For some of the work that Erik has done with Microsoft Patterns and Practices group, he has won a PnP Champion award. Find out more details at msdn.
For some of the work that Erik has done with Microsoft Patterns and Practices group, he has won a PnP Champion award. Find out more details at msdn.
We've been on a Presentation spree lately with .NET Montreal User Group, Ottawa .NET User Group, TechDays and DevTeach coming soon.
And while presenting on WPF and Umbrella, we received great feedback that made us realize that there are always ways to improve our presentations.
Here`s a Top 10 countdown focused on the Development environment you`re presenting to the attendees
DevTeach is coming soon, in 3 weeks in fact, and we wanted to mention it because of WPF. As you know, nVentive is strongly pushing the WPF technology so that we can start businesses can start building LOB applications with it.
I hadn't realized it before, but the first day (extra fee) has a full session with Kevin McNeish, where he will spend the day with Expression Blend. As if that wasn't enough, there are over 6 other sessions during the conference that will speak of WPF (or Silverlight).
Once done, don't forget to come and talk to us about your experience. nVentive is growing and will be on site to discover hidden talents.
We are happy to announce (or repeat) that Enterprise Library 4.1 and Unity 1.2 from Microsoft PnP group is out. Why are we so happy, well nVentive collaborated with Microsoft on this project.
This service release is a minor one, but brings one major new functionality : Interception from Unity. If you are using Unity as your IOC, i strongly urge you to upgrade to this new version and find that:
We'll be blogging about this new release very soon, with code examples to get you going.
As always, you can find these on CodePlex (http://www.codeplex.com/unity or http://www.codeplex.com/entlib) or the msdn landing pages (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa138002.aspx).
As announced previously, nVentive will be presenting at the Montreal Tech Days, brought to you by Microsoft on November 6th and 7th. Make sure the register, as this event is not a free one.
Erik will be giving the "Blackbelt Data Binding in WPF" presentation (make sure your to bring your karate skills) and François will be giving the "Building Differentiated UI Applications Using Composite WPF" talk. As a sneak preview, you can also catch François for the Tech Days in Toronto, as he will be doing his presentation there also.
These presentations should help your business intergrate the latest and greatest technologies from Microsoft for presenting information to your users. While François` talk will concentrate with some of the "best practices" given by Microsoft`s Patterns and Practices group on how to build composite applications, Erik`s will dig deeper into the misteries of data binding.
We hope to see you there, and as always, will be available to answer any questions that you might have on these new technologies.
nVentive is happy to annouce that it will be moving to new offices starting November 1st. This move will allow us to better serve our clients by offering space to offer training on our own premise, develop our own software and promote our new Center of Excellence. Stay tuned for more information.
When we were in Quebec city last week training a group of people on WPF, one of the trainees asked a question :
How would I go and change the "presentation" of the scroll bar.
This questioned was asked during one of the labs and so we had time (10 minutes) to come up with a quick answer, here is the walkthrough that we presented:
18 DefaultStyleKeyProperty.OverrideMetadata(typeof(MyScrollBar),
19 newFrameworkPropertyMetadata(typeof(MyScrollBar)));
This is the 1000 feet view on how to do skinning, and will require a lot more work when creating a custom style that works correctly (handling commands, events, triggers...).
It was a mere introduction to demonstrate the simplicity of the model that WPF uses to "present" controls.
Last week, Erik gave a 2 day training in Quebec city on the topic of WPF. He was amazed to see just how much interest there currently is for this new technology, especially now that SilverLight 2 got released.
These are some of the questions that were asked, as well as pointers to the answers:
1 - What do you recommend, a XBAP application or a SiliverLight one ?
This is a hard one because it involves so many upfront decisions. If you do not control the computers that will run the application, a SiliverLight application is the easiest to deploy. At the same time, SilverLight applications have severe constraints (partial trust, doesn't benefit from the full .net framework, stripped down WPF, limited network access...) but benefits from advances like DeepZoom (checkout the DeepEarth project). XBAP applications are normal .net applications that are hosted in the browser (Internet Explorer) and are usually partial trust (as the assemblies are downloaded at run-time from a webserver).
2 - Should we write new controls ?
WPF comes with so many extension points (skins, themes, control templates, data templates...) that should all be evaluated before actually writing a new control. In a upcoming post, we will explain the "on the fly walkthough" we used to change how scroll bars were displayed for a "trendy application". Writing new controls is still a possibility, allthough we think you will find that there are better ways to extend WPF.
3 - Isn't SilverLight just for making cheesy animations on the web ?
