Sergio Pereira

Please open my .aspx fast

2008-11-22T23:33:00Z

Still in the topic of performance, I'll throw a little freebie. Visual Studio seems to take an inordinate amount of time to open .aspx files for the first time. I noticed that the status bar read "Initializing toolbox..." for a long time. I'm mentioning .aspx but it really applies to any other webforms markup like .ascx and .master as well.

Heck, I don't even have the toolbox loaded, docked, or hidden in my IDE. I don't use the toolbox at all for web develoment. I'm more of a source view kind of programmer. So why should I be penalized like that?

I shouldn't. Here's what I did to speed that up:

Show the toolbox
Right-click and select "Choose Items..."
Uncheck every item that the namespace contains "Web" (I also unchecked controls that I can't stand, like the database connections and data sources.)
Click OK to save that, close the toolbox again and enjoy your precious stolen time again.

Sluggish Windows in VMWare Fusion - Solved

2008-11-22T23:25:00Z

I've had my MacBook for over 2 years. Initially I avoided installing virtualization or even BootCamp to run Windows. I was forcing myself to adapt to OS X, get out of my comfort zone, and learn more about that different environment. The mac was also my Ruby On Rails development machine and I wanted to keep Visual Studio out of it.

After one year, I decided that the hardest phase of the learning process was long gone and I installed VMWare Fusion (version 1.something - don't remember) and Windows XP with Visual Studio. I also bumped up my RAM to 2Gb.

Using Visual Studio inside a VM on a mac was a surprisingly viable alternative. I could have all the mundane applications like web browsers, email clients, IM, Twitter, word processors, etc, be mac applications running in the host and leave a very spartan Windows installation with just the minimum required software.

Enter Fusion v2.0. I honestly don't know at what point things started going downhill. More or less around the same time, maybe 4 or 5 months ago, I applied XP SP3, upgraded Fusion to 2.0, and installed VS2008 SP1. I don't even remember what order I followed anymore. I just know that my Windows VM became almost unusable. I'd click and wait. Visual Studio was so unresponsive that I would prefer to terminal in to my desktop Vista and work like that instead of the VM.

Today I had some time to get back to this problem and do a little googling on it. After a few not so useful hits, I landed on this forum posting that got me back on track.

I still don't know if all my messed up settings were done by yours truly, trying to solve the problem and making it worse, or by the Fusion upgrade. For now I'll assume it was me. Here's what I had to change.

Give less memory to the VM. This seems counterintuitive, but I had divided the RAM 50/50 between OS X and the VM. I reduced the VM to around 820MB.
Use only one virtual processor. I have a dual core processor but virtualizing only one seems to ensure the host always has at least one entire core to do the housekeeping.
Optimize for Mac OS. Mine was optimized for VM. Probably done by myself with the best intentions in the world.
No sharing of any applications. I just don't need that. Gone.

Several people on the forums mentioned reinstalling the VMWare Tools. Mine had installed/upgraded fine before so I didn't touch that.

With all these tweaks in place I'm again a happy camper and stopped making plans to buy one of the new MacBook models that support more than 2GB. Performance is back to it's Fusion v1.x days and that's all I was asking for.

Don't be sloppy in your scripts

2008-11-14T18:05:00Z

For a few weeks now, every time I try to logoff from my home banking website something bad happens. See screenshot below.

Firebug opens unexpectedly
There's a frigging debugger; statement in the live production site
The logoff process hangs until I press F8 in Firebug or the continue button
All my information is still on the screen. Imagine if I had just clicked Sign Off and left my desk.

When I saw this for the first time I though: wow, some developer will be slapped for that (actually there are some developer names in the file,) but it seems that nobody else has a debugger enabled or they just hate their clients that are also web developers. The "bug" has been there for at least 2 weeks now.

Even if you don't care for customers that happen to have a debugger like myself, leaving that kind of thing in your production environment immediately projects an image of sloppiness that is the last thing I want to have with my home banking.

Update 11/24/2008: That script was fixed sometime over this past weekend.

Video - The Langston's Ant

2008-11-14T13:41:00Z

Remember one recent post when I talked about the Code Kata that I attended? Well, Micah prepared a screencast version of that Kata and that video is now available.

It's a short screencast (14') and even if Ruby is not your cup of tea, it's interesting to watch BDD being practiced.

Langston's Ant in Ruby Kata from Micah Martin on Vimeo.

Video - Core, an AOP Framework

2008-11-07T15:34:00Z

Wow, that took a long time to be published, but here it is. This video was recorded during the October's meeting of Chicago ALT.NET that happened almost just about a whole month ago.

The video shows Josh Heyse demonstrating and explaining the works of the AOP framework called Core. What the video doesn't show is who's that voice that also knows a lot about Core. That would be Anthony Green, who developed Core with Josh.

