Shawn Wildermuth wrote about his experience using ASP.NET MVC for a new site he developed.

1. Part 1: Why ASP.NET MVC
2. Part 2: MVC in action
3. Part 3: Datavalidation

One of the things he does is sending "complex" models to the view to render, I'm not sure that's something you should do. I believe that you should stick so simple strings and have the controller do all the heavy lifting. It's a slippery slope you're stepping on, before you know, you're sending 'models' straight from the Entity Model to the view.

Not sure if that's really feasible (or the simplest/easiest) in all situations, but it ensure a clean separation between business logic in the controller and the model and the UI in the view.

More info:Enforcing Strict Model-View Separation in Template Engines (pdf)

Yesterday and today I had an interesting problem to solve. One of the projects I’m working on involves calling stored procedures on an Oracle server which return User Defined Types (UDT). To get this to work you need to install at least ODP.NET version 11.1.0.6.20, which at the moment is only publicly available in a 32bit. This was not a problem during development and since most .NET components are not architecture specific we were a bit surprised when we couldn’t get data from the Oracle server on the 64bit test environment.

After some investigation we discovered the ODP.NET components are architecture specific, so we needed to find 64bit components (since running in 32bit was not an option). Some research showed, that there is a 11.1.0.7.0 patch for 64bit, which can be downloaded from Metalink, but this requires a previous version to update. The solution to get everything working is downloading and installing the client tools from the 11.1.0.6.0 64bit server and finally applying the 1.4gb (!) 11.1.0.7.0 patch.

This is not new, but something that helped me today.

When debugging, you can see the types in scope in the auto’s window:

This shows only the relevant information after expanding the view. One way of improving the experience is by implementing the ToString() method.

While this helps a lot, this means you can’t use the ToString method for something else. Luckily in VS 2008 the DebuggerDisplayAttribute was introduced, this allows you to achieve the same effect and more.

And the code:

[System.Diagnostics.DebuggerDisplay("Date:{Date}, Value:{Value}", Name="{Name}")]
class Item
{
    public string Name { get; set; }

    public DateTime Date { get; set; }

    public int Value { get; set; }
}

String.Join concatenates an array of strings together without checking for empty entries. This means the separator character is added twice, between non-empty items sometimes.

String[] input = {foo, null, bar};

var result = String.Join(",", input);

// result == "foo,,bar"

My alternative uses the IEnumerable.Aggregate extension method, it checks for there empty entries and when it finds one doesn't add a redundant separator.

 string[] input = { "foo", null, "bar" };
 string result = input.Aggregate((x, y) => String.IsNullOrEmpty(y) ? x : string.Concat(x, ",", y));

// result == "foo,bar"

After a week of geeking out, PDC 2008 is over. It was an intense week with a bunch of interesting announcements and promising technologies.

The highlights:

“Dublin”: an application server build upon IIS 7 (Win2k8) hosting WCF and WF 4.0. But it’s more! Besides hosting WCF and WF, it also includes tooling (in the IIS management interface and Power Shell commandlets), templates in Visual Studio for deploying and a database filled with management information. (See also: BB18).

“Geneva”: an STS (Security Token Server) which allows you to extract the authentication from your applications (making it the problem of the IT professionals ). Using the Geneva Server and the Geneva Framework federation, extracting metadata about your users from diverse sources (age, shoe size etc.) becomes a matter of configuration instead of a matter of fragile hardcoded queries. (See also: BB42).

C# Futures: dynamic types, a little love from the dynamic languages for their static cousins. (See also: TL16 and TL10).

Boku: the best presentation from MSFT research, a ‘game’ which allows you to program using an Xbox controller.

“Oslo”: a language “M”, a visual modeler “Quadrant” and a repository. Everything is data, the quadrant visual modeler is stored as data in the repository. “M” (and MGrammer and MSchema) allows you to define your own DSL for your problem (e.g. music library with songs), build a grammar for it and create an object graph in memory. Quadrant is a visual modeler for your Visual DSL, which gives your end users a very rich editing experience. I did a hands on lab with “Oslo” and Dublin, modeling a WCF and WF solution and deploying it all from Quadrant, very slick! (See also: TL23 and TL31).

Windows Azure: making hosting easy and cheap. Combined with all the announced services (.NET Services, SQL Services, Access Services, Workflow Services etc.) this is a very compelling story for hosting your websites and –applications without the headaches of scaling and maintenance. (See also: ES16 and BB01).

CodeContract class: the new CodeContract class in .NET 4.0 allows you to defined pre- and post-conditions for the parameters of your methods (should never be null) and uses static analysis to verify those conditions. (This and more changes to the CLR in 4.0 see: PC49).

Expect more detailed posts about these and other subjects after my vacation.

See you at PDC 2009 (17 November 2009 – 20 November 2009).

Scott Hanselman has some great tips for cleaning up disk space under Windows Vista. The best tip is using vsp1cln.exe to remove the sp1 install files.

vsp1cln.exe - After you install Vista SP1, it leaves around the original files so you can uninstall the Service Pack if you want. After a few months with the Service Pack, I've decided for myself that it's a good thing and decided I don't need the option.
Open up an administrative command prompt. That means, click the Start Menu, type cmd.exe, then right-click on it and click "Run as Administrator." Alternatively, you can press Ctrl-Shift-Enter to run something as Administrator.
Next, type "vsp1cln" at the command prompt. If you select yes, you'll get back around 2 to 3 gigs. The only thing, again is that you can't uninstall SP1.

Last week the timeline for PDC08 was posted on the PDC site. All the sessions you previously selected, to help make a better schedule, are already added to your personal schedule. This is my schedule, based on the sessions I selected. As you can see, I have a small challenge, with 2-4 sessions at the same time, so I’m going to have some difficult choices to make.

Last week the final (25) sessions were added to the PDC Session list, making it a total of 178 sessions. I’m not sure which sessions are new or updated, so this list will not be unfamiliar to regular readers of this blog (all 5 of you).

The sessions I will try to attend, if they can schedule around my wishes, are: sessions about “Oslo”, “Zermatt”,  CLR Futures, some language sessions (C#, F#, Dynamic Languages, XAML), “Dublin” and the Parallel Symposium.

Update: I had another look at the session list today and 10 more sessions were added, making it a total of 188.

Yesterday dasBlog 2.2 (2.2.8279.16125) was released on CodePlex. This release adds OpenID for comments (and admin login), support for IIS 7 and support for custom 404 pages.

As always you can download the web- and the full install from CodePlex or get the source from repository.