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• Lessons from rewriting POP Forums for MVC, open source-like

  - by Jeff

  It has been a ton of work, interrupted over the last two years by unemployment, moving, a baby, failing to sell houses and other life events, but it's really exciting to see POP Forums v9 coming together. I'm not even sure when I decided to really commit to it as an open source project, but working on the same team as the CodePlex folks probably had something to do with it. Moving along the roadmap I set for myself, the app is now running on a quasi-production site... we launched MouseZoom last weekend. (That's a post-beta 1 build of the forum. There's also some nifty Silverlight DeepZoom goodness on that site.)I have to make a point to illustrate just how important starting over was for me. I started this forum thing for my sites in old ASP more than ten years ago. What a mess that stuff was, including SQL injection vulnerabilities and all kinds of crap. It went to ASP.NET in 2002, but even then, it felt a little too much like script. More than a year later, in 2003, I did an honest to goodness rewrite. If you've been in this business of writing code for any amount of time, you know how much you hate what you wrote a month ago, so just imagine that with seven years in between. The subsequent versions still carried a fair amount of crap, and that's why I had to start over, to make a clean break. Mind you, much of that crap is still running on some of my production sites in a stable manner, but it's a pain in the ass to maintain.So with that clean break, there is much that I have learned. These are a few of those lessons, in no particular order...Avoid shiny object syndromeOver the years, I've embraced new things without bothering to ask myself why. I remember spending the better part of a year trying to adapt this app to use the membership and profile API's in ASP.NET, just because they were there. They didn't solve any known problem. Early on in this version, I dabbled in exotic ORM's, even though I already had the fundamental SQL that I knew worked. I bloated up the client side code with all kinds of jQuery UI and plugins just because, and it got in the way. All the new shiny can be distracting, and I've come to realize that I've allowed it to be a distraction most of my professional life.Just query what you needI've spent a lot of time over-thinking how to query data. In the SQL world, this means exotic joins, special caches, the read-update-commit loop of ORM's, etc. There are times when you have to remind yourself that you aren't Facebook, you'll never be Facebook, and that databases are in fact intended to serve data. In a lot of projects, back in the day, I used to have these big, rich data objects and pass them all over the place, through various application tiers, when in reality, all I needed was some ID from the entity. I try to be mindful of how many queries hit the database on a given request, but I don't obsess over it. I just get what I need.Don't spend too much time worrying about your unit testsIf you've looked at any of the tests for POP Forums, you might offer an audible WTF. That's OK. There's a whole lot of mocking going on. In some cases, it points out where you're doing too much, and that's good for improving your design. In other cases it shows where your design sucks. But the biggest trap of unit testing is that you worry it should be prettier. That's a waste of time. When you write a test, in many cases before the production code, the important part is that you're testing the right thing. If you have to mock up a bunch of stuff to test the outcome, so be it, but it's not wasted time. You're still doing up the typical arrange-action-assert deal, and you'll be able to read that later if you need to.Get back to your HTTP rootsASP.NET Webforms did a reasonably decent job at abstracting us away from the stateless nature of the Web. A lot of people criticize it, but I think it all worked pretty well. These days, with MVC, jQuery, REST services, and what not, we've gone back to thinking about the wire. The nuts and bolts passing between our Web browser and server matters. This doesn't make things harder, in my opinion, it makes them easier. There is something incredibly freeing about how we approach development of Web apps now. HTTP is a really simple protocol, and the stuff we push through it, in particular HTML and JSON, are pretty simple too. The debugging points are really easy to trap and trace.Premature optimization is prematureI'll go back to the data thing for a moment. I've been known to look at a particular action or use case and stress about the number of calls that are made to the database. I'm not suggesting that it's a bad thing to keep these in mind, but if you worry about it outside of the context of the actual impact, you're wasting time. For example, I query the database for last read times in a forum separately of the user and the list of forums. The impact on performance barely exists. If I put it under load, exceeding the kind of load I expect, it still barely has an impact. Then consider it only counts for logged in users. The context of this "inefficient" action is that it doesn't matter. Did I mention I won't be Facebook?Solve your own problems firstThis is another trap I've fallen into. I've often thought about what other people might need for some feature or aspect of the app. In other words, I was willing to make design decisions based on non-existent data. How stupid is that? When I decided to truly open source this thing, building for myself first was a stated design goal. This app has to server the audiences of CoasterBuzz, MouseZoom and other sites first. In this development scenario, you don't have access to mountains of usability studies or user focus groups. You have to start with what you know.I'm sure there are other points I could make too. It has been a lot of fun to work on, and I look forward to evolving the UI as time goes on. That's where I hope to see more magic in the future.

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• ASP.NET MVC JavaScript Routing

  - by zowens

  Have you ever done this sort of thing in your ASP.NET MVC view? The weird thing about this isn’t the alert function, it’s the code block containing the Url formation using the ASP.NET MVC UrlHelper. The terrible thing about this experience is the obvious lack of IntelliSense and this ugly inline JavaScript code. Inline JavaScript isn’t portable to other pages beyond the current page of execution. It is generally considered bad practice to use inline JavaScript in your public-facing pages. How ludicrous would it be to copy and paste the entire jQuery code base into your pages…? Not something you’d ever consider doing. The problem is that your URLs have to be generated by ASP.NET at runtime and really can’t be copied to your JavaScript code without some trickery. How about this? Does the hard-coded URL bother you? It really bothers me. The typical solution to this whole routing in JavaScript issue is to just hard-code your URLs into your JavaScript files and call it done. But what if your URLs change? You have to now go an track down the places in JavaScript and manually replace them. What if you get the pattern wrong? Do you have tests around it? This isn’t something you should have to worry about.   The Solution To Our Problems The solution is to port routing over to JavaScript. Does that sound daunting to you? It’s actually not very hard, but I decided to create my own generator that will do all the work for you. What I have created is a very basic port of the route formation feature of ASP.NET routing. It will generate the formatted URLs based on your routing patterns. Here’s how you’d do this: Does that feel familiar? It looks a lot like something you’d do inside of your ASP.NET MVC views… but this is inside of a JavaScript file… just a plain ol’ .js file.  Your first question might be why do you have to have that “.toUrl()” thing. The reason is that I wanted to make POST and GET requests dead simple. Here’s how you’d do a POST request (and the same would work with a GET request):   The first parameter is extra data passed to the post request and the second parameter is a function that handles the success of the POST request. If you’re familiar with jQuery’s Ajax goodness, you’ll know how to use it. (if not, check out http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.Post/ and the parameters are essentially the same). But we still haven’t gotten rid of the magic strings. We still have controller names and action names represented as strings. This is going to blow your mind… If you’ve seen T4MVC, this will look familiar. We’re essentially doing the same sort of thing with my JavaScript router, but we’re porting the concept to JavaScript. The good news is that parameters to the controllers are directly reflected in the action function, just like T4MVC. And the even better news… IntlliSense is easily transferred to the JavaScript version if you’re using Visual Studio as your JavaScript editor. The additional data parameter gives you the ability to pass extra routing data to the URL formatter.   About the Magic You may be wondering how this all work. It’s actually quite simple. I’ve built a simple jQuery pluggin (called routeManager) that hangs off the main jQuery namespace and routes all the URLs. Every time your solution builds, a routing file will be generated with this pluggin, all your route and controller definitions along with your documentation. Then by the power of Visual Studio, you get some really slick IntelliSense that is hard to live without. But there are a few steps you have to take before this whole thing is going to work. First and foremost, you need a reference to the JsRouting.Core.dll to your projects containing controllers or routes. Second, you have to specify your routes in a bit of a non-standard way. See, we can’t just pull routes out of your App_Start in your Global.asax. We force you to build a route source like this: The way we determine the routes is by pulling in all RouteSources and generating routes based upon the mapped routes. There are various reasons why we can’t use RouteCollection (different post for another day)… but in this case, you get the same route mapping experience. Converting the RouteSource to a RouteCollection is trivial (there’s an extension method for that). Next thing you have to do is generate a documentation XML file. This is done by going to the project settings, going to the build tab and clicking the checkbox. (this isn’t required, but nice to have). The final thing you need to do is hook up the generation mechanism. Pop open your project file and look for the AfterBuild step. Now change the build step task to look like this: The “PathToOutputExe” is the path to the JsRouting.Output.exe file. This will change based on where you put the EXE. The “PathToOutputJs” is a path to the output JavaScript file. The “DicrectoryOfAssemblies” is a path to the directory containing controller and routing DLLs. The JsRouting.Output.exe executable pulls in all these assemblies and scans them for controllers and route sources.   Now that wasn’t too bad, was it :)   The State of the Project This is definitely not complete… I have a lot of plans for this little project of mine. For starters, I need to look at the generation mechanism. Either I will be creating a utility that will do the project file manipulation or I will go a different direction. I’d like some feedback on this if you feel partial either way. Another thing I don’t support currently is areas. While this wouldn’t be too hard to support, I just don’t use areas and I wanted something up quickly (this is, after all, for a current project of mine). I’ll be adding support shortly. There are a few things that I haven’t covered in this post that I will most certainly be covering in another post, such as routing constraints and how these will be translated to JavaScript. I decided to open source this whole thing, since it’s a nice little utility I think others should really be using. Currently we’re using ASP.NET MVC 2, but it should work with MVC 3 as well. I’ll upgrade it as soon as MVC 3 is released. Along those same lines, I’m investigating how this could be put on the NuGet feed. Show me the Bits! OK, OK! The code is posted on my GitHub account. Go nuts. Tell me what you think. Tell me what you want. Tell me that you hate it. All feedback is welcome! https://github.com/zowens/ASP.NET-MVC-JavaScript-Routing

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• C# Extension Methods - To Extend or Not To Extend...

  - by James Michael Hare

  I've been thinking a lot about extension methods lately, and I must admit I both love them and hate them. They are a lot like sugar, they taste so nice and sweet, but they'll rot your teeth if you eat them too much.   I can't deny that they aren't useful and very handy. One of the major components of the Shared Component library where I work is a set of useful extension methods. But, I also can't deny that they tend to be overused and abused to willy-nilly extend every living type.   So what constitutes a good extension method? Obviously, you can write an extension method for nearly anything whether it is a good idea or not. Many times, in fact, an idea seems like a good extension method but in retrospect really doesn't fit.   So what's the litmus test? To me, an extension method should be like in the movies when a person runs into their twin, separated at birth. You just know you're related. Obviously, that's hard to quantify, so let's try to put a few rules-of-thumb around them.   A good extension method should:     Apply to any possible instance of the type it extends.     Simplify logic and improve readability/maintainability.     Apply to the most specific type or interface applicable.     Be isolated in a namespace so that it does not pollute IntelliSense.     So let's look at a few examples in relation to these rules.   The first rule, to me, is the most important of all. Once again, it bears repeating, a good extension method should apply to all possible instances of the type it extends. It should feel like the long lost relative that should have been included in the original class but somehow was missing from the family tree.    Take this nifty little int extension, I saw this once in a blog and at first I really thought it was pretty cool, but then I started noticing a code smell I couldn't quite put my finger on. So let's look:       public static class IntExtensinos     {         public static int Seconds(int num)         {             return num * 1000;         }           public static int Minutes(int num)         {             return num * 60000;         }     }     This is so you could do things like:       ...     Thread.Sleep(5.Seconds());     ...     proxy.Timeout = 1.Minutes();     ...     Awww, you say, that's cute! Well, that's the problem, it's kitschy and it doesn't always apply (and incidentally you could achieve the same thing with TimeStamp.FromSeconds(5)). It's syntactical candy that looks cool, but tends to rot and pollute the code. It would allow things like:       total += numberOfTodaysOrders.Seconds();     which makes no sense and should never be allowed. The problem is you're applying an extension method to a logical domain, not a type domain. That is, the extension method Seconds() doesn't really apply to ALL ints, it applies to ints that are representative of time that you want to convert to milliseconds.    Do you see what I mean? The two problems, in a nutshell, are that a) Seconds() called off a non-time value makes no sense and b) calling Seconds() off something to pass to something that does not take milliseconds will be off by a factor of 1000 or worse.   Thus, in my mind, you should only ever have an extension method that applies to the whole domain of that type.   For example, this is one of my personal favorites:       public static bool IsBetween<T>(this T value, T low, T high)         where T : IComparable<T>     {         return value.CompareTo(low) >= 0 && value.CompareTo(high) <= 0;     }   This allows you to check if any IComparable<T> is within an upper and lower bound. Think of how many times you type something like:       if (response.Employee.Address.YearsAt >= 2         && response.Employee.Address.YearsAt <= 10)     {     ...     }     Now, you can instead type:       if(response.Employee.Address.YearsAt.IsBetween(2, 10))     {     ...     }     Note that this applies to all IComparable<T> -- that's ints, chars, strings, DateTime, etc -- and does not depend on any logical domain. In addition, it satisfies the second point and actually makes the code more readable and maintainable.   Let's look at the third point. In it we said that an extension method should fit the most specific interface or type possible. Now, I'm not saying if you have something that applies to enumerables, you create an extension for List, Array, Dictionary, etc (though you may have reasons for doing so), but that you should beware of making things TOO general.   For example, let's say we had an extension method like this:       public static T ConvertTo<T>(this object value)     {         return (T)Convert.ChangeType(value, typeof(T));     }         This lets you do more fluent conversions like:       double d = "5.0".ConvertTo<double>();     However, if you dig into Reflector (LOVE that tool) you will see that if the type you are calling on does not implement IConvertible, what you convert to MUST be the exact type or it will throw an InvalidCastException. Now this may or may not be what you want in this situation, and I leave that up to you. Things like this would fail:       object value = new Employee();     ...     // class cast exception because typeof(IEmployee) != typeof(Employee)     IEmployee emp = value.ConvertTo<IEmployee>();       Yes, that's a downfall of working with Convertible in general, but if you wanted your fluent interface to be more type-safe so that ConvertTo were only callable on IConvertibles (and let casting be a manual task), you could easily make it:         public static T ConvertTo<T>(this IConvertible value)     {         return (T)Convert.ChangeType(value, typeof(T));     }         This is what I mean by choosing the best type to extend. Consider that if we used the previous (object) version, every time we typed a dot ('.') on an instance we'd pull up ConvertTo() whether it was applicable or not. By filtering our extension method down to only valid types (those that implement IConvertible) we greatly reduce our IntelliSense pollution and apply a good level of compile-time correctness.   Now my fourth rule is just my general rule-of-thumb. Obviously, you can make extension methods as in-your-face as you want. I included all mine in my work libraries in its own sub-namespace, something akin to:       namespace Shared.Core.Extensions { ... }     This is in a library called Shared.Core, so just referencing the Core library doesn't pollute your IntelliSense, you have to actually do a using on Shared.Core.Extensions to bring the methods in. This is very similar to the way Microsoft puts its extension methods in System.Linq. This way, if you want 'em, you use the appropriate namespace. If you don't want 'em, they won't pollute your namespace.   To really make this work, however, that namespace should only include extension methods and subordinate types those extensions themselves may use. If you plant other useful classes in those namespaces, once a user includes it, they get all the extensions too.   Also, just as a personal preference, extension methods that aren't simply syntactical shortcuts, I like to put in a static utility class and then have extension methods for syntactical candy. For instance, I think it imaginable that any object could be converted to XML:       namespace Shared.Core     {         // A collection of XML Utility classes         public static class XmlUtility         {             ...             // Serialize an object into an xml string             public static string ToXml(object input)             {                 var xs = new XmlSerializer(input.GetType());                   // use new UTF8Encoding here, not Encoding.UTF8. The later includes                 // the BOM which screws up subsequent reads, the former does not.                 using (var memoryStream = new MemoryStream())                 using (var xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(memoryStream, new UTF8Encoding()))                 {                     xs.Serialize(xmlTextWriter, input);                     return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(memoryStream.ToArray());                 }             }             ...         }     }   I also wanted to be able to call this from an object like:       value.ToXml();     But here's the problem, if i made this an extension method from the start with that one little keyword "this", it would pop into IntelliSense for all objects which could be very polluting. Instead, I put the logic into a utility class so that users have the choice of whether or not they want to use it as just a class and not pollute IntelliSense, then in my extensions namespace, I add the syntactical candy:       namespace Shared.Core.Extensions     {         public static class XmlExtensions         {             public static string ToXml(this object value)             {                 return XmlUtility.ToXml(value);             }         }     }   So now it's the best of both worlds. On one hand, they can use the utility class if they don't want to pollute IntelliSense, and on the other hand they can include the Extensions namespace and use as an extension if they want. The neat thing is it also adheres to the Single Responsibility Principle. The XmlUtility is responsible for converting objects to XML, and the XmlExtensions is responsible for extending object's interface for ToXml().