SilverLight 1.0 was only able to work with WPF (through XAML) and was mostly used to display media. SilverLight 2.0 comes with an implementation of the .net framework which allows you to develop a lot of the same kinds of applications you do with the .net framework; think of it in the same way as you would the Compact Framework. One major difference with the Compact Framework (the one that runs on a Windows Mobile phone) is that there is no binary compatibility for assemblies and so code has to be physically recompiled. Microsoft believes so much in the SilverLight plateform for business applications that they are porting prism and unity to it (see here and here).
nVentive will be presenting it's "Top 10 Umbrellas" talk at the Ottawa.NET Community on Thursday, November 5th. Come and hear us talk about Umbrella and how the ideas within can save you development time.
One of the nice things of the latest versions of .net, is the ObservableCollection<T>. This class implements the new INotifyCollectionChanged interface (similar to INotifyPropertyChanged that we all know). Here is a small code example:
1 [TestMethod]
2 publicvoid ObservingAReadOnlyObservableCollectionSucceeds()
3 {
4 //setup original collection with some initial content;
5 ObservableCollection<string> strings = newObservableCollection<string>();
6 strings.Add("string1");
7 strings.Add("string2");
8
9 //setup readonly collection
10 ReadOnlyObservableCollection<string> readOnlyStrings = newReadOnlyObservableCollection<string>(strings);
11 int addedElementsWhileObservingReadOnlyCollection = 0;
12
13 //setup observer
14 (readOnlyStrings asINotifyCollectionChanged).CollectionChanged += delegate(object sender, NotifyCollectionChangedEventArgs e)
15 {
16 if (e.Action == NotifyCollectionChangedAction.Add)
17 {
18 addedElementsWhileObservingReadOnlyCollection += e.NewItems.Count;
19 }
20 };
21
22 //add one item, addign should be observed
23 strings.Add("addedString");
24
25 //assert
26 Assert.AreEqual(3, readOnlyStrings.Count);
27 Assert.AreEqual(1, addedElementsWhileObservingReadOnlyCollection);
28 }
Notice the usage of ReadOnlyObservableCollection<T>, which can be used when you don't want someone to alter the contents of a collection.
These are the problems we see with all this new goodness:
nVentive will be sponsoring the Montreal .NET community, it's our way of promoting this great group. They offer many meetings per month where great subjects are featured. It's one of our ways of offering coaching and guidance to the Montreal community.
For the second time this year, nVentive will be presenting at DevTeach, happening in our home town of Montreal from December 1st to the 5th. Come and catch us talk about agility in our "Done Done" conversation, or about hard core programming in our "Top 10 Umbrellas" talk.
nVentive will be presenting some cool material at the new Microsoft TechDays conference in Montreal on November 6th and 7th. Be sure to be there as the subjects are the latest and will surely help you increae your team's software developement velocity.
Well, such a nice tool was bound to be aquired by a company. Reflector has been acquired by Red-Gate software. You can find Reflector at http://reflector.red-gate.com.
Speaking of Reflector though, did you know there were over 30 plugins available ?
On the subject of plugins, the excellent TestDriven.net addin for Visual Studio will add a few context menu item for running your tests, but will also add one that allows you to jump back to Reflector. Isn't it nice when all these tools play nice together ?
We've been looking at tools lately that could an agile team get a better view of the quality of the software they are writing. On of those is NDepend, a tool that will inspect your assemblies, determine your code's dependencies and then calculate some metrics for you to analyze. The output will typically be a report, in HTML format. Since this step can be automated, We strongly suggest that you put this into your continuous integration process because from that point, you'll be able see the metrics for your software change with time.
On a previous project, we had integrated NDepend on the daily build and at the of each iteration, we would take a few minutes to look at the reports and note a few actions to be taken during the next one. It was a great way to maintain quality and I strongly recommend you integrate it on your next project.
Now where this tool really shines, is with the VisualNDepend application. This one allows you to visualize the metrics of your software, query your software's compiled code through a SQL like language, and perform comparisons between 2 different reports.
Here are a few examples of the queries you can do in CQL:
SELECT TOP 10 METHODS WHERE CouldBePrivate
SELECT TOP 10 FIELDS WHERE CouldBePrivate
SELECT TOP 10 TYPES WHERE IsClass AND NbChildren ==0 AND !IsSealed AND !IsStatic ORDER BY NbLinesOfCode
Here are a few snapshots of the tool when run on our own Umbrella library.
This image shows Umbrella being analyzed, with the mouse pointer on one method called "Truncate". NDepend shows metrics and information all on one easy screen.
This image shows the result of the execution of 1 CQL query and where in the assembly (in blue) are located the results. Once again, bravo for NDepend: quick, concise and visual.
The author of the product Patrick Smacchia gave an interview to the Visual Studio Talk Show, a french PodCast from Montreal; if you can, we strongly suggest you listen to it and hear what the author himself has to say about this great product.
Grigori, from Microsoft's PnP announced last week that there will be a new version of Enterprise Library coming out. It's a smaller version, when you look at the features coming out, but it's a welcome one as a few bugs will be fixed.
