The Morning Brew

Software

• Updates: Coreinfo v3.1, Desktops v2.0, Livekd v5.3, PsPasswd v1.23, Testlimit v5.22, Whois v1.11 - The Sysinternals team share updates to 6 of their tools, a few of which are updates to support Windows 8. This includes Desktops 2.0 virtual desktop support for Windows 8, support for LiveKd kernel debugging on Windows 8.

Information

• New Web Optimization Pre-Release Package on NuGet - Howard Dierking highlights the latest development on the ASP.NET Web Optimisation library which adds support to fall back through content delivery networks to local paths, template strings, Virtual Path Providers. The latest version is available as a pre-release package on NuGet.
• What’s new in ASP.Net 4.5 and VS 2012 - part 1 & Part 2 - Nikolaos Kantzelis takes a screen shot rich look at the new features of Visual Studio specifically aimed at ASP.NET developers, exploring amongst others the improvements in the editor for both server and client side code and CSS.
• ASP.NET 4.5 & MVC 4: Revisiting IBundleTransform - Nandip Makwana takes a look at the changes between developer preview and release with regard to the Bundling and Minification support of the Web optimization frameworks.
• Newsflash! ASP.NET Web API does not Sit on Top of ASP.NET MVC! In Fact, It does not Sit on Top of Anything - Tugberk Ugurlu highlights the not insignificant fact that the ASP.NET Web API does not rely on the ASP.NET MVC stack, instead resting only on top of the .NET Framework, part of the fact that makes embedding WebAPI inside your own applications possible.
• From API key to user with ASP.NET Web API - Maarten Balliauw takes a look at the MVC like Filters that are present in ASP.NET WebAPI, looking how you can use the framework to create API-Key support for your Web API endpoints.
• Multi threaded design guidelines for libraries: Part III - Ayende continues discussion of the use of Multi-threading in library code, discussing the dangers of exceptions, and the lack of understanding of the calling applications requirements, discussing how you can at least allow the controlling code to decide how to do the threading.
• Web Performance: When millisecond resolution just isn’t enough - Jatinder Mann of the Internet Explorer Team discusses another W3C Proposed Recommendation, this time addressing the need for high resolution rime within Web client applications.
• The Sophisticated Procrastinator - Volume 1 - Miguel de Icaza shares a collection of links in the first of what I hope will be a regular series - lots of interesting things to read in there on all things .NET, open source, and wider.

Community

• Free Webcast - Getting Started with .NET Gadgeteer - Clare Morgan highlights a free webcast event presented by Simon Morgan which will take a look at getting started with the .NET Gadgeteer. The event takes place on Thursday 8th November 9pm UK, 4pm New York, etc.

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Software

• jQuery 1.8.2 Released - The jQuery Team announce the release of jQuery 1.8.2, a bugfix and performance regression fix release. As usual the files are available from the jQuery site, and should be making their way to the various content delivery networks.
• IE 9.0.10 Available via Windows Update - The Internet Explorer Team have released a high importance security patch for Internet Explorer 9 to address recently reported security issues. Additionally there is an update for Internet Explorer 10 to address a Adobe Flash issue.

Information

• New TaskCreationOptions and TaskContinuationOptions in .NET 4.5 - Stephen Toub discusses soem new options introduced to help further control the creation and continuation of tasks in .NET 4.5, taking a look at the use of DenyChildAttach, HideScheduler, and LazyCancellation.
• await is not ALWAYS your friend - (Looks like the author has removed this post on MSDN, but it can be found here - thanks to @westleyl for letting me know) Julien Dollon discusses how, as with all things, you should use async/await in a responsible fashion to avoid harming your applications performance.
• Adding NuGet Support to F# Interactive in VS2012 - Daniel Mohl follows up the technique for getting NuGet support in Visual Studio 2010’s F# Interactive window with a look at achieving the same in Visual Studio 2012
• The F# 3.0 Freebase Type Provider Sample - Integrating Internet-Scale Data Sources into a Strongly Typed Language - Don Syme highlights a new F# 3.0 Sample Pack Sample which implements a Freebase Type provider in F#, and highlights an academic research paper which discusses the background on working with this entity graph model.
• An Introduction To F# Type Providers - F# tutorial - Keith Battocchi discusses the new Type Provider feature in F# 3.0, looking at what they are, and how they are implemented and used.
• ASP.NET 4.5 ScriptManager Improvements in WebForms - Pranav Rastogi discusses some of the key improvements to the Script Manager in .NET 4.5 WebForms, looking at the improved jQuery support, Remapping of Framework scripts, and script manager registration.
• .Net CLR Injection : Modify IL Codes on Run-time - Jerry Wang takes a look at manipulating .NET IL at runtime to provide injection capabilities
• IlPad - icemanind shares a neat looking utility for taking C# and compiling it to IL, providing a useful reference for dynamic compiling (and decompiling to IL), and also a way of learning more about the IL that underpins language constructs.