The people behind the bytes

2008-11-03T19:41:00Z

I think that any developer that creates customer-facing software dreams that their users rave about and show affection for the product. But being users of software ourselves we know it's not easy to like any application that much. There are usually so many other applications vying for our love, and they tend to be so bland and similar, it's easier to just treat them with equal disinterest.

SIDE NOTE: This reminds me of how much I miss Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users blog.

Still, why some applications win your heart?

I would argue that this has all to do with the way such application let some of the hearts and souls that created the application leak through some inoffensive outlets.

The idea is that it is hard for users to attach themselves to something that has no sign of human behavior. Let me try to clarify this point with an example. Let's say Albert is your co-worker. He gets his job done but not always the same way every day. Sometimes he's not in the mood for water cooler chat, worried about the world financial crisis, sometimes he's thrilled that his team qualified for the playoffs, sometimes he's supportive when you are facing some personal problem. I mean, he's not a machine.

Take one of the biggest examples of them all: Google. Do you think the Google Doodles or the famous hidden treats are there just the works of mischievous coders? No. They are carefully placed messages that serve as a constant reminder that the folks at Google are real people and they like to connect with you, the user. What other email site would dare to have user message like "Hooray, no spam here!" ?

Why am I talking about this?

I've joined a new company a couple of months ago and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that we make use of those little outlets to connect to our users on a personal level as well. For example we change the site logo on special occasions and send plush toys to customers when we release a new version (plush toys, as a "weapon" of Marketing, deserves its own post. I'll leave that for another day.)

You may think this just sounds silly, but you should see the emails we get from customers when they notice these little things. They are thrilled to find them. Sometimes it makes someone's day. It happened again last Friday (Haloween — a major occasion in the U.S.)

It's very rewarding and I'm very proud to work with people that think about their users that much.

ViewEngines at Chicago ALT.NET

2008-10-30T17:14:00Z

One of the reasons I've been mucking with NHaml is the upcoming meeting of the Chicago ALT.NET group.

The plan is to talk about NHaml and Spark (and maybe Brail), comparing equivalent implementations of a simple website written in ASPX, NHaml and Spark. The meeting is on November 12^th, see registration link below for details.

The Different Views of ASP.NET MVC

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm
The default ASPX view engine in ASP.NET MVC is fine and comfortable but as with just about anything in ASP.NET MVC, you can replace it with alternative engines — and there are a few of those available.

We will be giving an overview of some of the alternative view engines, showing how to install and use them, what brought them about, and why would you use them.

Adam Tybor will be presenting Spark,
Mike Hall will show NHaml,
and TBD (not defined, wanna talk?) will talk about Brail.

7:45 pm
You may want to stick around after the presentation portion of the meeting and take part in our monthly open discussion. The topic is never arranged in advance but it's common that it reflects the content of the presentation.

ASP.NET MVC and NHaml

2008-10-29T22:02:00Z

I started playing with NHaml lately for sheer curiosity. It comes with MVCContrib and that's what I've been using to explore it.

I'm not completely on board yet that you'll want to write all your views, for all kinds of application scenarios using NHaml. I know someone will probably jump out and say that their entire site was built with NHaml and it's wonderful. I'm sure it can be done, I'm just still wondering if it's more trouble than necessary. On the other hand, if you are starting a new application from scratch (i.e. you are not inheriting any existing template or that sort of thing,) then NHaml can guide you through a different way of thinking about your views and simplify them a lot.

I might have already said this before, but I'm generally in favor of working as close to the platform as possible and viable. That's why I'm not a big fan of things like Script#, RJS, and Volta. NHaml is almost in the same category but it does bring some nice things to the table and that's why I'm not ready to dismiss it just yet. Just take a look at what our HTML looked like circa 1998 and what it is now with richer CSS and JavaScript.

As much as I can, I try to separate my (X)HTML from my CSS and my JavaScript. Sometimes it gets to the point that I wonder why I am using HTML to begin with — it's all data and structure. I wonder how long until we have a WikiText or MarkDown view engines.

NHaml fits well for these kinds of well-separated HTML views. It does away (kind of) with the HTML tags and focus on the structure and meaning of each piece of information. Because it defines structure in a way that works well with CSS, it also works great with jQuery for our JavaScripts. It's unobtrusive JavaScript heaven!

I think the key to learning NHaml is forgetting about HTML and its tags (or at least don't focus on them). Forget that the page ultimately rendered will be in HTML. For a moment just visualize the areas of the page as meaningful pieces of data: sidebar, lists, headings, article title, article body, author name, navigation tabs, etc, not divs, tables, spans, fieldsets, etc.

Less Noise More Content

The most obvious impression you get when looking at a NHaml template for the first time is how skinny it is compared to any tag-based template. Your eyes are used to look for angle brackets to help you understand the structure of the document, but in NHaml the indentation serves that purpose.

