Fixing MVC Sitemap Errors
When attempting to manually test a .NET MVC application, I got the following exception from Visual Studio:
Looking at the inner exception revealed this message:
An item with the same key has already been added.The sitemap file for our application is pretty long (over 1300 lines of XML), but a co-worker pointed me to the potential culprit right away. There was a sitemap node near the end of the file that had empty strings for its controller and action attributes. As far as I can tell, this generates the default url for the site's home page. Since it already exists, this results in the exception that's thrown. Removing the sitemap node resolved our issue. A couple of threads that I checked on stackoverflow (here and here) provide other possible causes for the error.
Identifying All Bad Mappings with AutoMapper
One of the long-running annoyances we’ve had with our test of AutoMapper configuration validity on my current project is that a test failure only revealed the first mapping that was wrong. I haven’t figured out why this is the case, but I’ve come up with a work-around that displays all the necessary information.
Because the exception thrown if one or more incorrect mappings is found is AutoMapperConfigurationException, my revised test catches that exception in order to print the source type, destination type, and the list of unmapped property names. Re-throwing the exception at the end ensures that the test still reports a failure. The XUnit test which demonstrates this is available as a GitHub gist. If you’re using NUnit or MSTest in your application, minor revisions to this test will give you the same results.
Ours At Last
After about two weeks of homelessness (a.k.a. living in my wife’s condo and hotels), we finally completed the settlement process on our shiny new townhouse around 3 pm this afternoon. Less than two hours later, we’d spent some of the profit left over from the sale of my old townhouse on new furniture for the main level. Between working full-time, preparing a house to sell, and buying a new one, the past four months have been incredibly busy. It still won’t be slowing down anytime soon. Tomorrow is move-in day, since PODS is coming to pick up their storage unit at noon. There’s still Verizon FIOS to install, furniture deliveries to accept, more furniture and electronics to buy (not to mention a new washer and dryer). I’ll be glad when we’re finally settled in so we can invite some friends to hang out.
Our new neighborhood is still in the process of being built, but what we’ve seen so far of where we’ll be living looks great. I’m looking forward to getting to know our new neighbors.
Fastest Realtor in the East?
I didn’t think a house could be sold in just 4 days, but I was wrong. We got a list price, all-cash offer on the house yesterday. Many thanks to our realtor and friend Karane Campbell. I couldn’t recommend her more highly. She priced the place perfectly and worked hard on the three interested parties to get us the best price.
First-Time Home Seller
Since my wife and I are buying a new place together, I’m selling the townhouse we currently live in. If you’re looking to move into Montgomery County, Maryland you won’t find a better value.
The $285,900 list price gets you a 3-level interior unit townhouse with 2300 square feet of living space; 4 bedrooms, 3 1/2 baths, 2 fireplaces, and a fully-finished walkout basement. The $125 monthly homeowners' association dues cover your water bill, assigned parking space, trash, recycling, maintenance of community common areas and snow removal. Whether you work in DC, Maryland or northern Virginia, this location puts them well within reach. Metro’s Red Line is a 10-minute walk from the front door. The Beltway and Route 29 are just minutes away by car. I’ve had career opportunities in each of these areas over my 14 years here and having these transit options made it a lot easier than it might have been otherwise.
When it comes to shopping, dining, or entertainment, this area is hard to beat. Wheaton Plaza is just around the corner. The area’s newest Costco store will soon be open there. There are multiple CVS pharmacies, a Target and a Giant Food store. A brand-new Safeway is also scheduled to open within a year. There a few good Thai and Vietnamese restaurants within a short drive or a walk. Everything that downtown Silver Spring has to offer is a short drive (or two Metro stops) away.
If you’re into exercise, this area has you covered there too. LA Fitness has a facility in the Wheaton Plaza complex. The paved trails of the Sligo Creek Parkway are not far away either if you run or cycle.
Contact our realtor, Karane Campbell at (240) 393-8906 if you’re interested in finding out more.
