Microsoft

Videos and Interviews from MIX08

Matthew Podwysocki — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:21:46 GMT

Well, I've had the urge to find all the videos I could and watch them to find out all the goodies I missed while not at MIX08. If you missed any of the main sessions, you can find out more about them here. Note that there are 88 sessions recorded here, so it's a lot of good viewing material.

Best of all are Scott Hanselman's MVC Videos can be seen here. He also covers the MVC Mock Helpers which better allow for unit tests using various Mock frameworks including Rhino Mocks, TypeMock.NET and Moq.

Dave Laribee was great on Twitter to make sure we were all kept up to date with all the good things that were happening. Brendan Tompkins supplied Dave with a video phone so that he could capture impromptu videos and such. But, best of all they were broadcasted live. He was able to talk to guys like Rob Conery, Phil Haack, Steve Harman, Miguel, John Lam, Scott Hanselman and Josh Holmes. Very cool stuff! They were pretty good and entertaining, although the video wasn't always superb and sometimes you needed motion sickness pills. But, the sessions of note are:

More of them can be found here. And it's enough to make Phil think that he has enough of a fidgeting problem... Well, enjoy!

ASP.NET Team Releases for Mix 2008

Matthew Podwysocki — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:46:00 GMT

For all those interested in the information and the latest bits from the ASP.NET Team, here are the latest links.

Downloads:

ASP.NET Updates:

Jeffrey Palermo, the founder of MVCContrib and CodeCampServer has posted the changes from what he can gather here. As noted, you must uninstall the old bits first before installing the new ones.

I've been playing with the bits for a little bit lately and I must admit it's a lot better now. But, I'm noticing that it seems that the ASP.NET team wants us to use more of the Supervising Controller/Presenter Pattern and less of the Passive View Pattern. Brad Wilson also notes that here. It hasn't dampened my usage of it yet as I have adapted my designs since then. After all, you have to be a little flexible when using a CTP.

RockNUG Meeting - ASP.NET MVC + Updates

Matthew Podwysocki — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 23:54:37 GMT

Tonight, put on the DVR and come out to the Rockville .NET Users Group (RockNUG) for a presentation by Jeff Schoolcraft on ASP.NET MVC.

The timing of course couldn't be more appropriate as ScottGu has recently posted about the ASP.NET MVC Framework Update in which he talks about a few pain points I know I've been having as well as others such as:

Can be deployed in partial trust in the \bin directory
Improved routing features and infrastructure
Test wizard now supports and probably one of my favorite features
- MSTest
- NUnit
- MbUnit
- XUnit.NET
Removing ControllerAction Attribute requirement from controllers, instead all public members will be controller actions. Another nice thing to remove a pain point
Filter Support for Controllers and Action methods
HTML Helpers now built in
And so on...

The plan is to release a new preview at MIX08, so it should be pretty exciting to get the hands on the new bits.

Phil Haack has also covered this with his comments on ASP.NET MVC Update and Blocking Direct Access to Views in ASP.NET MVC.

Anyhow, back to the original intent of the post, the details are as follows:

An Introduction to ASP.NET MVC
presented by Jeff Schoolcraft

Come walk with me as I lead you on a gentle, relaxed tour of the ASP.NET MVC Framework. I'll demystify the forest of three letter acronyms. Then we'll take a journey through the hall of ancestors--and cousins--to discuss some influences and other players in the MVC space. We'll end up at the Grove of Hello World and, like habitat for softwarity, we'll build a demo application. Along the way we might run into some tangential trolls, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Jeff Schoolcraft is the founder of The Queue, Incorporated; a consulting shop that writes software and helps write software better. He has been in the .NET space from nearly the beginning and is still, mostly, writing web applications in C#. He tries to organize a couple Code Camps a year and is hoping to find a developer community that isn't over an hour away. When he's not immersed in code he enjoys spending time with his wife and two daughters.

Time:
Wednesday, February 13, 2007 6:30-9:00 PM

Location:
Montgomery College, Rockville
Humanities Building - Room 103
Rockville, MD
Click here for details....

Come and support the organization if you're in the area! Should be a great session!

Lang.NET and Rolling Your Own

Matthew Podwysocki — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:00:39 GMT

Last week, the 2008 Lang.NET symposium was held last week. If you're not familiar with what that is, it's a discussion about languages, compilers and libraries within the .NET space. It's been one of those things I'd love to attend just to understand where Miguel de Icaza, Anders Hejlsberg, Luke Hoban, Jim Hugunin and others are going with their related languages.

Lang.NET Stuff

I followed Ted Neward's recaps as they were going on as to understand what all we were missing. He was good enough to provide great writeups on the symposium and can be found here:

So, there was a pretty wide array of speakers there including Tomas Petricek and his project Phalanger. If you're unfamiliar with him, I've referenced him on several occasions when talking about F# as he's pretty deep into that as well. Anyhow, he has assumed control of Phalanger which compiles PHP to IL and has recently added on Silverlight functionality as well. What's really cool is that he's now working on Phalanger on the DLR. His recap of the even can be found here.