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It’s been quite a while since the last ‘Afternoon Tea’ post, and there have been quite a lot of significant announcements in the past few weeks, coupled with my being busy at work which has resulted in me building up quite a backlog of links which I really wanted to include in a Morning Brew. This post is my attempt to ‘clear the decks’ and get caught up again, and also provides the perfect excuse to do a link roundup of DDD South West which I had the pleasure of presenting at at the end of last month.

Software

• Introducing jQuery++ - Justin B Meyer and the folsk over at Bitovi announce the release of jQuery++, a collection of DOM helpers which complement and extend jQuery
• Bundler.NET - Bundler.NET brings the CSS and JavaScript minification and combining features of .NET 4.5 to earlier versions of .NET. The installation is simple via a NuGet package and the API reflects the .NET 4.5 implementation.
• bddify is moved to GitHub and is renamed to TestStack.BDDfy - Mehdi Khalili gives an update on TestStack.BDDfy, the project formerly known as bddify, discussing the name change, and change to the projects hosting, along with looking at the structure of the NuGet packages which amke up TestStack.BDDfy.
• #mvvmlight V4 for Windows 8 RP is available - Laurent Bugnion announces the release of version 4 of his MVVMLight framework for Windows 8 Release Preview
• Get latest CSS 3 support in Visual Studio 2010 - Mads Kristensen discusses how you can get the latest version of the CSS3 support into your Visual Studio 2010 installation providing a link to the schema files required and giving instructions on getting it setup and installed in Visual Studio 2010
• Tree Surgeon - Alive and Kicking or Dead and Buried? - Bil Simser gives an update on an old tool that I used to make considerable use of in the past. Tree Surgeon was a tool to create a standardized format of Development Source Tree structure. In this post Bil discusses how the landscape of .NET development has changed in the 4 years since its last release with improvements in T4 Templating and NuGet, and questions if there is a future for the project.
• Introducing RabbitBus - Derek Greer introduces RabbitBus, a .NET client API implementation for working with RabbitMQ, aiming to provide constructs which are not provided in the standard RabbitMQ .NET client. The library is open source with code available on GitHub, and the installation is available in NuGet package format.