The first intermediate drop (before the final release) of the source code is already there, so feel free to grab it and see how the new features can help you right now at http://www.codeplex.com/entlib.
Visual Studio 2008 SP1 has been out now for a few days, and we must say we like it. It brings a ton of enhancements to the IDE and to the .NET framework; and these are the things that hit us the most:
We suggest you install this service pack as soon as possible and use it with your forth coming developments. It is rare that a service pack brings so much new technology to the table and they are all welcome.
The Montreal .NET Community (formelly the GUVSM) has redone itself.
There is a new name and a new website in order to reflect the common interests that the community has in .net related technologies. There will be special interests groups for .Net, Team System, Sql and architecture. What's new though is that Francois and I will be pushing a new concept in the .net group called @Lunch.
@Lunch is basically an open session, once a month, where a subject will examined in a more informal way. It is modeled on the way Alt.NET and opens spaces work and will surely provoke a few interesting discussions. One of the things we will promote is to determine the subject of the next meeting, during the last few minutes of the meeting occuring. What an "Agile" way of learning what's most important. The first @Lunch is scheduled for September 24th and will be moderated by Francois, speaking on extension methods.
I suggest you visit the calendar, and find which sessions interest you the most. You can even subscribe to the calendar through a RSS feed; what a nice touch !
The last thing for this post is an upcoming Umbrella talk; we will be presenting our session called "Top 10 Umbrellas" at the .Net group of the Montreal .Net Community on October 20th. If you're interested in what it is, or how it can help you, we suggest you come by and listen what we have to say.
nVentive helped a group at the Canada DND (Department of National Defense) by producing an audit for a internal project that related to the techniques, methodologies and technologies use by that team.
nVentive will be working on a small mandate with Microsoft's PnP (Patterns & Practices).
Microsoft's Patterns and Practices group is a natural fit with nVentive's Coaching and Guidance approach. In future conferences and talks, we will be able to demonstrate the newest ideas we are developing together.
nVentive was selected as a Microsoft Vendor this week. This will allow us to work with Microsoft on a variety of projects in the future in order to help bridge the gap between the developers and the technology makers.
On Monday, Erik recorded his third Visual Studio Talk Show, the french podcast with Mario Cardinal and Guy Barrette. The subject was suppose to the Entity Framework, but after having attended the PnP Summit, the subject was changed to "Being Done".
The podcast is great, and shows a great discussion between the agile camp, and the more traditional waterfall processes.
You can download the podcast at http://www.visualstudiotalkshow.com/Archives/075-26mai2008-ErikRenaud.html and while your there, you should check out the other, past podcasts, we are sure you will like them.
At DevTeach and the PnP Summit, there were talks on how to use instrumentation within your applications and use it to monitor the health of it throughout it's lifecycle.
At one of our past contracts, we had a problem where our users were not taking the time to test the system correctly. We then resorted to reuse the instrumentation module to track how often the individual functions of the application were used.
At first, it was only about helping them focus on the tests, or rather where they had not tested. But after a few months, it all changed; it actually became a measure of how useful the software was and what parts were being adopted.
It's motivated two things :
I'm not sure if Usage Coverage is a good term for these ideas, but for sure, I will be using them in future projects also.
Amazing how he got it right.
This guy is busy like 10 of us and still, he's able to appreciate a piece of code I wouldn't dare taking less than 2 hours explaining the value of.
Here's what he had to say about Umbrella:
It is exceedingly broad and includes literally hundreds of new methods and helpers. However, I don't think you're expected to "learn" Umbrella as they hope you'll stumble into it...in a good way. It's like the concept of The Pit of Success . There's little easier than just falling, and the idea is that if you've designed an API correctly folks will just fall into success.
This should probably go on our home page as the project description.
Thanks Scott!
2 weeks ago, Francois and I were attending the Patterns and Practices Summit conference that was held in Quebec City.
Let me say that the presentations were really nice, and I would not hesitate to go again. This was a unique chance to have go out and meet some great minds in our industry and challenge some of nVentive's ideas with them.
This is the list of all of the sessions and the ones that particularly struck us (in no particular order) :
We'll be integrating a few of the ideas we learned in these sessions into our teams, and we'll let blog on them as we see success out of them.
For all those of you who asked about our session material, it is now available for download.
You'll have to login to your devteach account in order to be able to download the material. If the link doesn't work, go directly to the Schedule page, find our AOP + Unity session and you should be able to click on the Material link.
The .zip file contains both the material for the Validation + Security session and the AOP + Unity session.
A couple of days ago, Francois and I came back from Toronto after the DevTeach 2008 conference in Toronto. Wow was it nice, we met a lot of nice people and had the chance to debate a few of nVentive's ideas. The sessions where we spoke came out very good, and we hope that everybody was able to take something home, that they can use at their workplaces.