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• Advanced Continuous Delivery to Azure from TFS, Part 1: Good Enough Is Not Great

  - by jasont

  The folks over on the TFS / Visual Studio team have been working hard at releasing a steady stream of new features for their new hosted Team Foundation Service in the cloud. One of the most significant features released was simple continuous delivery of your solution into your Azure deployments. The original announcement from Brian Harry can be found here. Team Foundation Service is a great platform for .Net developers who are used to working with TFS on-premises. I’ve been using it since it became available at the //BUILD conference in 2011, and when I recently came to work at Stackify, it was one of the first changes I made. Managing work items is much easier than the tool we were using previously, although there are some limitations (more on that in another blog post). However, when continuous deployment was made available, it blew my mind. It was the killer feature I didn’t know I needed. Not to say that I wasn’t previously an advocate for continuous delivery; just that it was always a pain to set up and configure. Having it hosted - and a one-click setup – well, that’s just the best thing since sliced bread. It made perfect sense: my source code is in the cloud, and my deployment is in the cloud. Great! I can queue up a build from my iPad or phone and just let it go! I quickly tore through the quick setup and saw it all work… sort of. This will be the first in a three part series on how to take the building block of Team Foundation Service continuous delivery and build a CD model that will actually work for any team deploying something more advanced than a “Hello World” example. Part 1: Good Enough Is Not Great Part 2: A Model That Works: Branching and Multiple Deployment Environments Part 3: Other Considerations: SQL, Custom Tasks, Etc Good Enough Is Not Great There. I’ve said it. I certainly hope no one on the TFS team is offended, but it’s the truth. Let’s take a look under the hood and understand how it works, and then why it’s not enough to handle real world CD as-is. How it works. (note that I’ve skipped a couple of steps; I already have my accounts set up and something deployed to Azure) The first step is to establish some oAuth magic between your Azure management portal and your TFS Instance. You do this via the management portal. Once it’s done, you have a new build process template in your TFS instance. (Image lifted from the documentation) From here, you’ll get the usual prompts for security, allowing access, etc. But you’ll also get to pick which Solution in your source control to build. Here’s what the bulk of the build definition looks like. All I’ve had to do is add in the solution to build (notice that mine is from a specific branch – Release – more on that later) and I’ve changed the configuration. I trigger the build, and voila! I have an Azure deployment a few minutes later. The beauty of this is that it’s all in the cloud and I’m not waiting for my machine to compile and upload the package. (I also had to enable the build definition first – by default it is created in disabled state, probably a good thing since it will trigger on every.single.checkin by default.) I get to see a history of deployments from the Azure portal, and can link into TFS to see the associated changesets and work items. You’ll notice also that this build definition also automatically put my code in the Staging slot of my Azure deployment – more on this soon. For now, I can VIP swap and be in production. (P.S. I hate VIP swap and “production” and “staging” in Azure. More on that later too.) That’s it. That’s the default out-of-box experience. Easy, right? But it’s full of room for improvement, so let’s get into that….   The Problems Nothing is perfect (except my code – it’s always perfect), and neither is Continuous Deployment without a bit of work to help it fit your dev team’s process. So what are the issues? Issue 1: Staging vs QA vs Prod vs whatever other environments your team may have. This, for me, is the big hairy one. Remember how this automatically deployed to staging rather than prod for us? There are a couple of issues with this model: If I want to deliver to prod, it requires intervention on my part after deployment (via a VIP swap). If I truly want to promote between environments (i.e. Nightly Build –> Stable QA –> Production) I likely have configuration changes between each environment such as database connection strings and this process (and the VIP swap) doesn’t account for this. Yet. Issue 2: Branching and delivering on every check-in. As I mentioned above, I have set this up to target a specific branch – Release – of my code. For the purposes of this example, I have adopted the “basic” branching strategy as defined by the ALM Rangers. This basically establishes a “Main” trunk where you branch off Dev and Release branches. Granted, the Release branch is usually the only thing you will deploy to production, but you certainly don’t want to roll to production automatically when you merge to the Release branch and check-in (unless you like the thrill of it, and in that case, I like your style, cowboy….). Rather, you have nightly build and QA environments, or if you’ve adopted the feature-branch model you have environments for those. Those are the environments you want to continuously deploy to. But that takes us back to Issue 1: we currently have a 1:1 solution to Azure deployment target. Issue 3: SQL and other custom tasks. Let’s be honest and address the elephant in the room: I need to get some sleep because I see an elephant in the room. But seriously, I can’t think of an application I have touched in the last 10 years that doesn’t need to consider SQL changes when deploying code and upgrading an environment. Microsoft seems perfectly content to ignore this elephant for now: yes, they’ve added Data Tier Applications. But let’s be honest with ourselves again: no one really uses it, and it’s not suitable for anything more complex than a Hello World sample project database. Why? Because it doesn’t fit well into a great source control story. Developers make stored procedure and table changes all day long while coding complex applications, and if someone forgets to go update the DACPAC before the automated deployment, you have a broken build until it’s completed. Developers – not just DBAs – also like to work with SQL in SQL tools, not in Visual Studio. I’m really picking on SQL because that’s generally the biggest concern that I hear. But we need to account for any custom tasks as well in the build process.   The Solutions… ? We’ve taken a look at how this all works, and addressed the shortcomings. In my next post (which I promise will be very, very soon), I will detail how I’ve overcome these shortcomings and used this foundation to create a mature, flexible model for deploying my app – any version, any time, to any environment.

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• SQL University: What and why of database refactoring

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  This is a post for a great idea called SQL University started by Jorge Segarra also famously known as SqlChicken on Twitter. It’s a collection of blog posts on different database related topics contributed by several smart people all over the world. So this week is mine and we’ll be talking about database testing and refactoring. In 3 posts we’ll cover: SQLU part 1 - What and why of database testing SQLU part 2 - What and why of database refactoring SQLU part 3 - Tools of the trade This is a second part of the series and in it we’ll take a look at what database refactoring is and why do it. Why refactor a database To know why refactor we first have to know what refactoring actually is. Code refactoring is a process where we change module internals in a way that does not change that module’s input/output behavior. For successful refactoring there is one crucial thing we absolutely must have: Tests. Automated unit tests are the only guarantee we have that we haven’t broken the input/output behavior before refactoring. If you haven’t go back ad read my post on the matter. Then start writing them. Next thing you need is a code module. Those are views, UDFs and stored procedures. By having direct table access we can kiss fast and sweet refactoring good bye. One more point to have a database abstraction layer. And no, ORM’s don’t fall into that category. But also know that refactoring is NOT adding new functionality to your code. Many have fallen into this trap. Don’t be one of them and resist the lure of the dark side. And it’s a strong lure. We developers in general love to add new stuff to our code, but hate fixing our own mistakes or changing existing code for no apparent reason. To be a good refactorer one needs discipline and focus. Now we know that refactoring is all about changing inner workings of existing code. This can be due to performance optimizations, changing internal code workflows or some other reason. This is a typical black box scenario to the outside world. If we upgrade the car engine it still has to drive on the road (preferably faster) and not fly (no matter how cool that would be). Also be aware that white box tests will break when we refactor. What to refactor in a database Refactoring databases doesn’t happen that often but when it does it can include a lot of stuff. Let us look at a few common cases. Adding or removing database schema objects Adding, removing or changing table columns in any way, adding constraints, keys, etc… All of these can be counted as internal changes not visible to the data consumer. But each of these carries a potential input/output behavior change. Dropping a column can result in views not working anymore or stored procedure logic crashing. Adding a unique constraint shows duplicated data that shouldn’t exist. Foreign keys break a truncate table command executed from an application that runs once a month. All these scenarios are very real and can happen. With the proper database abstraction layer fully covered with black box tests we can make sure something like that does not happen (hopefully at all). Changing physical structures Physical structures include heaps, indexes and partitions. We can pretty much add or remove those without changing the data returned by the database. But the performance can be affected. So here we use our performance tests. We do have them, right? Just by adding a single index we can achieve orders of magnitude performance improvement. Won’t that make users happy? But what if that index causes our write operations to crawl to a stop. again we have to test this. There are a lot of things to think about and have tests for. Without tests we can’t do successful refactoring! Fixing bad code We all have some bad code in our systems. We usually refer to that code as code smell as they violate good coding practices. Examples of such code smells are SQL injection, use of SELECT *, scalar UDFs or cursors, etc… Each of those is huge code smell and can result in major code changes. Take SELECT * from example. If we remove a column from a table the client using that SELECT * statement won’t have a clue about that until it runs. Then it will gracefully crash and burn. Not to mention the widely unknown SELECT * view refresh problem that Tomas LaRock (@SQLRockstar on Twitter) and Colin Stasiuk (@BenchmarkIT on Twitter) talk about in detail. Go read about it, it’s informative. Refactoring this includes replacing the * with column names and most likely change to application using the database. Breaking apart huge stored procedures Have you ever seen seen a stored procedure that was 2000 lines long? I have. It’s not pretty. It hurts the eyes and sucks the will to live the next 10 minutes. They are a maintenance nightmare and turn into things no one dares to touch. I’m willing to bet that 100% of time they don’t have a single test on them. Large stored procedures (and functions) are a clear sign that they contain business logic. General opinion on good database coding practices says that business logic has no business in the database. That’s the applications part. Refactoring such behemoths requires writing lots of edge case tests for the stored procedure input/output behavior and then start to refactor it. First we split the logic inside into smaller parts like new stored procedures and UDFs. Those then get called from the master stored procedure. Once we’ve successfully modularized the database code it’s best to transfer that logic into the applications consuming it. This only leaves the stored procedure with common data manipulation logic. Of course this isn’t always possible so having a plethora of performance and behavior unit tests is absolutely necessary to confirm we’ve actually improved the codebase in some way.   Refactoring is not a popular chore amongst developers or managers. The former don’t like fixing old code, the latter can’t see the financial benefit. Remember how we talked about being lousy at estimating future costs in the previous post? But there comes a time when it must be done. Hopefully I’ve given you some ideas how to get started. In the last post of the series we’ll take a look at the tools to use and an example of testing and refactoring.

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• Are IE 9 will have a place in heart of user ?

  - by anirudha

  in a advertisement of IE 9 MSFT compare two product first is their IE9 and second is chrome 6. I know 6 is not currently [9] but no objection because may be they make ads when 6 is currently version and have RC or beta in their hands. on IE 9 test-drive website they show many of people ads to show the user that IE9 is performance better or other chrome or Firefox not. well they not compare with Firefox because last days firefox not still in news and search trends like before RC release many of user googling for them. Well I myself found IE9 perform smoother then chrome. but what MSFT do after IE9 nothing they waiting for IE 10 not for give updates not as well as Google chrome and Firefox. Are IE9 have anything new for Developer even a small or big. well they tell you blah or useless things everytime when they make for next version no matter for you but a matter for them because they add a new thing even useless for developer. I am not have any feeling with IE bad but I like to make reviews as well as I can make. I show you something who I experience with IE and someother browser like Chrome and Firefox. IE 9 still have no plugin as well as other provided like Firefox have Firebug a great utilities who is best option for developer to debug their code. IE9 developer tool is good but still you never customize them or readymade customization available to work as in firefox many of person make customization for firebug like example :- firepicker for picking color in firebug , firebug autocomplete for intellisense like feature when you write JavaScript inside console panel , pixelperfect , firequery , sitepoint reference and many other great example we all love to use. as other things that Firefox give many things customizable like themes , ui and many thing customization means more thing user or developer want to make themselves and more contribution make them better software so Firefox is great because customization is a great thing inside firefox and chrome. if you read some post of developer on MSDN to what’s new in IE 9 developer tool that you feel they are joking whenever you see some other things of Firefox and chrome. in a Firefox a plugin perform many much things but in IE still use IE 9 developer tool no other option like in Firefox use Firebug and many other utilities to make development easier and time saving and best as we can do.if you see Firefox page on mozilla that sublines of firefox is high performance easy customization advanced security well you can say what’s performance but there is no comparison with IE because IE have only performance and nothing else. but Firefox have these three thing to make product love. and third thing I really love that security yeah security. from long time before whenever IE6 is no hackproff and many other easily hack IE6 whenever Firefox is secure. I found myself that many of website install a software on client’s computer and they still not know about them so they track everything. sometime they hijack the homepage and make their website as their homepage. sometime they do something and you trying  to go to  any website then they go to their site first. the problem I telling about not long before it’s time of late in 2008 whenever Firefox is much better then IE6. if someone have bad experience with anyone of these software share with us I like to hear your voice. whenever IE still not for use Firefox is a good option for us even user or developer. I not know why someone make next version of IE. IE still have time to go away from Web. Firefox not rude as IE they still believe in user feedback and chrome is also open the door for feedback on their product gooogle Chrome. but what thing they made in IE on user feedback nothing. they still thing to teach what they maked not thing about what user need. if you spent some hour on firefox and chrome then you found what’s matter. what thing you have whenever you use IE or other browser like google chrome and Firefox :- as a user IE give you nothing even tell you blah blah and more blah but still next version of IE means next IE6 for the web. as in Google chrome you find plugins addons or customization to make experience better but in IE9 you can’t customize anything even the themes they have by default. Firefox already have a great list of plugins or addons to make experience better with Web but IE9 have nothing. this means IE9 not for user and other like chrome and firefox give you much better experience then IE. next thing after user is developer. first thing is that all developer want smooth development who save their time not take too perhaps saving.posts on IE9 show that a list of thing improved in IE 9 developer tool but are one developer tool enough for web development so developer need more utilities to solve different different type of puzzle who IE 9 never give like in Firefox you have utilities to do a task even small or big one. in chrome same experience you have but IE9 never give any plugin or utilities to make our work faster even they are new headache for developer because IE not give update as soon as other because in Firefox and in chrome if a bug is reported then they solve them fast and distribute them in next version of software very soon but in IE wait for a long time like IE 9 and IE 8 have no official release between them as update. As my conclusion there is no reason to use IE and adopt 9 again. it’s really not for Developer or user even newbie or smart people. as a rule I want to beware you with IE because it’s my responsibilities to move the thing in good way as I can make. well are you sure that there is no reason or profit they thing to have with IE9  if not why they forget luna [windows xp] user. because they are old nothing they want to force user to give them some money by purchasing a new version of OS. so this a thing why they marketed their software. if you thing about what firefox and chrome want to make : Mozilla's mission is to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the web. chrome mission we all see whenever we use them. but IE9 is a trick they promote because they want to add something to next version of windows. if somebody like IE9 [even surprised by ads they see or post they read] then they purchase windows soon as they possible. Well you feel that I am opposition of IE9 and favor of chrome and Firefox yeah you feel right I hate IE from a heart not from a pencil. well you get same thing when you have trying three product major I described here Chrome firefox and IE. well don’t believe on the blogs , posts or article who are provided by the merchant or vender’s website. open the eyes read and thing what they talk and feel are they really true. if you confused that compare with some other. now you know the true because no one telling so badly as a user can described who use them not only one who make their feature. always open the eyes don’t believe use your mind and find the truth. thanks for reading my post good bye and take care

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• Moving from Tortoise to TFS

  - by MarkPearl

  The Past A few years ago my small software company made the jump from storing code on a shared folder to source code control. At the time we had evaluated a few of the options and settled on Tortoise SVN. The main motivation for going the SVN route was that we found a great plugin for Visual Studio that allowed us to avoid the command prompt for uploading changes (like I said we are windows programmers… command prompt bad!! ) and it was free. Up to now we have been pretty happy with SVN as it removed many of the worries that I had about how safe my code was on a shared folder and also gave us the opportunity to safely have several developers work on the same project at the same time. The only times when we have been unhappy has been when we have had SVN hell days – which pretty much occur when you are doing something out of the norm and suddenly SVN just won’t resolve conflicts or something along those lines. This happens once every 4 or 5 months and is not necessarily a problem caused directly by SVN – but a problem augmented by SVN. When you have SVN hell days you want to curse SVN! With that in mind I recently have been relooking at our source code control. I have explored using GIT and was very impressed by it and have also looked at TFS. From a source code control perspective I don’t want to get into a heated discussion on which one is better – but I do want to mention that I wear two hats in my organization – software developer & manager, and with the manager hat on I tend to sway the TFS route. So when I was given a coupon to test DiscountASP.Net Team Foundation Server Service for a year, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to try TFS in a distributed environment and also make the first step towards having an integrated development management system. Some of the things that appeal to me about DiscountASP’s offering are the following… Basic management / planning facilities like to do lists inside Visual Studio Daily backup of data on the server – we are developers, not IT managers and so the more of this I could outsource the better Distributed solution – all of us work remotely and so this was a big one as well. Registering and Setting Up with DiscountASP.NET The whole registration process was simple and intuitive. The web interface is not the most visually impressive one, but it is functional and a few seconds after I clicked the last submit button a email was sitting in my inbox giving me my control panel username and suggesting that I read the “Getting Started” article. The getting started article was easy to read and understand so no complaints there either. Next to set my dev environment to work. With a few references to the getting started article I had completed the whole setup process in a matter of minutes. Ten minutes after initiating the whole thing I was logged into VS2010 and creating my first TFS project. With the service that I signed up for, I have access for 5 users – which is sufficient for my internal needs. So from what I can tell, to set the rest of us up on the system I just need to supply them with their user credentials and url. My Concerns Resolved 1) Security So, a few concerns I had about the service. First and foremost – is it secure? I would hate for someone to get access to our code and the whole idea of putting it up on the internet is a concern for me. Turning to the Knowledge Base on the DiscountASP website this is one of the first question I can see answered. According to them it is secure. I have extracted their comment below regarding this. Our TFS hosting service is secure. We only accept HTTPS connections ensuring that any client-server data transmission is encrypted. At the network level, all of our systems are protected by multiple Juniper firewalls, Tipping Point's Intrusion Detection System (see Tipping Point's case study of our use here), and we also employ DDoS mitigation to add extra layers of security. Additionally, physical access to the servers is tightly restricted. Please see the security section of this Knowledge Base article for further details. 2) Web Portal Access The other big concern I have is regarding web portal access. In the ideal world I would like to be able to give my end users access to a web portal for reporting bugs etc. When I initially read through the FAQ of the site it mentioned that there was web portal access – but from what I can see this is just for “users”. Since I am limited to 5 users for the account, it would not be practical to set up external users that we could get feedback from on bugs etc. I would be interested if this is possible – and if so if someone could post it in the comments it would be much appreciated. If this isn’t possible, it is a slight let down as we rely heavily on end user feedback to get feedback and it would have been ideal to have gotten this within the service. Other than those two items, I didn’t have any real concerns that were unresolved. So where do I go from here? So time passed by from the initial writing of this post and as work whirred in and out of my inbox I have still not had a proper opportunity to give the service a test run. Recently though things have began to slow down and then surprise surprise I had another SVN Hell day. With that experience I had a new found resolve to get our team on TFS and so today we are going to start to use the service as a team. I am hoping that I do not have TFS hell days – but if I do, I will be sure to write about them. In short - the verdict is still out on whether this service is going to be invaluable to my business or whether it will create more headaches than it is worth BUT I am hopping it will be an invaluable service. I will only really be able to determine that in a few months… till then!

