Excellent PSA that I found by way of The Consumerist. Original source.

ASP.NET MVC is all the rage right now in the .NET space. But did you know that MVC is a pattern that has been around for decades? And there are other communities of developers that have been using it to produce websites for years. Here are a set of videos from the Ruby on Rails community about the common pitfalls in MVC development.

• MVC Public Service Announcement #1 - Controller Obesity
• MVC Public Service Announcement #2 - The Importance of Tests
• MVC Public Service Announcement #3 - Keeping Views Stupid
• MVC Public Service Announcement #4 - Staying RESTful
• MVC Public Service Announcement #5 - Outdated HTML
• MVC Public Service Announcement #6 – Modularity
• MVC Public Service Announcements - Out-takes

This one is for all my contractor buddies out there.

Stolen from {CodeSqueeze}.

How did they go from version 1.0 of Entity Framework directly to 4.0?

Anyway, here is a nice overview of the new model first story that Microsoft has baked into the new EF in Visual Studio 2010.

After having watched this I have upgraded my impression of EF from “Complete Garbage” to “Not Entirely Horrifying”.

The RAD editor gives me pause as that is a sure sign of generating garbage behind the scenes. Is it human readable/modifiable?

The original EDMX format was incredibly brittle and very anti-source control system friendly. Have they made improvements to that?

I’ll have to play with it this weekend and see what it is like to actually build a simple app with it.

It is nice to see that MS is listening and at least attempting to play catch up with nHibernate. Would be interesting to do a feature by feature comparison between the two.

Saw this on Boing Boing today and can't agree more. I declare this my official stance on everything from today forward.

The Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you're done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the Internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

Blatantly stolen from this source. Bre Pettis & Kio Stark are obviously geniuses.

I sometimes suffer from deer in the head lights syndrome. Before doing anything, I psych myself out thinking  "all the things that need to get done", all the things "I don't know" and "how will I make it perfect" thoughts. I read constantly about a topic but I never do...

The only way I can get myself out of that mode is to simply throw myself at the task/idea and start doing. Fail over and over, learning from each experience until one day I can look back and say, "Hey I actually do that pretty well now."

My hard drives at work, home and in my laptop are littered with useless half projects where I was attempting to get an idea or approach thought though. Travel down one path, fail, done. Travel down another path, fail, done.

Failing is how we learn. You never fail if you don't start. Stop reading this. Get excited and make things. Done, done done.

Here is the gist of what I was trying to accomplish. Please excuse the VB.. it's not by choice. 8)

Basically the page I was working on has a set of switch statements based on string literals which annoys me.. So I was messing around with a way to use Enumerations to represent my commands. But the commands come back as strings from the various page controls.. So I was looking at a way to generically re-map back to the command Enumeration.

Private Function GetCommand(Of T)(ByVal commandName As String) As T
  Return CType([Enum].Parse(GetType(T), commandName), T)
End Function

Protected Enum GridCommand
  CompetencySelect
  FormSelect
  Sort
End Enum

Public Overrides Sub Grid_Commands(ByVal source As Object, _
                                     ByVal e As DataGridCommandEventArgs) _
                                     Handles CompetencyData.ItemCommand, FormData.ItemCommand
  If Page_Save() Then

    Select Case GetCommand(Of GridCommand)(e.CommandName)

      Case GridCommand.CompetencySelect
        NavigateToCompetencySelection( _
         CInt(CompetencyData.DataKeys(e.Item.ItemIndex)), _
         CompetencyData.ID)

      Case GridCommand.FormSelect
        NavigateToFormSelection( _
         CInt(FormData.DataKeys(e.Item.ItemIndex)), _
         FormData.ID)

    End Select
  End If

End Sub

So I have been living with my Mac Book Pro for a couple months now. I have purposely tried to use OSX for day to day things to force myself to get used to the OS. Here is a nice list of the applications that I have found useful so far.

This list is in no way targeted at long time Mac fans. Instead it is intended for newb/converts like me who are getting used to a whole new environment of software.

Quick Silver – Awesome tool for launching applications or finding documents. Simply hit Ctrl+Space and start typing what it is you want.. QuickSilver will display a list of items that match what you are typing. Once you have typed a set of letters and selected something QuickSilver will learn what you wanted and begin suggesting that thing faster… for example I can type Ctrl-Space, VM, Enter and launch VM Ware…. It’s a cool app.

Adium – Multi-Service messaging client very similar to Pigden. Can connect to MSN, ICQ, AOL, Facebook, GTalk, MySpace and many others.

