Peter's Software House

Omea 3 Executable and Google Reader

Pieter — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:07:31 GMT

I went over the unpublished comments on my blog a couple of days ago and in between the thousands of spam comments I found a number of comments that I approved and published. I had quite a few ask me for a link to Omea 3 executables. So I’ve uploaded the BinRelease folder from my PC and put it on my SkyDrive. I hope it works for those that try it. here is the link: http://cid-95226bf8d5337e4d.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/Omea3%20BinRelease.rar

If it doesn’t work drop me a line (comment here, or send me a message) and I’ll try and help.

I loved using Omea, but I’ve since moved on. I now use Google Reader and must say it does the job for me. I can now read my blogs anywhere I want. No more concerns about moving my subscriptions from PC to PC.

Minimizing the Ribbon

Pieter — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 23:36:14 GMT

The Ribbon Microsoft has introduced in Office 2007 takes up a lot of real estate. This is especially apparent when you use a laptop with a smaller screen or one of the new very popular netbooks. Most people it seems though does not realize, but you can minimize the Ribbon. All you need to do is right click anywhere on the Ribbon and select the ‘Minimize the Ribbon’ options.

Now the Ribbon will be minimized and you will have quite a bit of extra space to work with.

If you need to use the Ribbon, simple place your mouse pointer over the minimized Ribbon and it will drop down for you to use.

Busy playing with .NET Reflector Version 6.0.0.x

Pieter — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:59:09 GMT

Go and get it from the EAP over at Red-Gate.

Get the Column information for a Table using T-SQL

Pieter — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 23:41:33 GMT

It is really simple really, in this sample I am getting the column information for a table called ‘Account’:

SELECT     Columns.name AS ColumnName, ColumnTypes.name AS Type, Columns.prec AS Precision, Columns.scale AS Scale, 
                      Columns.isnullable AS IsNullable
FROM         sys.sysobjects AS Tables INNER JOIN
                      sys.syscolumns AS Columns ON Columns.id = Tables.id INNER JOIN
                      sys.systypes AS ColumnTypes ON Columns.xtype = ColumnTypes.xtype
WHERE     (Tables.type = 'U') AND (Tables.name = N'Account')
ORDER BY ColumnName

Get all the user Tables, Views or Stored Procedures for a Database with their schema using T-SQL

Pieter — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 23:15:57 GMT

Get all the Tables:

SELECT     sys.schemas.name AS [Schema], sys.sysobjects.name
FROM         sys.sysobjects INNER JOIN
                      sys.schemas ON sys.sysobjects.uid = sys.schemas.schema_id
WHERE     (sys.sysobjects.type = 'U')
ORDER BY sys.sysobjects.name

Get all the Views:

SELECT     sys.schemas.name AS [Schema], sys.sysobjects.name
FROM         sys.sysobjects INNER JOIN
                      sys.schemas ON sys.sysobjects.uid = sys.schemas.schema_id
WHERE     (sys.sysobjects.type = 'V')
ORDER BY sys.sysobjects.name

Get all the Stored Procedures:

SELECT     sys.schemas.name AS [Schema], sys.sysobjects.name
FROM         sys.sysobjects INNER JOIN
                      sys.schemas ON sys.sysobjects.uid = sys.schemas.schema_id
WHERE     (sys.sysobjects.type = 'P')
ORDER BY sys.sysobjects.name

Set the dictionary to use in Word 2007

Pieter — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 07:16:00 GMT

In Word 2007 you can pick a different language setting at any time. This is especially useful if you write in several languages or simply different English dialects. ;)

Click on the language bar on the bottom left hand side of the Word status bar.

You will get the following view:

Select your language you want to use or make a different language the default by clicking the ‘Default…’ button.

Things I learned last week #3

Pieter — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:55:18 GMT

Well actually more like things I learned the last three months as my last ‘Things I learned last week #2’ was on 24th of June.

Things are crazy busy in my life at the moment. With work going flat out and with study coming to an end in less than 4 weeks, I have no time for blogging. But I had a few minutes and thought I’d post a quick update.

NUnit 2.5.1 and 2.5.2 was released.
Deborah Korata is once again teaching me things I wasn’t aware of.

Pex is just getting better and better version 0.15 and 0.16 released.
jQuery rocks, period!
Use $exception to watch an exception thrown in VS.NET.
Wikiplex the source for the Codeplex wiki engine is released.
Test mail send routines without using a mail server – a simple web.config trick.
Get country names in .NET.
Updated our sites to use the scripts from http://www.ie6nomore.com/. We now only support IE7+ and Firefox 3+, although most of our sites work in Safari and Chrome as well.
I love/hate CSS.
Configuration Section Designer.
FileHelpers rock!