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• 5 Ways Android Still Disappoints (Me)

  - by TStewartDev

  Let me make this clear: I'm annoyed with Apple. I don't like their current policies and I don't like where Steve Jobs is taking the company. In general, I don't like it when any one company gets too much control in a market. When that happens, the leading company dictates the game and as consumers, our options all but disappear. That said, I'm still going to buy a new iPhone next week. My Apple-hating friends seem to desperately want me to go Android instead, but frankly, it's not good enough for me, and here are the reasons why. The Modern WinMo One of the reasons that Microsoft has identified for Windows Mobile's rapid decline is the breadth of hardware. They exercised little control over manufacturer's implementations. In theory, that sounds great. We as consumers have lots of choice. In practice, though, it meant among other things that updates to the devices were left up to the manufacturers. As a result, that rarely happened. (I'm still bitter at Toshiba for leaving me hanging back in 2002.) And now, Google is doing the same thing with Android. Case in point: my wife has a Motorola Backflip that we bought in April. It was released in March. Motorola says it will get Android 2.1 "sometime in Q3". Great. Meanwhile, I pull down the latest version of iPhone OS (now iOS) and install it the same day it's released. You may say that I can't judge Android by one lazy manufacturer. Yup, I sure can. With Apple, my original iPhone has been supported perfectly for 3 years. With Android, I will have to wait for upgrades after Google releases them, possibly indefinitely. Not cool. AT&T We signed a new contract with AT&T in April to get my wife's phone. I've had a reasonable experience with them. I don't imagine my experience with Verizon would be any better, and I'm relatively confident that Sprint doesn't have the coverage it takes to work well for us. The fact is, AT&T, for whatever reason, doesn't have jack for Android phones. May not be Android's fault, but it's still a shortcoming that prevents me from having it just like the iPhone's exclusivity keeps some folks on other networks from having it. Innovation? What Innovation? Android has a nice dashboard and a great notification system and… nothing else original. I keep reading about how disappointing the iPhone is nowadays. "It has no innovation," people say. Who does? Android has modeled its behavior after the iPhone. That's fine, but if all you've got is a similar product and I'm invested both skill-wise and app-wise in my current platform, why should I change? Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 looks somewhat innovative, and I'm pretty excited to see what they'll bring to the table, but that's another six months away, at least. I've got a 3 year old phone that has some annoying issues now (thanks to recent encounters with water). I need a new phone now. Is This Going to Work? There's no shortage of criticism of Apple over its App Store policies, and I've vented my own anger about it. However, I will give them credit: their screening of apps has done a great job of weeding out the crap and gives an excellent indication that the app will work on my device. How about Android? Nope. It might work on your phone. Maybe. You'll have to try it to see. Get burned by it? Well, write a nasty review to try to keep others from making the mistake you did. If you don't mind doing that stuff, then Android is the platform for you. Personally, I'd rather have a receptionist screening out the telemarketing and survey calls than hang up on them myself, but that's your call. Slow, Slowing, Slower All this yapping about multitasking. This is an area I've been on Apple's side from the beginning. Sorry folks, but this is the number one reason I hated Windows Mobile: the longer you use it, the slower it gets because it doesn't kill apps. I'm with Steve Jobs on this one: if you see a task manager, we're doing it wrong. I don't want to have to manually kill apps. I hate doing that on Windows let alone on a mobile device. To me, priority one should be keeping the device speedy. Waiting for your device to respond is unacceptable. Bonus! Taken from iPhone Letdown? 8 Things Apple Didn't Announce, here are my responses: 4G Yeah, let me know if your area actually has it. I live in Lincoln, Nebraska. No carrier is going to have 4G here for at least 3 years. Meanwhile, you still get to pay for it. Yay! Cloud iTunes/OTA Sync You got me here. Of course, whether or not your Android device will be able to do it is always a good question. 3G Video Chat You got me here, too. I'm sure you spent countless hours in front of your phone with video chat. Also, I can't wait for the "No Video Chat While Driving" laws. Mobile Hotspot This is a neat feature, but as the author points out, it's left up to the carrier whether to implement it or not. Pretty sure any Android phones that come to AT&T won't have this enabled in the foreseeable future. Is Verizon even allowing this? I just figured Sprint was because they're failing so hard at keeping customers. Free MobileMe I use Google's services with my iPhone. The only people I know who use MobileMe are Apple fanboys and fangirls. If you choose to pay for a service that you can get for free, that's your decision, not Apple's. Voice Input Voice input has been available on phones (even "dumb" phones) for years now. iPhone does have the ability, though limited. Why don't I hear people telling their phones what to do? Maybe because it's still easier to use your fingers than talk to it. Get back to me when this becomes an important feature. Free Navigation Maybe this will be a bigger deal to me now that I'm getting a phone with GPS, but when using my buddy's 3gs, Google maps has worked just fine. Maybe I just don't trust turn-by-turn navigation enough to want it. Dashboard The only legitimate complaint on this list, to me. iPhone's home screen is pathetic, doubly so for the iPad. What a waste of perfectly usable space. I also want to add notifications to this list. Android's notification panel is far superior to the iPhone's. I don't want to hunt all over my screen to find little red dots. Put 'em in one place, Apple.

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• How to begin? Windows 8 Development

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  Ok. I convinced you in my last post to do some Win8 development. You want a piece of that cake, or whatever your reasons may be. Good! Welcome to the club! Now let me ask you a question: what are you going to write? Ah. That’s the big one, isn’t it? What indeed? If you have been creating applications for computers before you’re in for quite a shock. The way people perceive apps on a tablet is quite different from what we know as applications. There’s a reason we call them apps instead of applications! Yes, technically they are applications but we don’t call them apps only because it sounds cool. The abbreviated form of the word applications itself is a pointer. Apps are small. Apps are focused. Apps are more lightweight. Apps do one thing but they do that one thing extremely good. In the ‘old’ days we wrote huge systems. We build ecosystems of services, screens, databases and more to create a system that provides value for the user. Think about it: what application do you use most at work? Can you in one sentence describe what it is, or what it does and yet still distinctively describe its purpose? I doubt you can. Let’s have a look at Outlouk. We all know it and we all love or hate it. But what is it? A mail program? No, there’s so much more there: calendar, contacts, RSS feeds and so on. Some call it a ‘collaboration’  application but that’s not really true as well. After all, why should a collaboration application give me my schedule for the day? I think the best way to describe Outlook is “client for Exchange”  although that isn’t accurate either. Anyway: Outlook is a great application but it’s not an ‘app’ and therefor not very suitable for WinRT. Ok. Disclaimer here: yes, you can write big applications for WinRT. Some will. But that’s not what 99.9% of the developers will do. So I am stating here that big applications are not meant for WinRT. If 0.01% of the developers think that this is nonsense then they are welcome to go ahead but for the majority here this is not what we’re talking about. So: Apps are small, lightweight and good at what they do but only at that. If you’re a Phone developer you already know that: Phone apps on any platform fit the description I have above. If you’ve ever worked in a large cooperation before you might have seen one of these before: the Mission Statement. It’s supposed to be a oneliner that sums up what the company is supposed to do. Funny enough: although this doesn’t work for large companies it does work for defining your app. A mission statement for an app describes what it does. If it doesn’t fit in the mission statement then your app is going to get to big and will fail. A statement like this should be in the following style “<your app name> is the best app to <describe single task>” Fill in the blanks, write it and go! Mmm.. not really. There are some things there we need to think about. But the statement is a very, very important one. If you cannot fit your app in that line you’re preparing to fail. Your app will become to big, its purpose will be unclear and it will be hard to use. People won’t download it and those who do will give it a bad rating therefor preventing that huge success you’ve been dreaming about. Stick to the statement! Ok, let’s give it a try: “PlanesAreCool” is the best app to do planespotting in the field. You might have seen these people along runways of airports: taking photographs of airplanes and noting down their numbers and arrival- and departure times. We are going to help them out with our great app! If you look at the statement, can you guess what it does? I bet you can. If you find out it isn’t clear enough of if it’s too broad, refine it. This is probably the most important step in the development of your app so give it enough time! So. We’ve got the statement. Print it out, stick it to the wall and look at it. What does it tell you? If you see this, what do you think the app does? Write that down. Sit down with some friends and talk about it. What do they expect from an app like this? Write that down as well. Brainstorm. Make a list of features. This is mine: Note planes Look up aircraft carriers Add pictures of that plane Look up airfields Notify friends of new spots Look up details of a type of plane Plot a graph with arrival and departure times Share new spots on social media Look up history of a particular aircraft Compare your spots with friends Write down arrival times Write down departure times Write down wind conditions Write down the runway they take Look up weather conditions for next spotting day Invite friends to join you for a day of spotting. Now, I must make it clear that I am not a planespotter nor do I know what one does. So if the above list makes no sense, I apologize. There is a lesson: write apps for stuff you know about…. First of all, let’s look at our statement and then go through the list of features. Remove everything that has nothing to do with that statement! If you end up with an empty list, try again with both steps. Note planes Look up aircraft carriers Add pictures of that plane Look up airfields Notify friends of new spots Look up details of a type of plane Plot a graph with arrival and departure times Share new spots on social media Look up history of a particular aircraft Compare your spots with friends Write down arrival times Write down departure times Write down wind conditions Write down the runway they take Look up weather conditions for next spotting day Invite friends to join you for a day of spotting. That's better. The things I removed could be pretty useful to a plane spotter and could be fun to write. But do they match the statement? I said that the app is for spotting in the field, so “look up airfields” doesn’t belong there: I know where I am so why look it up? And the same goes for inviting friends or looking up the weather conditions for tomorrow. I am at the airfield right now, looking through my binoculars at the planes. I know the weather now and I don’t care about tomorrow. If you feel the items you’ve crossed out are valuable, then why not write another app? One that says “SpotNoter” is the best app for preparing a day of spotting with my friends. That’s a different app! Remember: Win8 apps are small and very good at doing ONE thing, and one thing only! If you have made that list, it’s time to prepare the navigation of your app. The navigation is how users see your app and how they use it. We’ll do that next time!

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• Issues Converting Plain Text Into Microsoft Word Bulleted Lists

  - by user787832

  I'm a programmer. I hate status reports. I found a way to live with it. While I am working in my IDE ( Visual Slickedit ) I keep a plain text file open in one of the file/buffer tabs. As I finish things I just jot down a quick note into that file. At the end of the week that becomes my weekly status report. Example entries: The Datatables.net plugin runs very slowly in IE 8 with more than 2,000 records. I changed the way I did the server side code to process the data to make less work for the plugin to get decent performance for the IE 8 users. I made a class to wrap data from the new data collection objects into the legacy data holder objects. This will let the new database code be backward compatible with the legacy code until we can replace it. I found the bug reported by Jane. The software is fine. The database we use for the test site has data that is corrupted in a way it wouldn't be for production site At the end of the month I go back to each weekly *.txt file and paste all of the entries into a MS Word file for a monthly report. I give the monthly report to a liason to the contracting company who has to compile everyone's monthly reports into a single MS Word 2007 document. His problem, soon to be my problem, comes when he highlights my paragraphs like the ones above to put bullets in front of my paragraphs. When he highlights my notes to put bullets in front of them with MS Word 2007, Word rearranges the text a bit and the new line chars/carriage returns stagger the text so the text is no longer in neat chunks. This: I found the bug reported by Jane. The software is fine. The database we use for the test site has data that is corrupted in a way it wouldn't be for production site Becomes This: I found the bug reported by Jane. The software is fine. The database we use for the test site has data that is corrupted in a way it wouldn't be for production site I tried turning word wrap on in my IDE for the text files I put my status notes in. It just puts some kind of newline character in anyway. Searching/Replacing those chars in the text files has the result of destroying the paragraphs. Once my notes are pasted into MS Word, Word automatically translates them into paragraph breaks. Searching/Replacing them there has similar results. Blank lines separating the notes disappears. One big mess. What I would like is to be able to keep adding my status notes to a text file as I am now, but do something different when I paste the notes into MS Word such that my liason can select the text, hit the bulleting command and NOT have the staggered text as shown above. Any ideas? Thanks much in advance Steve

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• Who could ask for more with LESS CSS? (Part 2 of 3&ndash;Setup)

  - by ToStringTheory

  Welcome to part two in my series covering the LESS CSS language.  In the first post, I covered the two major CSS precompiled languages - LESS and SASS to a small extent, iterating over some of the features that you could expect to find in them.  In this post, I will go a little further in depth into the setup and execution of using the LESS framework. Introduction It really doesn’t take too much to get LESS working in your project.  The basic workflow will be including the necessary translator in your project, defining bundles for the LESS files, add the necessary code to your layouts.cshtml file, and finally add in all your necessary styles to the LESS files!  Lets get started… New Project Just like all great experiments in Visual Studio, start up a File > New Project, and create a new MVC 4 Web Application.  The Base Package After you have the new project spun up, use the Nuget Package Manager to install the Bundle Transformer: LESS package. This will take care of installing the main translator that we will be using for LESS code (dotless which is another Nuget package), as well as the core framework for the Bundle Transformer library.  The installation will come up with some instructions in a readme file on how to modify your web.config to handle all your *.less requests through the Bundle Transformer, which passes the translating onto dotless. Where To Put These LESS Files?! This step isn’t really a requirement, however I find that I don’t like how ASP.Net MVC just has a content directory where they store CSS, content images, css images….  In my project, I went ahead and created a new directory just for styles – LESS files, CSS files, and images that are only referenced in LESS or CSS.  Ignore the MVC directory as this was my testbed for another project I was working on at the same time.  As you can see here, I have: A top level directory for images which contains only images used in a page A top level directory for scripts A top level directory for Styles A few directories for plugins I am using (Colrizr, JQueryUI, Farbtastic) Multiple *.less files for different functions (I’ll go over these in a minute) I find that this layout offers the best separation of content types.  Bring Out Your Bundles! The next thing that we need to do is add in the necessary code for the bundling of these LESS files.  Go ahead and open your BundleConfig.cs file, usually located in the /App_Start/ folder of the project.  As you will see in a minute, instead of using the method Microsoft does in the base MVC 4 project, I change things up a bit.  Define Constants The first thing I do is define constants for each of the virtual paths that will be used in the bundler: The main reason is that I hate magic strings in my program, so the fact that you first defined a virtual path in the BundleConfig file, and then used that path in the _Layout.cshtml file really irked me. Add Bundles to the BundleCollection Next, I am going to define the bundles for my styles in my AddStyleBundles method: That is all it takes to get all of my styles in play with LESS.  The CssTransformer and NullOrderer types come from the Bundle Transformer we grabbed earlier.  If we didn’t use that package, we would have to write our own function (not too hard, but why do it if it’s been done). I use the site.less file as my main hub for LESS - I will cover that more in the next section. Add Bundles To Layout.cshtml File With the constants in the BundleConfig file, instead of having to use the same magic string I defined for the bundle virtual path, I am able to do this: Notice here that besides the RenderSection magic strings (something I am working on in another side project), all of the bundles are now based on const strings.  If I need to change the virtual path, I only have to do it in one place.  Nifty! Get Started! We are now ready to roll!  As I said in the previous section, I use the site.less file as a central hub for my styles: As seen here, I have a reset.css file which is a simple CSS reset.  Next, I have created a file for managing all my color variables – colors.less: Here, you can see some of the standards I started to use, in this case for color variables.  I define all color variables with the @col prefix.  Currently, I am going for verbose variable names. The next file imported is my font.less file that defines the typeface information for the site: Simple enough.  A couple of imports for fonts from Google, and then declaring variables for use throughout LESS.  I also set up the heading sizes, margins, etc..  You can also see my current standardization for font declaration strings – @font. Next, I pull in a mixins.less file that I grabbed from the Twitter Bootstrap library that gives some useful parameterized mixins for use such as border-radius, gradient, box-shadow, etc… The common.less file is a file that just contains items that I will be defining that can be used across all my LESS files.  Kind of like my own mixins or font-helpers: Finally I have my layout.less file that contains all of my definitions for general site layout – width, main/sidebar widths, footer layout, etc: That’s it!  For the rest of my one off definitions/corrections, I am currently putting them into the site.less file beneath my original imports Note Probably my favorite side effect of using the LESS handler/translator while bundling is that it also does a CSS checkup when rendering…  See, when your web.config is set to debug, bundling will output the url to the direct less file, not the bundle, and the http handler intercepts the call, compiles the less, and returns the result.  If there is an error in your LESS code, the CSS file can be returned empty, or may have the error output as a comment on the first couple lines. If you have the web.config set to not debug, then if there is an error in your code, you will end up with the usual ASP.Net exception page (unless you catch the exception of course), with information regarding the failure of the conversion, such as brace mismatch, undefined variable, etc…  I find it nifty. Conclusion This is really just the beginning.  LESS is very powerful and exciting!  My next post will show an actual working example of why LESS is so powerful with its functions and variables…  At least I hope it will!  As for now, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions on my current practice, I would love to hear them!  Feel free to drop a comment or shoot me an email using the contact page.  In the mean time, I plan on posting the final post in this series tomorrow or the day after, with my side project, as well as a whole base ASP.Net MVC4 templated project with LESS added in it so that you can check out the layout I have in this post.  Until next time…

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• Why is Postfix trying to connect to other machines SMTP port 25?