Colloquy – Pretty straight forward IRC client if you are into that sort of thing.

Remote Desktop Mac – This combined with with VPN connection to work is awesome. There is pretty much nothing I can't do now with my Mac and a network connection.

Twitterrific – Simple twitter client if you are into that sort of thing.

MonoDevelop – Mono is the open source implementation of the .NET framework. MonoDevelop a IDE for developing using Mono. If you ever wondered what it would be like without Visual Studio here you go.

Skype – Skype…

VMWare Fusion – Virtual Machine goodness…

XCode – The free IDE for developing on the Mac. Want to make a IPhone app? Here you go. Objective C is fun… really it is…

Bonus Tips: Be sure to enable Spaces via the Expose & Spaces menu. This lets you have the sliding desktop effect that I use all the time. A neat keyboard combo is Function+F8, this displays all your spaces on the screen and you can click one to go to that space. Expose is Function+F8 this will shrink all the windows on your screen and lay them out so that you can see them all. Then click the window you want and they all go back where they were with the one you selected in focus.

Bonus Bonus Tip: The World of Warcraft Mac client runs like a champ on my MBP. ;)
 

Discovered these little gem during the Christmas Potluck today.

And part 2..

UPDATE: Wanted to update this item to give credit to Shane Frost for creating these movies. Shane is no longer with Alliance, but after having watched these movies I would welcome him back any time. Hope things are working out well for you at the state Shane.

 public class ClassMapTester
    {
        protected XmlElement currentElement;
        protected XmlDocument document;
        protected XmlNamespaceManager mgr;


        public ClassMapTester ForString(string input)
        {
            document = new XmlDocument();
            document.LoadXml(input);
            return For(document);
        }

        public ClassMapTester For(XmlDocument doc)
        {
            document = doc;
            SetNameSpaceManager();
            return this;
        }

        public ClassMapTester For() where A : ClassMap, new()
        {
            For(new A().CreateMapping(new MappingVisitor()));
            return this;
        }

        private void SetNameSpaceManager()
        {
            mgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(new NameTable());
            mgr.AddNamespace("urn", "urn:nhibernate-mapping-2.2");
        }

        //....
     }

[Test]
public void LanguageMap_Creates_Valid_Mapping()
{
    new ClassMapTester().For()
        .TestDefaultConventions()
        .TestProperty("LanguageName", "8", "true").Exists()
        .TestProperty("LanguageDisplayName", "50", "true").Exists();
}

using System;
using System.Reflection;

namespace AllianceEnterprises.TestTools
{
  public static class ReflectionHelper
  {
    public static void SetPrivateField(object item, string fieldName, object value)
    {
      item.GetType()
        .GetField(fieldName, BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance)
        .SetValue(item, value);
    }

    public static void SetStaticField(string fieldName, object value)
    {
      typeof (T).GetField(fieldName, BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Static)
        .SetValue(null, value);
    }
  }
}

Well, I finally did it. I went over to the darkside and picked up a 15" MacBook Pro and a copy of VMWare Fusion. I got the box home and had a Bootcamp partition with Windows 2008 Workstation installed within an hour. Install Visual Studio 2008 and I was ready to do some development in one Space while working on Keynote presentations in another.

My journey though Mac software beings. I sit here now typing this up in a very nice blog post editor called Ecto. It's all good.

Look for more post as I explore the developer tools on the Mac.

I have been getting hounded by our webmaster to supply a bio for our company bio page. Here is my first stab at it:

Bobby Johnson is a Senior Development Specialist and joined Alliance Enterprises in September 2008. Bobby is an Agile fanatic, Domain Driven Design enthusiast and Unit Testing maven who is not afraid to run with scissors. Bobby attended Southwest Missouri State University prior to bailing out to seek fame and fortune. He previously could not be contained by the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries or the Red Wind Casino.

I'll update when when the actual bio goes up.

UPDATE: Here is what actually hit the page:

Bobby Johnson is a Senior Development Specialist.  He joined Alliance Enterprises in September 2008. Bobby is involved with the implementation of the agile approach to development and also developing Unit Testing for the AWARE system.  Prior to joining Alliance, Bobby worked at the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries as a  Development Specialist.

I'll be leaving my current place of employment this coming Friday. In an effort to not lose any of the awesome tools and resources I have found while working here, I am going to document them in a blog post.

If you don't know why, you are dead to me. I couldn't get a fanboy picture of myself with John Lam, but this totally made up for it.

Michael Feathers, the amazing author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code, posted recently about technical debt.

