.NET, Universe and Everything according to Dirk

Linklist

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:05:00 +1100

Another collection of links that accumulated in my "Starred" folder.

Happy Yuletide

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:39:00 +1100

I wish everybody a good and safe end of year! Incidentally, I upgraded to BlogEngine.NET 2.5 ...

How to Disable all Animations in a PowerPoint Presentation

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 01:25:00 +1100

Last week, a colleague and I were victimized by PowerPoint and a certain template that includes animations by default - even when the animations don't fit the presenter's style. I couldn't let that slide (hah!) and had to research whether there's a possibility to turn of all animations with a simple switch. It turns out there is, as described at http://malektips.com/powerpoint-2007-remove-animations-slide-show.html.

How to Order the Registration of your ASP.NET MVC Areas

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 17:40:00 +1100

I ran into a situation where the order of registration of the areas in my ASP.NET MVC application was important. So far, I've been using AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas() to have all areas registered automatically. Sometimes I got lucky and the areas were registered in the order I wanted, but sometimes they weren't, leading to mysterious 404 errors. It took me some time to diagnose that the problem was indeed the ordering, then some more to find the right google query. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1639971/mvc-2-arearegistration-routes-order describes my order, and Eilion's answer saved my day: a way to manually register areas in any order I choose:

var area1reg = new Area1AreaRegistration();
var area1context = new AreaRegistrationContext(area1reg.AreaName, RouteTable.Routes);
area1reg.RegisterArea(area1context);

Another Chapter Ends

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 20:30:00 +1100

The last day of 2010 not only marked the end of the year, but also the end of my employment at Tech Talk. I've spent 4 wonderful years there, and I am very grateful to have met and worked with a very fine collection of people indeed. I've learnt much, both professionally and personally. As Douglas Adams famously wrote: So long, and thanks for all the fish!

Leaving TFS Behind

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:40:00 +1100

For the past few years, I’ve been using Team Foundation Server to address the source control needs of my hobby projects. Soon I’ll have to leave that TFS behind, so naturally I’ve been looking at ways to get my source code out. Getting only the tip of the iceberg is trivially easy of course: get latest version, unbind from source control and you’re done. But I’d really like to get out the history as well. I’ve evaluated several options.

TFS Integration Tools

First stop on the road were the TFS Integration Tools. The TFS Integration Tools are a fairly mature set of tools for migrating from one source control system (including, but not limited to, TFS) to another TFS server. I set up a virtual machine with TFS Workgroup Edition, Team Explorer for both TFS 2008 and 2010. I was all set to go but then I ran into a critical problem: my VM is not in the domain of the old TFS server, and thus I don’t have access to the old TFS from my VM – even though the TFS Integration Tools GUI offers the “connect as a different user” functionality.

I decided to give up on the TFS Integration Tools, since I wasn’t convinced about wanting to store my source in yet another TFS.

Git-TFS

Second stop on the road was the Git-TFS bridge. It quickly turned out that this is really only a bridge: it’s designed for developers who don’t want the heavy-weight TFS source control interfering with their daily work but who will eventually check their stuff in into TFS.

SvnBridge

SvnBridge is another bridge, this time for using TortoiseSVN with TFS. My idea was to use this bridge in connection with a Git-Svn bridge and export everything into a Git repository. I abandoned that idea as well since I don’t feel comfortable using Git (yet).

We don’t need no Source Control …

I finally hit paydirt when the umpteenth Google query came up with Migrating from TFS to SVN. That article describes a way of extracting older versions from TFS by date.

The author (Joel Potischman) goes on to describe how to check in those versions into SVN. I decided I did not want to use SVN either – after all, I just spent several hours getting my code out of TFS, so I didn’t want to put it into another server system that I don’t know too well.

In addition – being the pedantic bugger that I am – I didn’t want to extract my code by date (as in the article), but by changeset. That turned out to be rather easy, and I changed Joel’s TFSGet script as follows:

mkdir source
cd source

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\TF.exe" get "*.*" /all /version:C%1 /recursive /overwrite

cd ..
rename source %1

You use this script by calling it with the number of the changeset.

Changesets, changesets, changesets

Now all I needed was a list of all changesets in my TFS project to automate calling TFSGet – I didn’t feel like calling it manually about 1000 times.

