Application Insights Tools for Visual Studio

Microsoft released some extra tools for Visual Studio to integrate Application Insights telemetry in your applications in an easy way. 

Get Started

To get started with a new project, simply create a Web or Windows Store project. In the New Project dialog, make sure that Add Application Insights to Project is checked.

To get started with an existing project, right-click on a Web or Windows Store project in Solution Explorer and choose Add Application Insights Telemetry to Project.
That's it! Then run your Web application locally (or deploy your application), and after 10-15 minutes, telemetry data will automatically start appearing in the Application Insights Portal in the Usage tab.

ASP.NET Web API 2: Attribute routing and Url.Link()

After upgrading to ASP.NET Web API 2, we decided to switch to the attribute based routing approach. Most things worked nicely, but we had one little problem.

In our POST methods, we returned the URL of the new created object:

The problem was that Url.Link expects a route name, but how do we specify the correct route name? Therefore an extra “Name” property is available on the Route attribute:

[Route("api/user/{id}", Name = "PostUser")]

response.Headers.Location = new Uri(Url.Link("PostUser", new { id = user.Id }));

Team Foundation Server 2013: Installation error

Last week, we finally found some time to upgrade our company TFS environment to Team Foundation 2013.

The upgrade didn’t go as smooth as we wanted. The installation immediately failed with the following error message:

TF400167 : Installation failed for the package(netfxfullredist_43) with the following status 0x800713EC, restart state 00x0

If you see this error, don’t panic. It’s an easy one to fix. When you install Team Foundation Server 2013, .NET 4.5.1 will be installed first as a prerequisite. The thing is that the .NET 4.5.1 installation requires 2.8GB(!) of free space to install.

We only had 2GB of free disk space available, so this explained the error message.

Cleaning up some old files on the TFS server, solved the issue and the installation could continue…

TypeScript: Enable sourcemap support for an IIS hosted ASP.NET MVC site

When you are using TypeScript in Visual Studio 2013, a source map is created when your TypeScript is build. This allows you to debug your TypeScript files in the browser. It will map the generated JavaScript to the corresponding lines inside your TypeScript file. 

However, this is the theory. When I added some TypeScript files to my MVC application, I couldn’t get it working. When I opened the source files inside the Chrome Developer Tools, the files were empty.

When I took a look at the Netwerk tab, I found the following error:

It seems that when you host your project in IIS, the .ts extension is blocked by default. So this explained the 404 error.

The solution was to add the .ts file extension inside the web.config:

Durandal: Write your viewmodels using TypeScript

I created this small sample that shows how to write a Durandal ViewModel using TypeScript:

Technology Radar

As an application architect and technical lead, I not only have to keep up with current technologies but also have an eye on future and upcoming technologies and trends.

One of these places I look at is the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar. A must follow for every (aspiring) architect…

Knockout: Multiple viewmodels per page

In a web application we are building we have a dashboard like functionality. To build this in a clean way, we  wanted to create multiple viewmodels in one page.

I found the following jsFiddle demonstrating how to get this working using Knockout: