Rod Paddock

Using Windows Authentication with ASP.NET Web Services

2008-05-22T21:55:00Z

This is a simple placeholder so I have a place to look for this code again.

exec sp_grantlogin 'SERVERNAME\ASPNET'

exec sp_grantlogin 'NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE'

use forum

sp_revokedbaccess 'NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE'

sp_grantdbaccess 'NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE', 'forumuser'

Unlearn

2008-05-09T13:37:00Z

“You must unlearn what you have learned.” Yoda to Luke Skywalker Empire Strikes Back 1981 I have become convinced that we are entering a new dawn of software development and we must take time to unlearn that which we know. Over the last 2 months I have been researching building business applications using Silverlight 2.0. In case you don’t know Silverlight 2.0 is a tool used to build Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) Silverlight 1.1 (released in 2007) gave us a small glimpse of the future of RIA...(read more)

DevTeach Toronto 2008 = Agile Immersion

2008-04-29T17:30:00Z

If you want a good general immersion in Agile practices look no further than DevTeach ( www.devteach.com ) Last DevTeach (in Vancouver) I sat through a number of Agile sessions with a fellow development partner. This parter had virtually no experience with Agile practices. After DevTeach we began discussions on implementing Agile practices in his 15+ developer shop. It was good for him to hear from other developers about their experiences with Agile. So if you want to get your management, developers...(read more)

OT: SilverLight 2.0 = iPhone SDK

2008-03-06T17:08:00Z

Maybe it's just a coincidence but I am thinking its not. I am at MIX 08 in Las Vegas and am eagerly awating today's keynote with Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki. Funny thing is the whole timing of it all.... 1. Apple's iPhone SDK Meeting is at 1:00pm Pacific 2. MIX 08 Keynote is at 1:00pm Pacific. 3. Guy Kawasaki is the former evangelist for Apple. Heck he started the whole software/hardware platform concept. 4. Silverlight is a full functioned player on the Apple. 5. Steve Jobs hates Flash http:...(read more)

Public Speaking Anti Patterns

2008-02-13T01:24:00Z

Public Speaking Anti-Patterns

Last week fellow CodeBetter blogger Kyle Baley wrote a blog topic called “Presentation Topics” (http://codebetter.com/blogs/kyle.baley/archive/2008/02/08/presentation-tips.aspx)

He did a good job of presenting a number of useful tips for speaking. Well I am going take a shot here and point out a few bad habits that some of my fellow presenters have developed over the years that do nothing but piss me off because they should know better.

1. SHUT UP AND LISTEN – I cannot tell you how many speakers I have seen that interrupt questions from the audience.

If you are going to allow questions in your sessions you need to shut up, listen, and let the person asking the question finish. Don’t interrupt!!!! Don’t ASSume you know what the rest of the question is.

2. REPEAT THE QUESTION – Whenever a question is asked: Repeat it out loud. That dude in the back probably didn’t hear the question from the front row.

You need to be courteous to your audience and let them know what is happening.

3. MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHAT THE QUESTION IS - If you don’t know what the question means or don’t understand it here’s a tip: Say this to the questioner: “Can you say that another way?” This will help you understand what they are really asking.

4. LESS IS MORE – If you have 60 slides for a 60 minute session you are not going to get to the end.

5. DON’T WRITE A BOOK – Slides are supposed to be outlines not dissertations. See #4.

6. DON’T UPGRADE YOUR MACHINE - The week/day/hour/minute before your session is not the time to install that new alpha, beta, omega version.

Just because that beta is ready doesn’t mean your session is. If you do this you deserve to have your *** break.

7. DON’T MAKE EXCUSES - If stuff breaks in your session it’s your fault. You didn’t prepare properly. See #6 about upgrades.

8. DO THE JULIA CHILD – Ever watch cooking shows. They always have one that’s done and ready to serve. You should have a copy of your sample code that runs perfectly.

If your demo breaks you can always go to that copy.

