Zubair.NET!

Microsoft Web Camp: My demo of MS Web Stack of Love

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 17:24:00 +0000

Last week I co-presented a session titled “Creating Cutting Edge Websites for Phones, Slates and Beyond” at Microsoft Web Camp in Dubai with Ronald Widha.

Opening Address, Michael Mansour
Development on Internet Explorer 9, Shaymaa Al-Terkait
Building an eCommerce Site in 13 Minutes with Web Matrix, Asli Bilgin
Creating Cutting Edge Websites for Phones, Slates and Beyond with WebMatrix and VS2010, Ronald Widha and Zubair Ahmed
Q&A with Pizza Dinner and drawing for a free Windows Phone 7!

From Microsoft Web Camp in Dubai

Ronald Widha talked about the challenge facing today’s designer and developers to build User interfaces that fit on desktop and phones alike, he discussed the Responsive UI design pattern and showed how Html5, CSS Media Queries and Fluid Images and can help solve this issue to some extent. Get Ronald’s slides

I then showed some goodness from Microsoft Web Stack of Love and took Ron’s user interface markup to the new CSHTML page type in Web Matrix and changed it to get the content from a SQL Compact Edition database using the Razor view syntax and launched the same solution in Visual Studio from Web Matrix then added Entity Framework and WCF Data Services to the mix.

You can download all the tools using Web PI and get my code.

Tools and tips for a developer

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 17:23:00 +0000

I watched Roy Osherove’s “Top 20 tools and tips that make me a better developer” talk that he gave at Oredev conference last year where he shared some tools that he uses on a daily basis at TypeMock.

What follows is a list of tools and tips that I noted, I do use some on a daily basis too and will look into others.

For Team Room

Remove tools and use Task Board
Two screens
Daily standups

Personal Development machine

How to use Amazon EC2 cloud in production?

Team City Continuous Integration server
FinalBuilder - Visual Build Automation for Windows Software Developers
Mercurial distributed source control management tool
PostSharp AOP Framework for global logging and exception management at assembly level
CryptoObfuscator
Help and Manual for Code documentation
Help Server to view code documentation from a Web browser

Deployment Insight

FogBugz bug tracking system
Gibraltar for reporting application behaviors
Eqatec Usage statistics – for analyzing how your users are using your software applications
Crypto licensing for licensing your software
Amazon simple notification service for enabling customer collaboration, via email or json etc

Bonus

Notepad2
Prezi for making presentations

Binding a Custom Meta field to a Template in Sitefinity with a ASP.NET Usercontrol

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 08:54:00 +0000

To get the background about this issue please read this article in Sitefinity knowledge base.

The last section of the article suggests that you can use the following syntax to set the NavigateUrl property of the ASP.NET Hyperlink control with its Text property

<asp:HyperLink ID="PDFAttachment" runat="server" NavigateUrl='<%=this.Text %>'></asp:HyperLink>

However the above doesn’t work and <%= %> is rendered as plain text

After trying to figure this out for a while I found the following way to do this, the trick is to create a custom user control that implements ITextControl interface, like this

public partial class UserControls_PDFAttachmentDownload : System.Web.UI.UserControl, ITextControl

    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

    private string text;

    public string Text

get

            return this.text;

set

            if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(value))

                this.showdownload.NavigateUrl = ResolveUrl(value);

The highlighted line above sets the NavigateUrl property from the Text value that is bound to the control.

The ASCX part of the user control simply has a ASP.NET Hyperlink control in it

<asp:HyperLink ID="showdownload" runat="server" Text="Download" />

To use this control just add a reference in the Template usercontrol that Sitefinity uses and your on your way.

<%@ Register TagName="Attachment" TagPrefix="PDF" Src="~/UserControls/PDFAttachmentDownload.ascx" %>

<div class="sf_singleNews">

....

<p>

       <PDF:Attachment ID="PDFAttachment" runat="server" />

    </p>

....

</div>

Hope this little trick helped you, let me know.

Notes: How to gather Agile Requirements with User Stories? Why Use them? How to write them?

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 18:50:00 +0000

Following are just some rough notes taken while watching Mike Cohn’s ‘User Stories for Agile Requirements’ talk at NDC2010 conference, I am posting them here hoping that it will help you, for a more in-depth look at user stories I recommend watching Mike’s presentation.