What happens to code when you don’t refactor?  Anyone with any experience knows the answer.  It gets messy.  It becomes hard to change and the rate at which you can add features slows to a crawl.

I was on a project that inherited a tremendous amount of technical debt. The motivating force for the original team was meeting a hard deadline. As the deadline approached development process crumbled. Hero developers shot from the hip. Corners were cut. Non-critical bugs piled up. Quality was sacrificed to meet the deadline.

The technical debt was put on the American Express.

At the end of the project, the resulting application had a week long eventful launch full of rapid critical bug fix releases. The application was eventually brought up to an acceptable level of performance through Herculean effort of very skilled and talented people.

The technical debt bill was left ignored.

The following project cycle a new team was introduced to the application. A feature set to be added was defined. A deadline was set. A new requirement was added. All new features would have a emphasis on quality. No defects would be added to the already limping system.

The technical debt went into Universal Default and the APR was bumped up to 29%.

The team began moving forward except this time the business actively using the system kept running into critical issues that the team had to quickly deal with. The short cuts taken by the previous team became direct roadblocks to the new features slowing the implementation down. Each new line of code had to make sacrifices to work around quirks in the code base.

The 800 pound technical debt collection gorilla started calling demanding payment.

After a year of use the sheer size of the technical debt in the database caused leaks to spring which cascaded outward through out the application. New releases were viewed with dread by the entire organization. The DBA's were not happy. The help desk was not happy. The users were not happy. Morale on the project was through the floor.

The 800 pound technical debt collection gorilla had frozen all assets and put a lean on the house.

You can put that debt on the card. You can ignore it and buy some time. But eventually that gorilla is going to find you, climb on your back and beat you down.

Photo Credit:  Ruben Bos

Over the course of the last couple months I have been working diligently to migrate the application I inherited from the wild wild west of unmanaged corner cutting contractor land to the happy kingdom of semi-intelligent source control.

I have successfully migrated what we have come to know as "what we think production is built with" source in to Team Foundation Server source control, cleaning up along the way. Why exactly this particular batch of contractors felt it was necessary to include references to both the 2.0 and 3.0 Enterprise Application Blocks, I may never know. I suspect they felt it was 2x more "Enterprise-y".

Next up on my path to Agile Nirvana, I whipped up a set of build scripts that produce a consistent build every time. Imagine that! My server support people are so happy with me.

The system I am working on is somewhat interesting. The application went live last summer and was officially handed over to a group of maintenance developers. A new project was immediately started to add new functionality while the maintenance guys fixed up bugs. I currently work with the New Development group.

The maintenance guys decided they wanted in on all this awesome TFS goodness. So I spun them off a branch and let them go on their merry way. That was until they decided they were ready to start rolling forward into production.

That is when I realized that all of my build scripts no longer worked. I would fire up a build using Team Builds in Team Explorer, it would do it's thing pulling down source code and firing off MSBuild to compile and then throw errors.

I checked on the build server in the location where source is downloaded and Team Build was no longer pulling down the source for my Main branch. The only thing be retrieved from Source Control was my Branches directory. Obviously the dirty maintenance branch hosed by lovely build process.

I checked my build definitions and mapping files. My source tree looks something like this:

$/PROJECT
..Branches
    ..2.0.1.0-APPLICATION-branch
..Main
   ..Framework
   ..APPLICATION
   ..Samples
   ..Utilites
..TeamBuildTypes
The 2.0.1.0 node is a branch of $/PROJECT/Main/APPLICATION. My workspace mapping pretty much looks like so:

<InternalMapping ServerItem="$/APPLICATION" LocalItem="flibbityjibits" Type="Map" />

I have a few cloaked paths as well all related to $/PROJECT/Main/Something. When I execute my Team Builds Branches and TeamBuildTypes are retrieved from source control and Main is ignored.

My buildlog shows that CoreGet is retrieving the latest:

Get Version="T" Recursive=True Force=True Workspace="NinjaWarrior"

There was something I was missing here. I shot off an email to the Seattle ALT.NET mailing list, more in a effort to articulate the issue well than expecting them to solve my issues or anything. Kinda just getting it all out as I understand the issue for the eventual call to tech support.

I went home that night utterly devastated that my painstakingly lovingly crafted system had failed so spectacularly.

At home I was playing some Lego Indy with the wife on the Xbox and letting the subconscious work on it. And finally the light bulb went off.

I have other branches in the Branches folder that caused no problem when they were created. I thought to myself, "Self, it's not the branch that did it.. It must be something that you did at the same time you created the branch."

