Yesterday (19th Oct) the information landslide for VS2010 & TFS2010 began with a number of items appearing all over:

• First (and most important) is that BETA 2 of VS2010 is available for download to MSDN subscribers AND everyone else. For more information on that see http://microsoft.com/visualstudio/2010UltimateOffer
• Since not everyone will upgrade their development tools to VS2010 straight away, you may find yourself needing to connect VS2008 to a TFS2010 server. To enable that you need to install the forward compatibility update which you can get from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=cf13ea45-d17b-4edc-8e6c-6c5b208ec54d
• The product SKU for Visual Studio 2010 is changing in a lot of ways to make it much simpler so make sure you are up to speed on it via the whitepaper and the Ultimate Offer site (see first link).
• New product logos for Visual Studio, you can see it above (no more orange?)
• MSDN has had a major over hall and now has information targeted for developers based on location. Oh and there is a new logo for MSDN too:
• John Robbins has a great series on the new debugger features available in VS2010 beta 2:
  • VS 2010 Beta 2 Debugger In-Depth First Look
  • VS 2010 Beta 2 IntelliTrace In-Depth First Look
  • VS 2010 Beta 2 Code Analysis In-Depth First Look
  • VS 2010 Beta 2 Sampling and Instrumentation Profiling In Depth First Look
  • VS 2010 Beta 2 Concurrency Resource Profiling In Depth First Look

Two months after the event I finally get around to posting a commentary on an aspect of Tech-Ed Africa, that was so under stated that I am wondering if I attended the same event as every one else. This year Tech-Ed Africa really decided, maybe intentionally and maybe not, to be a very green event. By green I mean the whole environmental aspect. How did they do this:

1. Delegates bags - one of the highlight of Tech-Ed has always been the delegate bag, which generally I use for the whole next year. They are always great quality but this years bags are made by Owl, and almost every thing that made up the bag was from recycled materials.
2. Paper less - Missing from the bag was the usual pad of writing paper. Yes, less paper saves trees.
3. Presentation CD’s - At the end of the event you used to get a CD/DVD with all the slides on it. Not this year, all had to be downloaded later. This is great for the environment as you have less disks to make which generally don’t get used much. As a speaker this is also great since it means the deadline for getting the completed slides to the staff was much longer, so those last minute tweaks that the audience sees, now make the download.

Very interesting approach - would love to know if more was done and why it was not punted more.

I’ve been working on an interesting project recently and found that I needed two pieces of code a lot, so what better than wrapping them as snippets.

What are snippets?

Well if you start typing in VS you may see some options with a torn paper icon, if you select that and hit tab (or hit tab twice, once to select and once to invoke) it will write code for you! These are contained in .snippet files, which are just XML files in a specific location.

To deploy these snippets copy them to your C# custom snippet’s folder which should be something like C:\Users\<Username>\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets

You can look at the end of this post for a sample of what the snippets create, but lets have a quick overview of them.

Snippet 1: StructC

Visual Studio already includes a snippet for creating a struct (which is also the snippet) however it is very bland:

StructC is a more complete implementation of a struct, mainly so it complies with fxCop requirements for a struct. So it includes:

• GetHashCode method
• Both Equals methods
• The positive and negative equality operators (== and !=)
• Lots of comments

which all in all runs in at 74 lines of code, rather than the three you got previously.

Warning - the GetHashCode uses reflection to figure out a unique hash code, but this may not be best for all scenarios. Please review prior to use.

Snippet 2: Dispose

If you are implementing a class that needs to inherit IDisposable you can use the the option in VS to implement the methods.

Once again from a fxCop point of view it is lacking since you just get the Dispose method. Now instead of doing that you can use the dispose snippet which produces 41 lines of code which has:

• Region for the code - same as if you used the VS option
• Properly implemented Dispose method which calls Dispose(bool) and GC.SuppressFinalize
• A Dispose(bool) method for cleanup of managed and unmanaged objects
• A private bool variable to make sure we do not call dispose multiple times.

StructC Sample

/// <summary></summary>
struct MyStruct
{
    //TODO: Add properties, fields, constructors etc...

