.net

STSDEV: Simple Tools for SharePoint 2007 Development, With different project name support

Madhawa Karunaratne — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 05:09:17 GMT

STSDEV is a simple tool for SharePoint developers. It helps you to create SharePoint projects (with solutions precisely) and deploy templates and components into the SharePoint 2007 platform.

http://www.codeplex.com/stsdev

This tool creates project and solution in same name and in the same folder. We all know we never put the solution and project files in the same folder and never use same name for the solution and the project. Unfortunately we didn’t find a way of changing those and use the tool after since it gives errors. I found a very easy way of tweaking that from changing small line in the source code or changing a line in the generated .target file.

And furthermore I have changed the tool to support for supplying a different project name when creating a solution and now we are using it in our SharePoint project.

BTW I'll explain how to tweak the tool to use separate source folder for project by a small change in the source code in next post. Until then play with the tool and have some fun.

If you want that version of the tool with source code please email me.

Effective Error handling in SQL Server 2005

Madhawa Karunaratne — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 07:05:47 GMT

One of the main things you should consider if you believe in good coding is error or exception handling. When it come to programming languages, now all popular object oriented languages have try, catch method to handle an exception.

We can put our code (which might gives errors or exceptions) inside the try block and error handling code in the catch block. This has become the de-facto of error or exception handling now.
But when it comes to T-SQL we hadn’t got that luxury. Error handling in T-SQL was always tedious and tricky job. Most of the time we used not to handle the error at the T-SQL level but handling it in the upper most level. (data access layer or business layer, handling database errors in business layer is a totally wrong practice)

But now in SQL 2005, 2008 you have proper error handling mechanism just like in modern OO languages. You can use try catch in the stored procedures and functions. Actually I knew that I can use try catch in stored procedures but only today I got to know about a more interesting method we can use.

After catching an error what we can to do was a question for me. If it’s in C# or Java we can log the error and may be throw a customized exception to the next layer. (There are so many options in handling errors)
Can you remember throw exception in C#? Of cause you know it. :) Well… we can do the same in T-SQL using RAISERROR function.

Using the RAISERROR is as follows,

BEGIN TRY
    -- RAISERROR with severity 11-19 will cause execution to
    -- jump to the CATCH block.
    RAISERROR ('Error raised in TRY block.', -- Message text.
               16, -- Severity.
               1 -- State.
               );
END TRY
BEGIN CATCH
    DECLARE @ErrorMessage NVARCHAR(4000);
    DECLARE @ErrorSeverity INT;
    DECLARE @ErrorState INT;

    SELECT
        @ErrorMessage = ERROR_MESSAGE(),
        @ErrorSeverity = ERROR_SEVERITY(),
        @ErrorState = ERROR_STATE();

    -- Use RAISERROR inside the CATCH block to return error
    -- information about the original error that caused
    -- execution to jump to the CATCH block.
    RAISERROR (@ErrorMessage, -- Message text.
               @ErrorSeverity, -- Severity.
               @ErrorState -- State.
               );
END CATCH;

Pretty good ha…
You can follow up this more in MSDN.

Is .net answer for GWT more powerful?

Madhawa Karunaratne — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 01:18:37 GMT

Visual WebGui is the .net answer for GWT (Google Web Toolkit). But it’s seems more powerful than GWT even though it’s not coming from Microsoft and yet it’s open source. Still I hadn’t got time to put my hands on deeply but you can feel it by just browsing their web site and checking the features and comparing those with GWT.
Not like GWT, in Visual WebGui you can use existing windows controls to create your UI. Major advantage of Visual WebGui over GWT is we can deploy Visual WebGui applications as web applications or desktop applications. That’s a huge step taken by Visual WebGui. And most importantly Visual WebGui is open source.

And with world best IDE (Visual Studio 2005) you have the ultimate power of designing your graphical user interfaces. Just check these features out by visiting Visual WebGui.

User-Friendly – Visual WebGui was designed to be the next VB6 for the web. Simple to program, simple to deploy. With a full WinForms API and design time support you can start developing complex AJAX applications in seconds with no web know-how.

Secured – Visual WebGui was designed to provide for military grade secured AJAX applications by eliminating client side service consumption and business logic processing using an empty client concept. The browser is used as a looking glass to the server that runs the application.

