The art of simplicity

The oData integration in Windows 8 Metro-Style applications is not yet at the level of other kind of applications. But to get you going Microsoft released a preview version of the client libraries for Windows 8 Metro-Style. How to use this version? As the “Add Service Reference” feature for oData in Visual Studio 2012 is not available yet, you’ll have to generate the client types manually. Open a command prompt as administrator and navigate to %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30128 Run the following command : DataSvcutil.exe /uri: http://www.nerddinner.com/Services/OData.svc/ /DataServiceCollection /Version:2.0 /out:nerdDinnerClient.cs Afterwards you can create a Metro Style application and import the generated file. More information here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/phaniraj/archive/2012/04/26/developing-windows-8-metro-style-applications-that-consume-odata.aspx

You want to create a quick sample or test some C# code? You no longer have to open up Visual Studio, the only thing you need is a browser thanks to complify.net ! “compilify.net is an interactive web interface for the .NET compiler powered by the Roslyn Project . It allows you to quickly and easily execute snippets of C# code from your browser.You can use compilify.net to learn C#, share and test code, reproduce bugs, explore fixes, and to demonstrate and collaborate on ideas. It's fast and simple . You can use it from any device * with a web browser, without installing any additional plugins. Use it when you don't have time for a full IDE!”

I really like the Scrum for Team System template for Team Foundation Server. The only problem is that it’s kind of hard to configure correctly. Only of all parameters are set correctly, the template will work and the correct reports are generated. To simplify my job as an TFS administrator, I customized the template a bit to get a head start. When you install this customized version, the correct iteration tree is created, some work items are added and the relationship between these work items is set. So no longer complaints by users who can not get this template working, and more time for me to do some useful stuff. Until a developer(yes, I’m talking about you Dennis) decides immediately after the Team Project was created to remove all this preconfigured parts. Back to ‘No data available’ in all reports… So just as a reminder to myself, what are the steps you need to take to configure the template correctly: Iterations This is the expected iteration tree(Release -> Wor...

The Microsoft SQL Server 2012 BPA is a diagnostic tool that performs the following functions: Gathers information about a Server and a Microsoft SQL Server 2012 instance installed on that Server Determines if the configurations are set according to the recommended best practices Reports on all configurations, indicating settings that differ from recommendations Indicates potential problems in the installed instance of SQL Server Recommends solutions to potential problems Download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=29302 Before you are able to run it, you need the following dependencies installed: PowerShell V2.0 Microsoft Baseline Configuration Analyzer V2.0

.NET 4.5 introduces the async and await keywords allowing you to write asynchronous code in a synchronous matter. But how do I test this asynchronous code? Do I have to add Thread.Sleep() and other kind of erroneous structures everywhere to be able to validate this code? Visual Studio 11 makes this easy by supporting async testing out-of-the-box.  You can now include “async” keyword part of the test method, and the “await” keyword within the test method body. A sample:  [TestMethod] public async Task TestAsyncFunctionality() { var result= await GoOutAndCallMySlowWebservice(); Assert.IsNotNull(result); } That’s it!

While preparing some training material about WCF Data Services v5.0 , I had the following problem: After creating my dataservice, I tried to add a reference to it from my client project. I right clicked on the client project and choose ‘Add service reference…’. I clicked ‘Discover’ and there was my DataService in the list of available services. But when I tried to add the reference I got the following error message: “The document at the url http://localhost:46400/OnlineShopService.svc/ was not recognized as a known document type. The error message from each known type may help you fix the problem: - Report from 'XML Schema' is 'The root element of a W3C XML Schema should be <schema> and its namespace should be 'http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema'.'. - Report from 'DISCO Document' is 'Discovery document at the URL http://localhost:46400/OnlineShopService.svc/ could not be found.'.   - The document format is not recognized. - Report f...

For a project I had to create some TFS Work Items programmatically using the TFS API. However saving the work item resulted in the following error message: TF237124: Work Item is not ready to save This error message doesn’t expose any useful information. What’s important to know is that you can configure a lot of rules before a work item is valid. If one of these rules is invalid, saving the work item will result in the above error message. Therefore it’s important to validate the WorkItem prior to save. The validate() method will return an arraylist of invalid fields. ArrayList result= wi.Validate(); So what’s inside this arraylist? A quick sample: This will give you all the information you need to know why this workitem cannot be saved.(In this case the field System.State has an InvalidListValue).