My assumption about the branch breaking my build came directly from my Jump To Conclusions Mat.
I created this branch for an external group who is adding functionality. In an effort to keep my main pristine, I locked it down so that only members of the group "Tech Leads" could check in to Main.

This had to be the cause.. when I realized it last night I almost went back in to work... but come on its Lego Indy!

So I get to work this morning and checked the membership of "Tech Members" and surprise, surprise... TFSService is a member... The build service uses this account to access TFS...

So I quickly added it to the leads group and verified that my builds worked again and went to repair the dent I put in the wall from beating my head against it.

So Lessons Learned here:
1. Respect the build user, he can make you a very sad panda.
2. I've automated the build, its time to get a nightly build going so these changes are fresh in my mind when stuff breaks.
3. While I am at it might as well look into setting up CI to the Dev environment with the nightly.
4. Indy really can accomplish anything.

So in the end, I created my own problem. Thanks to all the ALT.NET mailing list readers for silently laughing at me while I verbalized (textualized?) the issue on the mailing list and worked through it.

I'll be here all week.

The closer your documentation gets to a static Microsoft Word Document, the farther away from current it becomes.

I recently laid my hands on a copy of DevExpress' Code Rush and Refactor! Pro. They have a section on their site that allows you to watch training videos about these products. I wanted to watch them all but at my own pace and on my main TV in the living room.

Using  my new toys I whipped up the following code to download all of the movies from their site. Now I just need to convert them to AVI so I can watch them on the Xbox.

Code included just because I want to:

using System;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Xml;
using System.Net;

namespace SnagDevExMovies
{
    class Program
    {
        private static WebClient client = new WebClient();
        private static Uri site = 
                new Uri(@"http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/IDETools/CodeRush/Training.xml");
        private static UriBuilder siteResource = new UriBuilder(site);
        
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {

           string content = getContent(site);
           MatchCollection URLs = getMatches(content, 
                new Regex(@"bWatchExpanded.*LessonNewWindow\('(?<URL>.*)'\)"));
           processMatches(URLs);
        }

        private static void processResource(Uri uri)
        {
            Debug.Assert(uri != null, "uri is null.");
            Debug.WriteLine(String.Format("Processing: {0}", uri));

            string content = getContent(uri);

            MatchCollection URLs = getMatches(content, new Regex(@"(?<URL>\w*\.swf)"));

            if (URLs.Count > 0)
            {
                siteResource.Path = getResourcePath(siteResource.Uri) 
                        + URLs[0].Groups["URL"].Value;
                downloadFile(siteResource.Uri);
            }
        }

        private static MatchCollection getMatches(string content, Regex expression)
        {
            Debug.Assert(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(content), "content is null or empty.");
            Debug.Assert(expression != null, "expression is null.");

            MatchCollection matches = expression.Matches(content);
            Debug.WriteLine(String.Format("{0} matches found.", matches.Count));
            return matches;
        }

        private static void processMatches(MatchCollection relativePaths)
        {
            Debug.Assert(relativePaths != null, "relativePaths is null.");

            foreach (Match item in relativePaths)
            {
                siteResource.Path = item.Groups["URL"].Value;
                processResource(siteResource.Uri);
            }
        }

        private static void downloadFile(Uri uri)
        {
            Debug.Assert(uri != null, "uri is null.");

            Debug.WriteLine(String.Format("Downloading: {0}", uri.ToString()));
            try
            {
                client.DownloadFile(uri, getFileName(uri));
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                Debug.WriteLine(ex.Message);
            }

        }

        private static string getResourcePath(Uri uri)
        {
            Debug.Assert(uri != null, "uri is null.");

            string resourcePath = uri.AbsolutePath.Substring(0,
                                uri.AbsolutePath.LastIndexOf("/") + 1);
            return resourcePath;
        }

        private static string getFileName(Uri uri)
        {
            Debug.Assert(uri != null, "uri is null.");

            return uri.Segments[uri.Segments.Length - 1];
        }

        private static string getContent(Uri uri)
        {
            Debug.Assert(uri != null, "uri is null.");

            string content = client.DownloadString(uri);
            return content;
        }
       
    }
}

I recieved a fully licensed copy of Office Ultimate 2007 (Retail $454.99) last night at the Olympia Code Trip event. I would like to trade it straight across for a copy of Code Rush (Retail $249.99).

If you are interested please, feel free to contact me.

UPDATE: Trade made to Dylan in Issaquah. Thanks Dylan.