    /// <summary>
    /// Returns a hash code for this instance.
    /// </summary>
    /// <returns>
    /// A hash code for this instance, suitable for use in hashing algorithms and data structures like a hash table. 
    /// </returns>
    public override int GetHashCode()
    {
        int valueStorage = 0;
        object objectValue = null;
        foreach (PropertyInfo property in typeof(MyStruct).GetProperties())
        {
            objectValue = property.GetValue(this, null);
            if (objectValue != null)
            {
                valueStorage += objectValue.GetHashCode();
            }
        }

        return valueStorage;
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Determines whether the specified <see cref="System.Object"/> is equal to this instance.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="obj">The <see cref="System.Object"/> to compare with this instance.</param>
    /// <returns>
    ///     <c>true</c> if the specified <see cref="System.Object"/> is equal to this instance; otherwise, <c>false</c>.
    /// </returns>
    public override bool Equals(object obj)
    {
        if (!(obj is MyStruct))
            return false;

        return Equals((MyStruct)obj);
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Equalses the specified other.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="other">The other.</param>
    /// <returns></returns>
    public bool Equals(MyStruct other)
    {
        //TODO: Implement check to compare two instances of MyStruct
        
        return true;
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Implements the operator ==.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="first">The first.</param>
    /// <param name="second">The second.</param>
    /// <returns>The result of the operator.</returns>
    public static bool operator ==(MyStruct first, MyStruct second)
    {
        return first.Equals(second);
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Implements the operator !=.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="first">The first.</param>
    /// <param name="second">The second.</param>
    /// <returns>The result of the operator.</returns>
    public static bool operator !=(MyStruct first, MyStruct second)
    {
        return !first.Equals(second);
    }
}                

Dispose Sample

#region IDisposable Members

/// <summary>
/// Internal variable which checks if Dispose has already been called
/// </summary>
private Boolean disposed;

/// <summary>
/// Releases unmanaged and - optionally - managed resources
/// </summary>
/// <param name="disposing"><c>true</c> to release both managed and unmanaged resources; <c>false</c> to release only unmanaged resources.</param>
private void Dispose(Boolean disposing)
{
    if (disposed)
    {
        return;
    }

    if (disposing)
    {
        //TODO: Managed cleanup code here, while managed refs still valid
    }
    //TODO: Unmanaged cleanup code here

    disposed = true;
}

/// <summary>
/// Performs application-defined tasks associated with freeing, releasing, or resetting unmanaged resources.
/// </summary>
public void Dispose()
{
    // Call the private Dispose(bool) helper and indicate 
    // that we are explicitly disposing
    this.Dispose(true);

    // Tell the garbage collector that the object doesn't require any
    // cleanup when collected since Dispose was called explicitly.
    GC.SuppressFinalize(this);
}

#endregion

One of the best advantages of switching WCMS (Web Content Management System) is that I could finally switch to using Google Analytics for the statistics of the site which gives a insane amount of information for the site now. Below are some reports of the status on the site. Interesting notes:

• Big spike on the 22nd - which I think is from the MSDN Flash which included information about the site.
• Traffic is mostly direct or from search engines.
• 60% of users to the site use Internet Explorer, which is odd since you would think in IT dominated site it would be lower.
• 2% of users use a dialup :(

My latest batch of cheat sheets is out on DRP which are focused on ASP.NET MVC. So what is in this set:

ASP.NET MVC View Cheat Sheet

This focuses on the HTML Helpers, URL Helpers and so on that you would use within your views.

ASP.NET MVC Controller Cheat Sheet

This focuses on what you return from your controller and how to use them and it also includes a lot of information on the MVC specific attributes.

ASP.NET MVC Framework Cheat Sheet

This focuses on the rest of MVC like routing, folder structure, execution pipeline etc… and some info on where you can get more info (is that meta info?).

ASP.NET MVC Proven Practises Cheat Sheet

This contains ten key learnings that every ASP.NET MVC developer should know - it also includes links to the experts in this field where you can get a ton more information on those key learning's.

What are the links in the poster?

