My old Jonsie.net domain is due to expire sometime soon so I thought it was about time I saved the 1 or 2 interesting posts I made there. The old site uses .Text so I could easily grab the posts from the SQL DB, but I thought it would be more fun to use RSS. I remember Scott Guthry posting recently about the ASP.Net RSS Toolkit so I downloaded it to have a play.
First thing I tried was to RTFM but for some reason this word doc keeps exploding and taking Word with it. A quick copy and paste to a new document fixed that (Word's document recovery was less than helpful!). The 'manual' is a little sparse, but it gives enough pointers to get your started.
There are several ways you can access the RSS feed. I wanted to create a simple WinForms or Console app to do this job so I tried using the Rssdl.exe tool to create a strongly typed channel feed. Unfortunately our Nazi firewall got in the way and the RssToolkit doesn't know anything about firewalls. After a bit of a search around the code I found the source of the problem in RssDownloadManager.DownloadChannelDom(). It was using WebClient to make the call to DownloadData but without first configuring the proxy. So, I changed this to:
1 // download the feed
2 WebClient wc = new WebClient();
3 wc.Proxy.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials;
4 byte[] feed = wc.DownloadData(url);
This is adequate for this UI application but for a more robust solution you may need to modify this to allow a user name, password and proxy string to be passed in somehow.
So, now I executed the Rssdl.exe too to create the class. This created jonsie.cs for me. I then created a simple console app to dump the title of all the items on the blog:
1 using System;
2 using System.Collections.Generic;
3 using System.Text;
4
5 using RssToolkit;
6
7 namespace JonsieExtract
8 {
9 class Program
10 {
11 static void Main(string[] args)
12 {
13 jonsieChannel jc = jonsieChannel.LoadChannel();
14
15 foreach (jonsieItem ji in jc.Items)
16 {
17 Console.WriteLine(ji.Title);
18 }
19 Console.ReadLine();
20
21 }
22 }
23 }
Which produced this:
Cool! Oh, crap. I only get the last 15 posts. I need all of them. Oh yeah, this is a setting in .Text. So I log to my old site and .. hang on, where's the admin options?
IE 7 has problems displaying the tabs. Fortunatly I have a spare machine with IE6. I set the Default number of posts on the home page/feed to 115 and click save. And wait. And wait. And wait. Bum. Looks like .Text is as useful as ever. Oh well, part 2 another day.
I've been tweaking a stored proc today and when using the new SQL 2005 Management Studio I spotted a new option in the query menu: Client Stats. When I execute the stored proc, I get a tab page with some interesting numbers. The really usful thing is, if I execute the same query again - after tweaking the proc - I get to see multiple results side by side:
How cool is that!
Plans are starting to come together for our Code Camp. There's a lot of work getting this organised, but it's starting to get exciting. So far we have about a dozen sessions and speakers confirmed, talking on some interesting topics like AJAX, Ruby on Rails, WWF, SQL, Biztalk, Team System and more.
Registration for Code Camp will - hopefully - be available this week. In the meantime, you can enjoy the chrome, created by Phil (The Genius) Cockfield.
.png "http://www.dot.net.nz/Default.aspx?tabid=87") |
Don't miss the great kiwi
Coding Getaway
Two days of hard core .Net programming demo's, workshops & discussions. Nothing but code.
Code Camp 2006, April 22/23, Porirua Wellington
Brought to you by the NZ .Net User Group |
I've started working though the Hands-On-Labs for Windows Workflow Foundation today and in Lab 1, Excerise 1 (more about that later) I discovered something old that I had never existed before: Event Accessors.
Normally you would decalre an event like this:
1 public event EventHandler<CancelEventArgs> ValidateControls;
Using Event Accessors makes this look a lot more like a property:
1 public event EventHandler<CancelEventArgs> ValidateControls
2 {
3 add
4 {
5
6 }
7 remove
8 {
9
10 }
11 }
This could be useful to ... hmmm, I'm not exactly sure if I would use it, but I imagine some people would.
FYI, this also works in .Net 1.1. Not sure about VB though.