Productive – With full WinForms API and design time support, Visual WebGui is almost as productive as R.A.D. platforms without limiting your options. Debug your application the same way you would debug any .NET application free of script debugging nightmares.

Powerful – Visual WebGui was designed to support enterprise class applications with unlimited complexity supported by full object oriented programming. Using our unique AJAX transport, Visual WebGui applications consume 1% of bandwidth compared to any alternative AJAX framework.

Feature-Rich – Visual WebGui contains most of WinForm's components including non trivial implementations of controls such as the PropertyGrid that provides a simple way to edit live objects.

Supported - Visual WebGui is supported by its Core Team of developers and a dedicated international community. Through online forums and our support@visualwebgui.com mail box support is always close at hand (commercial support will be available soon).

Easily Installed – Visual WebGui comes with a simple installation that will get you started on developing your AJAX application in no time. Visual WebGui's toolbox and templates are integrated into Visual Studio so they are always available.

Localized – Visual WebGui includes full .NET and WinForms multi-language localization support which allows you to localize your application in the designer the same way you localize a WinForms application.

Open Source – Visual WebGui SDK is provided free, as open-source software, and licensed under a standard LGPL agreement. It allows individuals to do whatever they wish with the application framework, both commercially and non-commercially.

Cutting-Edge – Visual WebGui provides the developer with full object oriented .NET support allowing utilization of all the .NET capabilities including reflection, generics and more. This is enabled by a unique architecture that provides an alternative HTTP processing pipeline that does not include serializing JavaScript.

Extensible – Visual WebGui is provided with many customization and extensibility features including custom control creation, theme creation and gateways.

Interopable – As an extension to ASP.NET, Visual WebGui can also interact with standard ASP.NET pages hosting them within your Visual WebGui application or calling Visual WebGui dialogs and forms from your ASP.NET code.

Visual WebGui's roadmap includes…

Mono deployment - Allowing your Visual WebGui application to run on non Microsoft servers (Visual WebGui for .NET 1.1 is already compatible with mono).

Legacy to web – Migrating WinForms or VB6 applications to web with out rewriting your application.

Dual mode deployment – Deploy your Visual WebGui application as a desktop application or a web application enjoying the best of both worlds.

Titan-IOC : A lightweight, flexible, general purpose inversion-of-control container for .NET applications

Madhawa Karunaratne — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 16:36:41 GMT

Well guys... If you have read my previous blog post about Guice and you are using only .net technologies you might got little bit worried of that why you can’t use such a nice framework. Don’t worry, there is a project going on at Google called Titan that inspired by Guice. It’s still in the beta stage though. It’s a pre-release version and they don’t recommend it using in mission critical applications.

Titan is a new take on inversion of control for .NET 2.0 applications, inspired largely by Bob Lee and Kevin Bourrillion's Guice. Ultra-lightweight, easy to use, fast, flexible, and powerful, Titan aims to make inversion of control accessible to all types of .NET projects, regardless of complexity.

Goals of Titan:

1. Ultra-lightweight. We aim to keep all baseline functionality in a single assembly with no non-standard dependencies, and keep that assembly's footprint around 100KB when compiled for release. (The current version weighs in at 96KB.)

2. Easy to use. Too many of the existing IoC projects sacrifice usability for features that aren't often used. Each time a feature is added to Titan, its benefit is weighed against the complexity it adds. Our goal is to keep the 'barrier to entry' -- the baseline level of knowledge required to use Titan -- as low as possible. Titan has many advanced features, but understanding them is not required to use the toolkit.

3. Fast. Instead of relying on reflection for invocation, Titan takes advantage of the lightweight code generation features in version 2.0 of the CLR. This results in a dramatic (8-50x) improvement in speed.

4. Flexible and extensible. Titan is designed with customization and evolution in mind. Many facets of the system can be augmented or modified to fit the requirements of each project.

5. Powerful. Titan includes many advanced features. For example, most existing IoC frameworks use key-based binding to select concrete components for injection. Titan introduces the concept of contextual binding, in which a different concrete implementation of a service may be injected depending on the context in which it is requested.

http://code.google.com/p/titan-ioc/

Audio talk show in .net Rocks with Mark Pollack on Spring.Net

Madhawa Karunaratne — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 16:44:49 GMT

There is a good audio talk show in .net Rocks with Mark Pollack who founded Spring.Net. Particularly this show would be more useful if you are not aware of the potential of Spring.Net.

BTW Spring.Net has announced the release of Spring.NET 1.1 M1 (Milestone 1).
New features and improvements in the release are below.

    * NUnit Integration: Aids in writing integration tests. Configuration of test cases via dependency injection and automatic transaction rollback
    * NHibernate 1.0/1.2 Integration: Simplify use of NHibernate and participation in Spring's declarative management
    * ASP.NET AJAX Integration: Export 'plain .NET objects' as web service, configure and apply aspects to them, and then expose inside client side Javascript.
    * Transaction and AOP XML namespaces to simplify configuration.
    * AOP support for methods with out/ref parameters.
    * Sample NHibernate application.
    * Numerous bug fixes and improvements.

Easy way to create a temp SSL for your local web server for testing your web application

Madhawa Karunaratne — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 05:08:00 GMT

It’s seems to me that lot of developers still don’t know there is a very easy way to create a temp SSL for your local server for testing your web application.

You don’t have to obtain a trial SSL’s from third party venders or installing and using certificate service.

All you have to do is just use selfssl.exe which coming with IIS6 resource kit . Even though that resource kit is for IIS6 you can use it (selfssl.exe) with XP (IIS 5.1). I think it’s also compatible with Win2k also (IIS 5.0).

BTW Today I found this simple tutorial which describes nicely how to install IIS6 Resource kit and use selfssl.exe.

http://www.visualwin.com/SelfSSL/

How to get XML view of a typed DataSet in Visual Studio 2005?

Madhawa Karunaratne — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 06:27:00 GMT

If you are coming from vs2k3 background you might know how easy to get the XML view of a Typed DataSet. But unfortunately in vs2k5 they have removed that convenient XML view tab.

So how we gonna see the xml of the typed dataset. One of my friends asked me today and my instance answer was use other editor to get that facility. But after doing some research I found that we can get into xml view by right clicking the XSD file in the solution explorer and picking “open with”. Not only the xml view but you can choose some other views from couple other options.

Can you model Aggregations in Class Designer?

Madhawa Karunaratne — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 06:12:00 GMT

Can you model Aggregations in Class Designer? No, you can't.

The problem is that Aggregations and Compositions cannot be distinguished from regular associations in code because the .NET languages (apart from Visual C++ perhaps) do not distinguish members held "by reference" (regular association) from those held "by value" (aggregation or composition).

Even if you could model aggregation in Class Designer, the information would be lost when you re-visualized the code, for example by dragging the classes onto another class diagram.

This is where the VS2005 Class Designer differs from UML class designers. The VS2005 is a 100% visualization of the code, with no translation. In UML tools you have to "code generate" and "reverse engineer" between the code and a model that holds additional metadata (such as whether a particular association is an aggregation)...

Reverse WinFX Petition

Madhawa Karunaratne — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 09:44:00 GMT

Seems like more people are concerning on the WinFX renaming to .NET 3.0. There is a petition in the web written by Rei Miyasaka.

WinFX was renamed to .NET 3.0. This decision was made without any community feedback, which is uncharacteristic of Microsoft's recent openness to community input.

Not only is .NET 3.0 a misnomer, it throws a wrench in the .NET Framework, likely jamming future versions. It is also a severe inconvenience to developers, especially newcomers.

We ask that this short-sighted decision be turned around before the first release of the framework for its own sake as well as the sake of developers…

If you are agree with this you can sign for "Reverse WinFX Petition".

Is it .NET Framework 3.0 or 2.1?

Madhawa Karunaratne — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 05:49:00 GMT

We all know that .NET 3.0 is coming. But majority of the community are still catching things in 2.0. But don’t worry; there is no framework change in 3.0 from 2.0 but some additional features (libraries) ships with. So how come it’s a main version change ha? I think Microsoft had to make it 2.1 or sth but not going for 3.0.

Actually I’m not the only one thinks like that. Check this out and let me know what do you think.