What is a User story?

Short simple statement told from the perspective of the user.

Why use them?

User stories are a way to capture user requirement

How does it look like?

User Story Template

As-a (some user)

I want/I need (something)

So that (some reason)

Samples

As a user, I want to reserve a hotel room

As a user, I want to cancel a reservation

As a vacation traveler, I want to see photos of the hotels

As a frequent flyer, I want to rebook a past trip so that I save time booking trips I take often

Balance between developer division and business is important

Two ways to write User stories

Right user stories on a card, right story details behind the card

these become tests, high level tests (don't use 'tests' with product owner)

Take a user story and break it down

Or use both

Rip up the big story and write some smaller stories
Write condition of satisfaction on the back of the index card
Those user stories go to the product backlog, it should look like an Iceberg

Small user stories are on the top,medium below and large ones at the bottom

Take the medium user stories, break them up and bring them to the Sprint/Iteration, backlog gets empty every few weeks, break epic stories and make smaller ones

Epic is a large user story
Theme is a collection of related user stories

Take the bigger story and break it down

Replace document with discussion, if requirements are only documented and not discussed most likely user is going to get what is written, not what they wanted.

Examples

User stories are used to pull real information from the product owner.

Software Architecture: Where do you start?

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 12:01:00 +0000

I watched this interesting presentation by Simon Brown that answers some of the key questions about Software Architecture and the role of Software Architect including the following and clears some misconceptions about SA.

What is a Software Architecture?
Are you a Software Architect?
What is the role of a Software Architect?
How do you go from a blank sheet of paper to software delivery.

Click the following to watch the presentation on SkillsMatter.com

Dubai Tech Nights

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:51:00 +0000

Today I attended a session of Dubai Tech Nights, it was announced today that it’s been running successfully for 6 months now,but it was my first and definitely not the last, here’s why.

The most notable part of the whole session was the great audience, it was great to see so many professional under one roof dedicating their time to make it happen.

I cant remember the gentleman’s name,but he represented RIT University Dubai and shared with the audience the expansion plans and how his university is doing in general despite the unfavorable conditions.

Then a Emirati Phd student told his about his thesis on Small and Medium Business that he wants to hear from the CXO of 1000 companies in Dubai so then he can take their concerns and opinions to propose them to the Government.

Another fellow Emirati who happens to be a writer showed a book that he has written which basically tells the story of 6 Emiratis that he interviewed and how they made it big, one of them is Saeed Harib of Freej. The idea of writing a book came to his mind when he reached people to take an initiative and how he was given ready excuses by those that he approached.

Another interesting thing to hear was about the startup Nahel.com that offers online shopping in the UAE, the gentlemen talked about his company, what are their strengths, why they decided to launch it, what’s the business model, the target audience,what are the challenges they are facing, how he manages delivery etc, it was interesting to hear it and a lot of great questions were asked during his talk.

Then there was a presentation by Matt Glen from DLA Piper on Legal protections as an agent for fueling technology innovation, the gentleman explained the difference between a invention and a innovation, what’s an NDA from a legal perspective, the procedure for filing a patent if you are an inventor, what are limitations and your rights as an inventor. How do you define Intellectual property etc. He said that an Invention is something that converts money to an Idea and Innovation is something that takes an idea and converts it to money :)

Then there was the networking session over pizza and cold drinks, I met some interesting fellow DTN members and missed a lot others that I’m hopefully going to catch next time.

PLINQO or LINQ to SQL “Supercharged”: Getting Started

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 10:35:00 +0000

The goal of this post is to introduce you to PLINQO or Professional LINQ to Objects for CodeSmith Studio Professional to generate LINQ Entities and Query extensions.

By the end of this post you should know how to get a working Visual Studio project containing a single DBML file, Entity classes for your database tables & helpful Query Extensions generated using CodeSmith Studio and PLINQO.

PLINQO is developed by CodeSmith Tools, to follow the steps you need to have CS Studio installed, download the free trial

Let’s get started..

When we fire up CodeSmith Studio we get the Template Explorer window,expand Framework and see PLINQO installed out of the box.

I have expanded the CSharp folder and notice that it contains a bunch of .cst template files,PLINQO uses them to generate our objects.

Right-click on QuickStart.cst and clicking Execute brings up this dialog with bunch of properties.