Information

• Performance consideration for Async/Await and MarshalByRefObject - Stephen Toub discusses in detail the story behind the performance improvements in the Release Candidate implementation of StreamReader.ReadLineAsync over that of the beta release.
• Using Nightly ASP.NET Web Stack NuGet Packages with VS 2012 RC & ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Web Pages RC NuGet Packages - Henrik F Nielsen discusses how you can use the latest nightly builds of the ASP.NET Web Stack, made available as NuGet packages, with the Visual Studio 2012 RC release, and also provides details of the offical packages for the RC release.
• AspectMap - Part 2 - An Exception Handling Helper - Chris Surfleet continues his discussions of his AspectMap AOP framework which builds upon StructureMap. In this post Chris takes a look at building a generic exception handler which can be applied to your code.
• 5 things you should know about developing Windows 8 Apps with HTML5] - Martin Beeby highlights 5 key concepts which you should explore when implementing your Windows 8 Metro Style applications in JavaScript and HTML5
• My Take on Unit Testing Private Methods - Peter Provost discusses the common questions which surround unit testing of private methods, and discusses how just because a class or method is public it isn’t automatically part of your official public API.
• Setup Improvements for Visual Studio - David Guyer of the Visual Studio Team discusses the significant improvements made to the setup experience and performance in the latest Visual Studio 2012 Release
• Getting Started on Line-of-Business HTML5 App - Part 6 Selecting HTML with JQuery, Part 7 Local Storage, Part 8 Building a Better Form, Part 9 Show-Hide Wizard Using jQuery & Part 10 Validate, Validate, Validate - Bruce Kyle continues his series looking at using HTML5 and JavaScript to construct a Line of Business application, looking at using jQuery to work with HTML, exploring the use of Local Storage, and examining how you can use HTML5 to create better user input forms and validate the input.
• Writing a WCF 4.5 WebSocket Service - Peter Vogel has been exploring the use of Web Sockets in WCF 4.5 in a series of articles for Visual Studio Magazine. In this latest part he discusses the opening and handling of WebSocket connections
• Extending your ASP.NET Web API responses with useful metadata &Control the execution order of your filters in ASP.NET Web API - Filip W continues his series looking at the use of WebAPI with a look adding additional metadata such as the number of results found and the number returned, and look at how you can add in the ability to control the order of filters being applied to requests.
• Analyzing some "˜Big" Data Using C#, Azure And Apache Hadoop - Analyzing Stack Overflow Data Dumps - Anoop Madhusudanan takes a look at some of the concepts of ‘Big Data’ analysis on the Azure platform making use of MapReduce via Apache Hadoop, digging into a set of data from StackOverflow in this CodeProject article.
• Make Web Development Easier with IIS Express - Tim Corey gives a nice introduction into working with the IIS Express Web Server for your development web server needs, looking a the different ways it can be used and configured.
• Anders Hejlsberg Is Right: You Cannot Maintain Large Programs In JavaScript - In a recent Channel 9 discussion Anders Hejlsberg suggested that maintaining large programs in JavaScript was very difficult. In this short post Derek Bailey shares his thoughts. Be sure to have a read of the comments on this one for some further discussion.

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South-West 4.0

• DDD Southwest - Dan Maharry provides a nice overview of the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South West Conference from the end of last month. Dan also shares a collection of write ups of the sessions he attended (including mine on WebSockets and SignalR)
  • Session Notes 1 : Performance & Scalability
  • Session Notes 2 : Web Sockets & SignalR
  • Session Notes 3 : Defensive Programming 101
  • Session Notes 4 : Redis Is the New Black
• DDDSouthWest 4.0 26th May 2012 - Async 20/20 presentation - Liam Westley shares the audio recording along side the slides from his 20/20 lunch time presentation at DDD SW looking at Async in .NET 4.5
• My impressions of dddsw 4, DDDSW 4 - StyleCop: Breaking down the barriers to entry & Feedback from StyleCop presentation at DDDSW - Gary Ewan Park shares his experiences of DDD South west, along with the details of his presentation on StyleCop, and the feedback received.
• My DDDSW AppHarbor 20/20 talk - Phil Jones shares the slides from his hastily compiled but well received 20/20 presentation on the use of AppHarbor for hosting your .NET applications.
• Is your code solid &< Is-your-code-SOLID - GitHub - Nathan Gloyn shares the slides and code from his DDD SW session on the application of the SOLID Principles of object oriented programming.
• NuGet-PackageNPublish - Joel Hammond-Turner shares the code for the NuGet Package and Publish tooling that he presented in his DDD SW session on NuGet in the enterprise,
• Developer Developer Developer South West 2012 - Jackie Pollock shares her experiences as an attendee at DDDSW, giving a summary of each of the talks she attended.
• Agenda - The DDDSW agenda has been updated with links to the various slides and downloads for many of the sessions presented.

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Disaster struck this morning - I pressed post, waited until the page reloaded and shut my laptop as usual, but for reasons unexplained the post never made it onto the site - So here is today’s edition, a little later than planned - at least its still morning *somewhere* in the world!

Thanks to Libor or letting me know something was wrong

Update: In my haste to resurect today’s post a ’smart quote’ snook into some HTML merging Sankarsan & Jon Skeets links together - fixed now - thanks to EF for letting me know

Software

• Simple.Data for Mono - Mark Rendle has got his Simple.Data Dynamic Data Access library up and running under Mono, with most of the tests passing. The Mono release is available as a tgz download from the project’s GitHub Site.