MLS# MC7968156
How to Be Black
I finished reading this provocatively-titled book a couple of days ago. I expected Baratunde Thurston’s memoir to have its funny moments (he worked for The Onion until recently) and it did. I was not expecting the deep insights about black identity I found throughout the book. I also wasn’t expecting to see as much of myself in the author (beyond the unpleasant childhood experiences I had as a result of not fitting the stereotypes of what black kids are supposed to do and be). It was a pleasant surprise to discover that Thurston and I have Washington Post internships in common (as does my friend Sandro, one of the handful of other black computer scientists I know).
I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that Thurston’s interest in technology was inspired (at least in part) by his mother, who made a living writing COBOL for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. One of the other technologists that blogs whom I admire greatly, raganwald, was inspired into his career by his mother as well.
If you enjoy stories about people destroying stereotypes in general (or stereotypes of black people in particular), How to Be Black is well worth reading.
Visual Studio & TFS Behavior Tweaks
One of a few long-running annoyances I’ve had with every version of TFS is one of the default behaviors on check-in. The default is to resolve an open item on check-in, which is virtually never the case the first (or second, or third, etc) time you check in code to resolve a bug or implement new functionality. Fortunately, Edsquared has the solution.
After making this long-overdue change in my development environment, I exported the keys for VS2010 and VS2012 as registration entry files below:
Feel free to use them in your environment.
Freedom From Default Color Themes in Visual Studio 2012
I finally joined the ranks of those who’ve installed Visual Studio 2012 this week. The default Light color scheme is way too bright. The Dark color scheme is better, but the grays aren’t differentiated enough (just like the Microsoft Blend UI). Thankfully, some wonderful soul compiled this blog post, which details the changes necessary to save your eyes from the horrible default themes.
Following steps 1 and 2 will be enough, but you can go even further if you want the Visual Studio 2010 icons back in addition to the color scheme.
Tim Cook Should Ignore Ars Technica (Almost) Completely
I came across this article by Jacqui Cheng and thought I’d add my two cents on each of the suggestions.
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License OS X. Despite the article’s protestations that licensing doesn’t have to be the disaster it was for them in the 90s, this suggestion misses the mark because it misunderstands what kind of company Apple–a hardware company. Licensing OS X would only send hardware revenue to a company (or companies) other than Apple. There’s no compelling reason for them to give away that money. Licensing the OS won’t get them additional users, or revenue, or get them into some new market they might want to enter. This is by far the worst idea on the list.
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Bring some manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. It’s a nice idea in theory, but in reality, there’s no compelling reason for them to do this. Why should they voluntarily raise their costs and reduce their profit margins? Apple is hardly the only company doing business with Foxconn. Dell, H-P, Cisco, Intel and Cisco are also major customers.
8. Invest in an independent research lab. This has been said better by others, but Apple’s success is due in large part to its narrow focus. People and capital used for such a lab wouldn’t be available to help with the things that Apple is great at. There are other ways that Apple can contribute to the public good without directing a ton of money toward basic research. In my view, the federal government is the right entity to be doing that (but that’s a whole other discussion).
7. More transparency on OS X and Mac plans. Like suggestion 10, the primary focus of this suggestion seems to be on Mac Pro users. It’s true that the Mac Pro hasn’t gotten much attention from Apple over the past couple of years. Perhaps the biggest reason is that it doesn’t account for much of their revenue anymore. The one point I would extrapolate from their suggestion that I would agree with is that Apple can definitely improve in how they treat developers for their platforms. I’ve spent my career writing desktop and web applications on and for various versions of Windows, and Microsoft seems much more “pro-developer” (more information about development tools, free copies of software, training events, etc). I wouldn’t expect Apple to try and become just like Microsoft in this regard (nor should they), but there are definitely some lessons Apple could learn.
6. Make the Apple TV more than a hobby. This is the first suggestion in the list that I like. I like the Apple TV enough that I own one for each TV in my house and have started buying them as gifts for family.