We look at them in just a moment, first click the … button on SourceDatabase property, for the demo I am using a Northwind database, so let’s select it.

We can see that rest of the properties fill automagically,now lets take a look at each of them.

After the source database info, PLINQO needs to know the target language to generate the entities,location where the files will be generated and so on.

Now lets talk about the not so obvious ones.

By default PLINQO generates 3 projects, a DAL project, a Dynamic Data website or web application project and a Test project.

The Data Project group tells the namespace for the data project,do we need to copy the template files to the target folder and type of queries it should generate,this has 2 options QueryExtensions and ManagerClasses, we will look them in a future post.

The Interface Project needs to know whether or not generate a Data web service file, type of project (Web application or Website) and the project name.

The Test project properties tell whether or not include a Test project in the solution and the name of the test project.

Let’s leave the default selected,specify the target Location and hit Generate,

This launches Visual Studio with a solution that contains our 3 projects.

To generate Entities and Queries we need to do one last step before we’re on our way.

Before we do that let’s go behind the scenes to see how PLINQO will generate the classes for us,so

Right click on Northwind.Data.csp file and select Manage Outputs.

This will bring up the following dialog, PLINQO uses the information in these outputs to generate the templates.

For instance double-click on DBML will bring up a dialog where one of the things I can do is change the Ignore Pattern to exclude tables with a matching name that I don’t want or change the name of the base class for all my entities.

In Entities I can change the default location of the Entities output directory for instance, similarly in Queries I can change the default name of the Datacontext object that PLINQO generates.

Let’s leave them unchanged, Cancel the dialog and go back to the Solution Explorer.

Right-click the Northwind.Data.csp file again and this time select Generate Outputs.

PLINQO will then build the solution,generate Entities and Queries required to query the database.

The final output looks like.

Let’s open the generated Northwind.dbml.

Perfect, now let’s go to Northwind.UI project and fire up Default.aspx in the browser.

Nice so we got a fully working ASP.NET Dynamic Data web application project generated using PLINQO from a Northwind database.

In a future post we’ll see how PLINQO simplifies querying data with the help of some useful extension methods and few other tricks.

Download this VS2010 Solution with Northwind database script (does not require CodeSmith Studio)

Fun with VS2010 Ultimate: Comparing SQL Data

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 17:20:00 +0000

Update: Its an honor to have ScottGu and Scott Hanselman retweet this post and link from the "Gu" blog and also big thanks to Alvin Ashcraft & Chris Alcock for links to this post and offcourse thanks everyone else for RT-ing it on twitter. If you like this post then please visit back & dont forget to follow me on twitter @zubairdotnet

While playing with Visual Studio 2010 I discovered that the Ultimate (and Premium) edition ship with SQL Data and Schema Compare tools out of the box, so I decided to give a whirl.

I made two databases, SourceDB & TargetDB with only one table Customer. Here’s how the data looked like.

Source	Target

The Wizard

Next I selected the Compare Data options on the source table from Server Explorer

This brought up the interface where I chose the target database and hit Next, I decided to leave the other options checked.

Next screen showed the tables and views that I wanted to compare, in my case the only table Customer.

The Result

Now the interesting part,

The changed records are off course highlighted.

In addition to the above ones that need to be updated, notice that there is only 1 record in the source table that the target needs to add and 1 identical that will remain unchanged,let’s look at them.

The Update

but this doesn’t end here, off course I could update my target database right from VS, for that I had two options, I could generate the script or have VS2010 do it for me.

Since I was playing, I thought let’s see both so I right-clicked and selected,

That brought up the generated Sql script in the editor that I could then use to update my target database,that looked like.

Let’s look a bit deeper,hmm VS disables FK constraints,performs the operation and then restores it back, pretty good.

Since I was a bit lazy so thought I will have VS do it for me, all I had to do was…right-click and select..

VS 2010 then presented a confirm dialog, I knew what I was doing so I hit OK and the changes were pushed to the target table.

TechiesUAE presentation on Sharepoint 2010 Workflows

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 17:51:00 +0000

Just returned from another great session of @techiesuae, this time by Ed Muster at Microsoft Gulf about Sharepoint 2010 and Workflows.

Authoring Workflows
Ed showed authoring workflows in Visio 2010, export and customize them with Sharepoint Designer 2010 & Info Path 2010 and debug them with Visual Studio 2010.