Information

• New Bundling and Minification Support (ASP.NET 4.5 Series) - Scott Guthrie continues his series of posts looking at the new features of ASP.NET 4.5, currently available in the Developer Preview Release. In this post Scott discusses the new support for bundling and minification of CSS and JavaScript Resources.
• Inside ASP.NET 4.5 Bundling and Minification - Sankarsan discusses some of the details behind the Bundling and minification, looking at how the functionality is implemented in the framework, discussing how the functionality is called and the interactions between the parts.
• Eduasync part 17: unit testing - Jon Skeet continues his exploration of the Async / Await functionality of C#5 discussing how it is possible to unit test async code (sometimes), illustrating by showing and discussing some of the tests for his Majority Voting implementation.
• Razor Donut Caching - Phil Haack discusses the possible look and feel for the re-introduction of donut caching in ASP.NET MVC4, highlighting a package available for MVC3 which adds the functionality and discussing some of the limitations and possible changes to Razor to make creating donut holes easy.
• REPL for the Rosyln CTP 10/2011 - Chris Sells discusses the Roslyn CTP release and the Read Evaluate Print Loop (REPL) environment, looking into creating a console based REPL environment using Roslyn, showing how easy executing lines of code becomes with Roslyn.
• Reflection, performance and runtime code generation - Ivan Towlson discusses the use of reflection and code generation with regard to the performance of code where you need to work with types you don’t know at compile time.
• Building F# Solutions in Visual Studio 11 &
  Traffic Cop - Fresh Brewed Code, a new blogging community site for developers kicks off with posts from Dan Mohl highlighting resources for working with F# in Visual Studio 11, and Jim Cowart sharing an implementation he calls Traffic Cop for situations where he needed to avoid multiple jQuery Ajax requests for the same resources.
• Method Stubs - Phil Trelford discusses Test Driven Development in F#, focusing particularly on how you don’t need frameworks to implement stubs and spies in F#.
• 31 Days of Mango | Day #26: Background File Transfer , Day #27: Microphone API &amp Day #28: Media Library - Jeff Blankenburg’s series of posts on Windows Phone Mango continues with three more guest posts, first another from Gary Johnson discussing background file transfer. Next Parag Joshi discusses the Microphone API and the recording of audio, and finally Jeff Fansler takes a look at the Media Library.
• 10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 7 of 10) - Michael Crump continues his Silverlight 5 series with part 7 exploring operating system integration with a look at power awareness, 64 bit browser support and Save Dialogs.

Community

• NxtGenUG - Santa Westley - Liam Westley joins the NxtGenUG in Coventry of their User Group meeting on Monday 12th December. There are no details of the session to be delivered, but Liam is an excelent speaker, and will nodoubt be brings some swat and probably some tasty treats too!

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When you first request a page from the an ASP.NET application, the .NET framework takes the ASPX file and generates code to actually execute the page. This code is then compiled by the framework and the results of the compilation are stored in the Temporary ASP.NET files directory within the framework directory (usually located in c:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework). When the ASPX of the compiled DLL changes this code is re-generated and recompiled.
On a server that hosts lots of ASP.NET applications this store of temporary compiled code can occupy a considerable amount of space. On machines with a limited amount of space on their OS partition this can begin to cause problems. Thankfully the ASP.NET framework does allow the location of this directory to be specified as a custom location.
As with most server wide settings you need to make a change to the Machine.Config (for .NET 1.1) or Machine wide web.Config (for .NET 2). The crucial part of the configuration is the Compilation element within system.web. The compilation element has an optional attribute called tempDirectory that allows a new directory location to be specified overriding the default setting of %FrameworkInstallLocation%\Temporary ASP.NET Files.

<system.web>

   <compilation tempDirectory="d:\TempASP.NETFiles\">

      ...

   </compilation>

</system.web>

One thing to watch out for when making this change is the file permissions on your new Temporary ASP.NET files - copying the permissions from the original location will do the trick nicely.

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Image Credit: kevinzim on Flickr

One of my basic assumptions about the .NET framework was proved incorrect last week. Up until then, I had believed that when you are using the built in framework classes for exposing web services you were always safe when it came to the output being valid XML. Sadly that turns out to be untrue, and to make matters worse, .NET will happily output XML over a web service even its own .NET web service clients can’t read.

