.NET From India

Free VS 2011 Developer Preview Training Kit

If you have started looking into the new Visual Studio 2011 Developer Preview and want to learn more, then you have a training kit from the MS Developer Evangelism team. This includes Presentations, Hands on Labs and other resources to learn what’s new in VS 2011. (including Metro apps)

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview Training Kit - http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27738

Note: A VHD and set of HOLs covering TFS server and the ALM side of things is also available. Download instructions is available at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/briankel/archive/2011/09/16/visual-studio-11-application-lifecycle-management-virtual-machine-and-hands-on-labs-demo-scripts.aspx

Home Server 2011 Connector and Problems with .NET Framework..

I had setup the new Home Server 2011 on one of my servers and have been transitioning stuff off my Home Server v1.

So after all of the data has been transferred and I had setup the server in a way that makes sense to me (given that Drive Extender, DE, is not there anymore and how much I miss that… That is a completely separate post by itself)

Then I started moving my client machines over. I left my main desktop off till the last and I came to it yesterday.

The Connect installation is quite simple and it just asks around 2-3 simple questions and that’s it. The problem is that they have made it so simple that it becomes very difficult when there is a problem. So the only error the setup reports is a wonderfully descriptive – “The Windows Home Server 2011 Connector has encountered an unexpected error” or something like that (Well everyone knows what an unexpected error is and can easily fix that. Right )..

After some searching, I found an KB article saying that a few services need to be running and I was still getting this error after I confirmed those services were good.

Then I came upon this post on the forum that talks about this problem occurring if a beta .NET 4.0 was installed..

Then it stuck me.. I had installed the VS 2010 Beta on this machine a long time back and then after playing around for a few days, forgotten about that (as I rarely use that machine for any development). So I uninstalled all the pieces that was installed with VS 2010 Beta and then also uninstalled .NET 4.0 Beta.

Only problem was, half way thru the uninstall something happened and my machine blue screened. The Beta disappeared from the Program and Features screen. So I went ahead and installed the full .NET 4.0 RTM. But still Connector will not install. Same Problem as before.

So I tried to uninstall .NET 4.0 RTM thinking I will clean everything and try again. Now it wouldn’t uninstall cleanly. It would go half way and crash. So basically I got stuck with a half installed .NET 4.0.

Then I came upon the .NET cleanup utility. Downloaded the latest version and set it up to clean up .NET 4.0. It actually went half way and then the system re-booted. Not sure if this was the planned way, but when I checked the log, it seemed as if there was an error. So I just ran the utility again and it went through fine.

Then I went and installed the full .NET 4.0 RTM and then the Connector install went thru fine with no problems.

It would have been a lot easier and saved me around 5+ hours if the setup had just said, there was a wrong version of the .NET Framework, instead of the great “unexpected error”…

Moving Applications to Azure

I was reading this post about how they are moving TFS to Azure to provide a cloud based version of TFS.

I find this very interesting as it provides you with a view of what kinds of problems you may face if you are moving an existing application on to the cloud (esp. Azure)

Some issues like security can have a major impact on your application design, while others like SELECT INTO support may also drain a lot of effort to fix.

And the final big thing that may weigh on your overall effort is testing. Because, now all your previous test results are out of the window and you will have to do a complete regression to make sure that everything works find.

Microsoft BI – ‘hard to beat pricewise’ – Forrester

A recent Forrester Report on the BI space puts Microsoft BI on the leaders quadrant and also says the value of Microsoft BI is ‘hard to beat pricewise’.

I have been seeing an increasing trend among customers in adopting Microsoft BI over the past year or so and this seems to be led strongly from two fronts:

1. Price – Since the price of most of the elements required for BI is encapsulated in things that most enterprises already have (SQL Server, SharePoint (for PPS) and Office (Excel+PowerPivot).

2. New UI power in PowerPivot and SharePoint PPS services seem to also add to the overall trend.

(Source : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ragnarh/archive/2010/10/26/forrester-research-calls-microsoft-s-business-intelligence-value-proposition-hard-to-beat-pricewise.aspx)

Passing an Excel Application Object to .NET COM Object

I was writing .NET component that was COMVisible and aimed at working along with Excel Macros. Instead of creating a VSTO project, I just went with a .NET DLL with Com wrappers.

Actually this is a very viable option, if you just want to automate excel without too much of the support provided by VSTO (which in turn adds its own overhead). So you just reference the Excel Interop and you are set to go.

One of the things I wanted to do was to pass over the current Excel Application object to .NET so that I can interact and do some work from .NET.

So I initially wrote a function like below:

 

    Public Function testParam(ByVal app As Application) As Boolean
	more here code
        Return True
    End Function

If you try to call this function from Excel VBA

x.testparam (Application)

will result in an error at the VBA level “Invalid procedure call or argument”

I have tried to find why this is happening but I don’t see any specific description of why this happens. I did see some pointers where, the InterOp actually uses Interfaces and behind the scenes map the objects to the actual classes. So if you see in Visual Studio you will see the Excel.Application is actually shown as an interface. I suspect this maybe the reason for the error.