  - by TryTryAgain

  Jul 5 11:09:25 relay postfix/smtp[3084]: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.101]:25: Connection refused Jul 5 11:09:25 relay postfix/smtp[3087]: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.247]:25: Connection refused Jul 5 11:09:25 relay postfix/smtp[3088]: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.101]:25: Connection refused Jul 5 11:09:25 relay postfix/smtp[3084]: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.247]:25: Connection refused Jul 5 11:09:25 relay postfix/smtp[3087]: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.110]:25: Connection refused Jul 5 11:09:25 relay postfix/smtp[3088]: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.110]:25: Connection refused Jul 5 11:09:25 relay postfix/smtp[3084]: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.102]:25: Connection refused Jul 5 11:09:30 relay postfix/smtp[3085]: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.102]:25: Connection refused Jul 5 11:09:30 relay postfix/smtp[3086]: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.247]:25: Connection refused Jul 5 11:09:30 relay postfix/smtp[3086]: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.102]:25: Connection refused Jul 5 11:09:55 relay postfix/smtp[3087]: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.40.40.130]:25: Connection timed out Jul 5 11:09:55 relay postfix/smtp[3084]: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.40.40.130]:25: Connection timed out Jul 5 11:09:55 relay postfix/smtp[3088]: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.40.40.130]:25: Connection timed out Jul 5 11:09:55 relay postfix/smtp[3087]: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.135]:25: Connection refused Jul 5 11:09:55 relay postfix/smtp[3084]: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.110]:25: Connection refused Jul 5 11:09:55 relay postfix/smtp[3088]: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.247]:25: Connection refused Is this a DNS thing, doubtful as I've changed from our local DNS to Google's..still Postfix will occasionally try and connect to ab.xyz.com from a variety of addresses that may or may not have port 25 open and act as mail servers to begin with. Why is Postfix attempting to connect to other machines as seen in the log? Mail is being sent properly, other than that, it appears all is good. Occasionally I'll also see: relay postfix/error[3090]: 3F1AB42132: to=, relay=none, delay=32754, delays=32724/30/0/0, dsn=4.4.1, status=deferred (delivery temporarily suspended: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.102]:25: Connection refused) I have Postfix setup with very little restrictions: mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8, 10.0.0.0/8 only. Like I said it appears all mail is getting passed through, but I hate seeing errors and it is confusing me as to why it would be attempting to connect to other machines as seen in the log. Some Output of cat /var/log/mail.log|grep 3F1AB42132 Jul 5 02:04:01 relay postfix/smtpd[1653]: 3F1AB42132: client=unknown[10.41.0.109] Jul 5 02:04:01 relay postfix/cleanup[1655]: 3F1AB42132: message-id= Jul 5 02:04:01 relay postfix/qmgr[1588]: 3F1AB42132: from=, size=3404, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Jul 5 02:04:31 relay postfix/smtp[1634]: 3F1AB42132: to=, relay=none, delay=30, delays=0.02/0/30/0, dsn=4.4.1, status=deferred (connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.110]:25: Connection refused) Jul 5 02:13:58 relay postfix/qmgr[1588]: 3F1AB42132: from=, size=3404, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Jul 5 02:14:28 relay postfix/smtp[1681]: 3F1AB42132: to=, relay=none, delay=628, delays=598/0.01/30/0, dsn=4.4.1, status=deferred (connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.247]:25: Connection refused) Jul 5 02:28:58 relay postfix/qmgr[1588]: 3F1AB42132: from=, size=3404, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Jul 5 02:29:28 relay postfix/smtp[1684]: 3F1AB42132: to=, relay=none, delay=1527, delays=1497/0/30/0, dsn=4.4.1, status=deferred (connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.135]:25: Connection refused) Jul 5 02:58:58 relay postfix/qmgr[1588]: 3F1AB42132: from=, size=3404, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Jul 5 02:59:28 relay postfix/smtp[1739]: 3F1AB42132: to=, relay=none, delay=3327, delays=3297/0/30/0, dsn=4.4.1, status=deferred (connect to ab.xyz.com[10.40.40.130]:25: Connection timed out) Jul 5 03:58:58 relay postfix/qmgr[1588]: 3F1AB42132: from=, size=3404, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Jul 5 03:59:28 relay postfix/smtp[1839]: 3F1AB42132: to=, relay=none, delay=6928, delays=6897/0.03/30/0, dsn=4.4.1, status=deferred (connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.101]:25: Connection refused) Jul 5 04:11:03 relay postfix/qmgr[2039]: 3F1AB42132: from=, size=3404, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Jul 5 04:11:33 relay postfix/error[2093]: 3F1AB42132: to=, relay=none, delay=7653, delays=7622/30/0/0, dsn=4.4.1, status=deferred (delivery temporarily suspended: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.101]:25: Connection refused) Jul 5 05:21:03 relay postfix/qmgr[2039]: 3F1AB42132: from=, size=3404, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Jul 5 05:21:33 relay postfix/error[2217]: 3F1AB42132: to=, relay=none, delay=11853, delays=11822/30/0/0, dsn=4.4.1, status=deferred (delivery temporarily suspended: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.101]:25: Connection refused) Jul 5 06:29:25 relay postfix/qmgr[2420]: 3F1AB42132: from=, size=3404, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Jul 5 06:29:55 relay postfix/error[2428]: 3F1AB42132: to=, relay=none, delay=15954, delays=15924/30/0/0.08, dsn=4.4.1, status=deferred (delivery temporarily suspended: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.41.0.101]:25: Connection refused) Jul 5 07:39:24 relay postfix/qmgr[2885]: 3F1AB42132: from=, size=3404, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Jul 5 07:39:54 relay postfix/error[2936]: 3F1AB42132: to=, relay=none, delay=20153, delays=20123/30/0/0, dsn=4.4.1, status=deferred (delivery temporarily suspended: connect to ab.xyz.com[10.40.40.130]:25: Connection timed out)

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• Un-failing over a Cisco PIX 515e

  - by ABrown

  We had a power outage at our data center last week and when our dual PIX 515E running IOS 7.0(8) (configured with a failover cable) came back, they were in a failed over state where the Secondary unit is active and the Primary unit is standby I have tried 'failover reset', 'failover active', and 'failover reload-standby' as well as executing reloads on both units in a variety of orders, and they don't come back Primary/Active Secondary/Standby. The only thing in my arsenal that I haven't tried is driving to the data center and performing a hard reboot, which I hate to do. I have read How Failover Works on the Cisco Secure Firewall and it seems like this should be wicked straight forward. output of show failover on Primary: Failover On Cable status: Normal Failover unit Primary Failover LAN Interface: N/A - Serial-based failover enabled Unit Poll frequency 15 seconds, holdtime 45 seconds Interface Poll frequency 15 seconds Interface Policy 1 Monitored Interfaces 2 of 250 maximum Version: Ours 7.0(8), Mate 7.0(8) Last Failover at: 02:52:05 UTC Mar 10 2010 This host: Primary - Standby Ready Active time: 0 (sec) Interface outside (x.x.x.165): Normal Interface inside (y.y.y.3): Normal Other host: Secondary - Active Active time: 897045 (sec) Interface outside (x.x.x.164): Normal Interface inside (y.y.y.4): Normal Stateful Failover Logical Update Statistics Link : Unconfigured. output of show failover on Secondary: Failover On Cable status: Normal Failover unit Secondary Failover LAN Interface: N/A - Serial-based failover enabled Unit Poll frequency 15 seconds, holdtime 45 seconds Interface Poll frequency 15 seconds Interface Policy 1 Monitored Interfaces 2 of 250 maximum Version: Ours 7.0(8), Mate 7.0(8) Last Failover at: 02:03:04 UTC Feb 28 2010 This host: Secondary - Active Active time: 896925 (sec) Interface outside (x.x.x.164): Normal Interface inside (y.y.y.4): Normal Other host: Primary - Standby Ready Active time: 0 (sec) Interface outside (x.x.x.165): Normal Interface inside (y.y.y.3): Normal Stateful Failover Logical Update Statistics Link : Unconfigured. I'm seeing the following in my syslog: Mar 10 03:05:00 fw1 %PIX-5-111008: User 'enable_15' executed the 'failover reset' command. Mar 10 03:05:09 fw1 %PIX-5-111008: User 'enable_15' executed the 'failover reload-standby' command. Mar 10 03:05:12 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=406,op=20,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:05:12 fw1 %PIX-6-720028: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Peer state Failed. Mar 10 03:06:09 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=401,op=0,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:06:09 fw1 %PIX-6-720024: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Control channel is down. Mar 10 03:06:09 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=401,op=1,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:06:10 fw1 %PIX-6-720024: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Control channel is up. Mar 10 03:06:10 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=411,op=2,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:06:23 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=406,op=80,my=Active,peer=Standby Ready. Mar 10 03:06:23 fw1 %PIX-6-720028: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Peer state Standby Ready. Mar 10 03:06:24 fw2 %PIX-6-720027: (VPN-Primary) HA status callback: My state Standby Ready. Mar 10 03:07:05 fw1 %PIX-5-111008: User 'enable_15' executed the 'failover reset' command. Mar 10 03:07:31 fw1 %PIX-5-111008: User 'enable_15' executed the 'failover active' command. Mar 10 03:08:04 fw1 %PIX-5-611103: User logged out: Uname: enable_1 Mar 10 03:08:04 fw1 %PIX-6-315011: SSH session from admin1_int on interface inside for user "pix" terminated normally Mar 10 03:08:39 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=406,op=20,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:08:39 fw1 %PIX-6-720028: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Peer state Failed. Mar 10 03:09:10 fw1 %PIX-6-605005: Login permitted from admin1_int/36891 to inside:192.168.4.4/ssh for user "pix" Mar 10 03:09:23 fw1 %PIX-5-111008: User 'enable_15' executed the 'failover reset' command. Mar 10 03:09:38 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=401,op=0,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:09:39 fw1 %PIX-6-720024: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Control channel is down. Mar 10 03:09:39 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=401,op=1,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:09:39 fw1 %PIX-6-720024: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Control channel is up. Mar 10 03:09:39 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=411,op=2,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:09:52 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=406,op=80,my=Active,peer=Standby Ready. Mar 10 03:09:52 fw1 %PIX-6-720028: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Peer state Standby Ready. Mar 10 03:09:53 fw2 %PIX-6-720027: (VPN-Primary) HA status callback: My state Standby Ready. I'm not exactly sure how to interpret that syslog data. Primary doesn't seem to even try to become Active. When I reload the individual units separately, my connections are retained, so it doesn't seem like I have a real hardware failure. Is there something I can query (IOS or SNMP) to check for hardware issues? Any thoughts? My IOS-fu is weak. Thanks for any help you might provide, Aaron

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• My D-Link's Ethernet bridge downlink just got 10-30x slower?

  - by Jay Levitt

  TL;DR: I unplugged my network to move my desk, and now downloading via my DIR-655's Ethernet LAN bridge is 10-30x slower than the Ethernet switch it's plugged into. Background My network is SMC cable modem <-> Cisco firewall <-> Netgear switch <-> D-Link WiFi† | | | | SMC8014 ASA-5505 GS608v2 gigE DIR-655 rev A3 gigE †The DIR-655 is used as an access point, not a router (although what D-Link calls an access point, I'd call a bridge). The "WAN" port is unused; the Netgear connects to the built-in 4-port Ethernet LAN switch, inside the built- in router/firewall. Endpoints: MacBook Pro 17" mid-2010 iPhone 4S Fedora 12 Linux server running reasonably fast dual-Athlon X2, VelociRaptors, etc. All cables are <10 feet, mostly CAT-5e, some CAT-6, all premade. All WiFi endpoints are within three feet of the D-Link. Yesterday I unplugged and rearranged stuff, and now connecting via the D-Link - even through the wired switch, right next to the incoming network cable - is 30x slower than connecting directly to the Netgear switch, on both my MacBook and iPhone. How I'm measuring "slower" I'm mostly using http://speedtest.net, which of course only really measures broadband speeds. I've also installed http://www.speedtest.net/mini.php on my local server, but can't test the iPhone with that. Results Speedtest.net, closest server over Comcast business-class: CONFIG | PING (ms) | DOWN (Mbps) | UP (Mbps) Mac <-> Ethernet <-> Netgear | 9 | 31.6 | 6.8 Mac <-> Ethernet <-> D-Link | 8 | 4.1 | 6.0 Mac <-> WiFi <-> D-Link | 9 | 1.4 | 2.9 iPhone <-> WiFi <-> D-Link | 67 | 0.4 | 1.6 Speedtest Mini on Linux PC: CONFIG | DOWN (Mbps) | UP (Mbps) Mac <-> Ethernet <-> NetGear | 97.2 | 76.9 Mac <-> Ethernet <-> D-Link | 8.2 | 24.2 Mac <-> WiFi <-> D-Link | 1.0 | 8.6 Slow typing in SSH: Mac <-> Ethernet <-> Netgear <-> Linux PC: smooth Mac <-> Ethernet <-> D-Link <-> Linux PC: choppy Note that D-Link upload speeds are normal on broadband, slower locally (but I'd believe that's a D-Link limitation), and always faster than the downloads! Since ssh is choppy just with slow typing, I don't believe it's a throttling-type problem either; that's not a lot of bandwidth. What I've tried Swapping all "good" and "bad" cables Re-plugging "bad" cable from D-Link to Netgear and watching it be the "good" cable pulling cables away from power lines Verify that the Mac auto-detects the D-Link as gigE Try to verify the link speed of the D-Link <- Netgear connection, but the firmware doesn't report that Verify that the D-Link sees no TX/RX errors or collisions Use different Ethernet ports on both Netgear and D-Link Reset the D-Link to factory settings Upgrade the D-Link firmware from 1.21 to 1.35NA, 2010/11/12, the latest Reboot everything at least once On the Mac, disable Wi-Fi during the Ethernet tests, and unplug Ethernet during the Wi-Fi tests Using iStumbler, verify that the D-Link isn't picking overloaded Wi-Fi channels (usually just 1-5 neighbors on my and adjacent channels, average for my apt building) Verify that the only client connected to the Wi-Fi was the iPhone Verify that nothing was being chatty on my network according to the WISH log Enable and disable all sorts of D-Link settings, including forcing WAN auto-detect to gigE So. I don't mind buying a new access point—I wouldn't mind having a dual-link network—but as a guy who's been networking since gated v4 was a drastic rewrite, and who often used physical sniffers in the days before Wireshark, I'm baffled. I hate being baffled. What could I possibly have changed that would result in this? How can I measure it? All I can think of is a static zap—thick carpet, socks, HVAC—but I didn't feel one, and does that really happen anymore? Can I test if it's Ethernet vs. TCP layer slowness? I'm not familiar with modern network utilities; it's hard to Google without hitting "Q: Why is my network slow? A: Is your microwave on?" If I don't get an answer here, will someone big and powerful help me migrate it to serverfault without getting screamed back here? In the words of Inigo Montoya, "I must know." Don't get all Dread Pirate Roberts on me.

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• Visual Studio compiles WPF application twice during build

  - by Brian Ensink

  I have a WPF app in VS2008 that compiles twice during the build. The two CSC command lines are similar but with some differences. The first CSC command line does not have an /resource options, the second has two /resource options on the command line. The second CSC command line has these additional arguments: /resource:"obj\Debug AutoCAD\VisualApp.g.resources" /resource:"obj\Debug AutoCAD\CAP.Visual.Properties.Resources.resources" I hate to post such a huge ugly compiler output but here are both command lines. 2>c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Csc.exe /noconfig /nowarn:1701,1702 /platform:x86 /errorreport:prompt /warn:4 /define:DEBUG;TRACE /reference:..\BIN\RELEASE\FOO.Base.dll /reference:..\BIN\RELEASE\FOO.CAPArchiveHandler.dll /reference:..\BIN\RELEASE\FOO.CAPDOM.dll /reference:"C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.0\PresentationCore.dll" /reference:"C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.0\PresentationFramework.dll" /reference:"c:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.5\System.Core.dll" /reference:"c:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.5\System.Data.DataSetExtensions.dll" /reference:c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.Data.dll /reference:c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.dll /reference:"C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.0\System.Runtime.Serialization.dll" /reference:c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.Xml.dll /reference:"c:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.5\System.Xml.Linq.dll" /reference:"C:\Program Files\Telerik\RadControls for WPF Q1 2010\Binaries\WPF\Telerik.Windows.Controls.dll" /reference:"C:\Program Files\Telerik\RadControls for WPF Q1 2010\Binaries\WPF\Telerik.Windows.Controls.Docking.dll" /reference:"C:\Program Files\Telerik\RadControls for WPF Q1 2010\Binaries\WPF\Telerik.Windows.Controls.Navigation.dll" /reference:"C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.0\UIAutomationProvider.dll" /reference:c:\project\FooStudio\BIN\DEBUGCAD\VS-3DEngine-Wrapper.dll /reference:c:\project\FooStudio\BIN\DEBUGCAD\VisualServiceClient.dll /reference:"C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.0\WindowsBase.dll" /debug+ /debug:full /filealign:512 /out:"obj\Debug AutoCAD\VisualApp.exe" /target:winexe App.xaml.cs MainWindow.xaml.cs CameraAndLightingControl.xaml.cs CameraAndLightingViewModel.cs MainWindowViewModel.cs Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs Properties\Resources.Designer.cs Properties\Settings.Designer.cs ScenarioToolsWindow.xaml.cs SceneGraph.cs ScenePart.cs ToolWindow.xaml.cs "c:\project\FooStudio\VisualApp\obj\Debug AutoCAD\CameraAndLightingControl.g.cs" "c:\project\FooStudio\VisualApp\obj\Debug AutoCAD\MainWindow.g.cs" "c:\project\FooStudio\VisualApp\obj\Debug AutoCAD\ScenarioToolsWindow.g.cs" "c:\project\FooStudio\VisualApp\obj\Debug AutoCAD\ToolWindow.g.cs" "c:\project\FooStudio\VisualApp\obj\Debug AutoCAD\App.g.cs" "c:\project\FooStudio\VisualApp\obj\Debug AutoCAD\GeneratedInternalTypeHelper.g.cs" 2>Done building project "0ye0i4wb.tmp_proj". 2>c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Csc.exe /noconfig /nowarn:1701,1702 /platform:x86 /errorreport:prompt /warn:4 /define:DEBUG;TRACE /reference:..\BIN\RELEASE\FOO.Base.dll /reference:..\BIN\RELEASE\FOO.CAPArchiveHandler.dll /reference:..\BIN\RELEASE\FOO.CAPDOM.dll /reference:"C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.0\PresentationCore.dll" /reference:"C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.0\PresentationFramework.dll" /reference:"c:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.5\System.Core.dll" /reference:"c:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.5\System.Data.DataSetExtensions.dll" /reference:c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.Data.dll /reference:c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.dll /reference:"C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.0\System.Runtime.Serialization.dll" /reference:c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.Xml.dll /reference:"c:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.5\System.Xml.Linq.dll" /reference:"C:\Program Files\Telerik\RadControls for WPF Q1 2010\Binaries\WPF\Telerik.Windows.Controls.dll" /reference:"C:\Program Files\Telerik\RadControls for WPF Q1 2010\Binaries\WPF\Telerik.Windows.Controls.Docking.dll" /reference:"C:\Program Files\Telerik\RadControls for WPF Q1 2010\Binaries\WPF\Telerik.Windows.Controls.Navigation.dll" /reference:"C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.0\UIAutomationProvider.dll" /reference:c:\project\FooStudio\BIN\DEBUGCAD\VS-3DEngine-Wrapper.dll /reference:c:\project\FooStudio\BIN\DEBUGCAD\VisualServiceClient.dll /reference:"C:\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.0\WindowsBase.dll" /debug+ /debug:full /filealign:512 /out:"obj\Debug AutoCAD\VisualApp.exe" /resource:"obj\Debug AutoCAD\VisualApp.g.resources" /resource:"obj\Debug AutoCAD\FOO.Visual.Properties.Resources.resources" /target:winexe App.xaml.cs MainWindow.xaml.cs CameraAndLightingControl.xaml.cs CameraAndLightingViewModel.cs MainWindowViewModel.cs Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs Properties\Resources.Designer.cs Properties\Settings.Designer.cs ScenarioToolsWindow.xaml.cs SceneGraph.cs ScenePart.cs ToolWindow.xaml.cs "c:\project\FooStudio\VisualApp\obj\Debug AutoCAD\CameraAndLightingControl.g.cs" "c:\project\FooStudio\VisualApp\obj\Debug AutoCAD\MainWindow.g.cs" "c:\project\FooStudio\VisualApp\obj\Debug AutoCAD\ScenarioToolsWindow.g.cs" "c:\project\FooStudio\VisualApp\obj\Debug AutoCAD\ToolWindow.g.cs" "c:\project\FooStudio\VisualApp\obj\Debug AutoCAD\App.g.cs" "c:\project\FooStudio\VisualApp\obj\Debug AutoCAD\GeneratedInternalTypeHelper.g.cs" Any idea what could possibly cause this? I think this is causing a problem I posted about earlier today.

