Bower–Visual Studio 2013 Integration

I’m currently switching from NuGet to Bower as my client side package manager. The process is not going as smoothly as I hoped. During the process I got a range of problems I blogged about before.

In this final post, I walk through the process of getting Bower up and running inside Visual Studio 2013.

Outside the .NET world(where NuGet is king), NPM and Bower are the 2 mainstream package managers. I don’t like NPM as it creates a deep tree of package dependencies ending up with the NTFS 260 path length issue. Bower uses a flat dependency tree, requiring only one version for each package.

Installation Steps

Before we can use Bower inside Visual Studio 2013, we have to install 2 Visual Studio Extensions:

Grunt Launcher: https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/dcbc5325-79ef-4b72-960e-0a51ee33a0ff
Package IntelliSense: https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/65748cdb-4087-497e-a394-2e3449c8e61e

Now open up Visual Studio and create a new ASP.NET (MVC) Web project. I used the empty template but you can use any template you want.

Similar to NuGet where we have a package.config file, we need a file (bower.json) to configure the list of packages. The easiest way to create this bower.json file is by opening up a command prompt and running the ‘bower init’ command.

This will walk you through a list of questions. You can use the default for everything except the ‘Would you like to mark this package as private which prevents it from being acidentally published to the registry?: (y/N)’. For that question, change the response to yes.

Include the generated bower.json file inside your project.

Let’s add some dependencies to the bower.json file. We add a new “dependencies” property and start adding dependencies. The moment you enter a few characters, Visual Studio will offer to search the Bower registry for published packages.

When I click on the Search Bower… option, a list of matching packages is shown.

Same thing when I specify a version number.

Once we are done adding our dependencies, you can right-click on the bower.json file and choose Bower install packages to download and install the configured dependencies.

Visual Studio will invoke Grunt to get the packages from the registry. By default the packages will be installed in the bower_components folder.

Now you can include the packages or even better use a Grunt or Gulp task to copy the files over to the correct folder.(but this is for another blog post).

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME ...

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...

A complex system designed from scratch never works

A few years ago, I worked as an architect on a big mainframe rewrite. I still count it as one of my failures. Not because the technology was wrong, but because I couldn't convince the management team to simplify the approach. Years later, the organization is still struggling to get the new system up and running. I left the project at the time, because I couldn't put my name behind an approach that would take very long and cost a lot of money without a working system to show for it along the way. Gall’s Law That memory keeps coming back to me, because it's a textbook case of Gall's Law playing out in real life. Gall's Law , from John Gall's Systemantics , states it plainly: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works, and it cannot be patched to make it work. You have to start over with a simple system that works. What does that mean in practice,...

The art of simplicity

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