Think before you data bind
    TinyURL: http://TinyURL.com/aspnetmvcpp1
    Full URL: http://www.codethinked.com/post/2009/01/08/ASPNET-MVC-Think-Before-You-Bind.aspx

Keep the controller thin
    TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/aspnetmvcpp2
    Full URL: http://codebetter.com/blogs/ian_cooper/archive/2008/12/03/the-fat-controller.aspx

Create UrlHelper extensions
    TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/aspnetmvcpp3
    Full URL: http://weblogs.asp.net/rashid/archive/2009/04/01/asp-net-mvc-best-practices-part-1.aspx#urlHelperRoute

Keep the controller HTTP free
    TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/aspnetmvcpp4
    Full URL: http://weblogs.asp.net/rashid/archive/2009/04/01/asp-net-mvc-best-practices-part-1.aspx#httpContext

Use the OutputCache attribute
    TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/aspnetmvcpp5
    Full URL: http://weblogs.asp.net/rashid/archive/2009/04/01/asp-net-mvc-best-practices-part-1.aspx#outputCache

Plan your routes
    TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/aspnetmvcpp6
    Full URL: http://weblogs.asp.net/rashid/archive/2009/04/03/asp-net-mvc-best-practices-part-2.aspx#routing

Split your view into multiple view controls
    TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/aspnetmvcpp7
    Full URL: http://weblogs.asp.net/rashid/archive/2009/04/03/asp-net-mvc-best-practices-part-2.aspx#userControl

Separation of Concerns (1)
    TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/aspnetmvcpp8
    Full URL: http://blog.wekeroad.com/blog/asp-net-mvc-avoiding-tag-soup

Separation of Concerns (2)
    TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/aspnetmvcpp9
    Full URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns

The basics of security still apply
    TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/aspnetmvcpp10
    Full URL: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/BackToBasicsTrustNothingAsUserInputComesFromAllOver.aspx

Decorate your actions with AcceptVerb
    TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/aspnetmvcpp11
    Full URL: http://weblogs.asp.net/rashid/archive/2009/04/01/asp-net-mvc-best-pract…

PowerShell is magically powerful - besides the beautiful syntax and the commandlets there is the ability to invoke .NET code which can lead you down a horrible path of trying to do the super solution by using these, writing a few (hundred) lines of code and ignoring some old school (read: DOS) ways of solving a problem. This is similar to the case of when you only have a hammer everything is a nail - except this is the alpha developer (as in alpha male) version where you have 50 tools but 1 is newer and shiner so that is the tool you just have to use.

So with the VSTS Rangers virtualisation project we are creating a VM which is not meant for production (in fact I think I need to create a special bright pink or green wallpaper for it which has that written over it), and so we want to make it super easy for connections and the users of this VM. So one example of where the PowerShell version of the command and the DOS version is so much easier is allowing all connections in via the firewall.

So in there is a command line tool call netshell (netsh is the command) and if you just type it you get a special command prompt and can basically change every network related setting. However the genius who designed this (and it is so well designed) is that you can type a single command at a time or chain commands up in the netsh interface (which makes it easy to test) and then when you have a working solution you can provide it as a parameter to the netshell command. So to allow all connections in the command looks like:

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="Allow All In" dir=in action=allow

Once I had that - I slapped that into a PowerShell script, because PowerShell can run DOS commands and viola another script to the collection done, in 1 line :)

Another example of this is that I need the machine hostname for a number of things that I use in PowerShell and in DOS there is a create command called hostname. Well you can easily combine that with PowerShell by assigning it to a variable:

$hostname = hostname

Now I can just use $hostname anywhere in PowerShell and all works well.

Two days into the new S.A. Architect site and what's been happening?

• Added Willie Roberts to the community leads page - please blame me for forgetting to have him there in the first place.
• Got our first hosted blogger - Bramzer! Very keen to see what content he provides.
• Profile images are disabled - we having a technical issue with them which I hope to fix in the next week.
• Seeing more traffic than usual for a weekend on the site, which is in part due to the mails and so on, but more than that people are making use of things like the contact forms and so on! This is really great to see.

If you have suggestions or ideas on how to improve the site going forward, I'm looking at those two people who voted the site is average :) please let me know!

