A colleague of mine and I attended the .NET Developer Days conference this year. It was my third time participating; he was there for the first time. Here are links to the complete agenda and the pre-con workshops. My personal conference schedule Wednesday, October 18th Programming ASP.NET MVC Core (abstract) Dino Esposito @github Thursday, October 19th Surviving Microservices (abstract) Michele Leroux Bustamante – Opening Keynote Build Web Apps the “Progressive” Way (300) (abstract) Jeff Burtoft @github Async/Await and the Task Parallel Library: await headexplosion (400) (abstract) Daniel Marbach @github Setting up a CI/CD pipeline for a Containerized Project in VSTS (200) (abstract) Maciej Misztal – Sponsor Session Adding History to CRUD (400) (abstract) Dino Esposito Software Architecture That Every Developer Should Know (300) (abstract) Alon Fliess Building for the Future without Abandoning the Past (200) (abstract) Jeff Burtoft Friday, October 20th Performance that pays off (300) (abstract) Szymon Kulec @github The Performance Investigator’s Field Guide (300) (abstract) Sasha Goldshtein Building Evolutionary Architectures (300) (abstract) Neal Ford Securing .NET applications in Azure (300) (abstract) Sebastian Solnica – Sponsor Session How I Built An Open-Source Debugger (300) (abstract) Sasha Goldshtein Stories Every Developer Should Know (abstract) Neal Ford – Closing Keynote Random notes about the conference Predominant Topic Microservices are everywhere – this is my take on it Best Session The Performance Investigator's Field Guide – here I've shared my impressions Catering Inter Bankiet delivered fantastic food and drinks, including lots of good coffee and sandwiches Event Venue EXPO XXI, Warsaw – a good place for the conference, a few walking minutes from Warszawa Zachodnia Summary The 2017 edition of the .NET Developer Days was a success. I still have to process my notes and all the input I've gathered there. I will update my personal conference schedule with links to my own digest posts of the sessions where it makes sense. If you want to attend the 2018 edition, you will be able to catch a super early bird ticket from the beginning of December! Happy conferencing!

When I validate forms, I usually don't want the user to allow to enter only whitespace in any of the text fields that I deem required. With a handful of them, checking for that condition can be annoying. Let me introduce you to… TrimTextBox! To centralize the concern to trim padding whitespace from text inputs, I simply derived from the built-in TextBox class and overrode a single property – Text: With this simple piece of code my backend validation logic can now focus on the business rules, e.g. a minimum length of one character, without having to worry about leading, trailing, or only whitespace in any input field. Don't Repeat Yourself – Keep it DRY Whenever I encounter a piece of code that repeats more than once, I try and refactor that code away to make it reusable and sometimes even to completely hide a certain aspect of it from the current context so that when reading a block of code I can decide whether I want to dive deeper into the nitty gritty details or just get an overview of the workflow I'm looking at. This saves my brain some precious resources ;-) I wonder what other use cases you can come up with where a specialized control can make your developer life simpler :-) Happy coding (subclassing)!

Two days ago I finally did it: I asked a question on serverfault.com looking for advice on why our brand new server performs more poorly than our two older servers. All the hardware details speak in favor of the new server: CPU: Core i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz vs. Xeon E3-1230 @ 3.2 GHz RAM: 32 GB vs. 16 GB Drives: 2x SSD vs. 2x SATA But in reality, the older servers with the lower spec outperformed the new server by almost a factor of two! That is to say, for every 1 Request/sec processed the new server needed 4.5 % Processor time compared to 2.6 % on the old server. Here's a PerfMon screenshot of the new server: New CPUs are really good at saving energy… … actually so good, that they will rarely bother to hurry up until you really, really stress them out. Here's a good read by Brent Ozar on an energy serving CPU that would cause certain SQL queries to run two times slower on newer hardware than on the old one! That's exactly what's been happening to us. Power Plan: From Balanced to High Performance That brings us to: Power Plans. Windows Server and Client OSes come installed with several Power Plans, and it just so happened that the new server we had ordered with Windows Server 2012 R2 installed had its Power Plan set to Balanced (Recommended). Well, that might be a good choice for the server hoster as it helps keep the electricity bills down but it's absolutely not a good choice if you want your applications to perform well on that server. They will simply be a lot slower than the could be. So, open the Power Options window by typing "Power Plan" into the start menu or Windows search and check the High Performance radio button: After doins so on that new server, PerfMon would show this much more soothing picture: Now, we have only 1,5% Processing Time per 1 Request/sec processed. That's an improvement of factor 3. Nice! Lesson Learned I've learned that I'm not that good of a sys admin, yet. I had been contemplating on the reasons of the poor performance of that new server of ours again and again, I had checked all kinds of settings inside IIS, ASP.NET, and the like. Those are the areas I work in day-to-day. Turns out, I needed to widen my horizon. Thanks to serverfault.com I did. And our server is at last performing as it should. Happy administrating!

This is a short overview post on OWIN, which (I quote from its homepage) […] defines a standard interface between .NET web servers and web applications. The goal of the OWIN interface is to decouple server and application, encourage the development of simple modules for .NET web development, and, by being an open standard, stimulate the open source ecosystem of .NET web development tools. In other words, the OWIN specification aims to put an end to monolithic solutions like ASP.NET WebForms or even ASP.NET MVC in favor of creating smaller, more lightweight application components that can be chained together to configure an application that does exactly what the author intends it to do – and nothing more. In addition, OWIN simplifies development of alternative web servers that can substitute IIS, e.g. Nowin, or Helios, a promising .NET server alternative on top of IIS but without the heavy, 15-year old System.Web monolith (here's a good review of Helios by Rick Strahl). Katana is a Microsoft project that contains OWIN-compatible components… […] for building and hosting OWIN-based web applications. For an overview of Katana look here. The Katana architecture can be found on the right and promotes exchangeability of components on each layer. It turns out that ASP.NET vNEXT (github repo here) continues the work that has been done by Microsoft in that direction. Here's an enlightening quote by David Fowler, development lead on the ASP.NET team: vNext is the successor to Katana (which is why they look so similar). Katana was the beginning of the break away from System.Web and to more modular components for the web stack. You can see vNext as a continuation of that work but going much further (new CLR, new Project System, new http abstractions). The future of ASP.NET looks bright – especially for developers! Check out my last post on ASP.NET vNEXT and Docker, too.

It's been an impressive year so far in the realms of software development and deployment, especially with ASP.NET vNEXT enabling per-application bundling of not only the .NET runtime but even the CLR needed for your app Docker standardizing the software delivery process by use of Linux containers (runs on Windows in a VM), (here's A Docker ‘Hello World' With Mono) and now Microsoft announcing native Docker Support for Windows Server Now, it took me a while to understand that we're witnesses of nothing less than a revolution in software development. The Vision: Build Your App Anywhere, Bundle It, and Run It Anywhere (Else) The clouds have been with us for a couple of years now and have started to provide real benefit beyond "moving your stuff to somewhere else". What's emerging now, with Docker and also the new ASP.NET runtime bundling, is something completely new: Application Containers. They don't have either specific OS requirements – Docker will be supported natively on Windows Server soon, ASP.NET runs on Linux today – nor need they a specific technology stack installed on the target machine (as with PaaS) because they bring all of the necessary runtime along. But they're also not large VMs bundled with your application, which carry a significant maintenance overhead (when using IaaS). Virtualized application containers are the sweet spot between IaaS and PaaS. Go ahead and read that post – it's eye-opening.

I'm currently attending the first .NET Developer Days conference in Wrocław, Poland, and will put up a few posts with my notes from some of the sessions I was able to attend. The conference took place from 14.10. to 16.10.2014 in the Wrocław Stadium. Here's a list of all posts (I'll update the links as soon as I finish a given post): Visual Studio 2013 Hidden Gems ASP.NET vNEXT SQL Server Data Tools: An Intro Continuous Deployment WebAPI, OData There's already been a lot of input and the third day is still ahead of me! I hope I'll be able to update the above list soon. Happy Coding!