Importing existing Workflow
He also imported existing Sharepoint 2007 workflows in Sharepoint 2010 with no troubles but the bad news is that there is no backward compatibility and the tools cannot be used to target Sharepoint 2007.

Sharepoint 2010 targets .NET v3.5
While the goodness offered with WF4 cannot be leveraged,this means Sharepoint 2010 is built on a mature framework that has been around for a while.

Workflow authoring, debugging and publishing has been greatly simplified with the new version of Sharepoint 2010

Community
This event also gave a chance to chat with new and existing members of Techies user group,hopefully I'll see them again.

Update 11.6.2010

How to: Setup new Subversion Repository using a batch file

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Mon, 24 May 2010 16:16:00 +0000

For those who use Subversion source control know that setting up a new repository can be tedious specially when you have to do it couple times a week or month.

I found myself doing it quite often and realized that I should automate this somehow, so here’s how I did it using simple a batch file.

To be able to have a custom name of the repository I wanted the batch file to prompt me in the first step,here’s how you do it

@echo offset /p name=Type the name of repository 

With the echo off here’s how the command prompt looks like.

When you type the name of the repo and hit Enter, subversion sets up some folders and files that it needs to operate.

In the conf folder it stores users credentials and permissions to check into this repository. You dont want to create them everyday specially for a small team, in my case I had to copy them from another repository that I have previously configured, so in the batch file I did this

copy d:\svn_repository\old.project\conf\authz d:\svn_repository\%name%\conf\authz copy d:\svn_repository\old.project\conf\passwd d:\svn_repository\%name%\conf\passwd

%name% is the variable that holds the name of my repository.

Similarly in the hooks folder subversion stores different automated actions like pre-commit, post-commit, pre-lock and so on, in my case I wanted a demo server to update itself after every check-in to its repository, so in this case I could use post-commit hook that had this command.

"C:\Program Files\CollabNet Subversion Server\svn.exe" update "D:\demo_server\demo_project"
 

Following line creates the hook with the svn update command.

echo "C:\Program Files\CollabNet Subversion Server\svn.exe" update "D:\demo_server\%name%" >;> d:\svn_repository\%name%\hooks\post-commit.bat 

Then I wanted to setup my demo_server, I had to create the folder with the name of my repository along with branches, tags and trunk folders. Here’s the complete snippet or you can view it here create_svn_repository.bat

@echo offset /p name=Type the name of repository d:cd d:\svn_repository\svnadmin create %name%copy d:\svn_repository\old.project\conf\authz d:\svn_repository\%name%\conf\authz copy d:\svn_repository\old.project\conf\passwd d:\svn_repository\%name%\conf\passwd echo "C:\Program Files\CollabNet Subversion Server\svn.exe" update "D:\demo_server\%name%" >;> d:\svn_repository\%name%\hooks\post-commit.batcd d:\demo_servermd %name%md %name%\branchesmd %name%\tagsmd %name%\trunkset /p done=Type 'exit' to quit 

Hope it helps someone out there, let me know in the comments.

Permanent Redirections with Response.PermanentRedirect Extension method

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:54:00 +0000

To redirect a page request to another page ASP.NET ships with Response.Redirect() since the v1 that takes a string Url as the input parameter.

You will recall that this is not a permanent redirect, you know that to be able to make a permanent redirect you will have to do something like this

HttpContext.Current.Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
HttpContext.Current.Response.AddHeader("Location", StringUrl);

ASP.NET 4.0 now ships with a Response.PermanentRedirect() helper method that redirects the user permanently to a new page. Watch Joe’s quick hit video to see it in action.

Fortunately we don't need to wait for .NET 4.0 to have a fancy method like above, we can with the help of C# Extension methods, create a helper method today.

For example take a look at this code

public static void PermanentRedirect(this HttpResponse response, string StringUrl) {
     HttpContext.Current.Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
     HttpContext.Current.Response.AddHeader("Location", StringUrl);
}

Now if you do a Response. you will see the static helper method in the intellisense.