9. ARRIVE EARLY, SIT IN BACK – When you give a session you need to arrive early and check the lighting, sound, projection, etc in the room. All rooms are not created equally.

Check your colors, fonts, etc. Set up your machine with code on it and go sit in the last row. Can you read it? If not adjust accordingly.

10. ONE FOR THE AGILE DUDES- You need to have an outline of what you are going cover. In specifically titled sessions you need to have it planned and not do ad-hoc sessions.

11. FINISH ON TIME - At the last conference I attended there were a number of sessions that ran way long. Don’t do this!!! It’s RUDE! It’s RUDE to the attendee,

RUDE to the conference coordinators and the RUDE to the next speaker.

12. AND FINALLY ----- Don’t Ever Ask: “How much time do we have left” – This is my BIGGEST pet peave. You might think it’s cute. It’s not… If you ask this in a session you are a total complete idiot.

If you want the real answer to this question here it is: “Here Mr./Ms./Mrs. speaker let me look in the conference brochure and see what time the session with YOUR FREAKING NAME

on it is supposed to start and end.” Asking this question is unprofessional and silly. Get the point?

I hope this lists helps you as a speaker and attendee.

Microsoft Team Systems - Open Source Alternatives

2007-12-14T14:21:00Z

I am heading to a client next week to see a demo of Microsoft Team Systems. My client got a preliminary prices for implementing Team Systems. Needless to say. Its not cheap.... I want to have a good list of open source tools that will provide the same functionality as Team Systems. Maybe we can all contribute to a feature by feature list of open source tools and use this as a reference for later... Here's a starting list Testing - Nuniut CI - Cruise Control Build System - Nant Version Control - SubVersion...(read more)

AltNetConf Day2 - Agile and MVC Goodness

2007-10-07T12:03:00Z

Day 2 went great. The group gathered for some opening remarks and immediately went into sessions.

I was a participant in a discussion group where we discussed:

Introducing Agile/Alt.Net into the work place

Passion for Agile/Alt.Net

Pragmatic a Agile/Alt.Net

Being a catalyst for Agile/Alt.Net

The room was fairly full and some great conversations took place. Here are some of the ideas thrown out and recorded in my trusty Mead notebook:

JP Boodhoo http://www.jpboodhoo.com/blog/ started with “Passion does not necessarily incite action.” We discussed the concept that just because you are passionate you still need to take action. Passion for passions sake doesn’t do anything.

One mechanism for facilitating agile adoption is to arrive with a solution in hand. Scott Bellware is famous for saying you won’t understand until you do it. There is some truth to this. Agile is difficult to explain. It’s easier to see a readily provided solution.

Another idea is to do a month of iterations and use this as a basis for examining agile success.

Some stuff to look at:

The Agile Contract

The Pragmatic Programmer

21 Laws of Leadership

Success is always easy to sell twice.

You may need to introduce agile at a ground level. Start with one developer. Teach them. Have them teach too.

Try lunch and learns.

More stuff to look into

Resharper

Continuious Integration

Cruise Control

Maybe you just need to do agile on a project and show the results after the fact. Returns to the statement: “success is easy to sell twice”.

That was just my notes from session 1.

Now on to Behavior Driven Development

This intent of this session IMO was to discuss what BDD is and how to use it in your development process. I am not convinced that this session was successful as it seemed to degrade immediately.

The meeting was started off with three moderators discussing their POV of POV. It was never made clear what the hell BDD really is. The presenters should have started off defining what BDD is. Each person pretty much immediately jumped in discussing their favorite tools for doing BDD

In any case this session did provide me with some ideas.

BDD to me looks like a way to gather requirements (stories) in a standardized way then being able to take those requirements and generate programming and acceptance tests.

Scott Bellware shows a tool called Rspec that takes requirements from Ruby code (I believe) and puts them into a friendly/easy to read web interface. The thing that struck me as cool was the way in which requirements were spelled out. Stuff like:

Registrants will receive an e-mail

When signing up the registrant will be required to provide an e-mail address.

The thing that I liked was the way they documented requirements. The language used was very cool.

Another moderator showed his tool for recording stories. This persons’ tool showed a nice structure for recording requirements (stories) in a structured way. You can then generate testing artifacts from there system.

I am not sure if this was the theme or intent. But I did come up with a concept that I would love to explore.

How do we gather requirements in a more formalized and standard way? Language is important.

MVC and DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) Goodness

The next sessions that I attended were the MVC and DLR Goodness sessions.

ScottGu gave a kick ass session showing the new MVC framework. I am not going to write about what we saw as numerous other bloggers have done so. Let’s just say this is a cool framework and I cannot wait to play with it in a couple of weeks.

After ScottGu was done Scott Hanselman gave a good session on how DLR’s will be implemented in the new MVC framework. I have never written a line of Python or Ruby so this was an interesting session from that angle.

One thing I liked was that he showed the concepts surrounding creating your own Viewer in the new MVC framework. I can definitely see using the MVC framework when we implement WPF in our shop.

I am VERY impressed with what the Scott’s. Contrary to other opinions Microsoft seems to get this area and is taking ACTION. (See theme above <G>)

One side note: When ScottGu gets Ray Ozzies job. Scott Bellware will go work at Microsoft for ScottGu. I was there when it was said. I have witnesses <G>

AltNetConf Day 1 - Fishbowls Rock!

2007-10-06T12:04:00Z

OK so I am a newbie to Agile practices and this “conference” is a great place to become immersed in all that is Agile.

Last night was very interesting. Over 100 people gathered in one room to create this conference. The meeting started a definition of alt.net and Open Spaces. The definition of Open Spaces is:

Whoever shows up is the right group. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have. Whenever it starts is the right time. When it's over, it's over.

A definition of bumblebees vs. butterflies was discussed. Are you a bumblebee or a butterfly? Bumblebees go from one room to another landing and pollinating. Butterflies find a warm spot in the sun and take in their surroundings. You can also take on different roles because of the rule of two feet:

If you feel you aren’t learning or contributing you are encouraged to use the rule of two feet. Get up and move to another place.

So after a briefing on the “rules” 100+ people introduced themselves. Lots of people from lots of places with very diverse goals for this gathering. Scott Hanselman http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ had one of the best intros:

Hi, I’m Scott Hanselman I hope to bring my entire 3 weeks of experience at MSFT to this meeting. My goal is to find out what we do so bad that it started a movement.

Scott and Scott (Guthrie that is: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/) are here to join the conversation. This is a great thing. Of all the people I know from MSFT that listen these two dudes do.

After the intros we learned about the concept of a fishbowl meeting. I tell you what this was one of the coolest concepts I have participated in. Basically 5 or 6 chairs are put in front of the room. One chair is left empty the others are filled with members of the meeting. The topic that started it all was what does alt.net mean to you. And then it begins. The people in the chairs begin the discussing putting for the there points. When someone wants to contribute they take the empty chair, the person that has been in a chair longest gets up. The discussion continues. There is a constant rotation of people sitting, giving a POV or comment, and getting up. I don’t know if I did this justice but a lot of cool ideas were discussed and it was rather fun.

After the completion of the fishbowl the agenda was set. While the fishbowl was going on people were able to take 6*9 post it pads and write down an ideas for things they would like to see or discuss. Immediately after the fishbowl people with session ideas stood up and presented their idea and put that idea on grid with rooms and time slots. I think there were over 50 post its on the board. Not too bad for 100 people.

After the agenda was put on the board people “voted” for the sessions they wanted to see by putting their initials on the post it note. During the “voting process” endless hours of conversations happened. I was definitely a bumblebee. I flew from one small gathering to the next. From looking at a new MVC model being shown by ScottGu , discussions of UI testing with Jeremy Miller, meeting the new editor of MSDN Magazine and countless others. This meeting is off to a great start.

