The Mehn Point -aka- Paul Mehner's Blog

2005-06-05T18:26:00.000-07:00

INETA User Group Leaders Summit (Tech Ed 6/5/2005): Ari Bixhorn the Microsoft Directory of Webservices Strategy gave us a presentation this morning on Indigo. Indigo is the communications backbone of Windows Longhorn. It is Ari's vision that webservices will be as exciting as TCP a few years from now, meaning that we use TCP for everything, but we don't have to give much thought to sockets and network stacks when we write software. Webservices (and more specifically, Indigo) will make writing SOA and peer-to-peer systems much easier and promisses to make the adotpion of webservices that we have seen so far look like but a drop of water in the ocean. Indeed, I believe that he is correct in his assertion.

Indigo promisses to bring web services, queueing and transactional support together into one unified programming model. While we wait for Indigo to ship (with Windows Longhorn in 2006), we will have to settle for Web Services Enhancements WSE 3.0 which will ship shortly. Yes, yes... I know... you and I just finished installing WSE 2.0! All the same, WSE still remains the best way to secure your webservices today and to keep our software up to date with WS-* standards.

2005-05-12T08:51:00.000-07:00

May 12, 7:00-9:00 PM / Jason Mauer / Language Enhancements in .NET 2.0 / Olympia Center In this presentation we’ll be walking through new features of C# and VB in the .NET Framework 2.0. This is specifically about syntax; whiz-bang IDE features will be kept to a minimum. Come learn about the new abilities you’ll be able to take advantage of in the next release of .NET.

A free copy of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 DVD Kit will be given away to all in attendance (includes VS2005 Team Suite Beta 2, Team Foundation Server Beta 2, and the April CTP of SQL Server 2005) plus some additional goodies.

May 24, 1-3:15 PM / Jeffrey Richter At IPMA Forum / St. Martin’s College, LaceyDon't miss Jeffrey Richter's presentation at IPMA Forum on May 24 from 1:00 to 3:15! Jeffrey Richter is the author of Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming (ISBN: 0-7356-1422-9). His knowledge of the Microsoft .NET Framework is unparalleled in the world. We are extremely fortunate to have him visit our community. Please show your support for the South Sound .NET User Group by attending his presentation!

Win a Pass To Devscovery in Redmond
Wintellect (one of the South Sound .NET User Group Sponsors) will be giving a way one free three-day pass to the Redmond Devscovery event (valued at $900). Hear with the hugest names in software development: Software Legend Jeffrey Richter, Bug Slayer John Robbins, ASP.NET Guru Jeff Prosise, SQL Expert Peter DeBetta. Details on how to win the contest will be available at the Wintellect booth.

Are You A Blogger? Will You Be At IPMA Forum?
Send me an email (paul.mehner@ssdotnet.org) to be included in the “IPMA bloggers” website that I have set up at http://ipmabloggers.blogspot.com/. Visit the site frequently during the forum as many of us will be blogging away to keep you up to date on what’s happening.

South Sound .NET User Group Sponsors @ IPMA Forum
Milestone Technology, Wintellect, and Soundex co-sponsor the South Sound .NET User Group. Be sure to visit the Milestone and Wintellect booths and thank them for the support that they give to developers in our community!

2005-04-15T00:07:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of having a bite with my friend Jeffrey Richter today who posed for this cell phone picture with his tasty treat in the LNI Cafe. Jeffrey seemed genuinely skeptical of my view that there were many people out there interested in reading about his daily adventures. I assured him that we are all quite interested in such excitement as he had with Jeff Prosise in London and that we would all read his blog religiously if he should ever be convinced to take it up!

2005-03-20T09:29:00.000-08:00

What a fun thing this was to uncover: if the name of your project name exceeds 62 characters in length ASP.NET will give you a Configuration Error when you attempt to run the project from Visual Studio or navigate directly via a web browser. ASP.NET takes you on a not-so-friendly snipe hunt with information about the "given assembly name or codebase was invalid" and will highlight a line in in the compilation section of machine config <add assembly="*"/> After chasing this configuration error for awhile, I began to notice an apparent pattern. I zeroed in on the length theory and was able to reliably replicate the behavior for both web services and web sites running on Windows XP Professional. I also investigated the pathname to the project to be certain that it was not a pathname limit. Irrespective of the pathname length to the project a 62 character project name succeeds and a 63 character project name fails at runtime (Visual Studio will create and load the project at 63 characters and greater, but asp.net won't run them).

2005-03-04T22:39:00.000-08:00

I'll be teaching the CIS 216 ASP.NET Class at Pierce College (in Fort Steilacoom) . Classes start March 28 and are held in the evening from 5:30 to 7:40. I'll be teaching from Wintellect legend Jeff Prosise's Programming Microsoft .NET Book.

2005-02-27T09:02:00.000-08:00

Some very interesting anomalies can occur when you copy a project file on the filesystem to make another project that you intend to use in the same solution. Visual Studio creates a Project Guid which can be seen in the .vbproj or .csproj file that uniquely identifies a project. When you make references to other projects in the same solution, Visual Studio stores this unique project guid as the location to find the assembly. This can leave the developer scratching his or her head when the assembly that is being referenced is from a different project that the developer selected. To avoid this difficult to locate problem when copying project folders on the filesystem, it is important to generate a new guid and modify the project's .xxproj file accordingly before referencing the project in a solution.

2005-02-20T09:09:00.000-08:00

An absolutely chilling present-day motorcycle ride through the Chernobyl area: http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html It's a bit off topic for a .net blog, but worthy of a visit. Be sure to look at the chapters beyond chapter 1.

2005-02-17T22:10:00.000-08:00

The South Sound .NET User Group has a new sponsor: Wintellect!

While testing out their link from our site I happened to follow the link from the Wintellect website the .NET Rock Stars interview with the Wintellectuals. You can read it too at http://www.devsource.com/article2/0,1759,1751989,00.asp. I found this quote by Jeffrey Richter to ring oh so true:

"I see developers spending way too much time and effort writing error handling code. They are not using exception handling correctly in their code, and they are making life so difficult for themselves. It is typical to see a gazillion catch blocks in code that are swallowing exceptions hiding real errors in the code so that developers don't know when errors arise. This is also popular within Microsoft's own code, unfortunately. People really need to get Zen with exception/error handling more. "

2005-02-07T01:41:00.000-08:00

Catch Brian Randell (a.k.a "rat bastard") giving a one hour video presentation from the Orlando VSLive conference on many of the new features and tools found in Visual Studio Team System:
http://www.ftponline.com/vsm/2004_en/magazine/online/randell/

2005-02-01T22:56:00.000-08:00

Back in October we had Tim Shakarian speak to us on the Microsoft Enterprise Library. It was just recently published at:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=0325b97a-9534-4349-8038-d56b38ec394c&displaylang=en

2005-01-31T23:35:00.000-08:00

The Ellison Loop home saga continues... the seller's agent said that all the work on the home had all been completed so I went out to inspect. 9 out of 10 things were either not done or were done half-assed!

During our first inspection of the home we found a significant water stain in the front entry window. We were told by the seller's agent that the owners said that the stain was from a previous cleaning of the windows and that there were no current leaks. During our next inspection the stain was completely gone, but during our inspection today the stain was back in the exact same position!

I certainly hope that whoever ultimately purchases this house will do dilegence on things before buying. I feel foolish for pursuing this as far as I have; however, there is so very little available in water front homes right now and after shelling out the big bucks to sell my current home for waterfront, I feel financially and mentally comitted to making it a reality.

2005-01-29T08:52:00.000-08:00

I keep thinking that I will get back to blogging sometime soon. All of my time has been spent lately on home selling and now home buying (or lack there of). I almost purchased a home recently only to find things out on the inspection that were quite disturbing and had to back out. Ironically the MLS form 17 stated that there was nothing ever wrong with the home while the current owners posessed it... nada... nothing... zilch! So now we are back looking again for a home. Please feel free to drop me an email or follow-up on this post if you happen to be looking at a waterfront home on Ellison Loop in Olympia, WA. and I'll share with you my stories of 50-Amp breakers on 100-Amp circuits with 12-2 wire stretched over mains, carpenter ant corpses, unfastened sink faucets, improperly secured deck posts, and a host of others.

2004-12-29T21:13:00.000-08:00

I haven't blogged since October! Jumpin' Javascript, Batman! Where did all the time go!?

2004-10-30T09:13:00.000-07:00

Notes On Close, Dispose and Setting To Nothing

The DataSet, DataTable, DataRow and DataColumn are all managed code and the GC will take care of disposing the columns and tables contained therein when the DataSet is collected.

SqlDataReaders, SqlConnections, FileStream objects, and the like all require Disposal because they perform many of their operations in unmanaged code (code that is not under the control of the Common Language Runtime) and/or they operate on scarce resources such as database connections or files which require immediate release after their use.

The old practice of setting an object to Nothing in VB6 to cause the COM reference counter to be decremented by 1 has no synonymous purpose in .NET. The only purpose for setting a reference variable to Nothing is to cause it to no longer point to wherever it was pointing before. In most circumstances the Close method releases the unmanaged resource that an object is using. Dispose closes *and* finalizes the object. In many circumstances this distinction is not important, and the two methods can be used interchangeably. Be sure to read the documentation on the object in question though.

Here are a few suggestions regarding object garbage disposal:

A) Forget about setting objects to Nothing to force garbage collection. It doesn't do that!

B) Let managed code take care of its own clean up -- the garbage collector knows exactly what to do with managed objects, and it is VERY efficient at it.

C) Dispose of local scoped objects sporting a Dispose method in the finally section of a try/finally block.

D) Never call Close or Dispose outside of the finally section of a try/finally block (unless you're writing prototype code -- or just enjoy being sloppy). Code in a Finally block is guaranteed to be executed during exception processing. If an exception is thrown before your Close or Dispose statement can been executed, then the resource in question will likely not be reclaimed until the application has terminated.

E) Dispose of class member scoped IDisposable objects by implementing the IDisposable code pattern on the class hosting the IDisposable member.

F) It is safe to assume that if you Dispose of an IDisposable object such as a SqlConnection that the object will clean up any subordinate IDisposable objects that it may have created without any further action on your part.

G) Never add a finalizer to a managed code object. It will REALLY slow your object's garbage collection down instead of speeding things up. Google for information on the "freachable" queue to learn more.

H) If you are using COM Interop, then you will likely need to learn about the FCL System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.ReleaseComObject method.

I) Prove all of this to yourself rather than taking my word on it. Write a simple console application and place Console.Writeline statements in your object finalizers. Experiment with setting objects to Nothing and with implementing the IDisposable code pattern.

2004-10-07T23:20:00.000-07:00

A Tale of Two Cases
Case matters… now more than ever.

Microsoft .NET is a case sensitive platform. You can try to briefly escape case sensitivity if you believe it beneficial by using the case-insensitive Visual Basic language but you’d better keep your guard up while you are slinging that rapidly developed pile of code cause I’m here to tell ya’… case matters.

Of course some of us believe that RAD is really an acronym for Really Awful Design (assuming any design at all), but individuals are allowed to have their fantasies and thus VB.NET makes up for its warts with the popularity of its own illusions of giving us something for nothing.

Write a shared library in VB without your enterprise settling on any preferred casing convention and you are in for some interesting surprises. If you follow the Microsoft naming conventions two character acronyms are uppercased while three character acronyms are Pascal cased. Two character abbreviations are Pascal cased unless the product is more easily recognized by an alternative casing style. Your team interprets this to mean that “Wa” should be proper casing for your Washington State shared library component. Unbeknownst to you a team in another part of the building has just written 10,000 lines of code that they are ready to ship to production. All this code uses “WA” in the namespace.