- Offer streaming, subscription music. I’m not sure what I think of this suggestion. I avoided subscription music services in favor of buying music for years because I preferred the idea of owning it and being able to listen to it on whatever device I wanted. I like the experience I’ve had with Spotify so far, but I don’t know if I listen to enough music to justify the monthly cost. I’m not sure what Apple could bring to the space that would be better. Whether they do anything with streaming or not, what Apple really needs to do is re-think iTunes. As Apple has offered more and more content, iTunes has become more of a sprawling mess.
4. Inject some steroids into the Mac line. I disagree with this suggestion completely. Apple got it right with their focus on battery life and enough speed. In mobile phones and tablets, seemingly every manufacturer using Android as the OS focused on metrics like processor speed, camera megapixels, and features like full multi-tasking. The result: devices that had to be recharged multiple times over the course of a day. By contrast, the iPhone is plenty fast, but I can go a full day without having to recharge it. Multiple days can go by before I need to recharge the iPad. Apple has correctly avoided competing on specific measures like processor speed and how many megapixels their cameras have. They’re competing (and winning) on the experience of using their products.
3. Diversify the iOS product line. If the rumors are correct, Apple will be offering a smaller version of the iPad soon. The next iPhone will probably have a larger screen as well. But beyond those changes, I don’t think Apple should be in any hurry to diversify in the way Ars Technica suggests. By limiting the differentiation of their iOS-based products to storage size (and cost), Apple has chosen a metric that is both meaningful and easy for the typical consumer to understand. This makes Apple products easier to buy than the alternatives.
- Make a larger commitment to OS security. I agree with this suggestion as well. Apple’s success in the market has made them big enough for virus/malware makers to spend time targeting.
1. Cater to power users again. I see this suggestion as a variation on the them of suggestion 7. I’m sure Apple could do something like this in a way that wouldn’t disrupt their current approach. Whether or not it would net them enough additional customers and revenue to be worthwhile is another discussion.
Help Build a Tesla Museum
One of my favorite cartoonists, Matthew Inman, is using his unique brand of humor to help raise funds to buy the site of Nikola Tesla’s old lab. As of this post, he’s raised nearly $970,000. I don’t contribute to a lot of causes beyond my church and public radio, but I contributed to this project because the U.S. could use a museum about a great scientist a lot more than another mall. If you agree, I hope you’ll donate as well.
Introducing AutoPoco
I first learned about AutoPoco from this blog post by Scott Hanselman. But it wasn’t until earlier this spring that I had an opportunity to use it. I’d started a new job at the end of March, and in the process of getting familiar with the code base on my first project, I came across the code they used to generate test data. I used AutoPoco to generate a much larger set of realistic-looking test data than was previously available.
Last week, I gave a presentation to my local .NET user group (RockNUG) on the framework. The slide deck I put together is available here, and there’s some demo code here. The rest of this blog post will speak to the following question (or a rather rough paraphrase of it) that came up during a demo: is it possible to generate instances of a class with an attribute that has a wide range of values, save one?
The demo that prompted this question is in the AddressTest.cs class in the demo code I linked to earlier. In that class, the second test (Generate100InstanceOfAddressWithImpose) gives 50 of the 100 addresses a zip code of 20905 and a state of Maryland. The possible objective of the question could be to generate a set of data with every state except one.
After taking a closer look at the documentation, and a review of the AutoPoco source code for generating random states, I came up with an answer. The Generate1000InstancesOfAddressWithNoneInMaryland test not only excludes Maryland from the state property, it uses abbreviations instead of the full state name. The implementation of CustomUsStatesSource.Next adds a couple of loops (one if abbreviations are used, one if not) that keep generating random indexes if the resulting state is contained in the list of states to exclude.
The ability to pass parameters to custom datasources in order to control what type of test data is generated is an incredibly useful feature. In the work I did on my project’s test generator, I used the capability in order to create a base datasource that generated numeric strings with the length controlled by parameters. This allow me to implement new datasources for custom ids in the application by inheriting from the base and specifying those parameters in the constructor.
Because AutoPoco is open source, if your project has specific needs, you can simply fork it and customize as you wish. Another value-add of a framework like this could be realized if you write multiple applications that share data. In such a scenario, test data becomes a corporate resource, with different sets generated and made available according to the scenarios being tested.
Another advantage of AutoPoco for test generation is that its use of plain old CLR objects keeps it independent of specific database technologies. I’m currently using AutoPoco with RavenDB; it will work just as well with the database technology (or ORM) of your choosing–Entity Framework, NHibernate, SQL Server, Oracle, etc.
AutoPoco is available via NuGet, so it’s very easy to add to whatever test assemblies you’ve currently got in your solutions. As long as you have public, no-arg constructors for the CLR objects (since AutoPoco uses reflection to work), you can generate large volumes of realistic-looking test data in virtually no time.
The Perils of Renaming in TFS
Apparently, renaming an assembly is a bad idea when TFS is your version control system.
Earlier this week, one of my co-workers renamed an assembly to consolidate some functionality in our application yesterday, and even though TFS said the changes were checked in, they weren’t.
I got the latest code the morning after the change, and got nothing but build failures. We’re using the latest version of TFS and it’s very frustrating that something like this still doesn’t work properly.
Ultimately, the solution was found at the bottom of this thread.
The only way I’ve found to avoid this kind of hassle is to create a new assembly, copy your code from the old assembly to the new one, change any references to the old assembly to use the new assembly, then delete the old assembly once you’ve verified the new one is working.
Please Learn to Code (Continued)
A couple days ago, I wrote a post on why Coding Horror is wrong to suggest people shouldn’t learn to code.
Here’s a much better post on the same subject by Jon Galloway (hat tip Scott Hanselman, and his e-mail Newsletter of Wonderful Things).
Please Learn to Code
I came across this post from Jeff Atwood in my Twitter feed this morning. It even sparked a conversation (as much of one as you can have 140 characters at a time) between me and my old co-worker Jon who agreed with Jeff Atwood in far blunter terms: “we need to cleanse the dev pool, not expand and muddy the water”.
While I understand Jon’s sentiment, “cleansing” vs. “expanding” just isn’t going to happen. Computer science as an academic discipline didn’t even exist until the 1950s, so it’s a very long way from having the sort of regulations and licensure of a field like engineering (a term that dates back to the 14th century). Combine that with the decreasing number of computer science graduates our colleges and universities graduate each year (much less the elimination of a computer science department), and it’s no surprise that people without formal education in computer science are getting paid to develop software.
While it does sound crazy that Mayor Bloomberg made learning to code his 2012 new year’s resolution, I’m glad someone as high-profile as the mayor of New York is talking about programming. When I was deciding what to study in college (way back in 1992), computer science as a discipline didn’t have a very high profile. While I knew programming was how video-games and other software was made, I had to find out about computer science from Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
Jeff’s “please don’t learn to code” is counterproductive–the exact opposite of what we should be saying. Given a choice between having more people going into investment banking and more people going into software development, I suspect a large majority of us would favor the latter.
I also don’t believe that the objective of learning to code has to be making a living as a software developer in order to be useful. The folks at Software Carpentry are teaching programming to scientists to help them in their research. People who test software should know enough about programming to at least automate the repetitive tasks. If you use a computer with any regularity at all, even a little bit of programming knowledge will enable you to extend the capabilities of the software you use.
We need only look at some of the laws that exist in this country to see the results of a lack of understanding of programming by our judges and legislators. I think that lack of understanding led to software patents (and a ton of time wasted in court instead of spent innovating). The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are other examples of dangerous laws proposed by legislators that don’t have even the most basic understanding of programming.
As someone who writes software for a living, I prefer customers who understand at least a bit about programming to those who don’t, because that makes it easier to talk about requirements (and get them right). They tend to understand the capabilities of off-the-shelf software a bit better and understand the tradeoffs between it and a custom system. In my career, there have been any number of times where an understanding of programming has helped me find an existing framework or solution that met most of a customer’s requirements, so I and my team were able to focus our work just on what was missing.
Thanks Again StackOverflow!