DevTeach will occur again in Montreal before the end of the year, although I can't confirm any of the details just yet and we hope that we will be speaking again, giving us a chance to share ideas with the great Montreal developer community.
The list of sessions was very exhaustive and here are some that marked us:
Now although we did meet a lot of people, these are the ones with whom we had the biggest discussions on agile and architecture :
In the coming weeks, we'll probably blog on a few of the ideas we learned and transmit that knowledge to you.
For those of you who were at DevTeach Toronto and listened us talk about Enterprise Library 4.0 new features, we promised 4.0 was on the way. Well, it's officially released! You can get more information on Grigori's blog
Make sure to also look at what's new in the Unity 1.1 refresh.
Umbrella is nVentive's attempt at filling the gaps in the existing .net framework
and related technologies; hence reducing friction and increasing the predictability
of the api.
It consists of a set of helpers and additional abstractions that will likely augment
one's vocabulary and level of abstraction. This is the first drop of the framework,
and we look forward to adding new modules, that will complement Unity, Enterprise
Library, Entity Framework and more.
Go check it out on CodePlex (www.codeplex.com/Umbrella) and see how you can diminish your software's complexity by using new patterns.
Hopefully, after reading Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5, you should've become an Extension Method Master.
But there's more. There are other elements that can be simplified by using extension methods and that is, limiting usage of reflection.
Given something like:
public interface IServiceLocator
{
T Resolve
}
It is important to notice that the generic method Resolve has a
One might use the service locator as follows:
public ILogger GetLogger()
{
ILogger logger = serviceLocator.Resolve<ILogger>();
return logger;
}
But what if the type to resolve is only known at runtime? You'll have to fallback on reflection:
public static class ServiceLocatorExtensions
{
publicstaticobject Resolve(thisIServiceLocator locator, Type type)
{
MethodInfo resolveMethodInfo = typeof(IServiceLocator).GetMethod("Resolve");
resolveMethodInfo = resolveMethodInfo.MakeGenericMethod(type);
return resolveMethodInfo.Invoke(serviceLocator, null);
}
}
This approach can have terrible performance, especially since there is no reflection cache.
A far better approach is to define your IServiceLocator interface as a non-generic interface and provide strongly-typed extension methods:
public interface IServiceLocator
{
object Resolve(Type type);
}
and
public static class ServiceLocatorExtensions
{
publicstatic T
Resolve
{
return (T)locator.Resolve(typeof(T));
}
}
Thoughts?
Finding tools that can help you through your daily SCRUM meeting can be a hard task. Other than the usual rubber football that allows a person to speak, nothing else seemed interesting, that is until last week.
I was aimlessly surfing on CodePlex when I found TFS Sticky Buddy. It's a great way for your team to "see" the iteration. It's a small WPF program that visualizes the work items contained in a TFS Team Project.
As soon as I have time, I will try to implement this tool within my teams, because I believe that it is a nice way to focus the team, during the SCRUM meeting, on the iteration.
Yesterday I was helping somebody with a small WCF application and one of the tools I proposed was a plugin visualizer for Visual Studio called WCF Visualizers. It's available freely on CodePlex and will allow you to see different parts of WCF (messages, endpoints, channels...) while you are debugging. Go and check it out, as there are some great images on the project page. The next time I give a WCF presentation with Francois at different user groups, I will also take the time demo this tool.
nVentive was present in Quebec city at HEROES happen {here}, Microsoft's launch for Visual Studio.Net 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008.
François and I were experts there on the developer side of things, and the one thing we got asked the most, were questions on LINQ.
Everybody knows that LINQ is the hot new way to query objects in C# using a syntax similar to SQL. It depends on 2 tricks, Extension Methods and Lanbda Expressions.
This is a small sample.
public
class
Blog
{
public
string
Title
{
get
;
set
;
}
}
class
Program
{
static
void
Main(
string
[]
args)
{
IList
<
Blog
>
blogs =
new
List
<
Blog
>();
blogs.Add(
new
Blog
{
Title =
"3 cheese
lasagna"
});
blogs.Add(
new
Blog
{
Title =
"Blue
cheese alfredo sauce"
});
blogs.Add(
new
Blog
{
Title =
"Macaroni
and cheese"
});
blogs.Add(
new
Blog
{
Title =
"Angel
cake"
});
var
blogsWithCheese
=
from
blog
in
blogs
where
blog.Title.ToLower().Contains(
"cheese"
)
select
blog;
//blogsWithCheese
contains 3 elements.
}
}
You can query something that is IEnumerable
Now there's still more, if you have a source that you'd like to query with LINQ, it's
just a matter of implementing IQueryProvider and IQueryable
There are 2 tools I recommend you use in your adventures with LINQ: