebSession.Model.WebSessionModule, SingleWebSession"/> </httpModules>Sprite Sheet Packer: 2.1 Release: Made a few crucial fixes from 2.0: - Fixed error with paths having spaces. - Fixed error with UI not unlocking. - Fixed NullReferenceException on ...uManage - AD Self-Service Portal: uManage v1.1 (.NET 4.0 RC): Updated Releasev1.1 Adds the primary ability to setup and configure the application through a setup wizard. The setup wizard will continue to evol...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30321.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVS ChessMania: VS ChessMania V2 March Beta: Second Beta Release with move correction and making application more safe for user. New features will be added soon.WatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke: CKEditor Provider 1.9.00: Whats New Added New Toolbar Plugin (By Kent Safransk) 'MediaEmbed' to Include Embed Media from Youtube, Vimeo, etc. Media Embed Plugin Added New ...WeatherBar: WeatherBar 1.0 [No Installation]: Extract the ZIP archive and run WeatherBar.exe. Current release contains some bugs that will be fixed in the next version. Check the Issue Tracker...Work Item Visualization: Release 1.0: This is the initial release of the Work Item Visualization tool. There are no known issues when it comes to the visualization aspects of the tool b...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 1.0.0.10: Version: 1.0.0.10 (Milestone 10): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requi...WPF AutoComplete TextBox Control: Version 1.2: What's Newadds AutoAppend feature adds a new provider: UrlHistoryDataProvider sample application is updated to reflect the new things Bug Fixe...ZoomBarPlus: V2 (Beta): - Fixed bug: if the active window changed while you were in the middle of a single tap delay, long tap delay, or swipe-repeat, it would continue re...Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpSavvy DateTimeRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)Most Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterRawrOData SDK for PHPjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesDirectQPHPExcelFarseer Physics Enginepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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• Data Web Controls Enhancements in ASP.NET 4.0

  Traditionally, developers using Web controls enjoyed increased productivity but at the cost of control over the rendered markup. For instance, many ASP.NET controls automatically wrap their content in <code>&lt;table&gt;</code> for layout or styling purposes. This behavior runs counter to the web standards that have evolved over the past several years, which favor cleaner, terser HTML; sparing use of tables; and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets">Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)</a> for layout and styling. Furthermore, the <code>&lt;table&gt;</code> elements and other automatically-added content makes it harder to both style the Web controls using CSS and to work with the controls from client-side

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• Getting the innermost .NET Exception

  - by Rick Strahl

  Here's a trivial but quite useful function that I frequently need in dynamic execution of code: Finding the innermost exception when an exception occurs, because for many operations (for example Reflection invocations or Web Service calls) the top level errors returned can be rather generic. A good example - common with errors in Reflection making a method invocation - is this generic error: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation In the debugger it looks like this: In this case this is an AJAX callback, which dynamically executes a method (ExecuteMethod code) which in turn calls into an Amazon Web Service using the old Amazon WSE101 Web service extensions for .NET. An error occurs in the Web Service call and the innermost exception holds the useful error information which in this case points at an invalid web.config key value related to the System.Net connection APIs. The "Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation" error is the Reflection APIs generic error message that gets fired when you execute a method dynamically and that method fails internally. The messages basically says: "Your code blew up in my face when I tried to run it!". Which of course is not very useful to tell you what actually happened. If you drill down the InnerExceptions eventually you'll get a more detailed exception that points at the original error and code that caused the exception. In the code above the actually useful exception is two innerExceptions down. In most (but not all) cases when inner exceptions are returned, it's the innermost exception that has the information that is really useful. It's of course a fairly trivial task to do this in code, but I do it so frequently that I use a small helper method for this: /// <summary> /// Returns the innermost Exception for an object /// </summary> /// <param name="ex"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static Exception GetInnerMostException(Exception ex) { Exception currentEx = ex; while (currentEx.InnerException != null) { currentEx = currentEx.InnerException; } return currentEx; } This code just loops through all the inner exceptions (if any) and assigns them to a temporary variable until there are no more inner exceptions. The end result is that you get the innermost exception returned from the original exception. It's easy to use this code then in a try/catch handler like this (from the example above) to retrieve the more important innermost exception: object result = null; string stringResult = null; try { if (parameterList != null) // use the supplied parameter list result = helper.ExecuteMethod(methodToCall,target, parameterList.ToArray(), CallbackMethodParameterType.Json,ref attr); else // grab the info out of QueryString Values or POST buffer during parameter parsing // for optimization result = helper.ExecuteMethod(methodToCall, target, null, CallbackMethodParameterType.Json, ref attr); } catch (Exception ex) { Exception activeException = DebugUtils.GetInnerMostException(ex); WriteErrorResponse(activeException.Message, ( HttpContext.Current.IsDebuggingEnabled ? ex.StackTrace : null ) ); return; } Another function that is useful to me from time to time is one that returns all inner exceptions and the original exception as an array: /// <summary> /// Returns an array of the entire exception list in reverse order /// (innermost to outermost exception) /// </summary> /// <param name="ex">The original exception to work off</param> /// <returns>Array of Exceptions from innermost to outermost</returns> public static Exception[] GetInnerExceptions(Exception ex) {     List<Exception> exceptions = new List<Exception>();     exceptions.Add(ex);       Exception currentEx = ex;     while (currentEx.InnerException != null)     {         exceptions.Add(ex);     }       // Reverse the order to the innermost is first     exceptions.Reverse();       return exceptions.ToArray(); } This function loops through all the InnerExceptions and returns them and then reverses the order of the array returning the innermost exception first. This can be useful in certain error scenarios where exceptions stack and you need to display information from more than one of the exceptions in order to create a useful error message. This is rare but certain database exceptions bury their exception info in mutliple inner exceptions and it's easier to parse through them in an array then to manually walk the exception stack. It's also useful if you need to log errors and want to see the all of the error detail from all exceptions. None of this is rocket science, but it's useful to have some helpers that make retrieval of the critical exception info trivial. Resources DebugUtils.cs utility class in the West Wind Web Toolkit© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in CSharp  .NET  

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• Building services with .Net Part 1

  - by Allan Rwakatungu

  On the 26th of May 2010 , I made a presentation to the .NET user group meeting (thanks to Malisa Ncube for organizing this event every month … ). If you missed my presentation , we talked about why we should all be building services … better still using the .NET framework. This blog post is an introduction to services , why you would want to build services and how you can build services using the .NET framework. What is a service? OASIS defines service as "a mechanism to enable access to one or more capabilities, where the access is provided using a prescribed interface and is exercised consistent with constraints and policies as specified by the service description." [1]. If the above definition sounds to academic , you can also define a service as loosely coupled units of functionality that have no calls to each other embedded in the. Instead of services embedding calls to each other in their service code they use defined protocols that describe how services pass and parse messages. This is a good way to think about services if you’re from an objected oriented background. While in object oriented programming functions make calls to each other, in service oriented programming, functions pass messages between each other. Why would you want to use services? 1. If your enterprise architecture looks like this   Services are the building blocks for SOA . With SOA you can move away from the sphaggetti infrastructure that is common in most enterprises. The complexity or lack of visibility of the integration points in your enterprises makes it difficult and costly to implement new initiatives and changes into the business - and even impossible in some cases - as it is not possible to identify the impact a change in one system might have to other systems. With services you can move to an architecture like this Your building blocks from Spaghetti infrastructure to something that is more well-defined and manageable to achieve cost efficiency and not least business agility - enabling you to react to changes in the market with speed and achieve operational efficiency and control are services. 2. If you want to become the Gates or Zuckerburger. Have you heard about Web 2.0 ? Mashups? Software as a service (SAAS) ? Cloud computing ?   They all offer you the opportunity to have scalable but low cost business models and they built using services.  Some of my favorite companies that leverage services for their business models include  https://www.salesforce.com/ (cloud CRM) http://www. twitter.com (more people use twitter clients built by 3rd parties than their official clients) http://www.kayak.com/ (compares data from other travel sites to give information to users in one location) Services with the .NET framework      If you are a .NET developer and you want to develop services, Windows Communication Framework (WCF) is the tool for you. WCF is Microsoft’s unified programming model (service model) for building service oriented applications. ( Before .NET 3.0 you had several models for programming services in .NET including .NET remoting, Web services (ASMX), COM +, Microsoft Messaging queuing (MSMQ) etc, after .NET 3.0 the programming model was unified into one i.e. WCF ). Windows Communication Framework (WCF) provides you 1. An Software Development Kit (SDK) for creating SOA applications 2. A runtime for running services on the Windows platform Why should you use Windows Communication Foundation if you’re programming services?   1. It supports interoperable and open standards e.g. WS* protocols for programming SOAP services 2. It has a unified programming model. Whether you use TCP or Http or Pipes or transmitting using Messaging Queues, programmers need to learn just one way to program. Previously you had .NET remoting, MSMQ, Web services, COM+ and they were all done differently 3. Productive programming model You don’t have to worry about all the plumbing involved to write services. You have a rich declarative programming model to add stuff like logging, transactions, and reliable messages in-built in the Windows Communication Framework. Understanding services in WCF The basic principles of WCF are as easy as ABC A – Address This is where the service is located B- Binding This describes how you communicate with the service e.g. Use TCP, HTTP or both. How to exchange security information with the service etc. C – Contract This defines what the service can do. E.g. Pay water bill, Make a phone call A - Addresses In WCF, an address is a combination of transport, server name, port and path Example addresses may include http://localhost:8001 net.tcp://localhost:8002/MyService net.pipe://localhost/MyPipe net.msmq://localhost/private/MyService net.msmq://localhost/MyService B- Binding   There are numerous ways to communicate with services , different ways that a message can be formatted/sent/secured, that allows you to tailor your service for the compatibility/performance you require for your solution. Transport You can use HTTP TCP MSMQ , Named pipes, Your own custom transport etc Message You  can send a plain text binary, Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) message Communication security No security Transport security Message security Authenticating and authorizing callers etc Behaviour You service can support Transactions Be reliable Use queues Support ajax etc C - Contract You define what your service can do using Service contracts :- Define operations that your service can do, communications and behaviours Data contracts :- Define the messages that are passed from and into your service and how they are formatted Fault contracts :- Defines errors types in your service   As an example, suppose your service service shows money. You define your service contract using a interface [ServiceContract] public interface IShowMeTheMoney {   [OperationContract]    Money Show(); } You define the data contract by annotating a class it with the Data Contract attribute and fields you want to pass in the message as Data Members. (Note:- In the latest versions of WCF you dont have to use attributes if you passing all the objects properties in the message) [DataContract] public Money {   [DataMember]   public string Currency { get; set; }   [DataMember]   public Decimal Amount { get; set; }   public string Comment { get; set; } } Features of Windows Communication Foundation Windows Communication Foundation is not only simple but feature rich , offering you several options to tweak your service to fit your business requirements. Some of the features of WCF include 1. Workflow services You can combine WCF with Windows WorkFlow Foundation (WWF) to write workflow type services 2. Control how your data (messages) are transferred and serialized e.g. you can serialize your business objects as XML or binary 3. control over session management , instance creation and concurrency management without writing code if you like 4. Queues and reliable sessions. You can store messages from the sending client and later forward them to the receiving application. You can also guarantee that messages will arrive at their destincation. 5.Transactions:  You can have different services participate in a transaction operations that can be rolled back if needed 6. Security. WCF has rich features for authorization and authentication  as well as keep audit trails 7. Web programming model. WCF allows developers to expose services as non SOAP endpoints 8. Inbuilt features that you can use to write JSON and services that support AJAX applications And lots more In my next blog I will show you how you can use WCF features to write a real world business service.               Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 ]] /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Silverlight Cream for April 03, 2010 -- #829