Getting started with Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 17:40:00 +0000

Recently I got a chance to work with WordPress and Drupal, those are the coolest PHP based blogging and content management systems out there, while I was impressed with the simplified installation and configuration, one thing that struck me was how simple it is to add plugins to the system. For instance I wanted a photogallery, so I downloaded the plug-in from WordPress.com, unzipped, dropped it in the plugins folder, went to the Administration panel and there it was, the plug-in sitting right there ready to activate.

Fortunately .NET now gets its own plug-in architecture framework in the form of Managed Extensibility Framework or MEF.

MEF makes it really easy to build extensible .NET applications with just a few lines of code.

Here’s how.

In the application that needs to be extended you define a common interface that your plugins can implement.

   1: public interface IRule      2: {      3:     void DoIt();      4:     string Name { get; }      5:     string Version { get; }      6:     string Description { get; }      7: }

Then you make a collection where all the plugins are stored and mark it with Import or ImportMany attribute.

   1: [Import( typeof( IRule ) )]         2: internal IList<IRule>: _rules { get; set ;} 

Then all you need to do is write your plug-in that implements the above IRule interface that you defined in your extensible application and mark it with Export attribute.

   1: [Export( typeof( IRule ) )]      2: internal class RuleInstance1 : IRule      3: {      4:     public void DoIt() {}      5:      6:     public string Name      7:     {      8:         get { return "Rule Instance 1"; }      9:     }     10:     11:     public string Version     12:     {     13:         get { return "1.0.0.0"; }     14:     }     15:     16:     public string Description     17:     {     18:         get { return "Some Rule Instance"; }     19:     }     20: }   

With that only a few lines of code is required to load the plug-in into your extensible application.

   1: public void Init()      2: {      3:     var catalog = new AggregateCatalog();      4:     var container = new CompositionContainer( catalog );      5:     var batch = new CompositionBatch();      6:     batch.AddPart( this );      7:     // because all our types are in the same assembly we simply use the current one.          8:     catalog.Catalogs.Add( new AssemblyCatalog( Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly() ) );      9:     container.Compose( batch );     10:     foreach ( var rule in _rules )     11:     {     12:         Debug.WriteLine( rule.Name );     13:     }     14: }  

While this simple example is great for exploring MEF and building plug-in that live in the same assembly, in the real world scenario your plugins will be built as part of a different solution or a project, do check out some of the resources below that demonstrate in detail how to leverage MEF in your applications.

Resources:

MEF on CodePlex – contains assemblies, source code and sample applications, do checkout the Silverlight grid sample.

The PDC09 demo
http://twurl.nl/3cj8dp

Hanselminutes podcast on MEF (with Glenn Block, the PM)
http://twurl.nl/v6zoio

ScottGu’s awesome demo from PDC08 showing how MEF is used in the new VS2010 IDE to make it extensible, a must see.
http://blogs.msdn.com/brada...

The code sample shown above is taken from here, uses the Preview 8 drop of MEF on Codeplex
http://devlicio.us/blogs/derik_whittaker/archive..

MEF on MSDN – covers MEF in detail including the scenario to load multiple plugins and other details.

“Application Lifecycle Management in VS2010” session of TechiesUAE

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:57:00 +0000

I attended this session of TechiesUAE presented by Rolf Eleveld. First he took us through the installation and configuration steps required to run Team Foundation Server 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 beta 2.

Rolf then showed some of the new features in TFS 2010 version control and its integration with VS2010 including the web interface of TFS.

Also during the session, one of the interesting tool that he showed us is the new Problem Steps Recorder (or PSR) that ships with Windows 7.

This tool can help developers and IT Pros know the steps required to reproduce any problem to resolve it more quickly. For more info on it watch this video

During the session we also discussed the use of Entity Framework & Linq to Entities in the enterprise and also saw the demo of the interesting new Lab management capabilities introduced in VSTS 2010. This helps testers test the software in a virtual environment and raise any bugs, the developers can then launch the virtual machine from the IDE and find all the rich information along with the check point link included in the bug, for more info on this read this post on Soma’s blog.

The session lasted more than 3 hours.

Update. Dec 3,2009
Read Rolf's detailed notes from the event on the TechiesLeaders blog

Creating BlackBerry Playlist in C#

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:15:00 +0000

I dont have the Media Sync plugin for the Blackberry installed on my laptop yet so I wrote up few lines to create the playlist quickly.

Copy all your music to your blackberry and run the following script in a ASP.NET application.