As Willy-Peter pointed out, a lot of my evenings have been filled with a type of visual cloud computing, that being PowerShell’s white text on a blue (not quiet azure) background that make me think of clouds for the purpose of automating the virtual machines that the VSTS Rangers are building.

So how are we doing this? Well there is a great team involved, it’s not just me and there are a few key scripts we are trying build which should come as no surprise it’s configuration before and after you install VSTS/VS/Required software, tailoring of the environment and installing software.

The Structure

So how have structured this? Well since each script is developed by a team of people I didn’t want to have one super script that everyone is working on and fighting conflicts and merges all day and yet at the same time I don’t want to ship 100 scripts that do small functions and call each other - I want to ship one script but have development done on many. So how are we doing that? Step one was to break down the tasks of a script into functions, assign them to people and assign a number to them - like this:

*Note this is close to reality, but the names have been changed to protect the innocent team members and tasks at this point.

And out of that people produce the scripts in the smallest way and they name them beginning with the reference number - so I get a bunch of files like:

• 2015-InstallSQL.ps1
• 2020-InstallWSS.ps1
• 2025-InstallVSTS.ps1

The Build Script

These all go into a folder and then I wrote another PowerShell script which combines them into a super script which is what is used. The build script is very simply made up of a number PowerShell commands that get the content and outputs it to a file, which looks like:

Get-Content .\SoftwareInstall\*.ps1 | Out-File softwareInstall.ps1

That handles the combining of the scripts and the reference number keeps the order of the scripts correct.

As an aside I didn’t use PowerShell for the build script originally, I used the old school style DOS copy command - however it had a few bugs.

The Numbering

What’s up with that numbering you may ask? Well for those younger generation who never coded with line numbers and GOTO statements it may seem weird to leave gaps in the numbering and should rather have sequential numbering - but what happens when someone realises we have missed something? Can you image going to each file after that and having to change numbers -EEK! So leaving gaps is leaving the ability to deal with mistakes in a non-costly way.

Next why I am starting with 1015? Well each script is given a 1000 numbers (so pre install would be 1000, software install 2000 etc…) so that I can look at script and know what it’s for and if it’s in the wrong place. I start at 15 as 00, 05 and 10 are already taken:

• 00 - Header. The header for the file explaining what it is.
• 05 - Functions. Common functions for all scripts.
• 10 - Introduction. This is a bit of text that will be written to the screen explaining the purpose of the script and ending with a pause. The pause is important because if you ran the wrong script you can hit Ctrl+C at that point and nothing will have been run.

So that is part I. In future parts I will be looking at some of the scripts and learning's I have been getting.

Update 11 August 2011: Want this as an app for your smartphone? Click here

Update 30 March 2012: Details of the racial identifier can be found at: http://www.sadev.co.za/content/south-african-id-numbers-racial-identifier-flag

Cecil Tshikedi asked a great question - what is actually in an ID number:

• The first six numbers are the birth date of the person in YYMMDD format - so no surprise that my ID number starts 820716.
• The next four are a gender, 5000 and above is male and below 5000 is female. So my ID number would have a number of 5000 or greater.
• The next number is the country ID, 0 is South Africa and 1 is not. My ID number with have 0 here.
• The second last number used to be a racial identifier but now means nothing.
• The last number is a check bit. Which verifies the rest of the number.

So for my ID number it would look something like: 820716[5000-9999]0??

There you go, it’s that easy.

[Note: See the series index for a list of all parts in this series.]

In part III we looked the interesting part of Excel, Shared Strings, which is just a central store for unique values that the actual spreadsheet cells can map to. Now how do we take that data and combine it with the sheet to get the values?

What makes up a sheet?