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Scott Marlowe, Nokola, SilverLaw, Brad Abrams, Jeff Wilcox, Jesse Liberty, Alexey Zakharov, ondrejsv, Ward Bell, and David Anson. Shoutouts: Bart Czernicki has a post up about the latest with HTML5: HTML 5 is Born Old - Quake in HTML 5 I was sent a link to shoebox360 a while back and had to sign up to see the Silverlight use, but it does work very nice. I like the panoramic carousel in the viewer: shoebox360 Jeff Handley has a post up on RIA Services - Documentation Guidance and Community Samples... the team is looking for feedback from all of us Shawn Wildermuth posted his My MIX Talks' Source Code Laurent Bugnion posted his Sample code and slides for my TechDays10 (Belgium) talks From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight to WCF Cross Domain SecurityException Scott Marlowe wrote an article about an often-encountered security exception having to do with cross-domain policies. He details the problem, the response, the solution, and yet another problem/solution associated... good stuff, Scott! Simple Functions for HTML Interop You've seen Nokola's graphic work... how about some HTML Interop from him? He's exposing the code he uses in his work. New Video: ChildWindow Styling - Silverlight 3 SilverLaw has a new video tutorial on Silerlight 3 ChildWindow Styling up - in German - but the video is language-agnostic :) Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Exposing WCF (SOAP\WSDL) Services Brad Abrams' continuation in his RIA series is this one demonstrating exposing RIA Services as a Soap\WSDL service Silverlight 4: New parser implementation. New parser features. Jeff Wilcox has a post up highlighting some of the new features in Silverlight 4 such as a new parser implementation with new XAML features. New Video Series – Getting Started With Silverlight Jesse Liberty is starting a new video tutorial series that's going to build out to be a "complete survey of Silverlight programming". The first two are in this post and are Getting Started and Adding Controls to a Silverlight App... looks like good material, Jesse, and all the source is there for the taking as well. Silverlight layout hack: Centered content with fixed maxwidth Alexey Zakharov has a quick tip up on creating centered content with fixed maxwidth. He calls it a dirty trick... looks like code to me :) Silverlight DataForm’s autogenerated fields send empty strings to database ondrejsv points up a problem he had with the Toolkit's DataForm, and his solution to it... with code for all of us following along behind :) DevForce Extensibility With MEF InheritedExport Ward Bell has a post up describing how they got DevForce MEF'd up, and looks like a good post to get you all excited about MEF as well... lots of external links and good info. Tip: Read-only custom DependencyProperties don't exist in Silverlight, but can be closely approximated David Anson's latest Tip is about Read-only custom DependencyProperties in Silverlight -- which strictly is not possible, but he has a code example up that gets close. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Building the Elusive Windows Phone Panorama Control

  When the Windows Phone 7 Developer SDK was released a couple of weeks ago at MIX10 many people noticed the SDK doesnt include a template for a Panorama control.   Here at Clarity we decided to build our own Panorama control for use in some of our prototypes and I figured I would share what we came up with. There have been a couple of implementations of the Panorama control making their way through the interwebs, but I didnt think any of them really nailed the experience that is shown in the simulation videos.   One of the key design principals in the UX Guide for Windows Phone 7 is the use of motion.  The WP7 OS is fairly stripped of extraneous design elements and makes heavy use of typography and motion to give users the necessary visual cues.  Subtle animations and wide layouts help give the user a sense of fluidity and consistency across the phone experience.  When building the panorama control I was fairly meticulous in recreating the motion as shown in the videos.  The effect that is shown in the application hubs of the phone is known as a Parallax Scrolling effect.  This this pseudo-3D technique has been around in the computer graphics world for quite some time. In essence, the background images move slower than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth in 2D.  Here is an example of the traditional use: http://www.mauriciostudio.com/.  One of the animation gems I've learned while building interactive software is the follow animation.  The premise is straightforward: instead of translating content 1:1 with the interaction point, let the content catch up to the mouse or finger.  The difference is subtle, but the impact on the smoothness of the interaction is huge.  That said, it became the foundation of how I achieved the effect shown below.   Source Code Available HERE Before I briefly describe the approach I took in creating this control..and Ill add some **asterisks ** to the code below as my coding skills arent up to snuff with the rest of my colleagues.  This code is meant to be an interpretation of the WP7 panorama control and is not intended to be used in a production application.  1.  Layout the XAML The UI consists of three main components :  The background image, the Title, and the Content.  You can imagine each  these UI Elements existing on their own plane with a corresponding Translate Transform to create the Parallax effect.  2.  Storyboards + Procedural Animations = Sexy As I mentioned above, creating a fluid experience was at the top of my priorities while building this control.  To recreate the smooth scroll effect shown in the video we need to add some place holder storyboards that we can manipulate in code to simulate the inertia and snapping.  Using the easing functions built into Silverlight helps create a very pleasant interaction.    3.  Handle the Manipulation Events With Silverlight 3 we have some new touch event handlers.  The new Manipulation events makes handling the interactivity pretty straight forward.  There are two event handlers that need to be hooked up to enable the dragging and motion effects: the ManipulationDelta event :  (the most relevant code is highlighted in pink) Here we are doing some simple math with the Manipulation Deltas and setting the TO values of the animations appropriately. Modifying the storyboards dynamically in code helps to create a natural feel.something that cant easily be done with storyboards alone.   And secondly, the ManipulationCompleted event:  Here we take the Final Velocities from the Manipulation Completed Event and apply them to the Storyboards to create the snapping and scrolling effects.  Most of this code is determining what the next position of the viewport will be.  The interesting part (shown in pink) is determining the duration of the animation based on the calculated velocity of the flick gesture.  By using velocity as a variable in determining the duration of the animation we can produce a slow animation for a soft flick and a fast animation for a strong flick. Challenges to the Reader There are a couple of things I didnt have time to implement into this control.  And I would love to see other WPF/Silverlight approaches.  1.  A good mechanism for deciphering when the user is manipulating the content within the panorama control and the panorama itself.   In other words, being able to accurately determine what is a flick and what is click. 2.  Dynamically Sizing the panorama control based on the width of its content.  Right now each control panel is 400px, ideally the Panel items would be measured and then panorama control would update its size accordingly.  3.  Background and content wrapping.  The WP7 UX guidelines specify that the content and background should wrap at the end of the list.  In my code I restrict the drag at the ends of the list (like the iPhone).  It would be interesting to see how this would effect the scroll experience.     Well, Its been fun building this control and if you use it Id love to know what you think.  You can download the Source HERE or from the Expression Gallery  Erik Klimczak  | [email protected] | twitter.com/eklimczDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Node.js Adventure - Node.js on Windows