The one thing that drew me to this conference was the people. This is a real community of greate people sharing great ideas. This was not a fabricated community but one that formed like all great communities do: IT JUST HAPPENED.

Now it’s off to Day 2

My First TDD Dividend(s)

2007-10-05T12:03:00Z

It’s now 6:30am here in Austin, TX and my first forays into TDD have paid their first real dividends.

Roy Osherove (http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/) and I spent a couple of hours yesterday going over my system framework/architecture, installing nUnit and Test Driven.NET. We wrote one very simple contrived test and then left for BBQ with our bud Scott Bellware.

So it’s 4:00 am and I cannot sleep so I get up, do some client work and then return to so some tests on my own. So I refactored my customer business object. I added a rule to check that the last name is filled in. Then I wrote another test. The goal of this test was to make sure my validation engine worked and returned the proper error conditions.

So I ran the test and it failed. I’m like what? This should have worked. Why didn’t my rule(s) fire? So I looked into the framework code and low and behold. Looks like I never finished wiring in our new validation rules engine.

BINGO: Dividend 1 paid. We now need to finish wiring in the new validation engine.

So now I returned to making the test pass. I had a hook point where I could wire in manual calls to the validation engine. So I did that and restarted the test. Boom another failure. Now what happened? We have a set of code the integrity of the data being returned. Well when we have a data validation error we don’t return that data. Nice thing is that this section of the application is created via code-gen. I simply changed the script to test for the error condition. Now our test passed.

BINGO: Dividend 2 paid. We needed to fix some of our codegen templates.

So with just a few simple tests I found two very significant bugs in our framework. It’s nice to see that this stuff pays off so quickly.

The nice thing is that now I am confident that this stuff pays great dividends (and very quickly I might add). Also it’s great to see that it CAN be implemented against our framework.

In Austin, TX for Alt.Net Conference

2007-10-04T12:55:00Z

I flew in yesterday from Seattle to attend the Alt.Net conference (http://www.altnetconf.com) I am here early because I am working with Roy Osherove (http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/) to see how we can implement more Agile practices in our framework/architecture.

Our framework/architecture is rather non-standard and breaks lots of “rules”

1. We do all our database access via stored procedures

2. We pass datasets over the wire to our service layers.

3. These datasets are un-typed datasets.

4. We use a combined data access and business rules class.

Our framework/architecture has a lot of cool features though:

1. Works well with windows and web applications using an MVC style controller.

2. Is very scalable (we have some sites with a million+ users)

3. Does a lot of legwork with templates and code generation.

4. Is fairly easy to use and grok.

5. It has room for growth and improvement.

My goals for this weekend:

1. Figure out how to implement TDD using our architecture

2. Gather ideas on how we could move our framework forward

3. To hang out with the cool kidz coming to AltNetConf

4. To learn how other Agile techniques might work in our development environments.

5. To have fun!

So I am here and if you want get in touch for dinner, Guinness, BBQ or just to hang…. Give me a ring 253 906 2342

.NET Framework Code To Be Released

2007-10-03T16:59:00Z

We will finally have access to the .NET Framework source code...

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx

It will be great to use something other than Reflector to see what the heck is going on in there.

Spelunking Silverlight Article Published

2007-09-18T23:26:00Z

I just received word Part 1 of my Spelunking Silverlight article was published on the VB DevCenter!

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/default.aspx

Accessing External Assemblies from SQL Server CLR Stored Procedures

2007-09-13T22:31:00Z

Accessing External Assemblies from SQL Server CLR Stored Procedures

In the last couple of weeks I have been working on a specialized set of CLR Stored procedures for communicating with a mainframe via an ODBC driver. Each CLR stored proc will send an SQL query to the server and then dump the results of that query into a SQL Server table. There will be around 50 CLR stored procedures used to do this.

During this process I created an abstract class. This abstract class would be the basis for each CLR stored procedure. Because of the nature of CLR stored procedures (they are all shared/static functions) I had to create a new class for each mainframe call and then instantiate that from a separate CLR stored proc.