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• Do’s and Don’ts Building SharePoint Applications

  - by Bil Simser

  SharePoint is a great platform for building quick LOB applications. Simple things from employee time trackers to server and software inventory to full blown Help Desks can be crafted up using SharePoint from just customizing Lists. No programming necessary. However there are a few tricks I’ve painfully learned over the years that you can use for your own solutions. DO What’s In A Name? When you create a new list, column, or view you’ll commonly name it something like “Expense Reports”. However this has the ugly effect of creating a url to the list as “Expense%20Reports”. Or worse, an internal field name of “Expense_x0x0020_Reports” which is not only cryptic but hard to remember when you’re trying to find the column by internal name. While “Expense Reports 2011” is user friendly, “ExpenseReports2011” is not (unless you’re a programmer). So that’s not the solution. Well, not entirely. Instead when you create your column or list or view use the scrunched up name (I can’t think of the technical term for it right now) of “ExpenseReports2011”, “WomenAtTheOfficeThatAreMen” or “KoalaMeatIsGoodWhenBroiled”. After you’ve created it, go back and change the name to the more friendly “Silly Expense Reports That Nobody Reads”. The original internal name will be the url and code friendly one without spaces while the one used on data entry forms and view headers will be the human version. Smart Columns When building a view include columns that make sense. By default when you add a column the “Add to default view” is checked. Resist the urge to be lazy and leave it checked. Uncheck that puppy and decide consciously what columns should be included in the view. Pick columns that make sense to what the user is trying to do. This means you have to talk to the user. Yes, I know. That can be trying at times and even painful. Go ahead, talk to them. You might learn something. Find out what’s important to them and why. If they’re doing something repetitively as part of their job, try to make their life easier by including what’s most important to them. Do they really need to see the Created *and* Modified date of a document or do they just need the title and author? You’ll only find out after talking to them (or getting them drunk in a bar and leaving them in the back alley handcuffed to a garbage bin, don’t ask). Gotta Keep it Separated Hey, views are there for a reason. Use them. While “All Items” is a fine way to present a list of well, all items, it’s hardly sufficient to present a list of servers built before the Y2K bug hit. You’ll be scrolling the list for hours finally arriving at Page 387 of 12,591 and cursing that SharePoint guy for convincing you that putting your hardware into a list would be of any use to anyone. Next to collecting the data, presenting it is just as important. Views are often overlooked and many times ignored or misused. They’re the way you can slice and dice the data up so that you’re not trying to consume 3,000 years of human evolution on a single web page. Remember views can be filtered so feel free to create a view for each status or one for each operating system or one for each species of Information Worker you might be putting in that list or document library. Not only will it reduce the number of items someone sees at one time, it’ll also make the information that much more relevant. Also remember that each view is a separate page. Use it in navigation by creating a menu on the Quick Launch to each view. The discoverability of the Views menu isn’t overly obvious and if you violate the rule of columns (see Horizontally Scrolling below) the view menu doesn’t even show up until you shuffle the scroll bar to the left. Navigation links, big giant buttons, a screaming flashing “CLICK ME NOW” will help your users find their way. Sort It! Views are great so we’re building nice, rich views for the user. Awesomesauce. However sort is not very discoverable by the user. For example when you’re looking at a view how do you know if it’s ascending or descending and what is it sorted on. Maybe it’s sorted using two fields so what’s that all about? Help your users by letting them know the information they’re looking at is sorted. Maybe you name the view something appropriate like “Bogus Expense Claims Sorted By Deadbeats”. If you use the naming strategy just make sure you keep the name consistent with the description. In the previous example their better be a Deadbeat column so I can see the sort in action. Having a “Loser” column, while equally correct, is a little obtuse to the average Information Worker. Remember, they usually don’t use acronyms and even if they knew how to, it’s not immediately obvious to them that’s what you’re trying to convey. Another option is to simply drop a Content Editor Web Part above the list and explain exactly the view they’re looking at. Each view is it’s own page so one CEWP won’t be used across the board. Be descriptive in what the user is seeing but try to keep it brief. Dumping the first chapter of I, Claudius might be informative to the data but can gobble up screen real estate and miss the point of having the list. DO NOT Useless Attachments The attachments column is, in a word, useless. For the most part. Sure it indicates there’s an attachment on the list item but in the grand scheme of things that’s not overly informative. Maybe it is and by all means, if it makes sense to you include it. Colour it. Make it shine and stand like the Return of Clippy on every SharePoint list. Without it being functional it can be boring. EndUserSharePoint.com has an article to make the son of Clippy that much more useful so feel free to head over and check out this blog post by Paul Grenier on the task (Warning code ahead! Danger Will Robinson!) In any case, I would suggest you remove it from your views. Again if it’s important then include it but consider the jQuery solution above to make it functional. It’s added by default to views and one of things that people forget to clean up. Horizontal Scrolling Screen real estate is premium so building a list that contains 8,000 columns and stretches horizontally across 15 screens probably isn’t the most user friendly experience. Most users can’t figure out how to scroll vertically let alone horizontally so don’t make it even that more confusing for them. Take the Steve Krug approach in your view designs and try not to make the user think. Again views are your friend. Consider splitting up the data into views where one view contains 10 columns and other view contains the other 10. Okay, maybe your information doesn’t work that way but humans can only process 7 pieces of data at a time, 10 at most (then their heads explode and you don’t want to clean that mess up, especially on a Friday night before the big dance). It drives me batshit crazy when I see a view with 80 columns of data. I often ask the user “So what do you do with all this information”. The response is usually “With this data [the first 10 columns] I decide if I’m going to fire everyone, and with this data [the next 10 columns] I decide if I’m going to set the building on fire and collect the insurance”. It’s at that point I show them how to create two new views “People Who Are About To Get The Axe” and “Beach Time For The Executives”. Again, talk to your users and try to reason with them on cutting down the number of columns they see at once. Vertical Scrolling Another big faux pas I find is the use of multi-line comment fields in views. It’s not so bad when you have a statement like this in your view: “I really like, oh my god, thought I was going to scream when I saw this turtle then I decided what I was going to have for dinner and frankly I hate having to work late so when I was talking to the customer I thought, oh my god, what if the customer has turtles and then it appeared to me that I really was hungry so I'm going to have lunch now.” It’s fine if that’s the only column along with two or three others, but once you slap those 20 columns of data into the list, the comment field wraps and forms a new multi-page novel that takes up your entire screen. Do everyone a favour and just avoid adding the column to views. Train the user to just click through to the item if they need to see the contents. Duplicate Information Duplication is never good. Views and great as you can group data together. For example create a view of project status reports grouped by author. Then you can see what project manager is being a dip and not submitting their report. However if you group by author do you really need the Created By field as well in the view? Or if the view is grouped by Project then Author do you need both. Horizontal real estate is always at a premium so try not to clutter up the view with duplicate data like this. Oh  yeah, if you’re scratching your head saying “But Bil, if I don’t include the Project name in the view and I have a lot of items then how do I know which one I’m looking at”. That’s a hint that your grouping is too vague or you have too much data in the view based on that criteria. Filter it down a notch, create some views, and try to keep the group down to a single screen where you can see the group header at the top of the page. Again it’s just managing the information you have. Redundant, See Redundant This partially relates to duplicate information and smart columns but basically remember to not include the obvious in a view. Remember, don’t make me think. If you’ve gone to the trouble (and it was a lot of trouble wasn’t it?) to create separate views of your data by creating a “September Zombie Brain Sales”, “October Zombie Brain Sales”, etc. then please for the love of all that is holy do not include the Month and Product columns in your view. Similarly if you create a “My” view of anything (“My Favourite Brands of Spandex”, “My Co-Workers I Find The Urge To Disinfect”) then again, do not include the owner or author field (or whatever field you use to identify “My”). That’s just silly. Hope that helps! Happy customizing!

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• PASS Summit Feedback

  - by Rob Farley

  PASS Feedback came in last week. I also saw my dentist for some fillings... At the PASS Summit this year, I delivered a couple of regular sessions and a Lightning Talk. People told me they enjoyed it, but when the rankings came out, they showed that I didn’t score particularly well. Brent Ozar was keen to discuss it with me. Brent: PASS speaker feedback is out. You did two sessions and a Lightning Talk. How did you go? Rob: Not so well actually, thanks for asking. Brent: Ha! Sorry. Of course you know that's why I wanted to discuss this with you. I was in one of your sessions at SQLBits in the UK a month before PASS, and I thought you rocked. You've got a really good and distinctive delivery style.  Then I noticed your talks were ranked in the bottom quarter of the Summit ratings and wanted to discuss it. Rob: Yeah, I know. You did ask me if we could do this...  I should explain – my presentation style is not the stereotypical IT conference one. I throw in jokes, and try to engage the audience thoroughly. I find many talks amazingly dry, and I guess I try to buck that trend. I also run training courses, and find that I get a lot of feedback from people thanking me for keeping things interesting. That said, I also get feedback criticising me for my style, and that’s basically what’s happened here. For the rest of this discussion, let’s focus on my talk about the Incredible Shrinking Execution Plan, which I considered to be my main talk. Brent: I thought that session title was the very best one at the entire Summit, and I had it on my recommended sessions list.  In four words, you managed to sum up the topic and your sense of humor.  I read that and immediately thought, "People need to be in this session," and then it didn't score well.  Tell me about your scores. Rob: The questions on the feedback form covered the usefulness of the information, the speaker’s presentation skills, their knowledge of the subject, how well the session was described, the amount of time allocated, and the quality of the presentation materials. Brent: Presentation materials? But you don’t do slides.  Did they rate your thong? Rob: No-one saw my flip-flops in this talk, Brent. I created a script in Management Studio, and published that afterwards, but I think people will have scored that question based on the lack of slides. I wasn’t expecting to do particularly well on that one. That was the only section that didn’t have 5/5 as the most popular score. Brent: See, that sucks, because cookbook-style scripts are often some of my favorites.  Adam Machanic's Service Broker workbench series helped me immensely when I was prepping for the MCM.  As an attendee, I'd rather have a commented script than a slide deck.  So how did you rank so low? Rob: When I look at the scores that you got (based on your blog post), you got very few scores below 3 – people that felt strong enough about your talk to post a negative score. In my scores, between 5% and 10% were below 3 (except on the question about whether I knew my stuff – I guess I came as knowledgeable). Brent: Wow – so quite a few people really didn’t like your talk then? Rob: Yeah. Mind you, based on the comments, some people really loved it. I’d like to think that there would be a certain portion of the room who may have rated the talk as one of the best of the conference. Some of my comments included “amazing!”, “Best presentation so far!”, “Wow, best session yet”, “fantastic” and “Outstanding!”. I think lots of talks can be “Great”, but not so many talks can be “Outstanding” without the word losing its meaning. One wrote “Pretty amazing presentation, considering it was completely extemporaneous.” Brent: Extemporaneous, eh? Rob: Yeah. I guess they don’t realise how much preparation goes into coming across as unprepared. In many ways it’s much easier to give a written speech than to deliver a presentation without slides as a prompt. Brent: That delivery style, the really relaxed, casual, college-professor approach was one of the things I really liked about your presentation at SQLbits.  As somebody who presents a lot, I "get" it - I know how hard it is to come off as relaxed and comfortable with your own material.  It's like improv done by jazz players and comedians - if you've never tried it, you don't realize how hard it is.  People also don't realize how hard it is to make a tough subject fun. Rob: Yeah well... There will be people writing comments on this post that say I wasn't trying to make the subject fun, and that I was making it all about me. Sometimes the style works, sometimes it doesn't. Most of the comments mentioned the fact that I tell jokes, some in a nice way, but some not so much (and it wasn't just a PASS thing - that's the mix of feedback I generally get). One comment at PASS was: “great stand up comedian - not what I'm looking for at pass”, and there were certainly a few that said “too many jokes”. I’m not trying to do stand-up – jokes are my way of engaging with the audience while I demonstrate some of the amazing things that the Query Optimizer can do if you write your queries the right way. Some people didn’t think it was technical enough, but I’ve also had some people tell me that the concepts I’m explaining are deep and profound. Brent: To me, that's a hallmark of a great explanation - when someone says, "But of course it has to work that way - how could it work any other way?  It seems so simple and logical."  Well, sure it does when it's explained correctly, but now pick up any number of thick SQL Server books and try to understand the Redundant Joins concept.  I guarantee it'll take more than 45 minutes. Rob: Some people in my audiences realise that, but definitely not everyone. There's only so much you can tell someone that something is profound. Generally it's something that they either have an epiphany on or not. I like to lull my audience into knowing what's going on, and do something that surprises them. Gain their trust, build a rapport, and then show them the deeper truth of what just happened. Brent: So you've learned your lesson about presentation scores, right?  From here on out, you're going to be dry, humorless, and all your presentations will consist of you reading bullet points off the screen. Rob: No Brent, I’m not. I'm also not going to suggest that most presentations at PASS are like that. No-one tries to present like that. There's a big space to occupy between what "dry and humourless" and me. My difference is to focus on the relationship I have with the crowd, rather than focussing on delivering the perfect session. I want to see people smiling and know they're relaxed. I think most presenters focus on the material, which is completely reasonable and safe. I remember once hearing someone talking about product creation. They talked about mediocrity. They said that one of the worst things that people can ever say about your product is that it’s “good”. What you want is for 10% of the world to love it enough to want to buy it. If 10% the world gave me a dollar, I’d have more money than I could ever use (assuming it wasn’t the SAME dollar they were giving me I guess). Brent: It's the Raving Fans theory.  It's better to have a small number of raving customers than a large number of almost-but-not-really customers who don't care that much about your product or service.  I know exactly how you feel - when I got survey feedback from my Quest video presentation when I was dressed up in a Richard Simmons costume, some of the attendees said I was unprofessional and distracting.  Some of the attendees couldn't get enough and Photoshopped all kinds of stuff into the screen captures.  On a whole, I probably didn't score that well, and I'm fine with that.  It sucks to look at the scores though - do those lower scores bother you? Rob: Of course they do. It hurts deeply. I open myself up and give presentations in a very personal way. All presenters do that, and we all feel the pain of negative feedback. I hate coming 146th & 162nd out of 185, but have to acknowledge that many sessions did worse still. Plus, once I feel the wounds have healed, I’ll be able to remember that there are people in the world that rave about my presentation style, and figure that people will hopefully talk about me. One day maybe those people that don’t like my presentation style will stay away and I might be able to score better. You don’t pay to hear country music if you prefer western... Lots of people find chili too spicy, but it’s still a popular food. Brent: But don’t you want to appeal to everyone? Rob: I do, but I don’t want to be lukewarm as in Revelation 3:16. I’d rather disgust and be discussed. Well, maybe not ‘disgust’, but I don’t want to conform. Conformity just isn’t the same any more. I’m not sure I’ve ever been one to do that. I try not to offend, but definitely like to be different. Brent: Count me among your raving fans, sir.  Where can we see you next? Rob: Considering I live in Adelaide in Australia, I’m not about to appear at anyone’s local SQL Saturday. I’m still trying to plan which events I’ll get to in 2011. I’ve submitted abstracts for TechEd North America, but won’t hold my breath. I’m also considering the SQLBits conferences in the UK in April, PASS in October, and I’m sure I’ll do some LiveMeeting presentations for user groups. Online, people download some of my recent SQLBits presentations at http://bit.ly/RFSarg and http://bit.ly/Simplification though. And they can download a 5-minute MP3 of my Lightning Talk at http://www.lobsterpot.com.au/files/Collation.mp3, in which I try to explain the idea behind collation, using thongs as an example. Brent: I was in the audience for http://bit.ly/RFSarg. That was a great presentation. Rob: Thanks, Brent. Now where’s my dollar?