  - by Shaun

  Two weeks ago I had had a talk with Wang Tao, a C# MVP in China who is currently running his startup company and product named worktile. He asked me to figure out a synchronization solution which helps his product in the future. And he preferred me implementing the service in Node.js, since his worktile is written in Node.js. Even though I have some experience in ASP.NET MVC, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, I don’t think I’m an expert of JavaScript. In fact I’m very new to it. So it scared me a bit when he asked me to use Node.js. But after about one week investigate I have to say Node.js is very easy to learn, use and deploy, even if you have very limited JavaScript skill. And I think I became love Node.js. Hence I decided to have a series named “Node.js Adventure”, where I will demonstrate my story of learning and using Node.js in Windows and Windows Azure. And this is the first one.   (Brief) Introduction of Node.js I don’t want to have a fully detailed introduction of Node.js. There are many resource on the internet we can find. But the best one is its homepage. Node.js was created by Ryan Dahl, sponsored by Joyent. It’s consist of about 80% C/C++ for core and 20% JavaScript for API. It utilizes CommonJS as the module system which we will explain later. The official definition of Node.js is Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices. First of all, Node.js utilizes JavaScript as its development language and runs on top of V8 engine, which is being used by Chrome. It brings JavaScript, a client-side language into the backend service world. So many people said, even though not that actually, “Node.js is a server side JavaScript”. Additionally, Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking IO model. This means in Node.js there’s no way to block currently working thread. Every operation in Node.js executed asynchronously. This is a huge benefit especially if our code needs IO operations such as reading disks, connect to database, consuming web service, etc.. Unlike IIS or Apache, Node.js doesn’t utilize the multi-thread model. In Node.js there’s only one working thread serves all users requests and resources response, as the ST star in the figure below. And there is a POSIX async threads pool in Node.js which contains many async threads (AT stars) for IO operations. When a user have an IO request, the ST serves it but it will not do the IO operation. Instead the ST will go to the POSIX async threads pool to pick up an AT, pass this operation to it, and then back to serve any other requests. The AT will actually do the IO operation asynchronously. Assuming before the AT complete the IO operation there is another user comes. The ST will serve this new user request, pick up another AT from the POSIX and then back. If the previous AT finished the IO operation it will take the result back and wait for the ST to serve. ST will take the response and return the AT to POSIX, and then response to the user. And if the second AT finished its job, the ST will response back to the second user in the same way. As you can see, in Node.js there’s only one thread serve clients’ requests and POSIX results. This thread looping between the users and POSIX and pass the data back and forth. The async jobs will be handled by POSIX. This is the event-driven non-blocking IO model. The performance of is model is much better than the multi-threaded blocking model. For example, Apache is built in multi-threaded blocking model while Nginx is in event-driven non-blocking mode. Below is the performance comparison between them. And below is the memory usage comparison between them. These charts are captured from the video NodeJS Basics: An Introductory Training, which presented at Cloud Foundry Developer Advocate.   Node.js on Windows To execute Node.js application on windows is very simple. First of you we need to download the latest Node.js platform from its website. After installed, it will register its folder into system path variant so that we can execute Node.js at anywhere. To confirm the Node.js installation, just open up a command windows and type “node”, then it will show the Node.js console. As you can see this is a JavaScript interactive console. We can type some simple JavaScript code and command here. To run a Node.js JavaScript application, just specify the source code file name as the argument of the “node” command. For example, let’s create a Node.js source code file named “helloworld.js”. Then copy a sample code from Node.js website. 1: var http = require("http"); 2:  3: http.createServer(function (req, res) { 4: res.writeHead(200, {"Content-Type": "text/plain"}); 5: res.end("Hello World\n"); 6: }).listen(1337, "127.0.0.1"); 7:  8: console.log("Server running at http://127.0.0.1:1337/"); This code will create a web server, listening on 1337 port and return “Hello World” when any requests come. Run it in the command windows. Then open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:1337/. As you can see, when using Node.js we are not creating a web application. In fact we are likely creating a web server. We need to deal with request, response and the related headers, status code, etc.. And this is one of the benefit of using Node.js, lightweight and straightforward. But creating a website from scratch again and again is not acceptable. The good news is that, Node.js utilizes CommonJS as its module system, so that we can leverage some modules to simplify our job. And furthermore, there are about ten thousand of modules available n the internet, which covers almost all areas in server side application development.   NPM and Node.js Modules Node.js utilizes CommonJS as its module system. A module is a set of JavaScript files. In Node.js if we have an entry file named “index.js”, then all modules it needs will be located at the “node_modules” folder. And in the “index.js” we can import modules by specifying the module name. For example, in the code we’ve just created, we imported a module named “http”, which is a build-in module installed alone with Node.js. So that we can use the code in this “http” module. Besides the build-in modules there are many modules available at the NPM website. Thousands of developers are contributing and downloading modules at this website. Hence this is another benefit of using Node.js. There are many modules we can use, and the numbers of modules increased very fast, and also we can publish our modules to the community. When I wrote this post, there are totally 14,608 modules at NPN and about 10 thousand downloads per day. Install a module is very simple. Let’s back to our command windows and input the command “npm install express”. This command will install a module named “express”, which is a MVC framework on top of Node.js. And let’s create another JavaScript file named “helloweb.js” and copy the code below in it. I imported the “express” module. And then when the user browse the home page it will response a text. If the incoming URL matches “/Echo/:value” which the “value” is what the user specified, it will pass it back with the current date time in JSON format. And finally my website was listening at 12345 port. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var app = express(); 3:  4: app.get("/", function(req, res) { 5: res.send("Hello Node.js and Express."); 6: }); 7:  8: app.get("/Echo/:value", function(req, res) { 9: var value = req.params.value; 10: res.json({ 11: "Value" : value, 12: "Time" : new Date() 13: }); 14: }); 15:  16: console.log("Web application opened."); 17: app.listen(12345); For more information and API about the “express”, please have a look here. Start our application from the command window by command “node helloweb.js”, and then navigate to the home page we can see the response in the browser. And if we go to, for example http://localhost:12345/Echo/Hello Shaun, we can see the JSON result. The “express” module is very populate in NPM. It makes the job simple when we need to build a MVC website. There are many modules very useful in NPM. - underscore: A utility module covers many common functionalities such as for each, map, reduce, select, etc.. - request: A very simple HTT request client. - async: Library for coordinate async operations. - wind: Library which enable us to control flow with plain JavaScript for asynchronous programming (and more) without additional pre-compiling steps.   Node.js and IIS I demonstrated how to run the Node.js application from console. Since we are in Windows another common requirement would be, “can I host Node.js in IIS?” The answer is “Yes”. Tomasz Janczuk created a project IISNode at his GitHub space we can find here. And Scott Hanselman had published a blog post introduced about it.   Summary In this post I provided a very brief introduction of Node.js, includes it official definition, architecture and how it implement the event-driven non-blocking model. And then I described how to install and run a Node.js application on windows console. I also described the Node.js module system and NPM command. At the end I referred some links about IISNode, an IIS extension that allows Node.js application runs on IIS. Node.js became a very popular server side application platform especially in this year. By leveraging its non-blocking IO model and async feature it’s very useful for us to build a highly scalable, asynchronously service. I think Node.js will be used widely in the cloud application development in the near future.   In the next post I will explain how to use SQL Server from Node.js.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Regression testing with Selenium GRID