About a month ago, I wrote a brief post about starting a new job. In it, I tipped my hat to StackOverflow Careers, for connecting me with my new employer. Yesterday, I received a package from FedEx. I was puzzled, since I didn’t recall ordering anything recently. But upon opening it, I discovered a nice StackOverflow-branded portfolio, pen and card with The Joel Test on it. In the pocket was a version of my profile printed on high-quality paper.
I appreciate the gesture, and thank StackOverflow Careers and the StackExchange team not only for the portfolio (which I’ve already replaced my previous portfolio with), or for creating a great site for connecting developers with employers that value developers, but for the whole collection of Q & A sites that make software development (and many other fields of endeavor) easier to learn.
From Web Forms to MVC
In the weeks since my last post, I’ve been thrown into the deep end of the pool learning ASP.NET MVC 3 and a number of other associated technologies for a healthcare information management application currently scheduled to deploy this July. Having developed web applications using webforms since 2003, I’ve found it to be a pretty significant mental shift in a number of ways.
No Controls
There are none of the controls I’ve become accustomed to using over the years. So in addition to learning the ins-and-outs of MVC 3, I’ve been learning some jQuery as well.
No ViewState
Because there’s no viewstate in MVC, any information you need in more than one view should be available either in the url’s query string, the viewmodel, or be retrievable via some mechanism in your view’s controller. In the application I’m working on, we use Agatha.
More “Pages”
Each CRUD operation gets its own view (and its own viewmodel, depending on the circumstance). This actively encourages separation of concerns in a way that webforms definitely does not.
A Controller is a Lot Like Code-Behind
I’ve been reading Dino Esposito’s book on MVC 3, and he suggests thinking of controllers this way fairly early in the book. I’ve found that advice helpful in a couple of ways:
- This makes it quicker to understand where to put some of the code that does the key work of the application.
- It's a warning that you can put far too much logic in your controllers the same way it was possible to put far too much into your code-behind.
More to Come
This barely scratches the surface of my experience with MVC so far. None of the views I’ve implemented has been been complex enough yet to benefit from the use of Knockout JS, but future assignments will almost certainly change this. We’re also using AutoMapper to ease data transfer between our domain objects and DTOs. In addition to using StructureMap for dependency injection, we’re using PostSharp to deal with some cross-cutting concerns. Finally, we’re using RavenDB for persistence, so doing things the object database way instead of using SQL Server has required some fundamental changes as well.
New Gig
Tomorrow will be my first day with FEi Systems. They design, build and maintain healthcare IT systems, including health information exchanges and electronic health record (EHR) systems. I’ll be helping their efforts in those areas as a senior developer. I’m looking forward to being back in the healthcare sector (I worked for another healthcare IT company earlier in my career). I think it can benefit a great deal from the deployment and usage of well-designed IT systems.
I wouldn’t have been aware of this company, or this opportunity without Stack Overflow Careers. I was a beta tester on the original site (Stack Overflow), and since it launched it’s been a big help to me in solving a number challenging technical problems on a variety of projects. Both the career site and Q&A site are worth your while if you write code for a living.
Retraction
Just came across this story relating to my January 25th blog post on Mike Daisey’s story of his visits to factories in Shenzhen. As it turns out they were indeed stories–large portions of his monologue have been revealed as complete fabrications.
This American Life has fully retracted the story, so I thought I would do the same since I linked to it when it first aired.
Inserting stored procedure results into a table
Working with one of my colleagues earlier today, we found that we needed a way to store the results of a stored procedure execution in a table. He found this helpful blog post that shows exactly how.
One thing we found that the original blog post didn’t mention is that this approach works with table variables as well. A revised example that uses a table variable is available as a gist on GitHub.
Saving Changes is Not Permitted (SQL Server 2008 R2)
We just upgraded our development VMs at work, and I got bitten by one of the more annoying default settings in SQL Server Management Studio again. I imported some data for use in some queries and needed to change one of the column types. But when I tried to save the change, I got the dreaded “Saving changes is not permitted.” error.
Fortunately, this blog post directed me to the setting I needed to change in order for SSMS to do what I wanted.