Recently, we at teamaton decided to take a break from Camping.Info and discoverize to dive into something new. We wanted to breathe some fresh air, open our eyes and minds for a world outside of our day-to-day development stack of ASP.NET. During the process we also wanted to check out some tools, frameworks, environments that we'd heard of or read about but hadn't found the time to really take a closer look at. One of these was Meteor. What's Meteor about The elevator pitch on meteor.com reads like this: Meteor is an open-source platform for building top-quality web apps in a fraction of the time, whether you're an expert developer or just getting started. I really encourage you, dear Reader, to check out the Meteor site and take a look at what's waiting for you. I really liked what I found there: Pure JavaScript. Live page updates. Hot Code Pushes. Fully self-contained application bundles. And more. That's stuff, .NET developers aren't used to. Setting up Meteor on Windows [Note: Before proceeding, please have a look at Meteor's Supported Platforms page just to make sure you're not missing out on anything new.] This part took me about 2h to get right, so I took notes to save my colleagues or anyone else interested some precious time. I basically followed this comprehensive guide (and I encourage you to do the same) but made a few adjustments. [A word of warning: Running my first out of the box sample failed and that's where I stopped.] Install Git and add C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\bin to your PATH variable Download and install VirtualBox > 4.3.12 from here: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads Download and install Vagrant >= 1.6.3 from here: http://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html Install the ChefDK from here: http://downloads.getchef.com/chef-dk/windows/ Now start a command line and run: vagrant plugin install vagrant-berkshelf --plugin-version ">= 2.0.1" vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest vagrant plugin install vagrant-omnibus Create C:\vagrant and cd into it, then call: git clone git://github.com/shoebappa/vagrant-meteor-windows.git meteor Edit C:\vagrant\meteor\Vagrantfile to use a new virtual machine image (the old one wouldn't work with Meteor's current version):  In line 8, set: config.vm.box = "trusty64" In line 10, set: config.vm.box_url = "http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/vagrant/trusty/current/trusty-server-cloudimg-amd64-vagrant-disk1.box" In Iine 36, use a different name for your first app Go to C:\vagrant\meteor and initiate Vagrant (will take a while): vagrant up Now start your app by: cd C:\vagrant\meteor vagrant ssh cd /vagrant/mymeteorapp mrt run Running the app threw a NullReferenceException (or something alike) at me that was triggered from somewhere inside a javascript file – I don't remember exactly where. I tried fiddling around with it for another hour or so, especially when I read that Meteorite (mrt) is no longer needed with Meteor versions >= 0.9.0. But without success. What to do now? I shied away from it but you might just feel like setting up a dev environment on a Linux OS and simply running the few lines from the Meteor home page: $ curl https://install.meteor.com/ | sh It seems to simple to be true. But wait! Official Windows support is coming to Meteor – sometime in the near or farther future. So please check if the future isn't already here! What we did We went to grab Angular.js and haven't looked back. Happy coding!

At teamaton we're currently developing our own Time Tracking tool that we'll be using instead of KeepTempo as soon as it's good enough. We even plan on making it accessible to the public later but that's a different story. We chose Angular.js to develop the frontend and now want to synchronize our time tracking records with our ASP.NET WebAPI backend. One property of such a record is the date and time it was created at, createdUtc. Let's look at how we can send those date-time values to the server and back again. Some Background on Date and DateTime JavaScript Date instances are seeded at 01/01/1970 00:00:00 and can be instantiated by passing to the Date() constructor the number of milliseconds that have passed since that moment in time. Date.now() will directly output this number, at the moment of writing these words it returned the value 1 411 240 284 042. This value is what all other representations of a given Date instance will be based on. In .NET we have the DateTime type and its seed value is 01/01/0001 00:00:00. Internally, DateTime instances count time in Ticks, where one tick equals 100 nanoseconds, i.e. 0.000 000 1 seconds, thus delivering a theoretical precision of 10000 times that of the JavaScript equivalent. When writing these words, the current number of Ticks of DateTime.Now was 635 468 449 058 588 764 (I use LINQPad to execute C# code snippets). How to Convert JavaScript Date to .NET DateTime So how do we convert those values into each other? If we decide to send the number of milliseconds in a given JavaScript Date instance to our .NET server we can reconstruct an equivalent DateTime instance by seeding it with 01/01/1970 and just adding the milliseconds we got from the client to it: Record.CreatedUtc = new DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, DateTimeKind.Utc).AddMilliseconds(milliseconds); Going the other way, we actually need to get hold of a TimeSpan instance which has the property TotalMilliseconds that gives us what we want. We'll do that by substracting a DateTime instance representing the 01/01/1970 from the DateTime instance we want to send to the client: (Record.CreatedUtc - new DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, DateTimeKind.Utc)).TotalMilliseconds The code looks a bit ugly because we take care to work with UTC dates so that our code will run the same for clients and servers around the world. It's a very good idea to work with UTC dates internally and only convert them to local dates when you want to display them somewhere. … or Just Use Date Strings There's another way to transfer date objects between JavaScript and your server: using a standardized string representation that both sides will be able to generate and parse. In JavaScript you would use Date.toISOString() and in .NET DateTime.ToString("O") (see the MSDN for the O format string). Happy coding!