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e){            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();            foreach (FileInfo file in new DirectoryInfo("YourDriveLetter:\\BlackBerry\\music\\Media Sync\\<Your music folder path>").GetFiles())            {                    sb.Append("file:///SDCard/BlackBerry/music/Media%20Sync/<Your music folder path>/"+ HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(file.Name));        sb.Append("<br/>");            }            Response.Write(sb.ToString());    }

There you have it.

Sitefinity CMS and "There were errors during services initialization, check the error log for details" error

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:34:00 +0000

I use Sitefinity and have been getting this error on some websites including zubairahmed.net.

This error is so weird that it appeared randomly and vanished on subsequent page load. Recently I found something that I believe was causing this error.

It appears that this error is linked to the available memory on the server hosting your website, so as soon as the server reaches its limit it flushes the cache and the web application throws the error, to work around that Sitefinity has put a web.config setting to cache the web pages in Database, surprisingly Sitefinity did not tell anyone about this hidden feature until I googled it (not that I didn't do it before) and found it here.

So all it required was changing this in web.config

<cachedependency mode="InMemory">

<cachedependency mode="InDatabase">

and so far no issues, hope it helps someone out there.

WCF Service Contract and XML Serialization

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 08:13:00 +0000

I am building a Service using the WCF REST Starter Kit. This Service contains a method that accepts a complex type as input, it then deserializes the object into it’s concrete type.

Here’s how a service call looks like

using (HttpClient client = new HttpClient())
{
    RequestObject req = new RequestObject { FirstName = "John", LastName = "Doe", Email="johndoe@somecompany.com"};

    HttpContent body = HttpContentExtensions.CreateXmlSerializable<RequestObject>(req);

    HttpResponseMessage resp = client.Post("http://localhost:1575/Web/Service.svc/SendMail", body);

    Response.Write(resp.Content.ReadAsString());
}

What the above does is simply prepare a RequestObject, call a SendMail method on the service using the HttpClient, read and print the response, nothing fancy.

Here’s how the service looks like

[WebHelp(Comment = "Sample description for SendMail")]
[WebInvoke(BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Bare, RequestFormat =
WebMessageFormat.Xml, ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Xml,UriTemplate = "SendMail")]
[OperationContract]
public RequestObject SendMail(RequestObject request)
{
    return new RequestObject()
    {
        FirstName = request.FirstName, LastName = request.LastName,Email = request.Email
    }; 
}

Notice what I’m doing is preparing the same RequestObject and simply pass it as the response.

As you’d expect I’m suppose to get the following response in the browser.

- <RequestObject>
  <FirstName>John</FirstName> 
  <LastName>Doe</LastName> 
  <Email>johndoe@somecompany.com</Email> 
</RequestObject>

But the response I receive is similar to this

<RequestObject>
    <FirstName i:nil="true" />
    <LastNameName i:nil="true" />
    <Email>johndoe@somecompany.com</Email>
</RequestObject>

After a few hours of trying it occurred to me that XML Serialization is done in the alphabetical order if no ordering is specified even if the properties in the class are not in the alpha-order. (arrgh. If only I had used the Paste XML as Type as demo’ed in this screencast by Aaron Skonnard)

So to make it work I had to change the RequestObject class in both places to look like the following.

public class RequestObject
{
    public string Email { get; set; }
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
}

Adding Service References and ‘The system cannot find the path specified’ error

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:51:00 +0000

I was facing this problem recently in a project when adding a reference to a WCF Service simply gave me this error.

I google’d it for a while but in vain, I also removed the auto-gen service entries from the web.config but that did not work either.

Then I realized that earlier I had deleted the Service References folder from the application root, re-add and it worked as expected.

Funny thing is that Visual Studio will not tell you what went wrong, neither folder name appears under Add > ASP.NET Folders nor Visual Studio attempts to recreate it.