  - by Ben Adderson

  A lot of software teams out there are tasked with supporting and maintaining systems that have grown organically over time, and the web team here at Red Gate is no exception. We're about to embark on our first significant refactoring endeavour for some time, and as such its clearly paramount that the code be tested thoroughly for regressions. Unfortunately we currently find ourselves with a codebase that isn't very testable - the three layers (database, business logic and UI) are currently tightly coupled. This leaves us with the unfortunate problem that, in order to confidently refactor the code, we need unit tests. But in order to write unit tests, we need to refactor the code :S To try and ease the initial pain of decoupling these layers, I've been looking into the idea of using UI automation to provide a sort of system-level regression test suite. The idea being that these tests can help us identify regressions whilst we work towards a more testable codebase, at which point the more traditional combination of unit and integration tests can take over. Ending up with a strong battery of UI tests is also a nice bonus :) Following on from my previous posts (here, here and here) I knew I wanted to use Selenium. I also figured that this would be a good excuse to put my xUnit [Browser] attribute to good use. Pretty quickly, I had a raft of tests that looked like the following (this particular example uses Reflector Pro). In a nut shell the test traverses our shopping cart and, for a particular combination of number of users and months of support, checks that the price calculations all come up with the correct values. [BrowserTheory] [Browser(Browsers.Firefox3_6, "http://www.red-gate.com")] public void Purchase1UserLicenceNoSupport(SeleniumProvider seleniumProvider) {     //Arrange     _browser = seleniumProvider.GetBrowser();     _browser.Open("http://www.red-gate.com/dynamic/shoppingCart/ProductOption.aspx?Product=ReflectorPro");                  //Act     _browser = ShoppingCartHelpers.TraverseShoppingCart(_browser, 1, 0, ".NET Reflector Pro");     //Assert     var priceResult = PriceHelpers.GetNewPurchasePrice(db, "ReflectorPro", 1, 0, Currencies.Euros);         Assert.Equal(priceResult.Price, _browser.GetText("ctl00_content_InvoiceShoppingItemRepeater_ctl01_Price"));     Assert.Equal(priceResult.Tax, _browser.GetText("ctl00_content_InvoiceShoppingItemRepeater_ctl02_Tax"));     Assert.Equal(priceResult.Total, _browser.GetText("ctl00_content_InvoiceShoppingItemRepeater_ctl02_Total")); } These tests are pretty concise, with much of the common code in the TraverseShoppingCart() and GetNewPurchasePrice() methods. The (inevitable) problem arose when it came to execute these tests en masse. Selenium is a very slick tool, but it can't mask the fact that UI automation is very slow. To give you an idea, the set of cases that covers all of our products, for all combinations of users and support, came to 372 tests (for now only considering purchases in dollars). In the world of automated integration tests, that's a very manageable number. For unit tests, it's a trifle. However for UI automation, those 372 tests were taking just over two hours to run. Two hours may not sound like a lot, but those cases only cover one of the three currencies we deal with, and only one of the many different ways our systems can be asked to calculate a price. It was already pretty clear at this point that in order for this approach to be viable, I was going to have to find a way to speed things up. Up to this point I had been using Selenium Remote Control to automate Firefox, as this was the approach I had used previously and it had worked well. Fortunately,  the guys at SeleniumHQ also maintain a tool for executing multiple Selenium RC tests in parallel: Selenium Grid. Selenium Grid uses a central 'hub' to handle allocation of Selenium tests to individual RCs. The Remote Controls simply register themselves with the hub when they start, and then wait to be assigned work. The (for me) really clever part is that, as far as the client driver library is concerned, the grid hub looks exactly the same as a vanilla remote control. To create a new browser session against Selenium RC, the following C# code suffices: new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 4444, "*firefox", "http://www.red-gate.com"); This assumes that the RC is running on the local machine, and is listening on port 4444 (the default). Assuming the hub is running on your