I just noticed that Visual Studio gives you a nice little tooltip in the Solution Explorer to tell you who has a file checked out (or not).
Is this new? I normally don't keep the mouse stationary long enough to see tooltips.
I've been having a bit of a play with three 3rd party products for Team System, namely, TeamLook, TeamPlain and Teamprise. This is not a review of these products, just some observations.
TeamLook
TeamLook integrates without Outlook to provide access to Work Items only. It gives you a nice tree view of work items and you can create new work items from emails. It looks promising but I found that Outlook was taking minutes to start-up with TeamLook loaded. After removing TeamLook, Outlook starts up in about 2 seconds.
Teamprise
Teamprise is a J* client for TFS and provides work item and source control functionality for Eclipse or as a standalone client. I don't know much about Eclipse but we do have a team using it for a large WebSphere project. This does look promising but it doesn't go far enough yet. There is no access to reports or documents or process guidance - you fall back to Sharepoint for this - which is fine, but TeamPlain is better.
TeamPlain
TeamPlain is a ASP.Net application that provides much of the same functionality as Team Explorer, but with a much richer UI. With it you can view and create work items, view reports and documents, view source code with some limited source control interaction and pretty much do everything you need to do if you don't have Team Explorer. For us, this means we can provide work item access to testers and users without having to install the TS Client. I found the web access extremely fast - faster than the Team Explorer. The UI is also very attractive and easy to use. TeamPlain also authenticates users with Integrated Security if possible or using a standard login/password prompt. This means we can provide external access to our repository without providing a VPN.
In the future they will be providing Eclipse and VS2003 addins which will suit us very well.
Licensing of TeamPlain is not cheap, but they do have floating licenses and if you just need work item access then there will be a cheaper Lite version.
Summary
All of these products are still officially in beta, but TeamPlain is pretty much finished and just waiting for TFS RTM. Overall, I think TeamPlain provides the best performance and coverage of TFS functionality but I'd expect TeamPrise to improve when it's closer to release. If you just need work item access then TeamLook is probably also worth a closer investigation.
I'm jumping on the snippet bandwagon a bit late but this morning I realised I was repeating myself repeating myself repeating myself more than usual. I am trying to figure out a bit of spaghetti I write a while ago that is getting events firing in the wrong order. The logic is bit too complex to step through so I'm adding tracing code and capturing this to a log file.
Eg:
1 private void fireModeChange()
2 {
3 Trace.WriteLine("Starting fireModeChange", "Designer");
4 Trace.Indent();
5 try
6 {
7 if (ModeChanged != null)
8 {
9 ModeChanged(this, new EventArgs());
10 }
11 }
12 finally
13 {
14
15 Trace.Unindent();
16 Trace.WriteLine("Ending fireModeChange", "Designer");
17 }
18 }
The time saving solution is to create a code snippet that surrounds the selected code with this block. Creating a snippet is pretty easy when you've done it a few times, but to make things interesting I downloaded Snippy from GotDotNet. It's a NLU (nice little utility) for creating snippet files.
Now surrounding the selected code is very easy. Of course, it's taken me several hours of fracking about to get all this working and documented - but that's another blog post :}
I've been pretty critical of GotDotNet in the past so I must now give credit where it is due. The site is much faster, it seems more reliable and it even looks better. I also find the menu's a lot easier to navigate. The GDN team have done a great job. Well done!
My only annoyance is that you often have to join a workspace community to download a tool or sample code, but I suspect this necessary for legal reasons or some such thing.
Here's a few notes and tips from my TFS Server Upgrade experience.
- Make sure you get the upgrade kit and read the instructions cover to cover before starting.
- You'll also need the updated install guide. But be warned, you may not be able to view the contents of this. See my rant in a previous post.
- The upgrade guide is 43 pages long, but don't panic. You can ignore some of this. I have a single server install so I ignored the dual server upgrade instructions.
- Read Rob Caron's blog. There's a few links there to other peoples upgrade experience.