Now back to working on my paper.

Magic Numbers – How to remove them from your Codebase.

Pieter — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:09:24 GMT

I am not a fan Magic Numbers at all. But most code bases I have seen and/or worked on have them too varying degrees. Using simple OO techniques can help you avoid them. In this post I am going to discuss how to avoid Magic Numbers.

Let’s start by creating a simple class of say a Person.

public class Person
{
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
    public char Status { get; set; }
}

Nothing special, just a firstname, lastname and status. Let’s write a test to use it (Yea I know, should have written the test first!)

[TestMethod]
public void TestMethod1()
{
    Person p = new Person();
    p.Status = 'C';
    Assert.AreEqual(p.Status, 'C');
}

Ok, this works, but WTF does ‘C’ mean? Closed? Created? (The test Name doesn’t help)

Let’s make a change to the Test to make it clear:

[TestMethod]
public void Person_Status_Closed()
{
    Person p = new Person();
    p.Status = Person.Closed;
    Assert.AreEqual(p.Status, Person.Closed);
}

So we changed the ‘C’ to a constant called Closed, which we have added to the Person class. This is cool for now, when I read this code it is clear that the status I am assigning to the Person class is Closed. A funny status to pick when you have just created the object, so let’s say the default status for a person is Active. Let’s write a test for that first:

[TestMethod]
public void PersonStatus_Default_Active()
{
    Person p = new Person();
    Assert.AreEqual(p.Status, Person.Active);
}

And let’s update the person class:

public class Person
{
    public const char Active = 'A';
    public const char Closed = 'C';

    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
    public char Status { get; set; }

    public Person()
    {
        Status = Active;
    }
}

All going pretty well so far. But this does not stop us from using Magic Numbers, i.e. I can still check for ‘A’ or ‘C’ or I can assign any char value I like to status. This is especially likely to happen when you are working on a large codebase and an inexperienced developer has to make a change in code and their first response is to use ‘A’ instead of Person.Active. Sure this should be picked up during code reviews, but why not make it impossible to do this in the first place? How? Very easily, replace the Person.Status with a Status class.

Let’s create the test first:

[TestMethod]
public void PersonStatus_Default_Active()
{
    Person p = new Person();
    Assert.AreEqual(p.Status, PersonStatus.Active);
}

A simple change, can you spot it?

Let’s have a look at the implementation:

public class Person
{
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
    public PersonStatus Status { get; set; }

    public Person()
    {
        Status = PersonStatus.Active;
    }
}
public class PersonStatus
{
    public static PersonStatus Active = new PersonStatus('A', "Active");
    public static PersonStatus Closed = new PersonStatus('C', "Closed");

    public char Code { get; set; }
    public string Description { get; set; }

    public PersonStatus(char code, string description)
    {
        Code = code;
        Description = description;
    }
}

A huge improvement, you now have to use a PersonStatus object to indicate the status of Person. But you can still create your own version PersonStatus, i.e. you can set status = new PersonStatus(‘X’, ‘Invalid Status’) and it will work. Let’s add some validation.

Test first:

[TestMethod]
[ExpectedException(typeof(InvalidStatusException))]
public void PersonStatus_InvalidStatus_ExpectException()
{
    Person p = new Person();
    p.Status = new PersonStatus('X', "Invalid Status");
    Assert.Fail("Expected an InvalidStatusException");
}

And the Implementation:

public class Person
{
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }

    private PersonStatus _status = PersonStatus.Active;
    public PersonStatus Status 
    {
        get
        {
            return _status;
        }
        set
        {
            if (!PersonStatus.IsValid(value))
                throw new InvalidStatusException(string.Format("'{0}' - {1} is an invalid status", value.Code, value.Description));
            _status = value;
        }
    }
}
public class PersonStatus
{
    public static PersonStatus Active = new PersonStatus('A', "Active");
    public static PersonStatus Closed = new PersonStatus('C', "Closed");

    private static IList<PersonStatus> _validStatusList = new List<PersonStatus>();

    public char Code { get; set; }
    public string Description { get; set; }

    static PersonStatus()
    {
        _validStatusList.Add(Active);
        _validStatusList.Add(Closed);
    }

    public static bool IsValid(PersonStatus status)
    {
        return _validStatusList.Contains(status);
    }

    public PersonStatus(char code, string description)
    {
        Code = code;
        Description = description;
    }
}
[Serializable]
public class InvalidStatusException : Exception
{
    public InvalidStatusException() { }
    public InvalidStatusException(string message) : base(message) { }
    public InvalidStatusException(string message, Exception inner) : base(message, inner) { }
    protected InvalidStatusException(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context)
        : base(info, context) { }
}

In my next post I will show how you can use this same technique with an ORM tool.