local machine, then to create a browser session in Selenium Grid, via the hub rather than directly against the control, the code is exactly the same! Behind the scenes, the hub will take this request and hand it off to one of the registered RCs that provides the "*firefox" execution environment. It will then pass all communications back and forth between the test runner and the remote control transparently. This makes running existing RC tests on a Selenium Grid a piece of cake, as the developers intended. For a more detailed description of exactly how Selenium Grid works, see this page. Once I had a test environment capable of running multiple tests in parallel, I needed a test runner capable of doing the same. Unfortunately, this does not currently exist for xUnit (boo!). MbUnit on the other hand, has the concept of concurrent execution baked right into the framework. So after swapping out my assembly references, and fixing up the resulting mismatches in assertions, my example test now looks like this: [Test] public void Purchase1UserLicenceNoSupport() {    //Arrange    ISelenium browser = BrowserHelpers.GetBrowser();    var db = DbHelpers.GetWebsiteDBDataContext();    browser.Start();    browser.Open("http://www.red-gate.com/dynamic/shoppingCart/ProductOption.aspx?Product=ReflectorPro");                 //Act     browser = ShoppingCartHelpers.TraverseShoppingCart(browser, 1, 0, ".NET Reflector Pro");    var priceResult = PriceHelpers.GetNewPurchasePrice(db, "ReflectorPro", 1, 0, Currencies.Euros);    //Assert     Assert.AreEqual(priceResult.Price, browser.GetText("ctl00_content_InvoiceShoppingItemRepeater_ctl01_Price"));     Assert.AreEqual(priceResult.Tax, browser.GetText("ctl00_content_InvoiceShoppingItemRepeater_ctl02_Tax"));     Assert.AreEqual(priceResult.Total, browser.GetText("ctl00_content_InvoiceShoppingItemRepeater_ctl02_Total")); } This is pretty much the same as the xUnit version. The exceptions are that the attributes have changed,  the //Arrange phase now has to handle setting up the ISelenium object, as the attribute that previously did this has gone away, and the test now sets up its own database connection. Previously I was using a shared database connection, but this approach becomes more complicated when tests are being executed concurrently. To avoid complexity each test has its own connection, which it is responsible for closing. For the sake of readability, I snipped out the code that closes the browser session and the db connection at the end of the test. With all that done, there was only one more step required before the tests would execute concurrently. It is necessary to tell the test runner which tests are eligible to run in parallel, via the [Parallelizable] attribute. This can be done at the test, fixture or assembly level. Since I wanted to run all tests concurrently, I marked mine at the assembly level in the AssemblyInfo.cs using the following: [assembly: DegreeOfParallelism(3)] [assembly: Parallelizable(TestScope.All)] The second attribute marks all tests in the assembly as [Parallelizable], whilst the first tells the test runner how many concurrent threads to use when executing the tests. I set mine to three since I was using 3 RCs in separate VMs. With everything now in place, I fired up the Icarus* test runner that comes with MbUnit. Executing my 372 tests three at a time instead of one at a time reduced the running time from 2 hours 10 minutes, to 55 minutes, that's an improvement of about 58%! I'd like to have seen an improvement of 66%, but I can understand that either inefficiencies in the hub code, my test environment or the test runner code (or some combination of all three most likely) contributes to a slightly diminished improvement. That said, I'd love to hear about any experience you have in upping this efficiency. Ultimately though, it was a saving that was most definitely worth having. It makes regression testing via UI automation a far more plausible prospect. The other obvious point to make is that this approach scales far better than executing tests serially. So if ever we need to improve performance, we just register additional RC's with the hub, and up the DegreeOfParallelism. *This was just my personal preference for a GUI runner. The MbUnit/Gallio installer also provides a command line runner, a TestDriven.net runner, and a Resharper 4.5 runner. For now at least, Resharper 5 isn't supported.

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• LLBLGen Pro v3.5 has been released!

