Microsoft P&P Software Factories

Posted on June 5, 2007 by chrismay

I didn’t notice that the Microsoft P&P team has released something they call “Software Factories” which are supposed to guide the developer in building different apps using best practices (at least that is what I think they do from the descriptions).

Specifically I am interested in the Web Client Software Factory:

… provides an integrated set of guidance that assists architects and developers in creating composite Web applications and page flow client applications.

These applications have one or more of the following characteristics:

They have complex page flows and workflows.
They are developed by multiple collaborating development teams.
They are composite applications that present information from multiple sources through an integrated user interface.
They support XCopy deployment of independently developed modules.
They support online business transaction processing Web sites.

and the Web Service Software Factory, which as they put it is:

… an integrated collection of tools, patterns, source code and prescriptive guidance. It is designed to help you quickly and consistently construct Web services that adhere to well known architecture and design patterns.

The package covers:

Designing ASMX and WCF messages and service interfaces.

Applying exception shielding and exception handling.

Designing business entities in the domain model.

Translating messages to and from business entities.

Designing, building, and invoking the data access layer.

Validating the conformance of service implementation, configuration, and security using code analysis.

Planning for the migration to WCF.

Applying security to WCF services.

Applying message validation.

Nice NUnitASP writeup.

Posted on June 3, 2007 by chrismay

Over at TheServerSide they had a nice writeup of an example of how to use NUnitASP to test the UI of some pages.

I am not sure how valuable this would be to invest my time in, espically as it seems that there is now way to test repeaters or gridviews (there is a datagridtester however).

I will have to look some more and see if ther eis a way to do this.

Refactor! for ASP.NET

Posted on June 1, 2007 by chrismay

This looks really cool.

You can download it here for free.

Included Refactorings

Add Validator	Create Overload	Encapsulate Field
Extract ContentPlaceHolder	Extract ContentPlaceHolder (create master page)	Extract Method
Extract Property	Extract Style (Class)	Extract Style (id)
Extract to User Control	Flatten Conditional	Inline Temp
Introduce Constant	Introduce Local	Introduce Local (replace all)
Move Declaration Near Reference	Move Initialization to Declaration	Move Style Attributes to CSS
Move to Code-behind	Rename	Reorder Parameters
Replace Temp with Query	Reverse Conditional	Safe Rename
Simplify Expression	Split Initialization from Declaration	Split Temporary Variable
Surround with Update Panel

UPDATE: It seems that installing this may have removed some of the features of the old Refactor! that I was frequently using (?). I used to use the “Surround With–>Region” all the time. Now that is gone. I will have to investigate.

Asp.net Label vs Literal

Posted on May 28, 2007 by chrismay

It looks like I have fallen victim to an asp.net no-no.

I have always used a label in my forms when I want to have some text that is updated by the code behind. Turns out that I should probably be using literals.

Even more, I didn’t even realize that the label object allows you to specify a text element that will gain focus when the label is clicked. Nice.

Rhino Mocks

Posted on May 28, 2007 by chrismay

Rhino Mocks seems to be one of the most preferred mock frameworks out there.

Phil Haack, CodeBetter and Markitup have article showing how to test events on interfaces (x2) and objects in Rhino Mocks respectively.

They even have some videos up showing some Rhino Mocks stuff.

Haack also has a nice example of using MVP and Rhino Mocks to test some asp.net pages.

Drill Through Reports using Report Viewer and ASP.NET 2.0

Posted on May 11, 2007 by chrismay

Here is an interesting article on codeproject about creating “drill through” reports.

ASP.NET AJAX Errors

Posted on April 26, 2007 by chrismay

I have been getting a few errors when trying to use the asp.net ajax framework.

The one error message is:

Error: Sys.ArgumentTypeException: Object of type ‘Sys_Application’ cannot be converted to type ‘Sys._Application’/

Parameter name: instance

This is caused by having SmartNavigation turned on for the page.

The other error I was getting was this Sys.ArgumentOutOfRangeException. Value must be an integer. Parameter name: X. Actual value was NaN.

This error is caused by using a “yes” or “no” for “frameborder” for a frame.

Yes and No are valid entries but the framework is expecting a “1” or a “0”.

ASP.NET Upload Component

Posted on April 23, 2007 by chrismay

I think I saw this ABCUpload .Net tool being used by microsoft on one of their internal support sites for uploading large files.

I don’t think it actually gets around the httprequest length and executiontimeout problems, but it does provide you a window showing your progress, which is nice.

ASP.NET Process Recycling Too Often

Posted on April 11, 2007 by chrismay

I’m not going to write too much about this, but we have been seeing a LOT of recycles of our web application, which makes us lose session for everyone logged it.

I am just going to archive a few links I have been using to track down this problem.

ScottGu has some reflection code to get the reason the process is shutting down that I converted to vb.net

Scott Gu’s Article

And here are some places discussing the issue:

asp.net thread

Todd Carter’s Blog Article

Scott Forsyth’s Blog Article