Management strongly advocates use of your shared library for all projects, but when other projects sharing a different namespace casing reference your assembly strange and awful things start to happen. Although happy-go-lucky VB thinks that WA and Wa are the same thing, the Common Language Runtime knows better and treats them as unique namespaces. Keeping VB “simple enough for Mort” is the motto so two namespaces with different casing is not something that we need to deal with. Rather than doing something sane like mapping one case to the other though, VB just drops all lower case letters in favor of upper case ones! I said simple enough for Mort not Moron! Anyway… this means that nobody can see or compile against the classes in your library assembly from VB.NET (C# is fine with two separate namespace varying only by case).

So you are now through with that surprise and you go back to the drawing board. After wasting zillions more hours in meetings with your colleagues deciding who could best absorb the schedule impact, you settle on WA and go back and rename all your assemblies to use “WA” instead of “Wa”. This naturally means that the name of the assembly has changed from Wa to WA too. Enter our friend Visual Source Safe…

Ah yes… the ever popular dinosaur era source code repository Visual Source Safe. Source safe records the case of the files that you check into it, but it treats all subsequent check-ins as if they were in the same case as the original checked in files and directories. You have to manually change the case of files by using the rename facility of the source safe explorer. So when you check your compiled components with new casing back into the source safe without this step your assemblies are saved in their old casing.

Now that’s not so bad you might be saying… so what if the casing of the assembly is different in the Source Safe. So what indeed! It turns out that many of your components are remoted. Your production support personal deploys your application from their source safe. When the CLR goes to load an object named WA and only finds a Wa guess what it does? Right again! It throws an exception!

Developers be warned: Never let VB.NET convince you that proper casing doesn’t matter. It’s a nasty and very time consuming lesson to learn the hard way. RAD can quickly become Rapid Allocation of Dollars.

2004-09-19T16:54:00.000-07:00

Tracking assembly version numbers and their dependencies can be frustrating when you have to view the properties of each assembly individually to identify the version numbers. There's a better way than doing them one at a time though: In windows XP right click on your Name/Size/Type headers in the detail panel of your Windows File system Explorer. Select More from the context menu and then check on the "File Version" option. Select "Tools/Folder Options" and then click the "Apply to All Folders" button. Apply your changes and you're done. All folders will now show the version number of contained files.

2004-09-01T09:52:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has an edict that requires that programmers to validate method arguments. You too should also verify arguments passed into your own methods and throw an appropriate exception. There are three that you should know about and use all the time.

ArgumentNullException should be thrown when required arguments are passed in as null. ArgumentOutOfRangeException show be thrown when arguments are not within the values that your code is designed to process. Other types of exceptions should throw the ArgumentException (which is the base class of the first two).

2004-07-15T22:08:00.000-07:00

The Wintellectuals are posting on a shared site they call Wintellog . Mostly it seems to be Jeff Prosise, but there are at least two (count 'em... two) blogs from Jeffery Richter. Check 'em out!

2004-07-15T21:59:00.000-07:00

Many organizations seem to be agressively seeking the holy grail of single sign-on security. It's probably a train wreck that has too far much momentum to be stopped; however, some of us might wish to ponder the thoughts of Russel Jones in his Dev-X article: Single Sign-On: The High Cost of Convenience At the very least, we can be considering the new career opportunities that will be available for security consultants after the SSO party is over.

2004-07-09T20:10:00.000-07:00

EAServe now has ASP.NET 2.0 Beta available. They have nicely priced packages that include Microsoft SQL Server databases.

2004-06-21T23:33:00.000-07:00

Rocky Lhotka and Brian Randell team up to write a great article for MSDN Magazine on SOA (Service Oriented Architectures). Read it here.