First lets look at what a sheet looks like in the package:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?> 
<worksheet xmlns="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/spreadsheetml/2006/main" xmlns:r="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/officeDocument/2006/relationships" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="x14ac" xmlns:x14ac="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/spreadsheetml/2008/2/ac">
<dimension ref="A1:A4" /> 
<sheetViews>
<sheetView tabSelected="1" workbookViewId="0">
<selection activeCell="A5" sqref="A5" /> 
</sheetView>
</sheetViews>
<sheetFormatPr defaultRowHeight="15" x14ac:dyDescent="0.25" /> 
<sheetData>
<row r="1" spans="1:1" x14ac:dyDescent="0.25">
<c r="A1" t="s">
<v>0</v> 
</c>
</row>
<row r="2" spans="1:1" x14ac:dyDescent="0.25">
<c r="A2" t="s">
<v>1</v> 
</c>
</row>
<row r="3" spans="1:1" x14ac:dyDescent="0.25">
<c r="A3" t="s">
<v>2</v> 
</c>
</row>
<row r="4" spans="1:1" x14ac:dyDescent="0.25">
<c r="A4" t="s">
<v>3</v> 
</c>
</row>
</sheetData>
<pageMargins left="0.7" right="0.7" top="0.75" bottom="0.75" header="0.3" footer="0.3" /> 
</worksheet>

Well there is a lot to understand in the XML, but for now we care about the <row> (which is the rows in our speadsheet) and within that the cells which the first one looks like:

<c r="A1" t="s">
<v>0</v> 
</c>

First that t=”s” attribute is very important, it tells us the value is stored in the shared strings. Then the index to the shared string is in the v node, in this example it is index 0. It is also important to note the r attribute for both rows and cells contains the position in the sheet.

As an aside what would this look like if we didn’t use shared strings?

<c r="A1">
<v>Some</v> 
</c>

The v node contains the actual value now and we no longer have the t attribute on the c node.

The foundation code for parsing the data

Now that we understand the structure and we have this Dictionary<int,string> which contains the shared strings we can combine them - but first we need a class to store the data in, then we need to get to the right worksheet part and a way to parse the column and row info, once we have that we can parse the data.

Before we read the data, we need a simple class to put the info into:

public class Cell
{
    public Cell(string column, int row, string data)
    {
        this.Column = column;
        this.Row = row;
        this.Data = data;
    }

    public override string ToString()
    {
       return string.Format("{0}:{1} - {2}", Row, Column, Data);
    }

    public string Column { get; set; }
    public int Row { get; set; }
    public string Data { get; set; }
}

How do we find the right worksheet? In the same way as we did get the shared strings in part II.

private static XElement GetWorksheet(int worksheetID, PackagePartCollection allParts)
{
   PackagePart worksheetPart = (from part in allParts
                                 where part.Uri.OriginalString.Equals(String.Format("/xl/worksheets/sheet{0}.xml", worksheetID))
                                 select part).Single();

    return XElement.Load(XmlReader.Create(worksheetPart.GetStream()));
}

How do we know the column and row? Well the c node has that in the r attribute. We’ll pull that data out as part of getting the data, we just need a small helper function which tells us were the column part ends and the row part begins. Thankfully that is easy since rows are always numbers and columns always letters. The function looks like this:

private static int IndexOfNumber(string value)
{
    for (int counter = 0; counter < value.Length; counter++)
    {
        if (char.IsNumber(value[counter]))
        {
            return counter;
        }
    }
    return 0;
}

Finally - we get the data!

We got the worksheet, then we got the cells using LINQ to XML and then we looped over them in a foreach loop. We then got the location from the r attribute - split it into columns and rows using our helper function and then grabbed the index, which we then go to the shared strings object and retrieve the value. The following code puts all those bits together and should go in your main method:

    List<Cell> parsedCells = new List<Cell>();

    XElement worksheetElement = GetWorksheet(1, allParts);

    IEnumerable<XElement> cells = from c in worksheetElement.Descendants(ExcelNamespaces.excelNamespace + "c")
                                  select c;

    foreach (XElement cell in cells)
    {
        string cellPosition = cell.Attribute("r").Value;
        int index = IndexOfNumber(cellPosition);
        string column = cellPosition.Substring(0, index);
        int row = Convert.ToInt32(cellPosition.Substring(index, cellPosition.Length - index));
        int valueIndex = Convert.ToInt32(cell.Descendants(ExcelNamespaces.excelNamespace +  "v").Single().Value);

        parsedCells.Add(new Cell(column, row, sharedStrings[valueIndex]));
    }

And finally we get a list back with  all the data in a sheet!