- During the upgrade you need to create and delete Team Projects. I found that TFSDeleteProject would not work on my client machine. It kept telling me it could not find the server. I suspect this was due to my TFS permissions or something funcky with our domain/AD setup. I copied TFSDeleteProject to the server and, using remote desktop, logged in using the TFSService account and it then worked just fine.
- You need to uninstall Beta 3 during the upgrade. I have the Team Test Load Controller on our single server so I uninstalled that first just to be safe. I didn't have Team Explorer on the TFS server so I didn't need to uninstall this.
- After you install the TFS RC, you need to execute a web service method on http://localhost:8080/services/v1.0/Registration.asmx and verify that the returned XML is correct. This seems daft to me. It should be something that is built into the install.
- To upgrade the build types, you have to run the upgrade tool TFSBuildUpgrade on a machine that has the Team Explorer installed. I didn't have this installed on my TF Server so I tried to run this on my build server but I got the same error as TFSDeleteProject - it could not see the TFS Server. So, I installed the Team Explorer on the TF Server and ran the upgrade there without issue.
- You have to install the Team Explorer on client machines. This sounds obvious but when you are working through the upgrade instructions it's not easy to spot when you should do this. You should do it after you have installed all the servers. If you try to use Visual Studio with the Beta explorer (like I did) it won't work.
The installation took me about 2.5 hours but I was very careful - this is a production system. I would expect a full install from scratch (including SQL & Sharepoint Services) would take about the same time - maybe a little longer. Overall, this was a pretty painless process and I think is more than good enough for a Version 1 product - at least for a single server install. I'm being deliberatly cautious in my praise here as I have installed TFS a few times already. Someone installing for the first time may not find it as easy as I did.
I haven't had much time to play with the client yet, but here's a couple of things I noticed.
- The Security & Permissions dialogs include some more informational tips:
This is a nice reminder for people.
- User names are now displayed instead of login names:
- Reports are tidier and much more complete.
Now back to more boring work...
I understand that there is a lot of nasty stuff around on the web that may get onto my work machine and cause all sorts of problems, but really, sometimes I find Windows too protective. For example, I downloaded an updated Compiled Help File for my TFS upgrade. When I open the file I get this:
Well, ok, someone forgot to sign the file so this is reasonable and I can untick the option to hide this next time I open it. However, when I click open I see this:
After a lot of head scratching, a colleague pointed me to this in the file properties:
Once Unblocked, the help contents display correctly.
I spend all day working with various versions of Windows and I can't figure this stuff out. How the frack is an ordinary occasional PC user supposed to understand this BS? This is a really good example of unintelligent design. Maybe it's a consequence of the Windows UI that limits the amount of useful information that can be displayed to a user. To me, it would be much more sensible to display the file differently so I can immediately see that there is a problem with it. Eg. Instead of displaying the short-cut thus:
it could look something like this:
I look forward to having a play with Vista very soon to see if it's any better.
I've been looking at some complex code that someone else wrote lately and trying to figure out how it all works (or doesn't actually). I've been adding lots of Trace statements so I can more easily follow the flow of execution.
Now, I'm not sure if this is a problem for anyone else or just my addled brain but I found that Trace statements in my Web Service don't display in the Visual Studio Output window unless I step into the Web Service code from the WinForms client. This is a real drag. All I want to do is execute the application and later examine the process steps.
A simple workaround is to use the TextWriterTraceListener. With this I can capture Trace output to a file and look at the results after execute. You do this by adding the following section to your web.config:
<system.diagnostics>
<trace autoflush="true" indentsize="2">
<listeners>
<add name="myListener" type="System.Diagnostics.TextWriterTraceListener" initializeData="mywebapp.log" />
</listeners>
</trace>
</system.diagnostics>
However, I also rediscovered that by default, Trace messages also get output via OutputDebugStr() and this can be viewed with a suitable Debug Viewer. Eg:
This DebugView is free from SysInternals.com. It captures Trace messages from .Net apps and any other apps that use OutputDebugStr(), which includes Windows. There is one problem that I noticed immediately though. Trace.Write() appears like Trace.WriteLine() so you may loose some of the nice formatting that you would get in a log file but I can live with this.
According to Jeff Beehler - and he should know! - Team Foundatation Server RC 1 should be on MSDN very soon, like today. If you haven't seen what's in this release then here's another post with some details.
At the moment I'm quite happy with Beta 3 Refresh. It's working pretty well and is stable but I will definately be switching as soon as I can get the download.
It's official. CodeCamp is coming to New Zealand.
CodeCamp is:
- All about programming and software development.
- Run by the local community for the local community. Most speakers will be from the local community but there may be one or two overseas speakers.
- Free!
Think of CodeCamp like TechEd without the glitz and IT stuff.
If you want to know more about CodeCamp in general then see the official CodeCamp wiki site. Over the next few weeks we (the NZ .Net User Group) will be getting more information collated and details sorted, but for now, all you need to know is:
When: 22 & 23 April (Saturday and Sunday)
What: 2 whole days of pure programming sessions, discussions, workshops and fun! Plus one or two extra-curricular events.
But most importantly, if you would like to present a session to CodeCamp NZ, you should get in touch with Kirk [kirk AT dot DOT net DOT nz ] or myself [peter AT dot DOT net DOT nz].
I saw from Peter Himschoot's blog that TechEd Europe has been split into two separate events, one for IT Pros and the other for Developers.
I would love to see a developer only conference in New Zealand and TechEd is now probably big enough to split into two. At least the last two TechEd's have sold out very quickly and Auckland does not have a bigger venue. I'm not sure what the mix of IT Pro / Developer is - I'm guessing it's about 40/60. A thousand or so Developers would be a good number.
TechEd is a very expensive event to hold so I suppose splitting it would almost double the cost, but here's some ideas to help reduce that:
- Scrap the vendors hall as they add nothing to the content of the event (except the vendors with Segways).
Actually, if you just get rid of the vendors hall then Sky City would probably be big enough for a few hundred more attendees.
- Scrap the party - the cost of this must be getting ridiculous. I heard the rough cost of the 2003 TechEd party. 2005 must have been more. You could buy a warehouse apartment in central Auckland and have a non-stop year long party for less!
- Splitting it will make things go a little quicker - maybe 2 days will be enough for each event.
- Scrap the hands on labs and just give people the VPC images instead.
- Make people pay for internet access. I know what this cost for one TechEd a few years ago (2003?) and it's just horrendous. Most people just need to check their email occasionally or surf MSDN. They can save the p0rn downloading for their hotel rooms.
- Reduce the full ticket price by $400 and increase the corporate price by 50%. Business can afford to pay more and send less people. I know for some organisations that this is a junket for the staff.
Ok, so some of these ideas may be a bit controversial but really, TechEd can't get any bigger the way it is. It's time to think about a change.
Habbits are a bad thing. Automatic assumptions are the root of all evil. Challenge everything.
int i = 42;
Trace.WriteLine("The answer is " + i.ToString());
OR
Trace.WriteLine("The answer is " + i);
Could have saved myself:
const double TimeToPressKey = 0.3;
string wastedKeyStrokeString = ".ToString()";
int perDay = 25;
int workingDays = 5 * 48;
int years = 3;
double savings = TimeToPressKey * wastedKeyStrokeString.Length() * workingDays * years;
Or thereabouts.
It's been a great holiday. I've done very little and I'm feeling really relaxed and stress-free on my first day back at work. Here's a bit of a catch-up of some stuff, no particular order.
Some nice Team System 3rd party stuff I'm testing. I'll report on these more thoroughly soon.
- TeamPrise preview 4 - tried preview 3 and it's not bad - but limited
- TeamPlain Web Access - haven't tried yet but it looks to be more extensive than TeamPrise
- TeamLook - integrates work items with Outlook - seems to work fine so far
From the blogsphere:
What I did on my holidays:
- Installed DotNetNuke 4.02 and used it to create 2 new sites for the NZ .Net User Group. jobs.dot.net.nz is not far off being ready. The new NZ .Net site still has quite a bit of work to do - hopefully it'll be done around February.
- Created a new site for a new user group. My wife, Trish, uses Microsoft Dynamics Nav (formally known as Navision). She is also involved with the start-up user group for this so we have created a site for this using Community Server 2.
- Did some work on DNN 3.2.2 for Tim.
- Did some gardening and extended the driveway.
- Was best man at a wedding/new years eve party (a combo deal)
- Hosted Christmas dinner and a couple of barbies for the family and friends and neighbours
- Went to a couple of barbies
- Went into work once to make a phone call and check when I was supposed to return to work
Roll on 2006. I hope to:
- Get TFS RTM installed and working
- Get other Airways Teams using TFS
- Expand my own team
- Finish 1 project! Any one will do...
- Trips to South Africa & Redmond (maybe) again
- Organise a community developer conference
- Attend TechEd (maybe)
- Organise 10 user group meetings - first one in a couple of weeks so I better get cracking on that!
- Lose 10kg
Microsoft are
working on providing a SCC interface for TFS Source Control. This means
that any IDE that support the SCC API will now be able to use TFS Source
Control. The first cut of this for Visual Studio 6 has been released
already.
Maybe I was
expecting too much, but did anyone else find King Kong a bore? Some parts
were good, like the jungle scenes and anywhere Kong was tearing stuff up. But I
swear, if I had seen one more shot of Jack Black doing his Zoolander into the
camera trying to look shocked/concerned/awestruck, I would have thrown something
at the screen!
The thing is just
way too long. Jackson could easily have cut an hour out of the movie and
it would have been much better for it. What was the point of the side
story with the kid on the boat and his book? And what about those slow
motion shots - good grief! It seemed like he was going out the way to stretch
the movie to 3 hours.
I think it's time
Jackson did a real movie - something small and with drama and no CG effects and
real actors - then we will really see if he's a great director or just a good
project manager who got lucky.
We (Airways New Zealand) are currently recruiting trainee Air Traffic Controllers. If you are interested in pursing a life long career with a great employer then now is the time to apply. You get to work in a great environment with lots of cool techie stuff. This is not a job that suits everyone. The entry criteria are very specific and strict - you need to have the right stuff.
Despite popular belief, this is not a high stress job - don't believe the Hollywood image, it's complete garbage. If we controlled aircraft like they do in LAX (the TV show) or Moving Tin (the Movie) I would never fly again!
I've had a 'fun' weekend clearing out my overloaded inbox and mucking around with the NZ .Net Web Site.
MSDN Flash
If you don't receive MSDN Flash, then may I suggest that now is good time. Looking back over the flashes I've received over the last few months, I've just realised what a great resource it is. I tend to do a lot of surfing and blog reading of international material and often miss out on local news. Flash is an excellent way of keeping up with local happenings. If you don't get the flash, then give it a try for a while. I'm sure you will find it as useful as I do. 
DotNetNuke 4
I had a go at installing DNN 4 and actually got it working on the second attempt. On the first attempt it seemed to work fine, but it wouldn't stop installing. Normally the installer creates a dnn.config file in the install folder that contains the currently installed version. This file is used instead of querying the database on each request. However, this file wasn't created for me because the default installation doesn't include the correct settings in the web.config (UseDNNConfig=true). I turned this on, after I installed, but by then I think it was too late. So, I deleted the database and ran up the site again. This time, it created the dnn.config file and everything works sweetly.
The old DNN 2.1.2 NZ .Net skin uploaded to the new DNN 4 site without complaint and it actually looks just the same as the old site. This will save me considerable hassle when I do the upgrade.
I also created the ASP.Net membership/roles/profile database separately in the hope that I'll be able to share this DB with community server. That's my next task.
There's still a number of 3rd party components that I need to replace or upgrade. There's really only one that I need upgraded ASAP so I better start nagging the vendor or figuring out how to replace it.
Ruby on Rails
I met a chap on Friday (whilst attending an all-day stag party - lots of games - no strippers or pranks) who is using Ruby on Rails for a couple of projects. "You lucky bastard" I said. I love bleeding edge and Ruby on Rails is about as bloody as you will get at the moment. If you don't know anything about Ruby or Rails or Ruby on Rails, then check out the web site.
Anyways, I'd been looking for a suitable candidate for a head-to-head challenge for a user group session and ASP.Net v Ruby on Rails sounds like the perfect solution. From everything I've heard about Ruby and Rails, this could be a very interesting contest. Stay tuned in the new year.
Windows MCE
I've had a loan Media Centre PC for a few months now and I've been doing some testing with it. MCE does offer some nice features over standard Windows XP that make it work well on a TV screen, but overall.. how can I put this gently? - I think it sucks. I know some people love it and it does certainly try to be a TV/DVD/Video/PVR replacement but, for me, it just doesn't fly. Why?
- There are no out-of-the-box channel guides for New Zealand. I tried to get XMLTV to work with it - thanks Nic - but I failed. With more effort I'm sure I could have got it to work.
- All the functions of MCE are poor cousins to the full PC equivalents.
- The quality of TV cards pictures is not as good as real TV.
- You can't rip music or video to the hard drive.
- It's hard to manage folders for large picture, movie and music libraries.
To make MCE truly useful requires quite a few hacks and a lot of switching back to native Windows. I could live with all these short comings if I wanted to come home from a hard day in front of a PC and have a hard night in front of the TV, but I'm not and this is my point - Television is an alternative to a brain. If I have to think about how to watch TV, then it's NOT TV anymore. To me, MCE seems like a great way of making a simple device that works into a complex one that doesn't.
I'm very pleased to announce the .Net User Groups have started up a new mailling list for the discussion of all aspects of Team System - including Team Suite, Team Foundation Server, Team Build, Team Test, Reporting, Process Guidance, Portal, Licensing, etc etc etc. This list is intended to be used primarily for Kiwi's and local New Zealand issues but anyone is welcome to join.
Hopefully this forum will promote some lively discussions and provide some support for users new and old.
You can subscribe to the list here.
I've been playing with Testing in Team System this week (Wow! I want to be a tester! But that's another story for a later date). I am creating a sequence of manual tests for UAT (we don't have any UI Testing tools) and I want the testers/users to start with a clean build of the system and database with each test run.
Using RedGate SQL Packager I created a script to create the database with some sample starting data. I added a couple of tasks to my Team Build to create a database and execute the script on it. Using my custom ExecuteSQL task I added the following:
< TestDBServer>fred</TestDBServer>
<TestDBName>$(BuildNumber)</TestDBName>
<TestDBCreateConnectionString>
data source=$(TestDBServer);integrated security=SSPI;Pooling=true
</TestDBCreateConnectionString>
< Message Text="Creating test database " Importance="normal"/>
<ExecuteSQL ConnectionString="$(TestDBCreateConnectionString)"
Command="create database [$(BuildNumber)]" />
This created an empty database with a name of whatever the BuildNumber is. Note the [ and ] around the $(BuildNumber).
Next, I execute the script to create the database objects and populate it with sample data:
<Exec Command="isql.exe -E -S $(TestDBServer) -i $(BuildDirectoryPath)\SUMS3\SUMS3Debug\Sources\Airways.SUMS3\CreateTestDB.SQL -d [$(BuildNumber)]" />
The SQL script is checked in with the solution files, hence the funcky path to it. I could have had it in the Team Build project folder, but it's more visible in the solution.
So, now my Team Build produces completely isolated instances. Users can happily compare old versions with the latest and greatest version.
I just spotted something on MSDN about InfoCard and not knowing what the heck it was I searched and found a good description of it. Now I get an idea of what it is and it sounds like a good idea, but really, something that uses twelve-ish WS* standards seems way to much like something you'd get from IBM!
SOAP
WS-Addressing
WS-MetadataExchange
WS-Policy
WS-Security
WS-SecurityPolicy
WS-Transfer
WS-Trust
XML Signature
XML Encryption
SAML
WS-Federation (unclear)
Phew!
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