There are certain characters that are forbidden from being in XML as per the official specification. These characters are the low ascii characters such as NULL, EOF etc. Its important to note that this is not a case of unescaped/unencoded versions of this character being disallowed, the encoded characters are also disallowed.

The problem with this isn’t that the .NET framework doesn’t understand these rules - it manages just fine when it comes to acting as a client to a web service serving these characters in content, throwing nice exceptions explaining that these characters are invalid. Additionally, the XML Text Reader has a property ‘Normalization’ which causes the XML reader to be more liberal and ignore invalid characters - but this option is not used within the automatically generated Web Service Client.

This problem isn’t limited to just the web services, standard XML serialisation also experiences the same problems. Here are bits of code that illustrate the problem:

[WebMethod()]

public string InvalidCharacter()
{
   return "" + (char)4;
}

public class MyClass
{
   public string Test = "" + (char)0;
   public static void Main()
{
     MyClass c = new MyClass();
     System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer xs = new System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer(typeof(MyClass));
     System.Text.StringBuilder sb = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
     System.IO.StringWriter sw = new System.IO.StringWriter(sb);
     xs.Serialize(sw, c);
     Console.WriteLine(sb.ToString());
    
     System.IO.StringReader sr = new System.IO.StringReader(sb.ToString());
     try
     {
         c = (MyClass)xs.Deserialize(sr);
     }
     catch (System.Exception ex)
     {
         Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString());
}
}
}

The little console application gives output like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<MyClass xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
   <Test>&#x0;</Test>
</MyClass>

System.InvalidOperationException: There is an error in XML document (3, 12).
System.Xml.XmlException: '.', hexadecimal value 0x00, is an invalid character.
Line 3, position 12.

Unfortunately I haven’t yet found a fix for this - my only solution is to work around the problem by ensuring that these invalid characters can’t get into the system in the first place or clean the text on the get of each property of the serialized objects.

Things like this really worry me - our frameworks shouldn’t be outputting things that they can’t read - let alone outputting things that completely contravene the specifications. As always, any suggestions on an alternative solution to this problem are welcome.

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Today I encountered a strange problem with IIS6 restarting without notice on a server that had recently had the .NET Framework 2.0 installed on it. In our particular case the problem was made worse by the fact that the IIS restart was unsuccessful leaving the server in a some what crippled state. We traced the problem to clicking on the ASP.NET in the IIS Management MMC, not making any changes to the settings, then clicking OK on the properties dialog.
Usually making a change to the version of ASP.NET will cause a restart of IIS (and there are alternative ways that avoid the restart), however in this case it seems as though just viewing the tab and then clicking OK was enough to cause ASP.NET to restart the IIS Service. I’ve still not discovered precisely why this is happening, but for the time being I wanted to implement a work around to avoid the problem by disabling the ASP.NET Tab.

I thought doing this would be easy, after all enough people seem to have problems with the tab not being there. Common causes of the tab being missing seem to be running the IIS MMC on x64, or having installed an earlier beta of .NET 2.0. The fixes in most cases seem to be modifications to the registry or re-running aspnet_regiis -i to re-register ASP.NET.

While it is possible that by fiddling with the registry I could break the ASP.NET tab that didn’t seem to be a good solution, so I carried on digging. It turns out that the ASP.NET Tab is implemented as an MMC Snap-in extension, and can be disabled with two clicks of the mouse once you’ve found the setting. So, to disable the ASP.NET tab within the ASP.NET management MMC:

1. Start the MMC console (Start > Run > ‘mmc’ OK)
2. Open the IIS management mmc (Console > Open > ‘%windir%\system32\inetsrv\iis.msc’ OK)
3. Edit the Snapin Settings (Console > Add/Remove Snap-in)
4. Choose the Extensions Tab, and disable the ‘ASP.NET Management Extension’ by unticking ‘Add all Extensions’ and the unticking the ‘ASP.NET Management Extension’.
5. OK the changes and then save the console (Console > Save )

Now when you start the IIS Manager the ASP.NET tab won’t be there.

Sadly the tab is still there in the Computer Management MMC (Computer Management > Services And Applications > Internet Information Services), and looking at the computer management MMC in the same way as above does not yield the same choice of Extensions, so if anyone knows how to influence Computer Management in the same way, please let me know!

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