The art of simplicity

By default when you upload files using ASP.NET Web API, the files are saved using a random filename. This is not a bug, but a security decision Microsoft made. They considered it a security risk to take the file name provided in the Content-Disposition header field and decided  instead to compute a file name. You can easily solve this by deriving from the default MultiPartFormDataStreamProvider and provide your own naming mechanism: If you want to know some more about uploading files using Web API, I recommend the following blog post: A guide to asynchronous file uploads in ASP.NET Web API RTM

I talked about Web Deploy before. It allows you to easily deploy your web applications to IIS without much overhead. I use it most of the time. Last week I asked the server administrator to enable the automatic backup feature on the web server.  Once I got the confirmation email that it was configured, I did a new deployment to test the backup feature. After the deployment completed succesfully, I opened a command prompt and browsed to C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS\Microsoft Web Deploy V3. Print the list of backups I used the following command to dump the list of created backups: msdeploy -verb:dump -source:backupManager="development.customer.be/appname",computerName="serverXX",userName="UserXYZ",password="PasswordXYZ" But the output window returned nothing. No backups were created. Print the backup settings I switched to another command to dump the backupSettings from the server: msdeploy -verb:dump -source:backupSett...

In a Windows 8 application I added a WebView control to load some local HTML files. I started by setting the source property of the WebView control to the HTML page I embedded into the application: DisclaimerWebView.Source = new Uri("ms-appx-web:///assets/disclaimer.html"); But when I ran the application, I saw an empty WebView control. So I switched to the  WebView.Navigate method: DisclaimerWebView.Navigate(new Uri("ms-appx-web:///assets/disclaimer.html")); No effect… After a while I found the reason. I had to explicitly set the Width and the Height of the WebView control. And finally my HTML was loaded.

One important element in building a good SOA(Service Oriented Architecture) is creating a good versioning approach. If you fail to get good versioning from the start, It will become really hard to fix it afterwards. So therefore remember the first rule of versioning web services:   “One object in, One object out”   What does it mean? Let’s explain with the following sample. Imagine I created a webservice with the following method: This is a hard to version service and a really bad example. Why? Because we are using a simple type as input(in this case a guid). This means that in this case we have one object out, but not one object in. If later we have to add a second input parameter, we’ll end up with a breaking change. A better alternative is to use the following contract: Now we have one object in, one object out. If we want to send some extra data, we can just add it to the OrderRequest object as an extra property.

I’m currently working on a cross-platform solution using Xamarin . Today a colleague sent me a link to the following article: Here's why HTML-based apps don't work . In this article Matt Baxter-Reynolds who worked on a number of different projects based on PhoneGap/Apache Cordova shares his experiences. There is one quote(and the conclusion of the article) that I want to share with you: “Go native, try Xamarin . But in terms of hybrid: avoid.” I’m just saying…

In Visual Studio 2012 the Add STS reference… option is replaced by a completely new tool: The Identity and Access Tool . The Identity and Access Tool for Visual Studio 2012 enables you to secure your application with claims based identity and accept users from multiple identity providers. This extension adds a context sensitive project menu entry to easily add identity capabilities to your Web Applications, MVC Applications and WCF Services. This will provide you with capabilities for developing and testing your application with a Local Development STS, connecting to a corporate identity provider like ADFS2 and using the Windows Azure Access Control Service to connect to other identity provides such as LiveID, Google, Yahoo and Facebook. It does this by updating your web.config file with the proper settings to enable the Windows Identity Foundation in .NET 4.5 and adding the necessary configuration for the identity provider you select. This tool is not available out-of-the-...