First idea: get the list of changesets using tf.exe. I didn’t find out how to do that, and neither did our local TFS expert.

Second idea: use the TFS object model. I didn’t find an immediately self-evident way of retrieving changesets from there either.

Third idea: Excel to the rescue. It turns out that getting the numbers of the changesets is trivially easy, in a banging-your-head-on-the-desk sort of way: Stack Overflow has the scope in TFS query (in Visual Studio) to get all check-ins.

So armed with all that knowledge and a bag full of glue scripts I set to work. I left the script running overnight and it was busy extracting the last couple of changesets when I came back to my pc in the morning. Hooray!

ConQAT Clone Detector

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 20:00:00 +1100

ConQAT - includes a Clone Detection feature for finding instances of copy-paste inheritance and candidates for extraction.

A-Star (A*) Path Finding Implementation in C#

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 19:05:00 +1100

See http://www.codeguru.com/csharp/csharp/cs_misc/designtechniques/article.php/c12527__1/A-Star-A-Implementation-in-C-Path-Finding-PathFinder.htm

XAML Art and Resources

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 00:22:00 +1100

Two more links:

Xamalot features lots of free XAML clipart
How do I Include Vector-Based Image Resources in my WPF Application?

WPF/Silverlight Learning

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 00:08:00 +1100

I've collected a couple of links with WPF/Silverlight/MVVM learning content over the last couple of months. Here they are:

Using the PC Keyboard in the Windows Phone 7 Emulator

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 18:55:00 +1100

How to use Desktop PC/Laptop Keyboard in Windows Phone 7 Emulator

Git

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 20:41:00 +1100

A colleague and I were discussing source control systems the other day. He was praising the benefits of Git, and how it truly enables you to do feature-driven development. I had heard of Git before, but his enthusiasm sparked my interest. So I watched a video of Linus Torvalds talking about Git - it does sound promising. Linus's main point (for me, at least) is that merging is a pain in most other source control systems. I agree - I've tried using branches in TFS "to try things out" but when it came to merging the stuff back into the trunk, it turned out it was easier to apply the changes manually. So I will definitely try out Git in the near future.

Linus has some strong and negative opinions about systems like SVN - the word "moron" is used a number of times. I wonder what Linus would say about The Source Control System That Must Not Be Named.

Done: Certified Scrum Developer Course

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 21:47:00 +1100

My colleague Gaspar Nagy and I held Tech Talk's first Certified Scrum Developer course last week. We got good feedback, and I'm proud and happy that my part about Test Driven Development was very well received. I'm looking forward to the next iteration!

80 Large Background Websites

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 18:41:00 +1100

Note to self: a large collection of large background websites.

DevCamp 2010 Keynote Speaker Announced

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 00:06:00 +1100

I wrote about DevCamp 2010 earlier, and I'm happy to report that the keynote speaker has been announced the day before yesterday: my fellow countryman Bart de Smet from the SQL Cloud Programmability team.

Upgrading an ASP.NET MVC2 Application from autofac 1.4.4 to autofac 2.2.4

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 04:06:00 +1100

I upgraded an ASP.NET MVC2-based web application from autofac 1.4.4 to autofac 2.2.4 today. I hoped that simply swapping out the dlls would be enough, but that was not the case. I found the help I needed on these pages:

http://code.google.com/p/autofac/wiki/NewInV2
http://code.google.com/p/autofac/wiki/AspNetIntegration#Standard_Integration - the PropertyInjectionModule class was moved from Autofac.Integration.Web to Autofac.Integration.Web.Forms
http://code.google.com/p/autofac/wiki/MvcIntegration - you can dispense with custom Area-aware AutofacControllerFactory implementations that use IControllerIdentificationStrategy which does no longer exist.

Everything worked again after applying the information from those pages.

Update 2010-08-22: I needed http://code.google.com/p/autofac/wiki/WcfIntegration as well, since there have been changes to the WCF integration.

Shameless Plug 2: Certified Scrum Developer Course

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:02:00 +1100

TechTalk (the company I work for) is organizing a "Certified Scrum Developer" course. The purpose of the course is to teach you (or reinforce your knowledge of) the way software development can be done in a scrum environment. Successful completion of the course can be applied towards the Certified Scrum Developer credential that was recently introduced by the Scrum Alliance. The course will be held from 13-15 October 2010, by TechTalk at Microsoft Austria's Microsoft Innovation Center.