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• Lightning talk: Coderetreat

  - by Michael Williamson

  In the spirit of trying to encourage more deliberate practice amongst coders in Red Gate, Lauri Pesonen had the idea of running a coderetreat in Red Gate. Lauri and I ran the first one a few weeks ago: given that neither of us hadn’t even been to a coderetreat before, let alone run one, I think it turned out quite well. The participants gave positive feedback, saying that they enjoyed the day, wrote some thought-provoking code and would do it again. Sam Blackburn was one of the attendees, and gave a lightning talk to the other developers in one of our regular lightning talk sessions: In case you can’t watch the video, I’ve transcribed the talk below, although I’d recommend watching the video if you can — I didn’t have much time to do the transcribing! So, what is a coderetreat? So it’s not just something in Red Gate, there’s a website and everything, although it’s not a very big website. It calls itself a community network. The basic ideas behind coderetreat are: you’ve got one day, and you split it into one hour sections. You spend three quarters of that coding, and do a little retrospective at the end. You’re supposed to start fresh each, we were told to delete our code after every session. We were in pairs, swapping after each session, and we did the same task every time. In fact, Conway’s Game of Life is the only task mentioned anywhere that I find for coderetreat. So I don’t know what we’ll do next time, or if we’re meant to do the same thing again. There are some guiding principles which felt to us like restrictions, that you have to code in crazy ways to encourage better code. Final thing is that it’s supposed to be free for outsiders to join. It’s meant to be a kind of networking thing, where you link up with people from other companies. We had a pilot day with Michael and Lauri. Since it was basically the first time any of us had done anything like this, everybody was from Red Gate. We didn’t chat to anybody else for the initial one. The task was Conway’s Game of Life, which most of you have probably heard of it, all but one of us knew about it when did the coderetreat. I won’t got into the details of what it is, but it felt like the right size of task, basically one or two groups actually produced something working by the end of the day, and of course that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a day’s work to produce that because we were starting again every hour. The task really drives you more than trying to create good code, I found. It was really tempting to try and get it working rather than stick to the rules. But it’s really good to stop and try again because there are so many what-ifs when you’ve finished writing something, “what if I’d done it this way?”. You can answer all those questions at a coderetreat because it’s not about getting a product out the door, it’s about learning and playing with ideas. So we had all these different practices we were trying. I’ll try and go through most of these. Single responsibility is this idea that everything should do just one thing. It was the very first session, we were still trying to figure out how do you go about the Game of Life? So by the end of forty-five minutes hadn’t produced very much for that first session. We were still thinking, “Do we start with a board, how do we represent all these squares? It can be infinitely big, help, this is getting really difficult!”. So, most of us didn’t really get anywhere on the first one. Although it was interesting that some people started with the board, one group started with the FateDecider class that decides whether things live or die. A sort of god class, but in a good way. They managed to implement all of the rules without even defining how the squares were arranged or anything like that. Another thing we tried was TDD (test-driven development). I’m sure most of you know what TDD is: Watch a test, watch it fail for the right reason Write code to pass the test, watch it pass Refactor, check the test still passes Repeat! It basically worked, we were able to produce code, but we often found the tests defined the direction that code went, which is obviously the idea of TDD. But you tend to find that by the time you’ve even written your first assertion, which is supposed to be the very first thing you write, because you write your tests backwards from the assertions back to the initial conditions, you’ve already constrained the logic of the code in some way by the time you’ve done that. You then get to this situation of, “Well, we actually want to go in a slightly different direction. Can we do this?”. Can we write tests that don’t constrain the architecture? Wrapping up all primitives: it’s kind of turtles all the way down. We had a Size, which has a Width and Height, which both derive from Dimension. You’ve got pages of code before you’ve even done anything. No getters and setters (use tell don’t ask instead): mocks and stubs for tests are required if you want to assert that your results are what you think they should be. You can’t just check the internal state of the code. And people found that really challenging and it made them think in a different way which I think is really good. Not having mutable state: that was kind of confusing because we weren’t quite sure what fitted within that rule and what didn’t, and I think we were trying too hard to follow the rule rather than the guideline. No if-statements: supposed to use polymorphism instead, but polymorphism still requires a factory with conditional behaviour. We did something really crazy to get around this: public T If(bool condition, Func<T> left, Func<T> right) { var dict = new Dictionary<bool, Func<T>> {{true, left}, {false, right}}; return dict[condition].Invoke(); } That is not really polymorphism, is it? For-loops: you can always replace a for-loop with recursion, but it doesn’t tend to make it any more readable unless it’s the kind of task that really lends itself to that. So it was interesting, it was good practice, but it wouldn’t make it easier it’s the kind of tree-structure algorithm where that would help. Having a limit on the number of levels of indentation: again, I think it does produce very nice, clean code, but it wasn’t actually a challenge because you just extract methods. That’s quite a useful thing because you can apply that to real code and say, “Okay, should this method really be going crazy like this?” No talking: we hated that. It’s like there’s two of you at a computer, and one of you is doing the typing, what does the other guy do if they’re not allowed to talk. The answer is TDD ping-pong – one person writes the tests, and then the other person writes the code to pass the test. And that creates communication without actually having to have discussion about things which is kind of cool. No code comments: just makes no difference to anything. It’s a forty-five minute exercise, so what are you going to put comments in code for? Finally, this is my fault. I discovered an entertaining way of doing the calculation that was kind of cool (using convolutions over the state of the board). Unfortunately, it turns out to be really hard to implement in C#, so didn’t even manage to work out how to do that convolution in C#. It’s trivial in some high-level languages, but you need something matrix-orientated for it to really work. That’s most of it, really. The thoughts that people went away with: we put down our answers to questions like “What have you learnt?” and “What surprised you?”, “How are you going to do things differently?”, and most people said redoing the problem is really, really good for understanding it properly. People hate having a massive legacy codebase that they can’t change, so being able to attack something three different ways in an environment where the end-product isn’t important: that’s something people really enjoyed. Pair-programming: also people said that they wanted to do more of that, especially with TDD ping-pong, where you write the test and somebody else writes the code. Various people thought different things about immutables, but most people thought they were good, they promote functional programming. And TDD people found really hard. “Tell, don’t ask” people found really, really hard and really, really, really hard to do well. And the recursion just made things trickier to debug. But most people agreed that coderetreats are really cool, and we should do more of them.

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• T-SQL Tuesday #33: Trick Shots: Undocumented, Underdocumented, and Unknown Conspiracies!

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  Mike Fal (b | t) is hosting this month's T-SQL Tuesday on Trick Shots.  I love this choice because I've been preoccupied with sneaky/tricky/evil SQL Server stuff for a long time and have been presenting on it for the past year.  Mike's directives were "Show us a cool trick or process you developed…It doesn’t have to be useful", which most of my blogging definitely fits, and "Tell us what you learned from this trick…tell us how it gave you insight in to how SQL Server works", which is definitely a new concept.  I've done a lot of reading and watching on SQL Server Internals and even attended training, but sometimes I need to go explore on my own, using my own tools and techniques.  It's an itch I get every few months, and, well, it sure beats workin'. I've found some people to be intimidated by SQL Server's internals, and I'll admit there are A LOT of internals to keep track of, but there are tons of excellent resources that clearly document most of them, and show how knowing even the basics of internals can dramatically improve your database's performance.  It may seem like rocket science, or even brain surgery, but you don't have to be a genius to understand it. Although being an "evil genius" can help you learn some things they haven't told you about. ;) This blog post isn't a traditional "deep dive" into internals, it's more of an approach to find out how a program works.  It utilizes an extremely handy tool from an even more extremely handy suite of tools, Sysinternals.  I'm not the only one who finds Sysinternals useful for SQL Server: Argenis Fernandez (b | t), Microsoft employee and former T-SQL Tuesday host, has an excellent presentation on how to troubleshoot SQL Server using Sysinternals, and I highly recommend it.  Argenis didn't cover the Strings.exe utility, but I'll be using it to "hack" the SQL Server executable (DLL and EXE) files. Please note that I'm not promoting software piracy or applying these techniques to attack SQL Server via internal knowledge. This is strictly educational and doesn't reveal any proprietary Microsoft information.  And since Argenis works for Microsoft and demonstrated Sysinternals with SQL Server, I'll just let him take the blame for it. :P (The truth is I've used Strings.exe on SQL Server before I ever met Argenis.) Once you download and install Strings.exe you can run it from the command line.  For our purposes we'll want to run this in the Binn folder of your SQL Server instance (I'm referencing SQL Server 2012 RTM): cd "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn" C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn> strings *sql*.dll > sqldll.txt C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL11\MSSQL\Binn> strings *sql*.exe > sqlexe.txt   I've limited myself to DLLs and EXEs that have "sql" in their names.  There are quite a few more but I haven't examined them in any detail. (Homework assignment for you!) If you run this yourself you'll get 2 text files, one with all the extracted strings from every SQL DLL file, and the other with the SQL EXE strings.  You can open these in Notepad, but you're better off using Notepad++, EditPad, Emacs, Vim or another more powerful text editor, as these will be several megabytes in size. And when you do open it…you'll find…a TON of gibberish.  (If you think that's bad, just try opening the raw DLL or EXE file in Notepad.  And by the way, don't do this in production, or even on a running instance of SQL Server.)  Even if you don't clean up the file, you can still use your editor's search function to find a keyword like "SELECT" or some other item you expect to be there.  As dumb as this sounds, I sometimes spend my lunch break just scanning the raw text for anything interesting.  I'm boring like that. Sometimes though, having these files available can lead to some incredible learning experiences.  For me the most recent time was after reading Joe Sack's post on non-parallel plan reasons.  He mentions a new SQL Server 2012 execution plan element called NonParallelPlanReason, and demonstrates a query that generates "MaxDOPSetToOne".  Joe (formerly on the Microsoft SQL Server product team, so he knows this stuff) mentioned that this new element was not currently documented and tried a few more examples to see what other reasons could be generated. Since I'd already run Strings.exe on the SQL Server DLLs and EXE files, it was easy to run grep/find/findstr for MaxDOPSetToOne on those extracts.  Once I found which files it belonged to (sqlmin.dll) I opened the text to see if the other reasons were listed.  As you can see in my comment on Joe's blog, there were about 20 additional non-parallel reasons.  And while it's not "documentation" of this underdocumented feature, the names are pretty self-explanatory about what can prevent parallel processing. I especially like the ones about cursors – more ammo! - and am curious about the PDW compilation and Cloud DB replication reasons. One reason completely stumped me: NoParallelHekatonPlan.  What the heck is a hekaton?  Google and Wikipedia were vague, and the top results were not in English.  I found one reference to Greek, stating "hekaton" can be translated as "hundredfold"; with a little more Wikipedia-ing this leads to hecto, the prefix for "one hundred" as a unit of measure.  I'm not sure why Microsoft chose hekaton for such a plan name, but having already learned some Greek I figured I might as well dig some more in the DLL text for hekaton.  Here's what I found: hekaton_slow_param_passing Occurs when a Hekaton procedure call dispatch goes to slow parameter passing code path The reason why Hekaton parameter passing code took the slow code path hekaton_slow_param_pass_reason sp_deploy_hekaton_database sp_undeploy_hekaton_database sp_drop_hekaton_database sp_checkpoint_hekaton_database sp_restore_hekaton_database e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\hkproc.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\matgen.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\matquery.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\sqlmeta.cpp e:\sql11_main_t\sql\ntdbms\hekaton\sqlhost\sqllang\resultset.cpp Interesting!  The first 4 entries (in red) mention parameters and "slow code".  Could this be the foundation of the mythical DBCC RUNFASTER command?  Have I been passing my parameters the slow way all this time? And what about those sp_xxxx_hekaton_database procedures (in blue)? Could THEY be the secret to a faster SQL Server? Could they promise a "hundredfold" improvement in performance?  Are these special, super-undocumented DIB (databases in black)? I decided to look in the SQL Server system views for any objects with hekaton in the name, or references to them, in hopes of discovering some new code that would answer all my questions: SELECT name FROM sys.all_objects WHERE name LIKE '%hekaton%' SELECT name FROM sys.all_objects WHERE object_definition(OBJECT_ID) LIKE '%hekaton%' Which revealed: name ------------------------ (0 row(s) affected) name ------------------------ sp_createstats sp_recompile sp_updatestats (3 row(s) affected)   Hmm.  Well that didn't find much.  Looks like these procedures are seriously undocumented, unknown, perhaps forbidden knowledge. Maybe a part of some unspeakable evil? (No, I'm not paranoid, I just like mysteries and thought that punching this up with that kind of thing might keep you reading.  I know I'd fall asleep without it.) OK, so let's check out those 3 procedures and see what they reveal when I search for "Hekaton": sp_createstats: -- filter out local temp tables, Hekaton tables, and tables for which current user has no permissions -- Note that OBJECTPROPERTY returns NULL on type="IT" tables, thus we only call it on type='U' tables   OK, that's interesting, let's go looking down a little further: ((@table_type<>'U') or (0 = OBJECTPROPERTY(@table_id, 'TableIsInMemory'))) and -- Hekaton table   Wellllll, that tells us a few new things: There's such a thing as Hekaton tables (UPDATE: I'm not the only one to have found them!) They are not standard user tables and probably not in memory UPDATE: I misinterpreted this because I didn't read all the code when I wrote this blog post. The OBJECTPROPERTY function has an undocumented TableIsInMemory option Let's check out sp_recompile: -- (3) Must not be a Hekaton procedure.   And once again go a little further: if (ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsExecuted') <> 0 AND ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsInlineFunction') = 0 AND ObjectProperty(@objid, 'IsView') = 0 AND -- Hekaton procedure cannot be recompiled -- Make them go through schema version bumping branch, which will fail ObjectProperty(@objid, 'ExecIsCompiledProc') = 0)   And now we learn that hekaton procedures also exist, they can't be recompiled, there's a "schema version bumping branch" somewhere, and OBJECTPROPERTY has another undocumented option, ExecIsCompiledProc.  (If you experiment with this you'll find this option returns null, I think it only works when called from a system object.) This is neat! Sadly sp_updatestats doesn't reveal anything new, the comments about hekaton are the same as sp_createstats.  But we've ALSO discovered undocumented features for the OBJECTPROPERTY function, which we can now search for: SELECT name, object_definition(OBJECT_ID) FROM sys.all_objects WHERE object_definition(OBJECT_ID) LIKE '%OBJECTPROPERTY(%'   I'll leave that to you as more homework.  I should add that searching the system procedures was recommended long ago by the late, great Ken Henderson, in his Guru's Guide books, as a great way to find undocumented features.  That seems to be really good advice! Now if you're a programmer/hacker, you've probably been drooling over the last 5 entries for hekaton (in green), because these are the names of source code files for SQL Server!  Does this mean we can access the source code for SQL Server?  As The Oracle suggested to Neo, can we return to The Source??? Actually, no. Well, maybe a little bit.  While you won't get the actual source code from the compiled DLL and EXE files, you'll get references to source files, debugging symbols, variables and module names, error messages, and even the startup flags for SQL Server.  And if you search for "DBCC" or "CHECKDB" you'll find a really nice section listing all the DBCC commands, including the undocumented ones.  Granted those are pretty easy to find online, but you may be surprised what those web sites DIDN'T tell you! (And neither will I, go look for yourself!)  And as we saw earlier, you'll also find execution plan elements, query processing rules, and who knows what else.  It's also instructive to see how Microsoft organizes their source directories, how various components (storage engine, query processor, Full Text, AlwaysOn/HADR) are split into smaller modules. There are over 2000 source file references, go do some exploring! So what did we learn?  We can pull strings out of executable files, search them for known items, browse them for unknown items, and use the results to examine internal code to learn even more things about SQL Server.  We've even learned how to use command-line utilities!  We are now 1337 h4X0rz!  (Not really.  I hate that leetspeak crap.) Although, I must confess I might've gone too far with the "conspiracy" part of this post.  I apologize for that, it's just my overactive imagination.  There's really no hidden agenda or conspiracy regarding SQL Server internals.  It's not The Matrix.  It's not like you'd find anything like that in there: Attach Matrix Database DM_MATRIX_COMM_PIPELINES MATRIXXACTPARTICIPANTS dm_matrix_agents   Alright, enough of this paranoid ranting!  Microsoft are not really evil!  It's not like they're The Borg from Star Trek: ALTER FEDERATION DROP ALTER FEDERATION SPLIT DROP FEDERATION   #tsql2sday

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• Hello Operator, My Switch Is Bored

