Conway’s Law–The original paper

In the context of software architecture, people sometimes talk about Conway’s Law:

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

Although we apply it on software architecture, this definition is originally created in a more broader sense. If you are interested in reading the original paper, go check it out here; http://www.melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html

The original paper in PDF format can be found here; http://www.melconway.com/Home/pdf/committees.pdf

NPM 5 - Hopes for the future

I’m not a big fan of NPM, it’s not persé the fault of the tool itself but you don’t get happy when you end up with 1000’s of packages and any package change has a ripple effect through your code base. It even gets better when package creators don’t follow the semantic versioning rules and breaking changes appear without a warning. Everything I have to open up a new codebased and NPM starts its magic behind the scenes, it is not without fear that I first start compiling my code.

Sidenote: You can say similar things about any other packaging tool I guess, e.g. NuGet

But hey, enough complaining, time for some good news. Last month, the NPM released version 5 and they promised a lot of improvements.

The announcement:

Starting today, typing `npm install npm@latest -g` will update you to npm version 5.0.1.
npm@5 is all new and packed with performance, reliability, and usability improvements we know you’ll love. These include a new approach to lockfiles, more robust caching, and incredible speed — for many common tasks, npm@5 is up to 5x faster than previous versions.
The update is available now and we recommend it for everyone.
You can learn more about npm@5 here.

Did the update and it is certainly faster! Made my day…

Angular 4–Visual Studio 2017 - error TS2420: Class 'MdButton' incorrectly implements interface 'CanDisable'. Property 'disabled' is missing in type 'MdButton'.

After upgrading to Angular 4, my Visual Studio turned red from all the TypeScript errors.

Some samples:

/node_modules/@angular/material/typings/button/button.d.ts(40,22): error TS2420: Class 'MdButton' incorrectly implements interface 'CanDisable'.
  Property 'disabled' is missing in type 'MdButton'.

/node_modules/@angular/material/typings/button/button.d.ts(40,39): error TS2507: Type '(new (...args: any[]) => CanDisable) & typeof MdButtonBase' is not a constructor function type.

The strange thing was, that when I used the Angular CLI and ng build(or serve) no errors appeared and everything seemed to work. 

I first tried to remove my node_modules folder and do a clean install –> didn’t help 

Then I removed my globally installed node_modules and reinstalled them as well –> didn’t help 

Then I upgraded my TypeScript version and the related Visual Studio tooling –> didn’t help 

In the end I found a solution that worked for me here, I had to update to Visual Studio 2017 Update 15.2. I don’t understand why upgrading an Angular version will get Visual Studio into trouble. I hope this experience will improve as I will become hesitant to upgrade Angular in the future.

Remark: Afterwards I noticed that a colleague already sent me an email telling me to update my Visual Studio before upgrading. Better read my mails next time… 

Getting up to speed with QuickApp, an ASPNET Core / Angular4 startup project template

I’m always disappointed to see the amount of work to get your application setup done(you know the typical ‘Sprint 0’ work). Creating your frontend and backend projects, setting up your authentication and authorization, configure the webpack magic and so on… Before you know it you are 2 weeks in your project and you didn’t deliver a single bit of business functionality.

So every tool, framework or library that can help you get up to speed is a welcome addition to our toolbox. Recently I discovered QuickApp, an ASP.NET Core/AngularX Project Template.

From the documentation:

This application consists of:

• Template pages using Angular4 and TypeScript
• RESTful API Backend using ASP.NET Core MVC Web API
• Database using Entity Framework Core
• Authentication based on OpenID Connect
• API Documentation using Swagger
• Webpack2 for managing client-side libraries
• Theming using Bootstrap

You get the benefits of:

• A complete backend and frontend project structure to build on, with login, user and permission-based role management already integrated
• Data Access Layer built with the Repository and Unit of Work Pattern
• Code First Database
• A RESTful API Design
• Angular Directives Quidance
• Angular Pipes Quidance
• Angular Animations Quidance
• Angular Services
• Dialog and Notification Services
• Configuration Page and Configuration Service
• Integrated Internationaliztion
• Theming with SASS
• Ready-to-use email API
• Handling Access and Refresh Tokens with WebStorage (Bearer authentication) - No Cookies
• Jquery Integration (Ability to use standard Jquery libraries)
• CRUD APIs

What is the JavaScript variant of .Any() in LINQ(C#)?

Today during our ‘Bug Fix Friday’ we were discussing how to rewrite a rather complex loop construction using a more functional style syntax. As we were all C# developers, the equivalent of what we wanted to achieve in JavaScript was what C# offers through the .Any() LINQ operation.

So the discussion was if their was a similar approach possible in JavaScript?

And the answer is… of course! The Array.prototype.some() method did exactly what we needed.

From MDN:

some() executes the callback function once for each element present in the array until it finds one where callback returns a truthy value (a value that becomes true when converted to a Boolean). If such an element is found, some() immediately returns true. Otherwise, some() returns false. callback is invoked only for indexes of the array which have assigned values; it is not invoked for indexes which have been deleted or which have never been assigned values.

An example:

.NET 4.6.2 OutputCache max-age is incorrect

After upgrading to .NET 4.6.2 we started noticing problems with our ASP.NET MVC applications. We intesively use caching to limit the load on our web servers. This is easy to implement thanks to the OutputCache attribute in MVC.

The problem we noticed after upgrading was that the max-age in the response headers was no longer correct after hitting the cache. An example:

• We had the following OutputCache attribute on top of our MVC controller:
  [OutputCache(Duration = 86400 )]
• When executing the first request, we see the following response heade
  Cache-Control: public, max-age=86400
• On all subsequent requests, we see the following
  Cache-Control: public, max-age=63623538558

More information: https://github.com/Microsoft/dotnet/issues/330

Remark: This problem is fixed in .NET 4.7 and a specific quality update.

Windows 10–Remove the Windows.old folder after upgrading

After upgrading my Windows 10 installation to the Anniversary Update, I noticed that I had two windows folders; windows & windows.old. Both were eating up a lot of disk space, but I had no clue if I could safely delete the windows.old folder.

The windows.old folder contains all information about your previous windows version. Idea is that if you want to roll back to the old version, it’s possible through the recovery option. Windows will automatically clean up the old folder after some time but if you can’t wait here is a (safe) alternative:

• Open Windows Explorer.
• Right click on the drive that contains your Windows installation. Choose Properties.
• Click the Disk Cleanup button on the General tab.
• After the Disk Cleanup tool is done calculating, click on the Cleanup System Files button.
• Select the Previous Windows Installation(s) option to delete the Windows.old folder

Remark: I noticed that if you don’t run the Disk Cleanup tool as an administrator, the Previous Windows Installation(s) option is not available.