Ted Neward gave a presentation on Scala. I don't think he sounded too pleased as to the way it went with ribbing from Don Box among others. It'll be interesting to see how Scala progresses since it has been noted that Ruby is dead and Scala is in... Scala on .NET is something that I have yet to fully explore but it's on the latter half of this year I think. Right now it's a push on F# to get myself deep in that before anything else.

Anders gave a talk as well as others. It's going to be interesting to see the collision of functional programming into C#, taking ideas from F# and so on. It's already happening with lambdas and the System.Func delegate type.

F# was very well represented this year as Luke Hoban (F# Program Manager), Harry Pierson (Microsoft IT), and Tomas Petricek. Harry has a good recap of what he saw here. It's going to be interesting this year as F# becomes more of a first class player in the .NET space. I'm loving F# in what I'm doing right now and all interested should put it on their learning list.

John Lam has a pretty good writeup as well with regards to Lang.Net as a whole here. This time Ruby was well represented with Charlie Nutter, Wayne Kelly and John Lam. John has a pretty good recap and slides of his talk and that can be found here.

Roll Your Own?

So, why am I interested? Well, compilers and languages is something I definitely geek about. I've been looking at F# for creating my DSLs as well as looking at it to create compilers, both of which it can specialize quite nicely. Robert Pickering's book "Foundations of F#" can start you on your way to that.

With all this discussion about compilers, Joel Pobar published an article in the latest MSDN magazine called "Create a Language Compiler for the .NET Framework". This is a pretty good starting point for those unfamiliar with creating compilers and unfamiliar with the lovely thing that is System.Reflection.Emit and how much of a friend it is. I done a little bit of this years ago when I was creating a compiler for some DSLs that I created. I realized that it was more trouble than it was worth, but still a worthwhile exercise. But the point of the article is stating how easy it is to create or port a language to the .NET platform. A very good read and the source code is pretty solid too.

Until next time...

Continuous Integration: From Theory to Practice 2nd Edition Released

Matthew Podwysocki — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 05:55:35 GMT

Carel Lotz last year released a guide on Continuous Integration (CI) for .NET 2.0 last year and was made available for download via PDF for free. Carel took the series of posts on CI and rolled them into one guide.

The guide included CI with the following tools:

Flash forward to today. Carel spent the last two weeks and has updated the guide for Continuous Integration (CI) for .NET 3.5. Some of the improvements for Visual Studio 2008 include:

Update to Visual Studio 2008, MSBuild
Changed InstallShield to Windows Installer XML
Add support for MbUnit
Removed QuickTest Professional integration

You can find the downloads on the site for this. I'm going to give this a go in the next couple of days. I'm more familiar with CI Factory, which just had another release...

Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 & Windows Server 2008 Launch Event Coming to a City Near You!

Matthew Podwysocki — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 23:22:41 GMT

As noted today, you can now register for the Launch of Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008. You can find the closest event to you from here. For all you DC folks like me, our event is March 25th and you can find that registration information here.

Here is the basic information:

Take a test drive
Come to an event and test drive Windows Server® 2008 operating system, Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008, and Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008.

Meet the experts
Enjoy hands-on labs, face-to-face Q&A sessions with software experts, and other opportunities to interact with development team members.

Bring the products home
Want more? To say thanks for taking part of this exciting launch, you’ll take home a promotional kit with versions of all three products.

I was fortunate to be a part of the Washington DC Vista launch last year, help some of my DP&E give their presentations and even help with "Meet the Experts", so it's a great time. I was just tired by the end of the day directing people where to register and where lunch was. The lines were amazing and just outside in the freezing cold. A good time was had by all!

The Gizmodo Uncut Bill Gates Interview

Matthew Podwysocki — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 02:25:17 GMT

Gizmodo conducted a pretty good 20 minute interview with Bill Gates during CES which was pretty eye opening. You can view it here. Previously during the week it was shown in parts, so they have finally posted the complete part to Youtube.

He's pretty frank in the interview and I thought it was interesting to get his perspective now that his day to day duties are coming to an end.

C# - vNext

Matthew Podwysocki — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 02:20:01 GMT

I've been reading lately about what people are interested in with the next version of C#. It's amazing to think how far the language has come from the early days. Many of the newer features of the language with 3.0 by far have made it a better language.

So, what did we get with the latest C# 3.0?