  - by Paul White

  This is a post for T-SQL Tuesday #43 hosted by my good friend Rob Farley. The topic this month is Plan Operators. I haven’t taken part in T-SQL Tuesday before, but I do like to write about execution plans, so this seemed like a good time to start. This post is in two parts. The first part is primarily an excuse to use a pretty bad play on words in the title of this blog post (if you’re too young to know what a telephone operator or a switchboard is, I hate you). The second part of the post looks at an invisible query plan operator (so to speak). 1. My Switch Is Bored Allow me to present the rare and interesting execution plan operator, Switch: Books Online has this to say about Switch: Following that description, I had a go at producing a Fast Forward Cursor plan that used the TOP operator, but had no luck. That may be due to my lack of skill with cursors, I’m not too sure. The only application of Switch in SQL Server 2012 that I am familiar with requires a local partitioned view: CREATE TABLE dbo.T1 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 00 AND 24)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T2 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 25 AND 49)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T3 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 50 AND 74)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T4 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 75 AND 99)); GO CREATE VIEW V1 AS SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T1 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T2 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T3 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T4; Not only that, but it needs an updatable local partitioned view. We’ll need some primary keys to meet that requirement: ALTER TABLE dbo.T1 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T1 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T2 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T2 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T3 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T3 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T4 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T4 PRIMARY KEY (c1); We also need an INSERT statement that references the view. Even more specifically, to see a Switch operator, we need to perform a single-row insert (multi-row inserts use a different plan shape): INSERT dbo.V1 (c1) VALUES (1); And now…the execution plan: The Constant Scan manufactures a single row with no columns. The Compute Scalar works out which partition of the view the new value should go in. The Assert checks that the computed partition number is not null (if it is, an error is returned). The Nested Loops Join executes exactly once, with the partition id as an outer reference (correlated parameter). The Switch operator checks the value of the parameter and executes the corresponding input only. If the partition id is 0, the uppermost Clustered Index Insert is executed, adding a row to table T1. If the partition id is 1, the next lower Clustered Index Insert is executed, adding a row to table T2…and so on. In case you were wondering, here’s a query and execution plan for a multi-row insert to the view: INSERT dbo.V1 (c1) VALUES (1), (2); Yuck! An Eager Table Spool and four Filters! I prefer the Switch plan. My guess is that almost all the old strategies that used a Switch operator have been replaced over time, using things like a regular Concatenation Union All combined with Start-Up Filters on its inputs. Other new (relative to the Switch operator) features like table partitioning have specific execution plan support that doesn’t need the Switch operator either. This feels like a bit of a shame, but perhaps it is just nostalgia on my part, it’s hard to know. Please do let me know if you encounter a query that can still use the Switch operator in 2012 – it must be very bored if this is the only possible modern usage! 2. Invisible Plan Operators The second part of this post uses an example based on a question Dave Ballantyne asked using the SQL Sentry Plan Explorer plan upload facility. If you haven’t tried that yet, make sure you’re on the latest version of the (free) Plan Explorer software, and then click the Post to SQLPerformance.com button. That will create a site question with the query plan attached (which can be anonymized if the plan contains sensitive information). Aaron Bertrand and I keep a close eye on questions there, so if you have ever wanted to ask a query plan question of either of us, that’s a good way to do it. The problem The issue I want to talk about revolves around a query issued against a calendar table. The script below creates a simplified version and adds 100 years of per-day information to it: USE tempdb; GO CREATE TABLE dbo.Calendar ( dt date NOT NULL, isWeekday bit NOT NULL, theYear smallint NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT PK__dbo_Calendar_dt PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (dt) ); GO -- Monday is the first day of the week for me SET DATEFIRST 1;   -- Add 100 years of data INSERT dbo.Calendar WITH (TABLOCKX) (dt, isWeekday, theYear) SELECT CA.dt, isWeekday = CASE WHEN DATEPART(WEEKDAY, CA.dt) IN (6, 7) THEN 0 ELSE 1 END, theYear = YEAR(CA.dt) FROM Sandpit.dbo.Numbers AS N CROSS APPLY ( VALUES (DATEADD(DAY, N.n - 1, CONVERT(date, '01 Jan 2000', 113))) ) AS CA (dt) WHERE N.n BETWEEN 1 AND 36525; The following query counts the number of weekend days in 2013: SELECT Days = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.Calendar AS C WHERE theYear = 2013 AND isWeekday = 0; It returns the correct result (104) using the following execution plan: The query optimizer has managed to estimate the number of rows returned from the table exactly, based purely on the default statistics created separately on the two columns referenced in the query’s WHERE clause. (Well, almost exactly, the unrounded estimate is 104.289 rows.) There is already an invisible operator in this query plan – a Filter operator used to apply the WHERE clause predicates. We can see it by re-running the query with the enormously useful (but undocumented) trace flag 9130 enabled: Now we can see the full picture. The whole table is scanned, returning all 36,525 rows, before the Filter narrows that down to just the 104 we want. Without the trace flag, the Filter is incorporated in the Clustered Index Scan as a residual predicate. It is a little bit more efficient than using a separate operator, but residual predicates are still something you will want to avoid where possible. The estimates are still spot on though: Anyway, looking to improve the performance of this query, Dave added the following filtered index to the Calendar table: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX Weekends ON dbo.Calendar(theYear) WHERE isWeekday = 0; The original query now produces a much more efficient plan: Unfortunately, the estimated number of rows produced by the seek is now wrong (365 instead of 104): What’s going on? The estimate was spot on before we added the index! Explanation You might want to grab a coffee for this bit. Using another trace flag or two (8606 and 8612) we can see that the cardinality estimates were exactly right initially: The highlighted information shows the initial cardinality estimates for the base table (36,525 rows), the result of applying the two relational selects in our WHERE clause (104 rows), and after performing the COUNT_BIG(*) group by aggregate (1 row). All of these are correct, but that was before cost-based optimization got involved :) Cost-based optimization When cost-based optimization starts up, the logical tree above is copied into a structure (the ‘memo’) that has one group per logical operation (roughly speaking). The logical read of the base table (LogOp_Get) ends up in group 7; the two predicates (LogOp_Select) end up in group 8 (with the details of the selections in subgroups 0-6). These two groups still have the correct cardinalities as trace flag 8608 output (initial memo contents) shows: During cost-based optimization, a rule called SelToIdxStrategy runs on group 8. It’s job is to match logical selections to indexable expressions (SARGs). It successfully matches the selections (theYear = 2013, is Weekday = 0) to the filtered index, and writes a new alternative into the memo structure. The new alternative is entered into group 8 as option 1 (option 0 was the original LogOp_Select): The new alternative is to do nothing (PhyOp_NOP = no operation), but to instead follow the new logical instructions listed below the NOP. The LogOp_GetIdx (full read of an index) goes into group 21, and the LogOp_SelectIdx (selection on an index) is placed in group 22, operating on the result of group 21. The definition of the comparison ‘the Year = 2013’ (ScaOp_Comp downwards) was already present in the memo starting at group 2, so no new memo groups are created for that. New Cardinality Estimates The new memo groups require two new cardinality estimates to be derived. First, LogOp_Idx (full read of the index) gets a predicted cardinality of 10,436. This number comes from the filtered index statistics: DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, Weekends) WITH STAT_HEADER; The second new cardinality derivation is for the LogOp_SelectIdx applying the predicate (theYear = 2013). To get a number for this, the cardinality estimator uses statistics for the column ‘theYear’, producing an estimate of 365 rows (there are 365 days in 2013!): DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, theYear) WITH HISTOGRAM; This is where the mistake happens. Cardinality estimation should have used the filtered index statistics here, to get an estimate of 104 rows: DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, Weekends) WITH HISTOGRAM; Unfortunately, the logic has lost sight of the link between the read of the filtered index (LogOp_GetIdx) in group 22, and the selection on that index (LogOp_SelectIdx) that it is deriving a cardinality estimate for, in group 21. The correct cardinality estimate (104 rows) is still present in the memo, attached to group 8, but that group now has a PhyOp_NOP implementation. Skipping over the rest of cost-based optimization (in a belated attempt at brevity) we can see the optimizer’s final output using trace flag 8607: This output shows the (incorrect, but understandable) 365 row estimate for the index range operation, and the correct 104 estimate still attached to its PhyOp_NOP. This tree still has to go through a few post-optimizer rewrites and ‘copy out’ from the memo structure into a tree suitable for the execution engine. One step in this process removes PhyOp_NOP, discarding its 104-row cardinality estimate as it does so. To finish this section on a more positive note, consider what happens if we add an OVER clause to the query aggregate. This isn’t intended to be a ‘fix’ of any sort, I just want to show you that the 104 estimate can survive and be used if later cardinality estimation needs it: SELECT Days = COUNT_BIG(*) OVER () FROM dbo.Calendar AS C WHERE theYear = 2013 AND isWeekday = 0; The estimated execution plan is: Note the 365 estimate at the Index Seek, but the 104 lives again at the Segment! We can imagine the lost predicate ‘isWeekday = 0’ as sitting between the seek and the segment in an invisible Filter operator that drops the estimate from 365 to 104. Even though the NOP group is removed after optimization (so we don’t see it in the execution plan) bear in mind that all cost-based choices were made with the 104-row memo group present, so although things look a bit odd, it shouldn’t affect the optimizer’s plan selection. I should also mention that we can work around the estimation issue by including the index’s filtering columns in the index key: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX Weekends ON dbo.Calendar(theYear, isWeekday) WHERE isWeekday = 0 WITH (DROP_EXISTING = ON); There are some downsides to doing this, including that changes to the isWeekday column may now require Halloween Protection, but that is unlikely to be a big problem for a static calendar table ;)  With the updated index in place, the original query produces an execution plan with the correct cardinality estimation showing at the Index Seek: That’s all for today, remember to let me know about any Switch plans you come across on a modern instance of SQL Server! Finally, here are some other posts of mine that cover other plan operators: Segment and Sequence Project Common Subexpression Spools Why Plan Operators Run Backwards Row Goals and the Top Operator Hash Match Flow Distinct Top N Sort Index Spools and Page Splits Singleton and Range Seeks Bitmaps Hash Join Performance Compute Scalar © 2013 Paul White – All Rights Reserved Twitter: @SQL_Kiwi

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• Results Delphi users who wish to use HID USB in windows

  - by Lex Dean

  Results Delphi users who wish to use HID USB in windows HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB Contain a list if keys containing vender ID and Producer ID numbers that co inside with the USB web sites data base. These numbers and the GUID held within the key gives important information to execute the HID.dll that is otherwise imposable to execute. The Control Panel/System/Hardware/Device manager/USB Serial Bus Controllers/Mass Storage Devices/details simply lists the registry data. The access to the programmer has been documented through the API32.dll with a number of procedures that accesses the registry. But that is not the problem yet it looks like the problem!!!!!!!!! The key is info about the registry and how to use it. These keys are viewed in RegEdit.exe it’s self. Some parts of the registry like the USB have been given a windows security system type of protection with a Aurthz.dll to give the USB read and right protection. Even the api32.dll. Now only Microsoft give out these details and we all know Microsoft hate Delphi. Now C users have enjoyed this access for over 10 years now. Now some will make out that you should never give out such information because some idiot may make a stupid virus (true), but the argument is also do Delphi users need to be denied USB access for another ten years!!!!!!!!!!!!. What I do not have is the skill in is assembly code. I’m seeking for some one that can trace how regedit.exe gets its access through Aurthz.dll to access the USB data. So I’m asking all who reads this:- to partition any friend they have that has this skill to get the Aurthz.dll info needed. I find communicating with USB.org they reply when they have a positive email reply but do not bother should their email be a slightly negative policy. For all simple reasoning, all that USB had to do was to have a secure key as they have done, and to update the same data into a unsecured key every time the data is changed for USB developer to access. And not bother developers access to Aurthz.dll. Authz.dll with these functions for USB:- AuthzFreeResourceManager AuthzFreeContext AuthzAccessCheck(Flags: DWORD; AuthzClientContext: AUTHZ_CLIENT_CONTEXT_HANDLE; pRequest: PAUTHZ_ACCESS_REQUEST; AuditInfo: AUTHZ_AUDIT_INFO_HANDLE; pSecurityDescriptor: PSECURITY_DESCRIPTOR; OptionalSecurityDescriptorArray: PSECURITY_DESCRIPTOR; OptionalSecurityDescriptorCount: DWORD; //OPTIONAL, Var pReply: AUTHZ_ACCESS_REPLY; pAuthzHandle: PAUTHZ_ACCESS_CHECK_RESULTS_HANDLE): BOOl; AuthzInitializeContextFromSid(Flags: DWORD; UserSid: PSID; AuthzResourceManager: AUTHZ_RESOURCE_MANAGER_HANDLE; pExpirationTime: int64; Identifier: LUID; DynamicGroupArgs: PVOID; pAuthzClientContext: PAUTHZ_CLIENT_CONTEXT_HANDLE): BOOL; AuthzInitializeResourceManager(flags: DWORD; pfnAccessCheck: PFN_AUTHZ_DYNAMIC_ACCESS_CHECK; pfnComputeDynamicGroups: PFN_AUTHZ_COMPUTE_DYNAMIC_GROUPS; pfnFreeDynamicGroups: PFN_AUTHZ_FREE_DYNAMIC_GROUPS; ResourceManagerName: PWideChar; pAuthzResourceManager: PAUTHZ_RESOURCE_MANAGER_HANDLE): BOOL; further in Authz.h on kolers.com J Lex Dean.

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• Enteprise Library Exception Handling for WCF Fault Contracts - CLIENT SIDE

  - by Huw

  I have a Windows Service which communicates with WCF services. The WCF services are all fault shielded and generate custom UserFaultContracts and ServiceFaultContracts. No problems there. In the Windows Service I am using EntLib for exception handling and logging. I do not want to try catch for faults try { } catch (FaultException<UserFaultContract>) { } I want to use EntLib try { } catch (Exception ex) { var rethrow = ExceptionPolicy.HandleException(ex, "Transaction Policy"); if (rethrow) throw; } This also works, however, in my Tranasaction Policy I want to Log the details of the UserFaultContract. This is where I am unglued. And I hate becoming unglued. The fault is captured and logged...but I can't get the details of the fault. My exception policy is <add name="Transaction Policy"> <exceptionTypes> <add type="System.Exception, mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" postHandlingAction="None" name="Exception"> <exceptionHandlers> <add logCategory="General" eventId="200" severity="Error" title="Transaction Error" formatterType="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.TextExceptionFormatter, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling, Version=4.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" priority="2" useDefaultLogger="true" type="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.Logging.LoggingExceptionHandler, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.Logging, Version=4.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" name="Logging Handler" /> </exceptionHandlers> </add> <add type="System.ServiceModel.FaultException, System.ServiceModel, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" postHandlingAction="None" name="FaultException"> <exceptionHandlers> <add logCategory="General" eventId="200" severity="Error" title="Service Fault" formatterType="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.TextExceptionFormatter, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling, Version=4.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" priority="2" useDefaultLogger="true" type="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.Logging.LoggingExceptionHandler, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.Logging, Version=4.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" name="Logging Handler" /> </exceptionHandlers> </add> </exceptionTypes> </add> The exception logged is: Timestamp: 5/13/2010 14:53:40 Message: HandlingInstanceID: e9038634-e16e-4d87-ab1e-92379431838b An exception of type 'System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[[LCI.DispatchMaster.FaultContracts.ServiceFaultContract, LCI.DispatchMaster.FaultContracts, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null]]' occurred and was caught. 05/13/2010 10:53:40 Type : System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[[LCI.DispatchMaster.FaultContracts.ServiceFaultContract, LCI.DispatchMaster.FaultContracts, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null]], System.ServiceModel, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089 Message : There was an internal fault at the DispatchMaster service. Source : mscorlib Help link : Detail : LCI.DispatchMaster.FaultContracts.ServiceFaultContract Action : http://LCI.DispatchMaster.LogicalChoices.com/ITruckMasterService/MergeScenarioServiceFaultContractFault Code : System.ServiceModel.FaultCode Reason : There was an internal fault at the DispatchMaster service. Data : System.Collections.ListDictionaryInternal TargetSite : Void HandleReturnMessage(System.Runtime.Remoting.Messaging.IMessage, System.Runtime.Remoting.Messaging.IMessage) Stack Trace : In the fault contact there is an ID and a Message. I would, as you can see, like the ID and Message to be logged by EntLib. I am assuming that I'm going to have to write a custom handler to exctract the fault details - but thought I'd ask if I'm missing something in EntLib which might help me avoid that task. Thanks to anyone who is willing to help.

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• My View on ASP.NET Web Forms versus MVC

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Introduction A lot has been said on Web Forms and MVC, but since I was recently asked about my opinion on the subject, here it is. First, I have to say that I really like both technologies and I don’t think any is going away – just remember SharePoint, which is built on top of Web Forms. I see them as complementary, targeting different needs and leveraging different skills. Let’s go through some of their differences. Rapid Application Development Rapid Application Development (RAD) is the development process by which you have an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), a visual design surface and a toolbox, and you drag components from the toolbox to the design surface and set their properties through a property inspector. It was introduced with some of the earliest Windows graphical IDEs such as Visual Basic and Delphi. With Web Forms you have RAD out of the box. Visual Studio offers a generally good (and extensible) designer for the layout of pages and web user controls. Designing a page may simply be about dragging controls from the toolbox, setting their properties and wiring up some events to event handlers, which are implemented in code behind .NET classes. Most people will be familiar with this kind of development and enjoy it. You can see what you are doing from the beginning. MVC also has designable pages – called views in MVC terminology – the problem is that they can be built using different technologies, some of which, at the moment (MVC 4) do not support RAD – Razor, for example. I believe it is just a matter of time for that to be implemented in Visual Studio, but it will mostly consist on HTML editing, and until that day comes, you have to live with source editing. Development Model Web Forms features the same development model that you are used to from Windows Forms and other similar technologies: events fired by controls and automatic persistence of their properties between postbacks. For that, it uses concepts such as view state, which some may love and others may hate, because it may be misused quite easily, but otherwise does its job well. Another fundamental concept is data binding, by which a collection of data can be fed to a control and have it render that data somehow – just thing of the GridView control. The focus is on the page, that’s where it all starts, and you can place everything in the same code behind class: data access, business logic, layout, etc. The controls take care of generating a great part of the HTML and JavaScript for you. With MVC there is no free lunch when it comes to data persistence between requests, you have to implement it yourself. As for event handling, that is at the core of MVC, in the form of controllers and action methods, you just don’t think of them as event handlers. In MVC you need to think more in HTTP terms, so action methods such as POST and GET are relevant to you, and may write actions to handle one or the other. Also of crucial importance is model binding: the way by which MVC converts your posted data into a .NET class. This is something that ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms has introduced as well, but it is a cornerstone in MVC. MVC also has built-in validation of these .NET classes, which out of the box uses the Data Annotations API. You have full control of the generated HTML - except for that coming from the helper methods, usually small fragments - which requires a greater familiarity with the specifications. You normally rely much more on JavaScript APIs, they are even included in the Visual Studio template, that is because much less is done for you. Reuse It is difficult to accept a professional company/project that does not employ reuse. It can save a lot of time thus cutting costs significantly. Code reused in several projects matures as time goes by and helps developers learn from past experiences. ASP.NET Web Forms was built with reuse in mind, in the form of controls. Controls encapsulate functionality and are generally portable from project to project (with the notable exception of web user controls, those with an associated .ASCX markup file). ASP.NET has dozens of controls and it is very easy to develop new ones, so I believe this is a great advantage. A control can inject JavaScript code and external references as well as generate HTML an CSS. MVC on the other hand does not use controls – it is possible to use them, with some view engines like ASPX, but it is just not advisable because it breaks the flow – where do Init, Load, PreRender, etc, fit? The most similar to controls is extension methods, or helpers. They serve the same purpose – generating HTML, CSS or JavaScript – and can be reused between different projects. What differentiates them from controls is that there is no inheritance and no context – an extension method is just a static method which doesn’t know where it is being called. You also have partial views, which you can reuse in the same project, but there is no inheritance as well. This, in my view, is a weakness of MVC. Architecture Both technologies are highly extensible. I have writtenstarted writing a series of posts on ASP.NET Web Forms extensibility and will probably write another series on MVC extensibility as well. A number of scenarios are covered in any of these models, and some extensibility points apply to both, because, of course both stand upon ASP.NET. With Web Forms, if you’re like me, you start by defining you master pages, pages and controls, with some helper classes to glue everything. You may as well throw in some JavaScript, but probably you’re main work will be with plain old .NET code. The controls you define have the chance to inject JavaScript code and references, through either the ScriptManager or the page’s ClientScript object, as well as generating HTML and CSS code. The master page and page model with code behind classes offer a number of “hooks” by which you can change the normal way of things, for example, in a page you can access any control on the master page, add script or stylesheet references to its head and even change the page’s title. Also, with Web Forms, you typically have URLs in the form “/SomePath/SomePage.aspx?SomeParameter=SomeValue”, which isn’t really SEO friendly, no to mention the HTML that some controls produce, far from standards, optimization and best practices. In MVC, you also normally start by defining the master page (or layout) and views, which are the visible parts, and then define controllers on separate files. These controllers do not know anything about the views, except the names and types of the parameters that will be passed to and from them. The controller will be responsible for the data access and business logic, eventually relying on additional classes for this purpose. On a controller you only receive parameters and return a result, which may be a request for the rendering of a view, a redirection to another URL or a JSON object, to name just a few. The controller class does not know anything about the web, so you can effectively reuse it in a non-web project. This separation and the lack of programmatic access to the UI elements, makes it very difficult to implement, for example, something like SharePoint with MVC. OK, I know about Orchard, but it isn’t really a general purpose development framework, but instead, a CMS that happens to use MVC. Not having controls render HTML for you gives you in turn much more control over it – it is your responsibility to create it, which you can either consider a blessing or a curse, in the later case, you probably shouldn’t be using MVC at all. Also MVC URLs tend to be much more SEO-oriented, if you design your controllers and actions properly. Testing In a well defined architecture, you should separate business logic, data access logic and presentation logic, because these are all different things and it might even be the need to switch one implementation for another: for example, you might design a system which includes a data access layer, a business logic layer and two presentation layers, one on top of ASP.NET and the other with WPF; and the data access layer might be implemented first using NHibernate and later on switched for Entity Framework Code First. These changes are not that rare, so care should be taken in designing the system to make them possible. Web Forms are difficult to test, because it relies on event handlers which are only fired in web contexts, when a form is submitted or a page is requested. You can call them with reflection, but you have to set up a number of mocking objects first, HttpContext.Current first coming to my mind. MVC, on the other hand, makes testing controllers a breeze, so much that it even includes a template option for generating boilerplate unit test classes up from start. A well designed – from the unit test point of view - controller will receive everything it needs to work as parameters to its action methods, so you can pass whatever values you need very easily. That doesn’t mean, of course, that everything can be tested: views, for instance, are difficult to test without actually accessing the site, but MVC offers the possibility to compile views at build time, so that, at least, you know you don’t have syntax errors beforehand. Myths Some popular but unfounded myths around MVC include: You cannot use controls in MVC: not true, actually, you can, at least with the Web Forms (ASPX) view engine; the declaration and usage is exactly the same as with Web Forms; You cannot specify a base class for a view: with the ASPX view engine you can use the Inherits Page directive, with this and all the others you can use the pageBaseType and userControlBaseType attributes of the <page> element; MVC shields you from doing “bad things” on your views: well, you can place any code on a code block, at least with the ASPX view engine (you may be starting to see a pattern here), even data access code; The model is the entity model, tied to an O/RM: the model is actually any class that you use to pass values to a view, including (but generally not recommended) an entity model; Unit tests come with no cost: unit tests generally don’t cover the UI, although there are frameworks just for that (see WatiN, for example); also, for some tests, you will have to mock or replace either the HttpContext.Current property or the HttpContextBase class yourself; Everything is testable: views aren’t, without accessing the site; MVC relies on HTML5/some_cool_new_javascript_framework: there is no relation whatsoever, MVC renders whatever you want it to render and does not require any framework to be present. The thing is, the subsequent releases of MVC happened in a time when Microsoft has become much more involved in standards, so the files and technologies included in the Visual Studio templates reflect this, and it just happens to work well with jQuery, for example. Conclusion Well, this is how I see it. Some folks may think that I am being too rude on MVC, probably because I don’t like it, but that’s not true: like I said, I do like MVC and I am starting my new projects with it. I just don’t want to go along with that those that say that MVC is much superior to Web Forms, in fact, some things you can do much more easily with Web Forms than with MVC. I will be more than happy to hear what you think on this!

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• Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Tips and Tricks-Part 2: Key Shortcuts

  - by ToStringTheory

  Ask anyone that knows me, and they will confirm that I hate the mouse.  This isn’t because I deny affection to objects that don’t look like their mammalian-named self, but rather for a much more simple and not-insane reason: I have terrible eyesight.  Introduction Thanks to a degenerative eye disease known as Choroideremia, I have learned to rely more on the keyboard which I can feel digital/static positions of keys relative to my fingers, than the much more analog/random position of the mouse.  Now, I would like to share some of the keyboard shortcuts with you now, as I believe that they not only increase my productivity, but yours as well once you know them (if you don’t already of course)...  I share one of my biggest tips for productivity in the conclusion at the end. Visual Studio Key Shortcuts Global Editor Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are available from almost any application running in Windows, however are many times forgotten. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Ctrl + X Cut This shortcut works without a selection. If nothing is selected, the entire line that the caret is on is cut from the editor. Ctrl + C Copy This shortcut works without a selection. If nothing is selected, the entire line that the caret is on is copied from the editor. Ctrl + V Paste If you copied an entire line by the method above, the data is pasted in the line above the current caret line. Ctrl + Shift + V Next Clipboard Element Cut/Copy multiple things, and then hit this combo repeatedly to switch to the next clipboard item when pasting. Ctrl + Backspace Delete Previous Will delete the previous word from the editor directly before the caret. If anything is selected, will just delete that. Ctrl + Del Delete Next Word Will delete the next word/space from the editor directly after the caret. If anything is selected, will just delete that. Shift + Del Delete Focused Line Will delete the line from the editor that the caret is on. If something is selected, will just delete that. Ctrl + ? or Ctrl + ? Left/Right by Word This will move the caret left or right by word or special character boundary. Holding Shift will also select the word. Ctrl + F Quick Find Either the Quick Find panel, or the search bar if you have the Productivity Power Tools installed. Ctrl + Shift + F Find in Solution Opens up the 'Find in Files' window, allowing you to search your solution, as well as using regex for pattern matching. F2 Rename File... While not debugging, selecting a file in the solution explorer\navigator and pressing F2 allows you to rename the selected file. Global Application Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are available from almost any application running in Windows, however are many times forgotten... Again... Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Ctrl + N New File dialog Opens up the 'New File' dialog to add a new file to the current directory in the Solution\Project. Ctrl + O Open File dialog Opens up the 'Open File' dialog to open a file in the editor, not necessarily in the solution. Ctrl + S Save File dialog Saves the currently focused editor tab back to your HDD/SSD. Ctrl + Shift + S Save All... Quickly save all open/edited documents back to your disk. Ctrl + Tab Switch Panel\Tab Tapping this combo switches between tabs quickly. Holding down Ctrl when hitting tab will bring up a chooser window. Building Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are focused on building and running a solution. These are not usable when the IDE is in Debug mode, as the shortcut changes by context. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Ctrl + Shift + B Build Solution Starts a build process on the solution according to the current build configuration manager settings. Ctrl + Break Cancel a Building Solution Will cancel a build operation currently in progress. Good for long running builds when you think of one last change. F5 Start Debugging Will build the solution if needed and launch debugging according to the current configuration manager settings. Ctrl + F5 Start Without Debugger Will build the solution if needed and launch the startup project without attaching a debugger. Debugging Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are used when debugging a solution. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality F5 Continue Execution Continues execution of code until the next breakpoint. Ctrl + Alt + Break Pause Execution Pauses the program execution. Shift + F5 Stop Debugging Stops the current debugging session. NOTE: Web apps will still continue processing after stopping the debugger. Keep this in mind if working on code such as credit card processing. Ctrl + Shift + F5 Restart Debugging Stops the current debugging session and restarts the debugging session from the beginning. F9 Place Breakpoint Toggles/Places a breakpoint in the editor on the current line. Set a breakpoint in condensed code by highlighting the statement first. F10 Step Over Statement When debugging, executes all code in methods/properties on the current line until the next line. F11 Step Into Statement When debugging, steps into a method call so you can walk through the code executed there (if available). Ctrl + Alt + I Immediate Window Open the Immediate Window to execute commands when execution is paused. Navigation Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are used for navigating in the IDE or editor panel. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality F4 Properties Panel Opens the properties panel for the selected item in the editor/designer/solution navigator (context driven). F12 Go to Definition Press F12 with the caret on a member to navigate to its declaration. With the Productivity tools, Ctrl + Click works too. Ctrl + K Ctrl + T View Call Hierarchy View the call hierarchy of the member the caret is on. Great for going through n-tier solutions and interface implementations! Ctrl + Alt + B Breakpoint Window View the breakpoint window to manage breakpoints and their advanced options. Allows easy toggling of breakpoints. Ctrl + Alt + L Solution Navigator Open the solution explorer panel. Ctrl + Alt + O Output Window View the output window to see build\general output from Visual Studio. Ctrl + Alt + Enter Live Web Preview Only available with the Web Essential plugin. Launches the auto-updating Preview panel. Testing Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are used for running tests in the IDE. Please note, Visual Studio 2010 is all about context. If your caret is within a test method when you use one of these combinations, the combination will apply to that test. If your caret is within a test class, it will apply to that class. If the caret is outside of a test class, it will apply to all tests. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Ctrl + R T Run Test(s) Run all tests in the current context without a debugger attached. Breakpoints will not be stopped on. Ctrl + R Ctrl + T Run Test(s) (Debug) Run all tests in the current context with a debugger attached. This allows you to use breakpoints. Substitute A for T from the preceding combos to run/debug ALL tests in the current context. Substitute Y for T from the preceding combos to run/debug ALL impacted/covering tests for a method in the current context. Advanced Editor Shortcuts These are shortcuts that are used for more advanced editing in the editor window. Shortcut Action Visual Studio 2010 Functionality Shift + Alt + ? Shift + Alt + ? Multiline caret up/down Use this combo to edit multiple lines at once. Not too many uses for it, but once in a blue moon one comes along. Ctrl + Alt + Enter Insert Line Above Inserts a blank line above the line the caret is currently on. No need to be at end or start of line, so no cutting off words/code. Ctrl + K Ctrl + C Comment Selection Comments the current selection out of compilation. Ctrl + K Ctrl + U Uncomment Selection Uncomments the current selection into compilation. Ctrl + K Ctrl + D Format Document Automatically formats the document into a structured layout. Lines up nodes or code into columns intelligently. Alt + ? Alt + ? Code line up/down *Use this combo to move a line of code up or down quickly. Great for small rearrangements of code. *Requires the Productivity Power pack from Microsoft. Conclusion This list is by no means meant to be exhaustive, but these are the shortcuts I use regularly every hour/minute of the day. There are still 100s more in Visual Studio that you can discover through the configuration window, or by tooltips. Something that I started doing months ago seems to have interest in my office.. In my last post, I talked about how I hated a cluttered UI. One of the ways that I aimed to resolve that was by systematically cleaning up the toolbars week by week. First day, I removed ALL icons that I already knew shortcuts to, or would never use them (Undo in a toolbar?!). Then, every week from that point on, I make it a point to remove an icon/two from the toolbar and make an effort to remember its key combination. I gain extra space in the toolbar area, AND become more productive at the same time! I hope that you found this article interesting or at least somewhat informative.. Maybe a shortcut or two you didn't know. I know some of them seem trivial, but I often see people going to the edit menu for Copy/Paste... Thought a refresher might be helpful!

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• The Red Gate and .NET Reflector Debacle

  - by Rick Strahl

  About a month ago Red Gate – the company who owns the NET Reflector tool most .NET devs use at one point or another – decided to change their business model for Reflector and take the product from free to a fully paid for license model. As a bit of history: .NET Reflector was originally created by Lutz Roeder as a free community tool to inspect .NET assemblies. Using Reflector you can examine the types in an assembly, drill into type signatures and quickly disassemble code to see how a particular method works.  In case you’ve been living under a rock and you’ve never looked at Reflector, here’s what it looks like drilled into an assembly from disk with some disassembled source code showing: Note that you get tons of information about each element in the tree, and almost all related types and members are clickable both in the list and source view so it’s extremely easy to navigate and follow the code flow even in this static assembly only view. For many year’s Lutz kept the the tool up to date and added more features gradually improving an already amazing tool and making it better. Then about two and a half years ago Red Gate bought the tool from Lutz. A lot of ruckus and noise ensued in the community back then about what would happen with the tool and… for the most part very little did. Other than the incessant update notices with prominent Red Gate promo on them life with Reflector went on. The product didn’t die and and it didn’t go commercial or to a charge model. When .NET 4.0 came out it still continued to work mostly because the .NET feature set doesn’t drastically change how types behave.  Then a month back Red Gate started making noise about a new Version Version 7 which would be commercial. No more free version - and a shit storm broke out in the community. Now normally I’m not one to be critical of companies trying to make money from a product, much less for a product that’s as incredibly useful as Reflector. There isn’t day in .NET development that goes by for me where I don’t fire up Reflector. Whether it’s for examining the innards of the .NET Framework, checking out third party code, or verifying some of my own code and resources. Even more so recently I’ve been doing a lot of Interop work with a non-.NET application that needs to access .NET components and Reflector has been immensely valuable to me (and my clients) if figuring out exact type signatures required to calling .NET components in assemblies. In short Reflector is an invaluable tool to me. Ok, so what’s the problem? Why all the fuss? Certainly the $39 Red Gate is trying to charge isn’t going to kill any developer. If there’s any tool in .NET that’s worth $39 it’s Reflector, right? Right, but that’s not the problem here. The problem is how Red Gate went about moving the product to commercial which borders on the downright bizarre. It’s almost as if somebody in management wrote a slogan: “How can we piss off the .NET community in the most painful way we can?” And that it seems Red Gate has a utterly succeeded. People are rabid, and for once I think that this outrage isn’t exactly misplaced. Take a look at the message thread that Red Gate dedicated from a link off the download page. Not only is Version 7 going to be a paid commercial tool, but the older versions of Reflector won’t be available any longer. Not only that but older versions that are already in use also will continually try to update themselves to the new paid version – which when installed will then expire unless registered properly. There have also been reports of Version 6 installs shutting themselves down and failing to work if the update is refused (I haven’t seen that myself so not sure if that’s true). In other words Red Gate is trying to make damn sure they’re getting your money if you attempt to use Reflector. There’s a lot of temptation there. Think about the millions of .NET developers out there and all of them possibly upgrading – that’s a nice chunk of change that Red Gate’s sitting on. Even with all the community backlash these guys are probably making some bank right now just because people need to get life to move on. Red Gate also put up a Feedback link on the download page – which not surprisingly is chock full with hate mail condemning the move. Oddly there’s not a single response to any of those messages by the Red Gate folks except when it concerns license questions for the full version. It puzzles me what that link serves for other yet than another complete example of failure to understand how to handle customer relations. There’s no doubt that that all of this has caused some serious outrage in the community. The sad part though is that this could have been handled so much less arrogantly and without pissing off the entire community and causing so much ill-will. People are pissed off and I have no doubt that this negative publicity will show up in the sales numbers for their other products. I certainly hope so. Stupidity ought to be painful! Why do Companies do boneheaded stuff like this? Red Gate’s original decision to buy Reflector was hotly debated but at that the time most of what would happen was mostly speculation. But I thought it was a smart move for any company that is in need of spreading its marketing message and corporate image as a vendor in the .NET space. Where else do you get to flash your corporate logo to hordes of .NET developers on a regular basis?  Exploiting that marketing with some goodwill of providing a free tool breeds positive feedback that hopefully has a good effect on the company’s visibility and the products it sells. Instead Red Gate seems to have taken exactly the opposite tack of corporate bullying to try to make a quick buck – and in the process ruined any community goodwill that might have come from providing a service community for free while still getting valuable marketing. What’s so puzzling about this boneheaded escapade is that the company doesn’t need to resort to underhanded tactics like what they are trying with Reflector 7. The tools the company makes are very good. I personally use SQL Compare, Sql Data Compare and ANTS Profiler on a regular basis and all of these tools are essential in my toolbox. They certainly work much better than the tools that are in the box with Visual Studio. Chances are that if Reflector 7 added useful features I would have been more than happy to shell out my $39 to upgrade when the time is right. It’s Expensive to give away stuff for Free At the same time, this episode shows some of the big problems that come with ‘free’ tools. A lot of organizations are realizing that giving stuff away for free is actually quite expensive and the pay back is often very intangible if any at all. Those that rely on donations or other voluntary compensation find that they amount contributed is absolutely miniscule as to not matter at all. Yet at the same time I bet most of those clamouring the loudest on that Red Gate Reflector feedback page that Reflector won’t be free anymore probably have NEVER made a donation to any open source project or free tool ever. The expectation of Free these days is just too great – which is a shame I think. There’s a lot to be said for paid software and having somebody to hold to responsible to because you gave them some money. There’s an incentive –> payback –> responsibility model that seems to be missing from free software (not all of it, but a lot of it). While there certainly are plenty of bad apples in paid software as well, money tends to be a good motivator for people to continue working and improving products. Reasons for giving away stuff are many but often it’s a naïve desire to share things when things are simple. At first it might be no problem to volunteer time and effort but as products mature the fun goes out of it, and as the reality of product maintenance kicks in developers want to get something back for the time and effort they’re putting in doing non-glamorous work. It’s then when products die or languish and this is painful for all to watch. For Red Gate however, I think there was always a pretty good payback from the Reflector acquisition in terms of marketing: Visibility and possible positioning of their products although they seemed to have mostly ignored that option. On the other hand they started this off pretty badly even 2 and a half years back when they aquired Reflector from Lutz with the same arrogant attitude that is evident in the latest episode. You really gotta wonder what folks are thinking in management – the sad part is from advance emails that were circulating, they were fully aware of the shit storm they were inciting with this and I suspect they are banking on the sheer numbers of .NET developers to still make them a tidy chunk of change from upgrades… Alternatives are coming For me personally the single license isn’t a problem, but I actually have a tool that I sell (an interop Web Service proxy generation tool) to customers and one of the things I recommend to use with has been Reflector to view assembly information and to find which Interop classes to instantiate from the non-.NET environment. It’s been nice to use Reflector for this with its small footprint and zero-configuration installation. But now with V7 becoming a paid tool that option is not going to be available anymore. Luckily it looks like the .NET community is jumping to it and trying to fill the void. Amidst the Red Gate outrage a new library called ILSpy has sprung up and providing at least some of the core functionality of Reflector with an open source library. It looks promising going forward and I suspect there will be a lot more support and interest to support this project now that Reflector has gone over to the ‘dark side’…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011

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