  - by FransBouma

  Last weekend we released LLBLGen Pro v3.5! Below the list of what's new in this release. Of course, not everything is on this list, like the large amount of work we put in refactoring the runtime framework. The refactoring was necessary because our framework has two paradigms which are added to the framework at a different time, and from a design perspective in the wrong order (the paradigm we added first, SelfServicing, should have been built on top of Adapter, the other paradigm, which was added more than a year after the first released version). The refactoring made sure the framework re-uses more code across the two paradigms (they already shared a lot of code) and is better prepared for the future. We're not done yet, but refactoring a massive framework like ours without breaking interfaces and existing applications is ... a bit of a challenge ;) To celebrate the release of v3.5, we give every customer a 30% discount! Use the coupon code NR1ORM with your order :) The full list of what's new: Designer Rule based .NET Attribute definitions. It's now possible to specify a rule using fine-grained expressions with an attribute definition to define which elements of a given type will receive the attribute definition. Rules can be assigned to attribute definitions on the project level, to make it even easier to define attribute definitions in bulk for many elements in the project. More information... Revamped Project Settings dialog. Multiple project related properties and settings dialogs have been merged into a single dialog called Project Settings, which makes it easier to configure the various settings related to project elements. It also makes it easier to find features previously not used  by many (e.g. type conversions) More information... Home tab with Quick Start Guides. To make new users feel right at home, we added a home tab with quick start guides which guide you through four main use cases of the designer. System Type Converters. Many common conversions have been implemented by default in system type converters so users don't have to develop their own type converters anymore for these type conversions. Bulk Element Setting Manipulator. To change setting values for multiple project elements, it was a little cumbersome to do that without a lot of clicking and opening various editors. This dialog makes changing settings for multiple elements very easy. EDMX Importer. It's now possible to import entity model data information from an existing Entity Framework EDMX file. Other changes and fixes See for the full list of changes and fixes the online documentation. LLBLGen Pro Runtime Framework WCF Data Services (OData) support has been added. It's now possible to use your LLBLGen Pro runtime framework powered domain layer in a WCF Data Services application using the VS.NET tools for WCF Data Services. WCF Data Services is a Microsoft technology for .NET 4 to expose your domain model using OData. More information... New query specification and execution API: QuerySpec. QuerySpec is our new query specification and execution API as an alternative to Linq and our more low-level API. It's build, like our Linq provider, on top of our lower-level API. More information... SQL Server 2012 support. The SQL Server DQE allows paging using the new SQL Server 2012 style. More information... System Type converters. For a common set of types the LLBLGen Pro runtime framework contains built-in type conversions so you don't need to write your own type converters anymore. Public/NonPublic property support. It's now possible to mark a field / navigator as non-public which is reflected in the runtime framework as an internal/friend property instead of a public property. This way you can hide properties from the public interface of a generated class and still access it through code added to the generated code base. FULL JOIN support. It's now possible to perform FULL JOIN joins using the native query api and QuerySpec. It's left to the developer to check whether the used target database supports FULL (OUTER) JOINs. Using a FULL JOIN with entity fetches is not recommended, and should only be used when both participants in the join aren't the target of the fetch. Dependency Injection Tracing. It's now possible to enable tracing on dependency injection. Enable tracing at level '4' on the traceswitch 'ORMGeneral'. This will emit trace information about which instance of which type got an instance of type T injected into property P. Entity Instances in projections in Linq. It's now possible to return an entity instance in a custom Linq projection. It's now also possible to pass this instance to a method inside the query projection. Inheritance fully supported in this construct. Entity Framework support The Entity Framework has been updated in the recent year with code-first support and a new simpler context api: DbContext (with DbSet). The amount of code to generate is smaller and the context simpler. LLBLGen Pro v3.5 comes with support for DbContext and DbSet and generates code which utilizes these new classes. NHibernate support NHibernate v3.2+ built-in proxy factory factory support. By default the built-in ProxyFactoryFactory is selected. FluentNHibernate Session Manager uses 1.2 syntax. Fluent NHibernate mappings generate a SessionManager which uses the v1.2 syntax for the ProxyFactoryFactory location Optionally emit schema / catalog name in mappings Two settings have been added which allow the user to control whether the catalog name and/or schema name as known in the project in the designer is emitted into the mappings.

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• Creating a JSONP Formatter for ASP.NET Web API