The current workaround that works for me is to use a Property to capture the Application object. Though this is the cleanest way (I prefer the parameter in the object I was designing) the property seems to be the only way to get this to work.

So the code will change to

Public Property ExcelApplication As Application

And in the VBA you can just assign to the property as:

x.ExcelApplication = Application

This works fine….

 

Note: I am using VS2010 and .NET 4. So I have taken advantage of Automatic Properties

Memory Mapped Files in .NET 4.0

File manipulations has been something that you have been doing for a long time. It is a integral part of application development. But the approach to doing this has not changed much from the days of Basic.

I came across this article about .NET 4.0 support for Memory mapped files and it does seem interesting and neat way to handle large files (Especially if your application does flat file based import of data etc.).

Working with Large Memory-Mapped Files in VB 2010

Enhanced Data Generator 1.2.0

I have uploaded a new version of the Custom Data Generator Library I am building.

More information is available here and the Download is available here.

Major Changes are

• Seperated out the IBAN Generator to a seperate DLL so as to isolate the usage of the RegExString Class
• Added a new Generator to generate Indian Bank Codes
• Minor bug fixes

Offline Event Video Viewer Update

I just updated the Offline Event Video Viewer to handle videos from PDC 2009.

Download Source from CodePlex here

Test Data Generation - EnhancedDataGenerator

One of the most problematic part of any new development is to make sure that you test your application with data that is near real life. 90% of the cases developers just test with a couple of rows of data that they enter and the data is rarely diverse enough or similar to real life data.

There are a number of data generator tools out there in the market, but they are costly and development teams rarely get the budget to buy these tools. There are a number of random data generation free-wares, but most of these are developed over a weekend hacks and though they generate random data, I don’t think they are representative of most real life data (Who actually has a name like “$ssoghetn2u#a”).

Few people know that Visual Studio Database Edition has a set of tools to generate test data. Called Data Generators, you can add a data generation plan to your database project and use that to generate test data. It ships with multiple data generators and you can also write custom data generators very easily. Since the Database Edition is now available with the developer and some of the other editions, it is easy to use by most developers.

I actually started writing a data generation application that can generate real life representative data a couple of years back. As is the fate of a number of those weekend projects, this went into hibernation once I ran into time issues and then was forgotten.

Then a couple of months back I started playing around with the Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) Database Edition and then remembered I had some code that I had written for the original data generator and so started looking into writing custom data generators for VSTS DB. There is not too much data on writing custom generators and most of the blogs are out of date. So if you want to write custom generators, I would point you to MSDN.(That information is quite good and you should be able to get up and running quickly)

I was surprised at how the VSTS DB custom generator interface was so similar to what I had come up with and so started writing a couple of data generators based on the code I already had. After a couple of weekends, I had my first couple of custom data generators.

Note: These are written for VS 2008 SP1 and Database Edition GDR R2. I am not sure if this will work for GDR 1. (I suspect it will as the interface for custom data generators have not changed).

This EnhancedDataGenerator currently contains two DataGenerators:

1. FirstNameGenerator – Generates real-life First Names

2. LastNameGenerator – Generates real-life Last Names

These are also locale aware and currently support two locales en-US and de-DE. So based on the locale this generates different kinds of First and Last Names. (Locale is a property in each generator, so you can generate English first names and German last names, if that is what you want). If you have data for common First and Last names in other cultures, please send them to me and I will update the database to handle those cultures too. (The maximum time I actually spent was to search for and get the base data into a format that I can import into the database)

The FirstName Generator is also Gender aware.

A couple of screenshots of these at work:

en-US	de-DE

EnhancedDataGenerator – DLL and config Files. For people who know how to do a manual deploy of custom extensions.

EnhancedDataGenerator Setup – Setup File that will deploy the files to the default VS install location (Don't use if you had used a custom path to install Visual Studio)

Other Things to Notes

1. Error Handling is not great. I have not yet found a way to report errors to the IDE user. So as of now if there are any errors, nothing happens. E.g. if you set the locale to anything other than en-US or de-DE, you just get empty data back. So if no data appears, that means you have an error .

2. The setup kit has not be fully tested. So if this does not work for you, use the DLL kit and do a manual deploy

3. Retain the directory structure inside the zip file when doing manual deploy

3. If your Visual Studio is installed to a custom path (not <prog Files x86>\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0, then you will have do a couple of more things.

a. Use the manual depoy method and get the Extensions deployed in the VSTSDB\Extensions

b. Change the config file setting DBPath to point to the Database directory inside your custom extensions directory.

4. The .Extensions.xml file is already created with the correct data, so you will not have to create those again when doing a manual deploy.

.NET 4.0 - CLR Enhancements

My co-architect Madhu has created a new Blog. Hoepfully he gets to stick to this one, as I think this is his second or third attempt at writing a blog.

His first post is on .NET 4.0's CLR Enhancements.