When creating a new ASP.NET MVC 4 project, I noticed that a  _references.js file was added to the Scripts folder. If we look at the content, I only see some comments. So what is it good for? The VS <reference /> Syntax The // <reference path=”…” /> allows you to enable IntelliSense in any JavaScript file by including everything defined in the JavaScript located at this path.Visual Studio 2012 will give you IntelliSense for all files that have references in the “_references.js” file. This way you can enable IntelliSense for the JavaScript files you use all the time. If you want, you can add your own files too: Go to Tools –> Options. Browse in the Tree view to Text Editor –> JavaScript –> IntelliSense –> References Here you can add other script files containing reference paths

One question I get a lot from customers is how to manage their bugs using Team Foundation Server 2012. Some teams like to track bugs as tasks and other teams track them as backlog items, such as user stories or requirements. If you’re using a Scrum project, bugs are already in your backlog. However, if your team project was created using the Agile, CMMI, or other process template, bugs don't appear on the task board or the backlog pages. Figure 1: Manage bugs at the Task board level Figure 2: Manage bugs at the Product Backlog level The Visual Studio team created a blog post explaining the steps to add bugs to either the task board or the product backlog.

One of the nice features of Windows Azure Service Bus is the ability to expose an internal WCF service through Azure without any extra configuration on the firewall/network level. This means that a user connects to your service through the Azure Service Bus. You can even take this one step further and change the relay binding to ‘Hybrid’ mode. This means that the Azure Service Bus tries to ‘upgrade’ the connection to a peer to peer connection between the client and the WCF service without going through the Azure Service Bus anymore. This sounds like a little bit of magic, and it actually is(at least for me). Configuring this can be done through the connectionMode property on the binding element: Relayed (default): All communication is relayed through the relay service. The SSL-protected control connection is used to negotiate a relayed end-to-end socket connection that all communication flows through. Once the connection is established the relay service behaves as a socket ...

For an Android application we are building, we added some string values to our /resources/values/strings XML file. Mono for Android detects this and generates a strongly typed value in a designer class. The only problem is that the generated value is an integer, not the string value itself. So how can we get access to the string resource?

One of the issues we encountered after upgrading from TFS 2010 to TFS 2012 is related to the build. What’s particular to our environment is that we have 2 domains(both containing the same users). The goal is to move from one domain to another(and remove the old obsolete domain), but this is taking a little bit longer as expected . In the meanwhile we are stuck with 2 domains. This already gave us some trouble when upgrading from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010, but now it’s back to haunt us again… This time it goes wrong when the build server tries to execute the Associate ChangeSets and related Workitems build step. This step fails with the following error message: Exception Message: Multiple identities found matching 'Username'. Please specify one of the following identities:- Username(NEW_DOMAIN\Login)- Username(OLD_DOMAIN\Login) (type MultipleIdentitiesFoundException)Exception Stack Trace:    at System.Activities.Statements.Throw.Execute(CodeActivityContext context)...

A few weeks ago I went to a presentation about LightSwitch at our local user group . The presentation was great but I wasn’t convinced that LightSwitch was the right tool for me… There were some features still missing that I think are critical before I want to use it for my projects. Somehow Microsoft was able to read my mind because with the announcement of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 CTP 4 ,  they released an updated preview of the LightSwitch HTML Client containing almost every feature I was looking for. What’s new? New UI primitives such as command bars, popups, and reusable dialogs. Responsive User Interface to adapt gracefully to different form factors. Deploy your application as a provider-hosted app in addition to auto-hosting. Deploy your app to Sharepoint 2013 on premise(in addition to being able to run your app in Office 365) Localize your app into multiple languages. NuGet Package integration. And many more… The official annou...

For a customer I’m preparing the migration process from TFS 2010 to TFS 2012. To test the migration, we did a test upgrade from TFS 2010 to TFS 2012 on a separate server. This allows to test the new behavior in isolation, validate if our customizations still work and hopefully save us some time when doing the production migration. One thing we struggled with is that we couldn’t switch back to the old TFS 2010 environment after connecting to the TFS 2012 environment. Same problem when trying to connect to the old build server after connecting to the new one. Instead Team Explorer showed a HTTP code 404: Not Found message. The solution for everything: clear the cache. The solution is simple. It looks like Visual Studio is caching some information about the TFS servers. Because these servers are almost the same, I guess that Visual Studio mixes up some things. To fix it, you have to clear the cache folder located at: C:\Users\userName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Team Foundati...