The tentative schedule allows for large chunk of Test Driven Development-related content on day 2, and I am deeply involved in the preparation of that part. I hope you'll attend to enjoy the fruits of my work :-)

Shameless Plug 1: DevCamp 2010

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:53:00 +1100

TechTalk (the company I work for) is once again part of the organization of DevCamp - the 4th edition already. DevCamp is an Austrian developer conference held yearly in October in Vienna. This year's edition will take place on tuesday 12 October 2010, at Vienna Marriott, Parkring 12a, 1010 Wien. There will be three tracks: Windows Azure – Über oder in der Wolke?, Application Lifecycle Management and User Experience & Applications.

Troubleshooting SQL Server CE 3.5

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 05:48:00 +1100

If SQL Server CE 3.5 mysteriously cannot be found by an application anymore - even if another one is perfectly able to load it - with this exception message: Cannot open “X:Pathtodatafiledatafile.sdf”. Provider ‘System.Data.SqlServerCe.3.5′ not installed then you might try the solution suggested at http://www.geekfreeq.com/linq-sql-server-ce-35/. It worked for me.

How To Convert A Photograph Into A Pencil Drawing Using Photoshop

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 21:20:00 +1100

Here's a technique for creating a pencil drawing from a photograph using Photoshop - my wife grabbed it from the internet, modified it a bit and wrote it down as a recipe that's understandable to non-photoshop-wizards like me. Here goes:

Photo so viel als nötig croppen (erspart einiges an wegradier-arbeit)
Layer from Background
alles was nicht dabei sein soll, mit dem eraser-tool wegradieren
Desaturate
desaturierten layer kopieren
invert: strg i
blending mode: color dodge: alles wird weiß
filter – blur – gaussian blur
eventuell noch korrekturen
als .psd speichern
Old parchment 3 öffnen (that's the background image where the pencil drawings where used on.)
Place bearbeitetes Foto
Blending mode: ausprobieren
wenn zu hell: image- adjustment – shadow/highlight oder variations
wenn linien von bearbeitetem Foto zu dunkel hilft statt radieren im original auch Layer style „outer glow“

Some more design tips

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 02:28:00 +1100

Some more interesting design resources as a note to self: http://speckyboy.com/2009/11/02/40-fresh-and-free-icon-sets-for-web-designers-and-bloggers/.

in WPF

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:14:40 +1100

From a usability point of view, it is a good thing to be able to associate labels and entry fields with each other: a screen reader knows which label belongs to the entry field, and if the label has a shortcut, pressing the shortcut typically results in the entry field receiving keyboard focus.

In HTML, this is done using the ?for? attribute of the label. In Windows Forms, this is done by cleverly arranging the tab order for the controls. In WPF, this can be done by binding the Target property of the Label to the entry field:

<Label Target="{Binding ElementName=startEntry}" Content="_My Label:" />
<TextBox x:Name="startEntry" />

Lessons Learned about Software Development for Windows Mobile using the .NET Compact Framework

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 17:42:36 +1100

Note: I am writing about ?Windows Mobile? as in ?based on Windows CE 5.x? rather than ?Windows Phones? as in ?based on Windows CE 6.x?.

Test-Driven Development

It came as a surprise to me ? a welcome one, to be sure, but a surprise all the same ? that there actually is a Unit Test framework for the .NET Compact Framework that is both easy to use and really runs on the .NET Compact Framework. It is called MsTest ? Unit Testing for .Net Compact Framework is now friendly enough! describes how to use it.

Debugging Unit Tests on .NET CF is said to be a pain (at least according to Debugging Smart Device MSTEST Unit Tests). My team and I are of the opinion however that if things come to the point where you need to debug a unit test, you are doing something wrong. So we decided to accept this problem.

There?s one pitfall there though. Every Smart Device project in Visual Studio has an associated target device. However, the unit tests do not run on the associated target device of the test projects. They run on the target device of the test configuration instead.

What?s with the Network?

Enabling network on a Windows Mobile Device is simply a matter of running the emulator, pointing to File ?> Configure on the emulator, clicking on the Network tab and making sure that the NE2000 checkbox is activated.

However, on Windows 7 you may receive the following error when you try to enable the checkbox and click on OK: ?The required Virtual Machine Network Driver could not be found. Make sure that Virtual PC 2007 is installed. You can install Virtual PC 2007 from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=46859?.

This is a bit of a quandary: Virtual PC 2007 does not work on Windows 7, there is a separate ?Virtual PC for Window 7? (part of Windows XP Mode on Windows 7). In order to enable networking on the emulator, you need to install Virtual PC 2007. That results in Virtual PC for Windows 7 being broken (at least the network). So if you need Virtual PC on Windows 7, you need to uninstall Virtual PC 2007.

Fortunately, it is possible to install the network components of Virtual PC 2007 only, so you can have the best of both worlds: working network on the device emulator, and working Virtual PC on Windows 7. Windows Virtual PC and the Microsoft Device Emulator describes how to set this up.

ActiveSync, USB and DMA Connections

In order to connect a Windows Mobile device to your PC, you need ActiveSync on Windows XP and Windows Mobile Device Center on Windows Vista or 7. If you want to connect a Windows Mobile Emulator to your PC as well, you will need to allow DMA connections.

Once you have allowed DNA connections, you need to ?cradle? your emulator, using the Device Emulator Manager (%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Device Emulator\1.0\dvcemumanager.exe). Your emulator will then behave exactly like a physical device connected to your PC.

/etc/hosts

Sooner or later during development of any non-trivial project there comes the need to match DNS names to IP addresses. In other words, you need a hosts file. Too bad that there is no hosts file on Windows Mobile.

As it turns out, you can achieve the same goal by using the registry of the mobile device, as described in /etc/hosts file equivalent in Windows Mobile device.

Remotely Controlling a Windows Mobile Device

It is much more comfortable to control a device by using the keyboard and mouse of your own PC than to use a stylus and tap around on small squares. Additionally, it comes in handy if you can copy text on your pc and paste it on the mobile device, or vice versa. MyMobiler is a freeware program that does exactly that; SOTI Pocket Controller is a commercial alternative.

TDD Master Class with Roy Osherove

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 02:00:11 +1100

Last week, I took part in Roy Osherove's TDD Master Class in Vienna. The name "Master Class" is thoroughly appropriate: the 5 days are packed with loads of useful advice, best practices (including what will go happen if you don't follow them), concise theory and lots of exercises. The exercises are pair programming sessions, and Roy occasionally looks over your shoulder and gives helpful advice or asks annoying (*) questions like "is this the simples thing you can think of?".

(*) annoying as in "he's right and I'm probably wrong".

Some things I learned (the top two for each day):

Think like the laziest developer in the world
Beware of the serial killer
TDD Kata
The difference between stubs and mocks
A feel for the API differences between Rhino Mocks, Moq and Typemock Isolator
When to use an isolation framework and when not
The three pillars of trustworthy unit test
How to review unit tests
Dealing with legacy code
Object Oriented Design and Testable Design are sometimes at odds with each others

Honorable mentions go to the recurring topic of using Visual Studio without a mouse.

Roy is both very knowledgeable and very down to earth - a good combination in a teacher. I wholeheartedly recommend his master class. Do yourself a favor and make sure you have some experience with unit testing before you attend the course, otherwise you will find the master class rather overwhelming and will miss many of the nuances.

I'll finish with Roy's and mine favorite quote by Arthur C. Clarke (slightly adapted): Any sufficiently advanced unit test is indistinguishable from magic.

Random - For a Given Value of Random

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:10:00 +1100

I had some fun with .NET's random number generator (System.Random) last week. In my defense, I want to point out that

I do know that System.Random is not a true random number generator, but rather an algorithm that "fulfills certain statistical properties" of randomness.
I do know that if two instances have the same seed, then they will produce the same series of random numbers.
I do know that if you instantiate an instance of System.Random using the default constructor, the seed is taken from the current time of the computer.

What I did not fully realize until last week was that the length of a clock tick is 100 nanoseconds (0.1 microsecond). So creating 5 instances of System.Random in a row may (and did) happen in the course of a single clock tick - resulting in 5 identical random number series. Very random indeed.

The MSDN documentation of System.Random actually mentions this problem (and its solution), but hey, who reads the manual?

Optional Parameters in C# 4.0- Use them wisely!

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:32:00 +1100

Christoph, one of my TechTalk colleagues posted his views on optional parameters in C# 4.0. His advice is: don't use them. I partly agree with him: the values of the optional parameters are compiled as literals (which is probably not how I would have implemented it) and this makes the concept questionable from the point of view of dependency injection. So I would recommend not to use optional parameters in a dependency injection scenario.

I disagree, however, with Christoph's blanket statement "don't use them [at all]." Optional parameters are meant to be used when wrapping COM libraries - think Outlook: you have COM interfaces and methods with a truckload of parameters, many of which do not need to be passed to the method. C# requires values for all parameters, though, so you have to specify default values or "System.Type.Missing" for all the optional parameters. In the past, if you were wrapping the COM library with a C# library you had to create lots of overloads if you wanted a better API. In C# 4.0 you can use optional parameters and need only provide one version of the method.

So I recommend: use optional parameters wisely.

This collection already contains an address with scheme http. There can be at most one address per scheme in this collection.

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:03:13 +1100

Problem: you are publishing a WCF service, and when you try to access it, you receive the error ?This collection already contains an address with scheme http. There can be at most one address per scheme in this collection.?

The problem is caused by the fact that IIS supports specifying multiple IIS bindings per site (which results in multiple base addresses per scheme), but a WCF service hosted under a site allows binding to only one base address per scheme.

The solution is to specify a baseAddressFilterPrefix:

<system.serviceModel>
    <serviceHostingEnvironment>
        <baseAddressPrefixFilters>
            <add prefix="net.tcp://payroll.myorg.com:8000"/>
            <add prefix="http://shipping.myorg.com:9000">
        </baseAddressPrefixFilters>
    </serviceHostingEnvironment>
</system.serviceModel>

Source: How can WCF support multiple IIS Binding specified per site?

Note: this solution assumes you are using .NET 3.5. For a solution that works in .NET 3.0, see Supporting Multiple IIS Bindings Per Site.

Some Design Tips

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:28:00 +1100

I recently came across a couple of interesting summaries regarding web design techniques and tools. I'm posting them here as a note to self.

8 Layout Solutions To Improve Your Designs: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/19/8-layout-solutions-to-improve-your-designs/
55+ Extremely Useful Online Generators for Designers: http://www.balkhis.com/web-designs-resources/55-extremely-useful-online-generators-for-designers/

Using HttpModules on IIS7 in Integrated Mode

Wed, 20 May 2009 23:10:07 +1100

HttpModules are a convenient way of hooking into the ASP.NET request lifecycle. You need to implement a simple interface (IHttpModule) and register it in the web.config of your application. In IIS6 and IIS7 with your application in Classic Mode you need to add the entries to the system.web/httpModules section.

For IIS7 in Integrated Mode, however, you need to add the entries to a different section: system.webServer/modules. If you encounter the problem that your HttpModules mysteriously fail to execute when running your application on IIS7 with the application in Integrated Mode, then the most likely cause is that your HttpModules are still in the system.web/httpModules section.

If you need to run your application both on II6 (or IIS7 in Classic Mode) and II7, then you need to add the module registrations to both the system.web/httpModules and the system.webServer/modules sections. Additionaly, you need to add <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false" /> to the system.webServer section; otherwise IIS7 in Integrated Mode will throw an error because of the entries in system.web/httpModules.

How to send Ctrl+Alt+Del to a Windows terminal session

Tue, 05 May 2009 16:48:00 +1100

Every so often, you need to send Ctrl+Alt+Del to a Windows terminal session. Blindly hitting those keys with the actived terminal window, however, will bring up the Windows Security window (the "Ctrl+Alt+Del Window") of your local machine, not that of the remote machine. My usual reaction in those cases used to be cursing Microsoft for their lack of consideration and giving up in disgust.

No more, though: some time ago, a colleague whose name has disappeared in the recesses of my mind showed me how to do this: press Ctrl+Alt+End. It's probably no coincidence that the "End" key is located just to the right of the "Del" key on a traditional keyboard layout.