Looking for some styling, coding guidelines for your JavaScript code? Have a look at the Principles of Writing Consistent, Idiomatic JavaScript on GitHub. The idea of this guideline is that: “All code in any code-base should look like a single person typed it, no matter how many people contributed.” Some other useful guides: Code Conventions for the JavaScript Programming Language by Douglas Crockford Google JavaScript style guide Efficient JavaScript (Opera Developer Community) Anyone with some other good coding guidelines for JavaScript development?

Microsoft shipped a beta version of the Team Foundation Server Power Tools that work with VS 11 and are optimized to work with TFS 11. This Power Tools release is designed to work with a VS 11 client (or Team Explorer 11) but you won’t get the VS integration in a VS 2010 or earlier client. This beta gives you the most useful Power Tools up and running with VS 11/TFS 11. Some of the features of the previous Power Tools are removed because they have  been integrated into the product and At the moment no new features are added instead. The features included in this release are: TFS Power Tools TFPT Command Line The Team Explorer extensions – All are included except work item templates. Windows Shell Extension – It’s been enhanced to support local workspaces meaning no more read-only files and need to checkout, better offline support and everything else that comes with local workspaces. Process Template Editor – We’ve added support for al...

After moving some WCF services from one server to another, I was welcomed by the following error message: "This collection already contains an address with scheme https. There can be at most one address per scheme in this collection." “Googling” the error brought me a solution soon, but what caused this error message? The solution You can resolve this error by changing the web.config file. With ASP.NET 4.0 , add the following lines to your web.config: <system.serviceModel> <serviceHostingEnvironment multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" /> </system.serviceModel> With ASP.NET 2.0 / 3.0 / 3.5 , add the following lines to your web.config: <system.serviceModel> <serviceHostingEnvironment> <baseAddressPrefixFilters> <add prefix="https://dev.server.be"/> </baseAddressPrefixFilters> </serviceHostingEnvironment> </system.serviceModel> The reason IIS has web sites, which are con...

    “Adobe® Shadow is a new inspection and preview tool that allows front-end web developers and designers to work faster and more efficiently by streamlining the preview process, making it easier to customize websites for mobile devices.”   Features Synchronized Browsing and Refreshing (Device Pairing) — Wirelessly pair multiple iOS and Android devices to your computer . With Shadow, you browse in Chrome, and all connected devices will stay in sync. Remote inspect your code — Remote inspection and debugging capabilities. Target a device for remote inspection and using familiar development tools, make changes to your HTML, CSS and JavaScript and see your device update instantly. Localhost URL support — Shadow now works correctly with URLs containing localhost, and 127.0.0.1. On Mac OS X, it also works with machine.local. Adobe Edge integration — If you are using Adobe Edge, the Preview in Browser command now works with Shadow. You ...

The management options for SQL Azure are rather limited. For a lot of functionality, a friendly interface was missing. AUMC is a simple application that helps you managing the users and logins of an Azure SQL database. Go check it out!

By default, if you load a datetime value from the database through NHibernate, the DateTimeKind will be set to ‘Unspecified’. For a specific requirement on a recent project, the DateTimeKind needed to be set to ‘Local’ instead. So I dived into NHibernate to discover a rich set of Date/Time related functionality. Let’s create a simple object: public class SampleEntity { public DateTimeEntity() { CreatedOn = DateTime.Now; } public virtual Guid Id { get; private set; } public virtual DateTime CreatedOn { get; set; } } If we save this entity to the database and load it again, we see there’s a difference: Original entity: Id: 9245fe4a-d402-451c-b9ed-9c1a04247482 CreatedOn: 2012-04-08 11:57:22 PM (Local) Reloaded entity: Id: 9245fe4a-d402-451c-b9ed-9c1a04247482 CreatedOn: 2012-04-08 11:57:22 PM (Unspecified) When creating the entity, we initialized the CreatedOn property with DateTime.Now.(This is always the local time.) After saving and reload...

Last month Microsoft  released a new version of the TFS Integration Tools on the Visual Studio Gallery .(with support for both Team Foundation Server 11 and Team Foundation Service.) “The TFS Integration Tools is a project developed by the Team Foundation Server (TFS) product group and the Visual Studio ALM Rangers to integrate Team Foundation Server with third party systems for migration and synchronization of data.” The list of fixed bugs is long(I recognize too much of them ): General TFS authorization error syncing with a hosted TFS When in multi session mode, integration tools appear to have a memory leak in TfsIntegrationService.exe Version Control ClearCaseDetailedHistoryAdapter with the SnapshotStartPoint option create folders in TFS for files in ClearCase Cloaked filter pairs should always be applied after non-cloaked filter pairs or a migration to TFS VC will fail Detail History Adapter runs the lshistory command one level higher in the ...