Using a static class for logging exceptions using ELMAH

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 07:16:00 +0000

If you have used Elmah for logging exceptions in your Visual Studio projects, you must have used the following syntax in the try..catch blocks

try
{
  ....
}catch(Exception ex)
{
   ErrorSignal.FromCurrentContext().Raise(ex);
}

Or if you want to log a custom message you do something like

try
{
...
}
catch
{
   ErrorSignal.FromCurrentContext().Raise(new Elmah.ApplicationException(Message));
}

Or also include the exception object with the message like this

try
{
....
}
catch(Exception ex)
{
   ErrorSignal.FromCurrentContext().Raise(new Elmah.ApplicationException(Message,ex));
}

As you can see this is a lot of text to be put in each try..catch block, so to make it look a little bit nice I made a static class that looks like this

/// <summary>
   /// This class logs exception in ELMAH
   /// </summary>
   public static class Error
   {
       /// <summary>
       /// Logs the exception in ELMAH with a custom message
       /// </summary>
       /// <param name="Message">Custom message</param>
       /// <param name="ex">Exception object</param>
       public static void Log(string Message, Exception ex)
       {
           ErrorSignal.FromCurrentContext().Raise(new Elmah.ApplicationException(Message,ex));
       }

       /// <summary>
       /// Logs the message in ELMAH
       /// </summary>
       /// <param name="Message">Custom message</param>
       public static void Log(string Message)
       {
           ErrorSignal.FromCurrentContext().Raise(new Elmah.ApplicationException(Message));
       }

       /// <summary>
       /// Logs the exception in ELMAH
       /// </summary>
       /// <param name="ex"></param>
       public static void Log(Exception ex)
       {
           ErrorSignal.FromCurrentContext().Raise(ex);
       }
   }

Now the try..catch block looks like this

try
{
.....
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
 Error.Log("this is a custom error",ex);
}

Take it away here

Domain Driven Design – Quickly

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Wed, 27 May 2009 02:06:00 +0000

Lately I’ve been wanting to read Domain Driven Design book by Eric Evans but then I found Domain Driven Design Step by Step by InfoQ and just in the foreword it says that I must read DDDQuickly also by InfoQ before proceeding, so I downloaded it (PDF)and started reading a few chapters.

I have now stopped reading the book mainly because it got to the point where I thought I needed to see a concrete example of it’s implementation in C#/.NET which I couldn’t find and also because I have found another great read.

Below are some of the notes that I think are the key takeaways from the read so far, I’m sharing them here thinking they might be useful to someone with a disclaimer that they are my notes and I make no warranties for the accuracy, if you are serious about DDD than start reading the book.

Domain - knowledge of the the domain is important before building software, e.g. for banking. Bankers know better about the rules that anyone else.

Model - Is the internal representation of the domain, we must communicate this upfront to all the stakeholders in a software design, the domain experts, domain analysts and off course developers.

Ubiquitous Language - when domain experts and developers talk they often use some keywords use to describe the system, these keywords make up the domain that is used in UML diagram and Documents explaining those diagrams and ultimately in Classes and Variable names in the code.

Analysis model - a model created by domain experts while not taking into account the software used to code therefore make matter worst at software design time, where developers have to make few decisions on their own. The idea is to choose a model that can be appropriately represented in software.

The key is to involve developers at Domain Model design stage with Domain experts and analysts to let them get the first-hand knowledge of the domain rather than having to understand it with the help of diagrams and documents.

Entities - entities should be unique and defined with a ID, not everything should be Entity but it can be Value Object

Value Object - are unchangeable objects with no unique IDs and created using Constructor, their values cannot be and must not be changed, if new value is needed, simply create another Value object.

VS 2010 Beta 1 and Functional UI Testing

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Thu, 14 May 2009 12:55:00 +0000

I just watched a video over at Channel9 which explains how to leverage some of the UI Testing capabilities that are going to be introduced with VS 2010 beta 1 expected next week.

Visual Studio had testing capabilities for C# code for a long but now I’m glad to see for the first time an integrated UI testing built right into VS 2010 IDE. In particular I like the option to store the tests in the database and be able to run them automatically.

See it for yourself, there is also a Mix09 video here

Return JSON objects the right way

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 11:38:00 +0000

Today I experienced a weird behavior when I was passing JSON string back to a jQuery call using an Ajax-enabled WCF Service.

My code looked something like this.

[OperationContract, WebGet(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json, UriTemplate = "/GetJson")]public string GetJson(){    return new JavaScriptSerializer().Serialize(MyCustomObject)}

The problem with above code is that the string returned is escaped and enclosed with inverted commas that for some reason was not handled properly using jQuery that looked like this.

“[{\"Id\":1,\"SomeKey\":\"SomeMoreText\"}]”

Not sure what I was missing and while there is a JsonResult action in ASP.NET MVC with a .svc there’s nothing that I could use (or may be there is).