  - by Rick Strahl

  Out of the box ASP.NET WebAPI does not include a JSONP formatter, but it's actually very easy to create a custom formatter that implements this functionality. JSONP is one way to allow Browser based JavaScript client applications to bypass cross-site scripting limitations and serve data from the non-current Web server. AJAX in Web Applications uses the XmlHttp object which by default doesn't allow access to remote domains. There are number of ways around this limitation <script> tag loading and JSONP is one of the easiest and semi-official ways that you can do this. JSONP works by combining JSON data and wrapping it into a function call that is executed when the JSONP data is returned. If you use a tool like jQUery it's extremely easy to access JSONP content. Imagine that you have a URL like this: http://RemoteDomain/aspnetWebApi/albums which on an HTTP GET serves some data - in this case an array of record albums. This URL is always directly accessible from an AJAX request if the URL is on the same domain as the parent request. However, if that URL lives on a separate server it won't be easily accessible to an AJAX request. Now, if  the server can serve up JSONP this data can be accessed cross domain from a browser client. Using jQuery it's really easy to retrieve the same data with JSONP:function getAlbums() { $.getJSON("http://remotedomain/aspnetWebApi/albums?callback=?",null, function (albums) { alert(albums.length); }); } The resulting callback the same as if the call was to a local server when the data is returned. jQuery deserializes the data and feeds it into the method. Here the array is received and I simply echo back the number of items returned. From here your app is ready to use the data as needed. This all works fine - as long as the server can serve the data with JSONP. What does JSONP look like? JSONP is a pretty simple 'protocol'. All it does is wrap a JSON response with a JavaScript function call. The above result from the JSONP call looks like this:Query17103401925975181569_1333408916499( [{"Id":"34043957","AlbumName":"Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap",…},{…}] ) The way JSONP works is that the client (jQuery in this case) sends of the request, receives the response and evals it. The eval basically executes the function and deserializes the JSON inside of the function. It's actually a little more complex for the framework that does this, but that's the gist of what happens. JSONP works by executing the code that gets returned from the JSONP call. JSONP and ASP.NET Web API As mentioned previously, JSONP support is not natively in the box with ASP.NET Web API. But it's pretty easy to create and plug-in a custom formatter that provides this functionality. The following code is based on Christian Weyers example but has been updated to the latest Web API CodePlex bits, which changes the implementation a bit due to the way dependent objects are exposed differently in the latest builds. Here's the code:  using System; using System.IO; using System.Net; using System.Net.Http.Formatting; using System.Net.Http.Headers; using System.Threading.Tasks; using System.Web; using System.Net.Http; namespace Westwind.Web.WebApi { /// <summary> /// Handles JsonP requests when requests are fired with /// text/javascript or application/json and contain /// a callback= (configurable) query string parameter /// /// Based on Christian Weyers implementation /// https://github.com/thinktecture/Thinktecture.Web.Http/blob/master/Thinktecture.Web.Http/Formatters/JsonpFormatter.cs /// </summary> public class JsonpFormatter : JsonMediaTypeFormatter { public JsonpFormatter() { SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/json")); SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new MediaTypeHeaderValue("text/javascript")); //MediaTypeMappings.Add(new UriPathExtensionMapping("jsonp", "application/json")); JsonpParameterName = "callback"; } /// <summary> /// Name of the query string parameter to look for /// the jsonp function name /// </summary> public string JsonpParameterName {get; set; } /// <summary> /// Captured name of the Jsonp function that the JSON call /// is wrapped in. Set in GetPerRequestFormatter Instance /// </summary> private string JsonpCallbackFunction; public override bool CanWriteType(Type type) { return true; } /// <summary> /// Override this method to capture the Request object /// and look for the query string parameter and /// create a new instance of this formatter. /// /// This is the only place in a formatter where the /// Request object is available. /// </summary> /// <param name="type"></param> /// <param name="request"></param> /// <param name="mediaType"></param> /// <returns></returns> public override MediaTypeFormatter GetPerRequestFormatterInstance(Type type, HttpRequestMessage request, MediaTypeHeaderValue mediaType) { var formatter = new JsonpFormatter() { JsonpCallbackFunction = GetJsonCallbackFunction(request) }; return formatter; } /// <summary> /// Override to wrap existing JSON result with the /// JSONP function call /// </summary> /// <param name="type"></param> /// <param name="value"></param> /// <param name="stream"></param> /// <param name="contentHeaders"></param> /// <param name="transportContext"></param> /// <returns></returns> public override Task WriteToStreamAsync(Type type, object value, Stream stream, HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, TransportContext transportContext) { if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(JsonpCallbackFunction)) { return Task.Factory.StartNew(() => { var writer = new StreamWriter(stream); writer.Write( JsonpCallbackFunction + "("); writer.Flush(); base.WriteToStreamAsync(type, value, stream, contentHeaders, transportContext).Wait(); writer.Write(")"); writer.Flush(); }); } else { return base.WriteToStreamAsync(type, value, stream, contentHeaders, transportContext); } } /// <summary> /// Retrieves the Jsonp Callback function /// from the query string /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> private string GetJsonCallbackFunction(HttpRequestMessage request) { if (request.Method != HttpMethod.Get) return null; var query = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(request.RequestUri.Query); var queryVal = query[this.JsonpParameterName]; if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(queryVal)) return null; return queryVal; } } } Note again that this code will not work with the Beta bits of Web API - it works only with post beta bits from CodePlex and hopefully this will continue to work until RTM :-) This code is a bit different from Christians original code as the API has changed. The biggest change is that the Read/Write functions no longer receive a global context object that gives access to the Request and Response objects as the older bits did. Instead you now have to override the GetPerRequestFormatterInstance() method, which receives the Request as a parameter. You can capture the Request there, or use the request to pick up the values you need and store them on the formatter. Note that I also have to create a new instance of the formatter since I'm storing request specific state on the instance (information whether the callback= querystring is present) so I return a new instance of this formatter. Other than that the code should be straight forward: The code basically writes out the function pre- and post-amble and the defers to the base stream to retrieve the JSON to wrap the function call into. The code uses the Async APIs to write this data out (this will take some getting used to seeing all over the place for me). Hooking up the JsonpFormatter Once you've created a formatter, it has to be added to the request processing sequence by adding it to the formatter collection. Web API is configured via the static GlobalConfiguration object.  protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Verb Routing RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "AlbumsVerbs", routeTemplate: "albums/{title}", defaults: new { title = RouteParameter.Optional, controller = "AlbumApi" } ); GlobalConfiguration .Configuration .Formatters .Insert(0, new Westwind.Web.WebApi.JsonpFormatter()); }   That's all it takes. Note that I added the formatter at the top of the list of formatters, rather than adding it to the end which is required. The JSONP formatter needs to fire before any other JSON formatter since it relies on the JSON formatter to encode the actual JSON data. If you reverse the order the JSONP output never shows up. So, in general when adding new formatters also try to be aware of the order of the formatters as they are added. Resources JsonpFormatter Code on GitHub© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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