Development

I had a great chance to write some kick ass Silverlight code last week as a proof of concept for a potential new business venture the company I work at is thinking about, and hopefully in 6 months to a year I will be able to talk about it. The final solution won’t be Silverlight based but for the POC it provided the delivery method, functionality and UI that gets the message across.

Part of that POC was to be able to have a local XML file (local as on the server) loaded when the application was open and parsed. So the only way to do that is to use the WebClient class and call the DownloadStringAsync method with the URI to the XML file and then parse that in an XDocument. Not rocket science at all, but when I tried it I kept getting a message “An exception of type ‘System.NotSupportedException’ occurred in System.Windows.dll but was not handled in user code Additional Information: Specified method not supported.”

No matter what I tried I could not get it to work :( Eventually I figured out that it only was occurring when debugging/running from within Visual Studio. Publishing it to an actual web server and running it as a user would worked perfectly. This is a big issue for me, since it makes ad-hoc testing and debugging very difficult. Thankfully for me it was just a POC, but this could be a big pain for serious projects.

Well there is a solution for that now besides going to the web site and downloading them, it’s called Live! Yip, Microsoft’s hosted solutions, have the solution in two forms. Firstly there is a file listing page http://live.sysinternals.com which just lists all the files so in one click you can get the tool you need, but even better, it’s also published as a file share! So if you open \\Live.sysinternals.com\tools you can actually browse a file share for the tool you need.

• ASP.NET MVC: This model view controller (MVC) framework for ASP.NET provides a structured model that enables a clear separation of concerns within web applications, and makes it easier to unit test your code and support a TDD workflow. It also helps provide more control over the URLs you publish in your applications, and more control over the HTML that is emitted from them.
• ASP.NET Silverlight Support: With the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions release we'll deliver support for easily integrating Silverlight within your ASP.NET applications.  Included will be new controls that make it easy to integrate Silverlight video/media and interactive content within your sites.
• ADO.NET Data Service (codename "Astoria"): In parallel with the ASP.NET Extensions release we will also be releasing the ADO.NET Entity Framework.  This provides a modeling framework that enables developers to define a conceptual model of a database schema that closely aligns to a real world view of the information.  We will also be shipping a new set of data services (codename "Astoria") that make it easy to expose REST based API endpoints from within your ASP.NET applications.

• http://dotnetwithme.blogspot.com/2007/05/what-new-in-net-35.html
• http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332048(VS.90).aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2007/07/27/what-s-new-in-wpf-3-5-here-s-fifteen-cool-features.aspx

Being a Dot Net developer means that those giants include the Microsoft patterns and practices team. Well what do they do?

We talk with a large number of Microsoft customers, partners, and consultants to understand the commonly occurring scenarios and the technical challenges associated with them. Then we discover and harvest the solution patterns and engineering practices (including anti-patterns) that have proved successful in addressing these scenarios.
Once we understand the scenarios and technical challenges, we work with product and technology teams across Microsoft, industry experts, and with customers and partners, to build guidance that reflects both the current, practical state of the technology and that is also aligned with future Microsoft technology plans. Often, the underlying scenarios and solutions guidance ends up influencing future Microsoft product direction.
Most of our projects are conducted in CodePlex communities. This allows continuous input from the development community at large and keeps us honest. We call this approach, “customer connected engineering” and it ensures that what we deliver actually meets the needs of our customers. We also ship the source code to nearly everything we deliver, usually along with a license agreement that encourages source level adoption and customization.
From http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-za/practices/bb969103(en-us).aspx

That's great for marketing but for developers it means that they produce tools, frameworks and documentation (guides, proven practices etc...). My personal favorite from them is a set of components called the Enterprise Library which provides amazing code for logging (log4net eat your heart out), database access, exception handling, cache handling, cryptography, policy management (ala AD policies in your app) and validation. It really is amazing stuff. Two nice examples are the database application block, you can connect to a database, run a query and get the result in result set and close the database all following best practices with a tool to change the connection string (cause it's not hard coded so your users may need it) all in 2 lines of code! The validation block provides attributes to decorate your classes with to enforce validation with no additional code. You can get all of that from http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480453.aspx and much more from http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-za/practices/bb969097(en-us).aspx.

The site is: http://www.codeplex.com/reflectoraddins

Some of the nice ones there:

• Code Metrics
• Code Review Tools
• Dumping of source code to file
• Silverlight support
• SQL 2005 (for CLR integration) support
• Unit and mock testing
• BizTalk Support
• A few diagram and charting tools
• Powershell support (as a language)

There are a lot of other nice ones but those are really great.