2004-06-09T08:15:00.000-07:00

After attending about 20 or 30 sessions at this year's Tech Ed in San Diego and I have to report the following: only one session had any VB.NET code in it (and it was mixed with C#). All other session's were completely C#. Although it's true that I was attending the "higher end" sessions, I began to wonder where all the VB.NET evangelists preaching that VB.NET was a truly "high-end" language were hiding out. They must have moved on to greener pastures at VSLive because they certainly weren't anywhere to be found at Tech Ed.

I work all day (and often night too) writing VB.NET code and I teach VB.NET code at community college as well... C# simply remains my language of choice for code that I have to write when the language choice is mine to make.

2004-05-26T17:11:00.000-07:00

Microsoft announced major changes to Visual Source Safe at Tech Ed. As Source Safe is widely used in our community, I highly recommend reading about Visual Source Safe 2005

2004-05-26T15:29:00.000-07:00

As a follow-up to my post of May 24... The new visual studio 2005 integrates with sharepoint team services to report such statistics as % of code churn, % of code with unit test coverage, % of defects being found by unit tests, and many more. It appears to dervice this information real-time from the work that the developers are performing in Visual Studio.

2004-05-26T07:44:00.000-07:00

Microsoft recently released Web Services Extensions for Visual Studo (WSE) v2.0

2004-05-24T14:43:00.000-07:00

Microsoft announced a new product this morning at Steve Balmer’s Tech Ed 2004 keynote entitled Visual Team Studio 2005. Microsoft is integrating many key product development lifecycle features into the Visual Team Studio 2005 product. The product appears to seamlessly help tie communications and workflow management between architects, developers, testers, and project managers into the Visual Studio environment. A few of the new features included in the product were integrated unit tests (which reminded me a little of NUnit with its green lights) and a unit test coverage analyzer. The coverage analyzer allows all lines of code that are not exercised by a unit test to be easily located. Other features allowed code to be tested for security and another for load. The new toolset is also rumored to replace Visual Source Safe and provide a configuration management tool (MSBuild). The MSBuild tool is a published fact, but I have not been able to confirm the Visual Source Safe rumor.

2004-05-07T23:31:00.000-07:00

I just found a new schema that supplies Visual Studio .NET configuration files will IntelliSense.

2004-04-22T20:52:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone! I found these high quality UML tutorials available free on the internet and thought I would share with the South Sound .NET User Group.

2004-04-05T23:33:00.000-07:00

Weighing in at a "trim" 2.67 Gigabytes, the Visual Studio 2005 Community Edition Preview (Whidbey and the .NET Framework 2.0) is now available on MSDN subscriber downloads.

2004-04-05T23:23:00.000-07:00

Don Box defines Indigo as Lubricant... oh so typical of his humor! LOL!

2004-03-20T20:31:00.000-08:00

It is often desirable to run a command prompt with the visual studio & .net framework tools and compilers in your path. For example, you may want to run 'ildasm' on an assembly, generate a public/private key with 'sn', or compile some source code using the command line from any directory on your computer's filesystem. Check out http://www.codeproject.com/macro/dotNETcmdhere.asp for a utility that adds the visual studio command prompt to the windows explorer right click context menu.

2004-03-16T21:25:00.000-08:00

I was absolutely shocked by IBM's single developer price for Rational XDE object modelling software. IBM seems to want twice as much for XDE as an entire MSDN Universal subscription which includes (among the hundreds of other valuable software licenses) Visio Enterprise Architect. In my opinion, XDE is a more complete and well rounded product that Visio, but it is very hard to justify that significant of a price difference. On an annualized cost basis, they are implying that their product is twice as valuable to a developer as the sum total of every server and application that Microsoft makes. Doubtful...

I truly respect the quality and capabilities of Rational XDE, but I have a hard time recommending a product that I cannot justify the cost to benefit ratio enough to purchase myself. I'll stick with Visio Enterprise Architect for the time being. Besides (if history is any indication of the future)... a better product will likely be bundled in my MSDN Universal subscription by this time next year.

2004-03-12T12:44:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the my own personal corner of the blogsphere where I will post items of interest to Microsoft .NET developers