To fix it I changed the method like this.

[OperationContract, WebGet(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json, UriTemplate = "/GetJson")]public System.IO.Stream GetJson(){   byte[] resultBytes = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(new JavaScriptSerializer().Serialize(MyCustomObject));      WebOperationContext.Current.OutgoingResponse.ContentType = "application/json";    return new MemoryStream(resultBytes); } 

Here’s how Json is returned.

[{"Id":1,"SomeKey":"SomeMoreText"}]

Don’t use UriTemplate = "/MethodName/Param1/{Param1}/Param2/{JsonObject} for Json input with WCF Service

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 13:58:00 +0000

When building Ajax-enabled WCF service that expect a Json object as input then the following would not work

[OperationContract, WebGet(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json, UriTemplate = "/Methodname/jsonvariable/{jsonvariable}/param2/{param2}")]public void MethodName(string jsonvariable, string param2){ }

Where jsonvariable is a json object passed through jQuery (or ASP.NET Ajax) to a WCF service that looks like this

[{"Name":"za","Email":zubairdotnet@hotmail.com}]

After spending a while I figured out that the following UriTemplate should be used instead

[OperationContract, WebGet(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json, UriTemplate = "/Methodname/?jsonvariable={jsonvariable}&param2={param2}")]public void MethodName(string jsonvariable, string param2){ }

DataTable.SelectRows(n)

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 09:38:00 +0000

Doing a DataTable.Select() in ADO.NET is like using a Where clause in T-SQL, but you'd have noticed that Data table lacks a way to retrieve only specific number of rows. Well this can be easy to work around using a Top N clause in T-SQL but can be tricky in case when the data is read from different sources like XML files, Web Services etc.

Steven Smith shows a little code-snippet that can be used to work around this, so I decided to use that.

I went a step ahead and added the method to my Extension methods library as below.

public static DataTable SelectRows(this DataTable dataTable, int rowCount){    try    {        DataTable myTable = dataTable.Clone();         DataRow[] myRows = dataTable.Select();        for (int i = 0; i < rowCount; i++)        {            if (i < myRows.Length)            {                myTable.ImportRow(myRows[i]);                myTable.AcceptChanges();            }        }         return myTable;     }    catch (Exception)    {        return new DataTable();    }}

So for example it can be used as follows.

GridView.DataSource = MyDataTable.SelectRows(5);GridView.DataBind();

ASP.NET Chart Control

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 05:02:00 +0000

I just downloaded and installed ASP.NET Chart Controls that ScottGu just announced.

I'm looking at the sample documentation and it looks very detailed because one of the problems I had with the Telerik and ComponentOne Chart controls that I have used in the past is the poor documentation, but Microsoft ASP.NET Charts docs seem to go a step further and explain every nitty-gritty of the charts along with C# and VB.NET source code, I'm looking forward to try them soon.

Using CustomValidator to compare Time Values

noreply@blogger.com (Zubair.NET!) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 08:17:00 +0000

ASP.NET ships with many client-side validation controls out of the box, one of them is the Custom Validator control. In client input scenario if you need to compare two date values you can use a CompareValidator and set its Type property to Date, for example check this link. However anytime you need to compare two Time values then there is no support for this in any validation controls.This is how Telerik's TimePicker control looks like.

Fortunately comparing the two values is easy using the CustomValidator control and a little bit of javascript. The CustomValidator control has a ClientValidationFunction property that we can use to trigger a javascript function and using the following function we can can compare two time values.

<script type="text/javascript">    function compareTime(sender, args) {        var start = document.getElementById("<%=rdpStarttime.ClientID %>");        var end = document.getElementById("<%=rdpEndtime.ClientID %>");        var starttime = new Date(0, 0, 0, start.value.substring(11, 13), start.value.substring(14, 16));        var endtime = new Date(0, 0, 0, end.value.substring(11, 13), end.value.substring(14, 16));        args.IsValid = (endtime >= starttime);    }</script>

<asp:CustomValidator ID="CustomValidator1" runat="server" ErrorMessage="End time should be greater than Start" ClientValidationFunction="compareTime" ControlToValidate="rdpEndtime"></asp:CustomValidator> 

Here's how it looks like.