These are session notes, so they might not adhere to the standards of a complete blog post, but there's a bunch of inspiring info that I had to get out of my head… Shapes – Overview What are they dynamic data model can be updated at runtime replaces static(ally typed) view models Creating Shapes Never instantiate Shape directly it won't trigger the related events in code, use an IShapeFactory dependency IShape Create(string shapeType) in Orchard views, use New   - New is just an IShapeFactory cast to dynamic   - New.Product -> IShapeFactory.Create("Product") Rendering Shapes use well-named file templates use shape methods any method in class inheriting from IDependency with the [Shape] attribute future: dynamic shapes to come, e.g. from DB (by Piotr Szmyd) refer to IDisplayHelperFactory and IDisplayHelper for more detailed info Advanced Uses of Shapes If you're just starting with Orchard Shapes, I recommend you to skip this section for now ;-) Creating Strongly Typed Shapes in your ContentDriver, when creating a Shape, you can do: 1: protected override DriverResult Display(EntryPart part, string displayType, dynamic shapeHelper) { 2: return ContentShape("Parts_Common_Body" /* Placement Key */, 3: () => shapeHelper.Parts_Common_Body(Html: someHtml)); 4: } becomes: 1: public class ConcreteType : Shape { 2: public string Html { get; set; } 3: } 4:  5: protected override DriverResult Display(EntryPart part, string displayType, dynamic shapeHelper) { 6: var shape = (ConcreteType) shapeHelper.Parts_Common_Body(typeof(ConcreteType)) 7: shape.Html = someHtml; 8: return ContentShape("Parts_Common_Body" /* Placement Key */, 9: () => shape); 10: } And then in your template, you can actually define your @model to be of type ConcreteType: 1: @model My.Namespace.ConcreteType 2:  3: @Display(Model.Html) Shape Events We have different extension points to hook into the shape rendering process: IShapeDisplayEvent intercept all shape Display events ShapeMetadata intercept a specific shape's Display events IShapeTableProvider configured at discovery time, for a specific type hook into events other than Display Order of invocation of the different event handlers: Displaying ShapeDisplayEvents ShapteTableProvider ShapeMetadata Display Set Metadata.ChildContent Shape is rendered if ChildContent not set (open e.g. for Caching) Wrappers are rendered in order, from Metadata.ChildContent, e.g. Document.cshtml Displayed ShapeDisplayEvents ShapteTableProvider ShapeMetadata Shape Morphing change the Metadata.Type of a Shape before rendering render the same Shape again using a different template see the MenuItem template for an example Shape Relocation The idea here is to add a Shape to a different part of the page than where your current ContentItem is rendering. In your view, just use: 1: @Display(Model.MyTitle) Now, in your placement.info file, write: 1: <Match ContentType="Page" DisplayType="Detail"> 2: <Place Parts_Title="MyTitle:5" /> 3: </Match> This will display your Title shape (possibly) a second time.

Some part of MVC 4 didn't like what was in my view: 1: @using Orchard.ContentManagement; 2: @using Orchard.Users.Models; 3: @{ 4: var userCanRegister = 5: @WorkContext.CurrentSite.As<RegistrationSettingsPart>().UsersCanRegister; 6: var enableLostPassword = 7: @WorkContext.CurrentSite.As<RegistrationSettingsPart>().EnableLostPassword; 8: } Turns out that the (incorrectly placed) @ signs in front of WorkContext were (finally) not swallowed silently anymore. Now, this works: 1: @using Orchard.ContentManagement; 2: @using Orchard.Users.Models; 3: @{ 4: var userCanRegister = 5: WorkContext.CurrentSite.As<RegistrationSettingsPart>().UsersCanRegister; 6: var enableLostPassword = 7: WorkContext.CurrentSite.As<RegistrationSettingsPart>().EnableLostPassword; 8: } It's just the error message that's a bit misleading.