The code is like this:

<Microsoft.SqlServer.Server.SqlProcedure()> _
Public Shared Sub CardholderNamesCLR(ByVal cAcctNo As String)

Dim oTest As New CardHolderNamesLib

oTest.cAcctNo = cAcctNo

oTest.RunProc()

End Sub

From the code you can see that I create an instance of the CardHolderNamesLib class which inherits from my abstract class. This was all fine and good when all my concrete classes and abstract class existed in the same assembly.

So after creating two or three of these classes the client came back to me and said: “We want to put each class and CLR stored proc in its own assembly. Note I said that my abstract and concrete classes existed in the same assembly.

To a .NET programmer this would be simple. Just create new assembly and reference it from each CLR stored proc assembly. No problem right? Well… I wouldn’t be writing this post if it was that easy.

So I created an external assembly… Went to my CLR stored procedure project and tried adding my assembly. Right clicked on my project…selected Add Reference and…. The list was rather limited:

As you can see there’s no real way to add a reference to an external assembly.

Well I did what all good developers do. I hit Google and after consulting numerous blogs and MSDN pages there I found no answer to my question.

Well today I found my answer…by accident actually but I found it….

After deploying an assembly to my SQL Server I returned to my project and went to add a reference to one of the built in assemblies and what did I see. The assembly I had just deployed was there in the reference list. Bingo! Now I could add a reference to an “external” assembly. The only requirement is the “external” assembly must be “pre-deployed” to the server.

So I created a new SQL Server project from Visual Studio, added my abstract class and deployed that assembly to the server. Then I returned to my CLR stored procedure, went to the Add Reference dialog and there it was my assembly was included in the list of assemblies.

After this it was pretty simple to refactor all my code using the abstract class contained in my "external" assembly. The funny thing about this was the total lack of posts about this subject. I guess the concept of abstract classes, concrete classes and inheritance has not made it far into the SQL Server world.

MSDN Canada Speaking Engagements and INETA

2007-09-11T13:37:00Z

I have a couple of speaking engagements coming up in British Columbia.

Tuesday October 9^th, 2007

Vancouver BC

http://www.netbc.ca/DNCal/NetBcEvents.aspx

Silverlight Adventures

At MIX 07 in Las Vegas Microsoft released a new web development platform known as Silverlight. This session will demonstrate a number of features of Silverlight.

Come prepared to learn: How to create a basic Silverlight application, how to control the Browser DOM with Silverlight, how to retrieve data into your Silverlight application using web services and finally how to send data to your web services from Silverlight. You should walk away from this session with a good understanding of the capabilities and limitations of Silverlight.

Wed October 10^th, 2007

Victoria, BC

http://vicdotnet.org/Default.aspx

Ajaxing Your Applications

Last Year Microsoft released a set of ASP.NET Ajax extensions. These extensions enable you to add Web 2.0 Style features to your ASP.NET Applications with little or no effort. In this session you will learn how to create new ASP.NET Ajax applications, how to incorporate Ajax into existing ASP.NET applications, what happens when you incorporate Ajax features into your web forms and overall how you can make your web forms smoother and more interactive. You will also learn how to incorporate the controls provided by the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit.

November 26 to 30th

DevTeach

www.devteach.com

INETA Bound

Also some good news… Last week I became an INETA speaker. I look forward to speaking at more user groups around the country and potentially the world. Thanks for all of those who helped make that happen.

Fiddler to the Rescue

2007-09-03T19:58:00Z

Fiddler to the Rescue Last week I was working on a Sliverlight 1.1 article for the Visual Basic DevCenter ( http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/default.aspx ) and ran into some problems making my Silverlight application communicate with a web service I included in my examples. After some discussion with Rick Strahl ( www.west-wind.com/weblog ) he told me to use Fiddler to diagnose my problem. Fiddler is a free HTTP sniffer that can be found at http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/ Fiddler is a...(read more)