At a customer we are not using the Visual Studio Code Coverage feature to measure the unit test code coverage. Instead we are using NCover . As we are migrating from CruiseControl.NET to TFS Build, we installed NCover on our fresh new build server. Running the build resulted not in an all green report but in the following error: “System.DllNotFoundException: Unable to load DLL 'NCover.Lib.x64.dll': The specified module could not be found. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007007E)”   On the NCover forums , we found a solution for our problem. We accidently installed the x86 version of NCover on our 64bit build server.. Although it might work in some cases, it is not a supported configuration. So we removed the x86 version and did a clean install of the x64 version of NCover. This version includes both the 64-bit and 32-bit installations.

Troy Hunt, the creator of the great ebook about the OWASP Top 10 specifically targeted at .NET developers has built a great tool to check your website security: ASafaWeb . What’s ASafaWeb? “ASafaWeb is the Automated Security Analyser for ASP.NET Websites. The purpose of ASafaWeb is to make scanning for common configuration vulnerabilities in live ASP.NET websites dead easy. To that effect, you don't need anything more than a URL to get started and ASafaWeb will head off and report on anything it can find which is remotely detectable.” Whilst this is an unequivocally a basic tool, it will still find configuration flaws in many web sites. The sort of flaws it finds are things like custom errors being off, YSODs with stack traces being returned, tracing still on, debug mode enabled and many, many more. How does it work? Browse to Asafaweb.com . Enter the url of your application and click Scan. Can it be any easier? (I tried it with my employer's website ). Once...

I’m converting a Nant build script to MsBuild. In Nant I have the following statement to check if a specific build property exists: <if test="${property::exists('application.environment')}"> To do the same thing in MsBuild you have to use the condition attribute: <PropertyGroup> <ApplicationEnvironment Condition="'$(ApplicationEnvironment)' == ''">UAT</ApplicationEnvironment> </PropertyGroup>

Last week, we discovered a strange bug inside WCF. We have the following datacontract which represents a surface size expressed in Ha, A and Ca: [DataContract(Namespace = Constants.SCHEMANAME + "Perceel")] public class SurfaceSize { [DataMember(IsRequired = false)] public int? Ha { get; set; } [DataMember(IsRequired = false)] public int? A { get; set; } [DataMember(IsRequired = false)] public decimal? Ca { get; set; } } We noticed that only the Ha value was saved into the database. We looked at the NHibernate mapping files, the domain mapping code, the queries,… everything looked okay. So we took a look at the only place that was left, the message communication itself. The following message data was send to us: <c:SurfaceSize> <c:Ha>99</e6:Ha> <c:A>9</e6:A> <c:Ca>10</e6:Ca> </c:SurfaceSize> We discovered that changing the order of the parameters inside the messag...

I talked about running your build server on Azure before. Although this solution worked, it was a cumbersome and time consuming process. You had to install, manage, patch, etc the build machines yourself. Last week at VS Live, Brian Harry announced and demonstrated a better solution: a new cloud based build service for Team Foundation Service on Azure . With this new service, you can just use a pool of build machines that are manage in the cloud (though you can still install and manage build machines if you like). And, of course, you can do more than just build – like with on-premises TFS, you can run a default workflow that includes, compilation, testing, etc or you can create a custom workflow that does whatever you like. The new build service works by maintaining a pool of Azure VM roles that can expand and shrink as needed. When you start a build, a VM is allocated from the pool to run your build. Your build is run, the build output is copied off the build machine then the VM...

At a customer both the .NET and Java developers are using Team Foundation Server for Source Control, Work Item management, … To optimize the development process and enforce some quality checks, we use the available check-in policies. This forces the developers to check that their code compiles, the code analysis results are successful, a work item is selected, and so on… We enable these check-in policies immediately after creating a new Team Project. So we were a little bit surprised when the Java developers came to us telling that the check-in policies were not applied when working inside RAD or Eclipse. First we thought it was a bug in the Team Explorer Everywhere plugin. But in the end we discovered that the policies that you set in team explorer visual studio are not applied in the plugin of Eclipse. See comment below from MS: “Policies that you define by using Team Web Access or Team Explorer in Visual Studio are not applied when you check in by using the Team Foundati...