Icon/Cursor Paint.NET Plug-In

Pieter — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 11:16:54 GMT

I’ve just learned that my #1 image editor (Paint.NET) has a Plug-in that allows you to edit Icons and Cursors – Fantastic!

Get it here: http://www.evanolds.com/pdnicocur.html

Things I learned Today

Pieter — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:55:52 GMT

Well actually it was yesterday, but who cares…

I HATE COM!!!

Yea I had to struggle yesterday with a VB6 application that calls out to a VB.NET app using COM. The age old problem of ‘but it works on my machine’ and in this case the dev server and the deployment server. But for some freaking crazy reason it did not want to work on the Production server. After tearing my hair our for several hours I decided to change the interface and now we are spawning a new process and passing a couple of parameters to a console app using command line parameters and that worked first time and every time since. Thank God there is more than one way to skin a cat. It might not be pretty but it works, consistently.

Another classic WTF

Pieter — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 01:39:07 GMT

I ran into this WTF a few minutes ago:

string valueFormat = "$#,##0.00";

// Updating a label
lblDecimalValue.Text = decimalValue.ToString(valueFormat);

// Updating another label, notice anything strange?
lblSomeOtherLabel.Text = (accountBalance + decimal.Parse(lblDecimalValue.Text.Replace("$", string.Empty))).ToString(valueFormat);

What should have happened in Line 7?

lblSomeOtherLabel.Text = (accountBalance + decimalValue).ToString(valueFormat);

Why? Well that is pretty obvious, you already have decimalValue so why would you want to parse the string value to get a number you already have?

How to format DateTime using ToString

Pieter — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:52:00 GMT

Another WTF:

// I saw this code today and went WTF!!!!
string oldway = DateTime.Now.Year + "-" +    
DateTime.Now.Month.ToString("00") + "-" + DateTime.Now.Day.ToString("00") +    
    "T" + DateTime.Now.Hour.ToString("00") + ":" + DateTime.Now.Minute.ToString("00") +    
    ":" + DateTime.Now.Second.ToString("00");

// I changed it to this
string newWay = DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss");

// And to prove it worked I placed it all in a test and checked that both returns the same result.
Assert.AreEqual(oldway, newWay);

Use Null Coalescing Operator

Pieter — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:30:00 GMT

// WTF - Code
// Reads the DB twice if an Address is found
Address addressExisting = personExisting.ReadAddress(Database) == null ? new Address() : personExisting.ReadAddress(Database);

// What should you use?
// The Null Coalescing Operator
Address addressExisting = personExisting.ReadAddress(Database) ?? new Address();

You have found a bug – how to find out which process created a window.

Pieter — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:34:58 GMT

There was a bit of a panic today when this came up. Some thought it was a virus, others thought it was someone playing a trick.

So I opened up Spy++. Found the Window.

When you right click and select properties.

Now select the Process tab and click on the Process ID link.

And then you can see which process this window came from:

As you can see in this case it was SVN-Monitor.

Things I learned last week #2

Pieter — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:11:30 GMT

Last week I started a session at work during our Monday morning development meeting called Things I learned last week. Here is episode #2.

It was a bit of a dry week in terms of what I learned, but there was a few things worth mentioning.

I learned:

to love Code Contracts. I knew that James from Intergen had done a mentoring session at Intergen and had done the same presentation at Code Camp 2009 as I looked at his presentation he put up on his blog. I have read up on Code Contract before then but then quickly forgot about it. Having a second look and actually RTFM I have to admit that I like it. So much actually that we have started using it in out new codebase that will only see the light after .NET 4.0 and VS2010 is released and as such this will provide us with some future proving as we don’t then have to pull out all our custom old school pre-condition checking. Code Contracts also add so much more, for example you can create Code Contracts for Interfaces, post-conditions and Invariants, fantastic stuff. But as always, use wisely, don’t go and implement everything the static analysis tells you to implement. ;)
how to use SyntaxHighlighter and love PreCode the Windows Live Writer add-in.
about Web.Config Transformation coming in VS2010. Finally I can get rid of all the complex homebrew .config handling between all the environments.