On the surface, I suppose this is YAMVCVWFC (Yet Another MVC vs. WebForms Comparison). If this topic doesn’t appeal to you, or you’re sick and tired of this discussion then I encourage you to move on. I won’t be offended, promise. This post is here to serve as my living, breathing arguments for fighting for MVC and it will serve to highlight my major gripes with Web Forms. The motivation for this post came from an all-too-familiar IRC chat in #asp.net – for those of you unfamiliar with IRC, it’s a lot like the Twitter of the 90s....

I saw the following question asked earlier today -- the only context given was the code itself. Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with this Dim min As Integer = Integer.Parse(leavingTimeTextBox.Text.Substring(leavingTimeTextBox.Text.IndexOf(":") + 1, leavingTimeTextBox.Text.Length) -1 )? it shows me an exception index out of range exception: length and index must be within the range of the string, parameter name: length  so its five characters and on debug time : index is 2 so I'm starting from index 3 to length which is 5 -1 "4" It was clear that he looking to parse some sort of pre-defined time format, but...

As a brief recap, the reason this post even exists is because the generated code from the EF4 designer does not properly suppress code analysis warnings. In that post, I mentioned that I would provide a proper T4 template and tutorial on integrating it into your EDMX model. This post details the steps to creating and customizing an Entity Framework 4 T4 template. T4 (the Text Template Transformation Toolkit) is the code generation technology built into Visual Studio. Thankfully, the EF4 designer has been enhanced to support customizable templates so that developers are free to change the code...

Update I have published the instructions and provided a template that can be used to properly suppress code analysis.   Starting a new project opens the doors for some great things. One of those things for me, was adherence to code analysis from the get-go. Visual Studio 2010 in particular has great Code Analysis Rule Set support allowing teams to carefully dictate which rules they wish to apply and suppress. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before the decision to use Entity Framework 4 put a nice little wrench in my code analysis plan. (As an aside, I will blog more about my decision to use...

A very welcomed addition to the all-too-common File In Use dialog when trying to delete a file that a process has locked. As you can see from the screenshot, the dialog in Windows 7 finally tells the user exactly which process is preventing the deletion. No longer do I need Process Monitor from SysInternals for such a simple need.   Technorati Tags: Windows7

Unable to update the EntitySet 'PlanPriceHistory' because it has a DefiningQuery and no <InsertFunction> element exists in the <ModificationFunctionMapping> element to support the current operation. While I was getting my feet wet in Entity Framework 4 (from the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 release), I generated my EDMX from an existing legacy database. All was going well – for a few days in fact, until I attempted to Insert an entity to a specific table (seen below). After some digging around in my model/EDMX configuration thinking something was wrong in there, I decided to open...

Unit testing a method that relies on DateTime.Now is generally a challenge. Take the below example, which was the first version of a method to get the Current Price of a Product. The business rule for GetCurrentPrice() is simple: find the most recent price where the effective date is not in the future. For this scenario, imagine the user sets the Price of a product to $25,000 but that price doesn't take effect until the next year. Until that time, we must make sure that the system returns the previous (existing) price. The poorly testable method public decimal GetCurrentPrice() { ...

Researching strategies for unit testing view model mappers… It never occurred to try google.com to find that information…

As is usually the case when I encounter a pain point while developing with Visual Studio, a quick google search reminds me that all along this problem has been solved for me. Today’s lesson is brought to you by the all-to-common namespace renaming. Earlier today I started cleaning up the file structure in the Solution Explorer, and up until now I would resort to a clumsy Solution Wide Find-Replace to fix up the namespaces after the files were moved into their more logical placement. However, I should have realized that ReSharper would have handled this for me – and...

This post was spawned as I was reviewing the latest Oxite source code on CodePlex. I’ve been reading any source code I could get my hands on lately looking for inspiration to cure my “winter coding boredom.” While it isn’t winter yet, it is fast approaching, which means less outdoors time and more computer time. I try to blog more, update my open source projects with a new release, and with any luck begin a new project worth getting passionate about. Today I'm going to hit the ground running with a short tip, again, on the yield keyword. The following code...

Today I began integration testing my SqlRepository while I experiment with an MVC prototype. I tried googling for a simple base class for integration testing a LINQ to SQL DataContext that would provide automatic rollback between each test, but after (minimal) searching, decided to simply write my own. Perhaps this will help someone. This base class was written for MS Test, but simply renaming the attributes accordingly would yield the same results on nUnit, xUnit, etc. The Code Simply inherit your test class from this base class and any changes done via the internal Context property will be...

This was one of the first extension methods I wrote when C# 3.0 arrived, since I just stumbled across it on an older project I figured I might as well post it, if for nothing else but future reference. One downside to be aware of if you choose to use this method, is that it will not project the results on a IQueryable provider like LINQ to SQL, so please be aware the conversion will be done on the client side. The Code public static class DelimitedStringExtensions { public static string DefaultDelimiter = ", "; ///...

LINQ and Expression Trees have enabled a ton of possibilities for us as developers, particularly in establishing some code-reducing convention based querying. I have found myself playing with Expressions in C# since their inception and will hopefully be publishing a few other posts I have queued up. For now, this post will simply demonstrate how to take advantage of a popular convention whereby each database table always has a single integer primary key named “Id” By taking advantage of this primary key convention I can save myself a ton of boilerplate code to query a table by ID. ...

Note: This article was written for ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 1 – it may become outdated in future previews. The Html helper in ASP.NET MVC 2 comes with some handy methods called “DisplayFor” and “EditFor” – please see Scott Gu’s article if you are not familiar with these new features. Long story short, they provide an ASP.NET Dynamic Data-like mechanism which uses reflection and templating to render a display form or an edit form. It works great for primitive properties like String, DataTime, Int32, as well as complex types like “Address.” However, as I was playing with them, I...

Well I am heading out to Myrtle Beach tonight at 4am, so I spent today finishing up some cleanup so I could release DoddleImport on CodePlex. It should be pretty feature complete and ready for use, and as always, please let me know if it helps you out! Objective Flexible importing of data via a fluid and fully extensible API to easily add support for new Import Sources and Import Destinations. I will update the documentation and provide some better examples when I get back. Here you can see a quick example of me importing some...

A project I am now working on is using the Web Client Software Factory (WCSF) from the patterns & practices team. It is basically an elaborate MVP-based framework that currently sits on top of ASP.NET Webforms. One of the components it ships with is the ObjectContainerDataSource which is a lot like the ObjectDataSource that ASP.NET provides. I admittedly have little experience with either of these controls, since I am not a huge fan of declarative data binding in larger applications. It does however offer better integration with the MVP pattern, simplifying the “bubbling” of DataSource events up to...

Update 2/10/2009: I have updated the helper code a little bit to include an ID parameter as well as to inject the jQuery treeview script code automatically. Please modify to your desire, or make sure to include the jQuery TreeView plugin script to your page before running. The following helper will make it easy to create a tree view from a recursive self-referencing table. Below you are seeing a tree of “Locations” where each Location can contain X number of child locations. Dependencies  jQuery TreeView Plugin Rendered Tree Table Definition The table itself is extremely simple, each Location has a ParentLocationId which is a relationship...

I encountered a rather frustrating problem with jQuery UI tabs this week. The problem occurs when trying to tabify some content after using jQuery’s $().load method to load the tabs HTML via an ajax request. The following code works perfectly in all browsers except IE6 and IE7 (It works fine in IE8 as well), as can be seen in the screenshot below. $('#deviceDetailsWrapper').load('/device/details/294', null, function() { $('#tabs').tabs(); }); However, here is what renders in IE6/7. For some reason, the jQuery tabs are triggering a GET request of the current URL and loading the content into the tab itself. Below you...

A couple months ago I wrote a basic set of extension methods to handle automatic auditing in LINQ to SQL. Well I have received a large number of emails regarding this particular project so I have decided to focus on cleaning up my v2 API and releasing it on CodePlex. There was a lot of room for improvement from version 1 and today I am going to post the all new LINQ Audit Trail code. This new version is significantly enhanced in the previous version. Objective Automatic auditing of all inserts/updates/deletes for any table in your database with...

This weekend I started playing with Automated Builds in TFS 2008. Over the next few weeks I am going to setup automated builds for my various projects so I can start running automated integration testing and automated staging releases at certain intervals (nightly, weekly, etc). Unfortunately I hit a snag when I tried building one of my solutions that contained a Web Application Project. After some digging around, I eventually opened up the “Release.txt” log file which can be found in the deployment directory, I found the following error: error MSB4019: The...