The art of simplicity

Bootstrap is a great framework for building good looking and powerful websites. However in the hands of developers, most Bootstrap sites end up looking the same. Enter LayoutIt! , a drag & drop interface builder that let you easily design your own sites by using the Bootstrap functionality. It allows you to drag & drop your template together and download the required HTML, CSS, LESS and JavaScript afterwards.

Microsoft Research released their first extension for Visual Studio 2012: Code Digger . Code Digger analyzes possible execution paths through your .NET code. The result is a table where each row shows a unique behavior of your code. The table helps you understand the behavior of the code, and it may also uncover hidden bugs. Through the new context menu item " Generate Inputs / Outputs Table " in the Visual Studio editor, you can invoke Code Digger to analyze your code. Code Digger computes and displays input-output pairs. Code Digger systematically hunts for bugs, exceptions, and assertion failures. You can also try the functionality online through Pex4Fun . Remark: At the moment Code Digger only works on public .NET code that resides in Portable Class Libraries. This limits its usefulness at the moment.

Last week, our users send us a bug report mentioning that they cannot print a reporting services report from the web browser. We discovered that printing from the ASP.NET Report Viewer control requires a separate ActiveX to be installed. If you don’t have this ActiveX control installed and the users don’t have the rights to install the ActiveX control themselves, they end up with the following error message: “Unable to load client print control” The browser will ask you to install the required ActiveX control to solve this problem: Remark: Because the printing is using an ActiveX control, you can only print Reporting Services reports from Internet Explorer. If you open the ASP.NET reportviewer in FireFox or Chrome, the print button will not be available.

For a long time, I had the (good?) habit to document all my public API’s. But keeping the documentation up-to-date has always been a long and boring task. After a discussion with my fellow developers, I decided to stop adding documentation. Most developers said they don’t look at the documentation but just read the code or  have a look at my unit tests to understand what’s going on. After removing all the documentation, I’m left with a long list of warnings inside my application complaining about ‘Missing XML comment for publicly visible type or member’ .  How to remove these warnings? There are 2 ways to remove these warnings: Turn off the comment generation: Go to the Project properties(Right click on your project and choose Properties from the context menu) Go to the Build tab Uncheck the XML documentation file checkbox Repeat this for every project in your solution Disable the warning: Go to the Project...

I talked about sliding sessions before . With the release of WIF 4.5, a lot of changes were introduced. So to get sliding sessions working in .NET 4.5, replace the old implementation of the SessionSecurityTokenReceived method with the following:

  PostMan is a REST client available as a  Chrome application. It’s a very easy-to-use and developer friendly tool to test and try your Web API’s. You have lots of options to manipulate the request and it has integrated support for multiple authentication mechanisms.  Download it here .     Features Create requests quickly Compact layout HTTP requests with file upload support Formatted API responses for JSON and XML Open responses as an HTML file in a new window HATEOAS support Image previews Request history Basic and OAuth 1.0 helpers Autocomplete for URL and header values Key/value editors for adding parameters or header values. Works for URL parameters too. Use environment variables to easily shift between settings. Great for testing production, staging or local setups. Use Global variables for values which are common throughout APIs ...

In a previous post I introduced the Microsoft Fakes framework. However when I tried to use this framework inside my tests, they always failed with the following message: Microsoft.QualityTools.Testing.Fakes.UnitTestIsolation.UnitTestIsolationException: UnitTestIsolation instrumentation failed to initialize. Please restart Visual Studio and rerun this test   I discovered that it failed because I was running my tests through the ReSharper test plugin. When I used the Visual Studio Test runner instead, everything worked fine… Anyone who knows how I can get this working using ReSharper?