The ALM Rangers did it again. Last week they released a new guide:  Better Unit Testing with Microsoft Fakes . This guidance document provides you with a jump-start for effectively using Microsoft Fakes in your projects. Microsoft Fakes makes it easier and faster to create well-isolated unit tests when you do have systems that are “testable,” letting you focus on writing good tests and not on test plumbing. It also enables you to isolate and test code that is not traditionally easy to test, by using a technology called Shims. Shims use runtime interception to let you detour around challenging dependencies and replace them with something you can control. As we have mentioned, being able to create this control variable is imperative when creating high-quality, fast-running unit tests. Shims provide a very powerful capability that will let you circumvent all kinds of roadblocks when unit testing your code. As with all powerful tools, there are a number of patterns, techniques...

After upgrading a Sharepoint environment from Sharepoint 2010 to Sharepoint 2013, users started to panic. Why? Because some strange characters were added to their account names. To give you an example: “Lastname Firstname ( i:0#.w |domain\accountname)” Did something strange happened during the migration that changed all the accounts? No, this is actually a feature. What you see is the claim information about this user. How do you need to decode this claim information? i an identity claim # user logon name . of type string w windows account More information can be found here: http://www.wictorwilen.se/Post/How-Claims-encoding-works-in-SharePoint-2010.aspx

First of all make sure that dynamic compression is enabled and configured in IIS. Afterwards you just have to add the following section to your IIS config(located at  %WinDir%\System32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config ):   Maybe it should work too if you add this to your web.config, but I couldn’t get this working.

Xamarin brought cross-platform mobile development to the next level. With the announcement of Xamarin 2.0 comes a rebranding of their products, a new IDE called Xamarin Studio, a Visual Studio add-in for iOS development, and the introduction of a component store. Xamarin Studio Xamarin Studio is the successor of MonoDevelop. It has a new interface and provides some of the functionality familiar to Visual Studio developers: auto-completion, refactoring, syntax highlighting, code tooltips, code navigation, integrated debugger for simulator/emulator or the real device, integration with Git and Subversion. Don’t forget to have a look at ‘the making of’ . Visual Studio Add-in for iOS development Xamarin offered the option to do iOS development before, but you couldn’t use Visual Studio and had to switch to MonoDevelop(which was a great IDE by the way). Now Xamarin fixed this by releasing a Visual Studio add-in for iOS development. This add-in offers good integration with Microso...

HttpClient is a part of .NET Framework 4.5 and Windows Store apps that provides developers an extremely easy way to connect with services across the internet including REST-based services. But if you wanted to use the same library in Windows Phone 8 or a portable library you were out of luck. Last month Microsoft changed this by releasing a Beta of the portable version of HttpClient . This release of HttpClient adds support for the following platforms: .NET framework 4.0 Windows Phone 7.5 and higher Portable class libraries What do I need? In order to use this release of HttpClient you need to ensure that you have two things. Visual Studio 2010 (for .NET 4.0 Windows Phone 7.1) or Visual Studio 2012 (required for .NET 4.5, Windows Store and Windows Phone 8). The NuGet package manager version 2.1 or higher. To use the HttpClient package, right click on your solution, go to the Manage Nuget Packages dialog, search for Id Microsoft.Net.Http, and make sur...

An inspirational video about software development(and a look at some cool offices too…) If you are interested, go have a look at code.org .

What can I say? Unit testing Windows 8 applications is a painful experience. It’s hard to apply mocking and some stuff is not easy to discover. Last week I created a Windows 8 unit test that required a specific file to be available on the file system. So I added the file to my test project, changed the Build action to content and set Copy to output directory to Copy always . But now the hard part what code should I use to read out the file from the file system? That's it. Once you found it, it's actually not so difficult.

For a Windows 8 application we are building, we have to deploy versions that connect to different backends. We could have created different branches  but this would result in lots of merges. Instead we decided to go for a provider model combined with conditional compilation symbols. This allows us to easily switch between providers by changing the build configuration. This brought us half way there but we had still an issue because we also had to use a different 3th party component depending on the backend. So what we actually want is that when setting the build configuration to QA, the 3thparty.component.QA winmd file was loaded and if we switch to Production the 3thparty.component.Production winmd file was loaded. This is perfectly possible by changing the project file and editing the underlying MSBuild settings: Unload the project. Choose Edit project and open it using the XML editor. Find the reference to the component you want to change depending on the build configurati...