Object Initializers
Automatic Properties
Anonymous Types
Extension Methods
Lambda Expressions
LINQ
Collection Initializers

By far, I agree with most of Jeremy Miller's sentiments regarding C# vNext, including:

Mixins
Ruby-like Symbols
Hash language features
Automatic Delegation

I'll throw Spec# features and Duck Typing onto the pile. As you may note from my earlier posts, parts already exist in .NET 3.5 libraries, so it's not hard to imagine that might open up a bit. Plus, since I've given several presentations on the matter, I'm pretty into it. But, also some of F#'s features are great as well that I'd like to see more merging includes mutables. A good introduction to F# can be found here. But, then again, why not just stick to F#?

What might in store for C# 4.0 anyhow? Well, if you follow Eric Lippert, one of Microsoft's best bloggers, like I do, there are some things that are very interesting that he's been working on including Covariance and Contravariance with his ten post series:

Each of these are worth a read:

Also, could immutability be another thing coming? If you're a follower of Domain Driven Design, you like Value Objects and Immutability. Spec# also introduces this concept to C# as well through the use of attributes. And since parts of Spec# covers this, it's also very likely. Anyhow, Eric Lippert also covers this in a "hypothetical way":

But, with all new features, there are diminishing returns as noted by Ian Cooper. I'd have to agree with this point. At some point, what are these new features going to give you when other languages can do these things more naturally? If, say C# doesn't have a certain feature, but IronRuby does, why not use IronRuby? Also, keeping on piling on features will ultimately make the language more complex and sifting through the various answers to find the right one becomes a bit harder.

I disagree with others like Jeremy that call for an end and stick a fork in C#. It's not done yet and I think it holds much more promise before we call it a day.

Extensions Methods for Good and Evil and Mixins

Matthew Podwysocki — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 23:54:36 GMT

Lately, I've been evaluation my use of extension methods. Extension methods have a good use, but that can quickly turn to overuse and confusion.

The Evil

When I start seeing these methods, I really start to wonder if it's really necessary. In fact, I run away screaming with my hands flailing above my head.

internal static class ExtensionMethods
{
     public string IsValidEmailAddress(this string email)
     {
          ...
     }

     public DateTime IsBefore(this DateTime date)
     {
          ...
     }
}

For readability sake, it's very tempting to make this for a string that happens to be an email address, but come on! There's a separation of concerns which quickly approaches this. Why not make a custom type instead of you're so worried about it being a valid email address.

To me, extension methods should be avoided where ever possible and treated as code smells when they are unavoidable. Extension methods are great in LINQ, so the smell is definitely tolerable, but I warn against the patchwork extension method frameworks. But, obviously there are some good uses to them.

The Good

That's on the abuse side, but there are some good examples out there as well.

For example, Greg Young discusses using Extension Methods in the context of using Fluent Fixtures which is a topic near and dear to my heart. This is just a simple example of what he goes over:

public class TransactionBuilder
{
     private string accountNumber;
     private double balance;

     public TransactionBuilder WithAccountNumber(string accountNumber) { ... }

     public TransactionBuilder Withdrew(double amount) { ... }

     public TransactionBuilder(string accountNumber, double balance) { ... }

     public static implicit operator Transaction(TransactionBuilder builder)
     {
          return new Transaction(accountNumber, balance);
     }
}

And then the extension method goodness comes into play:

public class Builder
{
}

public class Create
{
    public static Builder New = new Builder();
}

public static TransactionBuilder Transaction(this Builder s)
{
    return new TransactionBuilder();
}

So, now I can have a nice fluent statement such as:

Create.New.Transaction().WithAccount("12345").WIthdrew(57);

Now, that is cool! This allows you to create any number of things from the Create class without much effort whatsoever. This is perfect for the Fluent Fixtures scenario of building objects. Great stuff...

Other uses can be found here:

Mixins

But, what about mixins? Mixins are a wonderful feature of such dynamic languages such as Python, Scala and Ruby. Just a simple example of a Ruby mixin is below:

class FullName
attr_accessor :first, :middle, :last
def initialize(f, m, l)
    @first, @middle, @last = f, m, l
end

def <=>(other)
    [@first, @middle, @last] <=> [other.first, other.middle, other.last]
end

# The mixin to get < and <= as well
include Comparable
end

Can we extend C# 3.0 and beyond to give us the same kind of functionality? Bill Wagner included a sample on MSDN on how to do so. This could be a good approach for mocking purposes so that you don't have to rely on static helper classes such as System.IO.File, System.IO.Path and so on.

public interface IPath
{
     FilePath { get; }
}

And then create a mixin such as this:

public static class ExtensionMethods
{
     public static IsFile(this IPath path)
     {
          return File.Exists(path.FilePath);
     }
}

And then when you implement the IPath interface, you get the IsFile method for free...

Will we ever see more native approaches to this in C# 4.0?

Bill's last day at Microsoft

Matthew Podwysocki — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 01:37:17 GMT

From the CES Keynote... Quality is all I need to say!

Video: Bill Gates Last Day CES Clip