Take a look at a common template to create a grid of products in ASPX.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
	<head>
		<title><%= ViewData["pagetitle"] %></title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<h1>All Products</h1>
		<table class="grid" id="products">
			<tr>
				<th>ID</th>
				<th>Name</th>
			</tr>
			<% foreach(var prod in (IEnumerable<Product>)ViewData["products"])  { %>
				<tr>
					<td><%= prod.ID %></td>
					<td><%=  prod.Name %></td>
				</tr>
			<% }  %>
		</table>
		<input type="button" value="Say Hi" onclick="alert('Hi');" />
	</body>
</html>

Now take compare that to the NHaml version.

!!! XML
!!!
%html
  %head
    %title= ViewData["pagetitle"] 
    %body
      %h1 All Products
        %table.grid#products
          %tr
            %th ID
            %th Name
          - foreach(var prod in (IEnumerable<Product>)ViewData["products"])
          %tr
            %td= prod.ID
            %td= prod.Name
        %input{ type="button", value="Say Hi", onclick="alert('Hi');"}/

Never Forget a Closing Tag Again

Having meaningful indentation brings the common advantage of needing to explicitly mark the end of a block, making that automatic. In other words, the closing tags are added at the right places for you. That's something I value a lot.

Identifiers and Selectors, Css-Friendly

By now, after looking at the above NHaml sample a few times, you probably noticed that the class and id attributes are set using a dot and a # sign, respectively.

%table.grid#products

Not by coincidence, that's the same type of syntax you'll find in CSS selector rules. Another plus for NHaml here, one less syntax to be memorized — or eventually mismatched.

Server Side Code/Tokens Syntax

Server side statements are simply prefixed with a dash and a space. The code blocks are also delimited using indentation (notice the lack of curlies in the foreach loop.)

 - foreach(var prod in (IEnumerable<Product>)ViewData["products"])
 %tr
   %td= prod.ID
   %td= prod.Name

I'm a little bit uneasy with this code formatting but, to be fair with NHaml, I haven't played with that aspect of it enough yet.

Let's Throw jQuery in This Mixture

Oh, about those CSS selectors I mentioned above. That goes very well with jQuery as well since jQuery uses CSS selection rules as well. That's one more reason NHaml can help you keep the HTML/CSS/JavaScript triad separated.

More to come (hopefully)

I plan to explore it a little more, especially with MVC in mind, and I'll try to get to some conclusion in a later post.

Performing Code Katas

2008-10-14T02:21:00Z

I just came back from the first meeting of the Software Craftsmanship Group. Tonight Micah Martin talked about Code Kata but added an extra facet to it.

Micah proposes that, although practicing the Katas by yourself, in your spare time, is valuable, presenting your routine to an audience can deliver even more results. For the presenter there is the opportunity to gain feedback from the audience (peers, masters, even pupils.) For someone watching there's the chance of seeing another peer (or even a master) in action and learn how other developers approach problems and construct their software. By the way, it takes a non trivial amount of courage to sit in front of an audience and write code, even if you have practiced it several times beforehand.

To demonstrate this concept, Micah created a Ruby program that implemented Langton's Ant. I'll try to illustrate the results of this experience.

The audience - me (and many others)

Once Micah explained what the problem was, he asked that we watched him code and be prepared to evaluate his performance (quality, smoothness, clarity, etc.)

Although I know a little bit of Ruby, I'm by no means a proficient Ruby developer yet. Seeing someone that works with the language all the time in action would be interesting no matter what. But there was more in it for me.

Micah, as a true BDD pratictioner, started by creating the specs with RSpec and proceeded with the red/green/refactor iterations until he achieved a complete successful specification execution.

There's nothing like seeing a technology at work to understand it better. Tonight's performance contributed a lot for my BDD understanding.

The presenter

After the presentation we had to rate it (0 to 10) and give some feedback. There's where the other Ruby and BDD ninjas in the room could make educated comments about Micah's performance and average joes like myself could comment on less sophisticated issues like font size and keystrokes.

Judging by the constructive feedback, I'd imagine the presenter's future performances will be fine tuned and get better. On that note, the suggestion is that the presenter moves on to a different Kata for each performance.

Buncha' Links

New Software Craftsmanship Group

2008-10-02T17:10:00Z

It's so rare to find interesting group meetings up here in Suburbia that I can't pass the chance to attend new ones.

As Micah Martin announced, the Software Craftsmanship Group was created and the first meeting happens soon.

One of the topics for the evening will be Ruby Kata. Should be fun.

Chicago ALT.NET - The aspects of AOP

2008-10-01T10:02:00Z

The October 2008 meeting of out user group will be held next week, Wednesday the 8^th. The chosen topic for this month was AOP.

Core: An Aspect Oriented Business Objects Framework

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm
Learn about aspect-oriented design patterns and how they can be used to quickly add common functionality to your business objects. Josh Heyse explains how Aspect-Oriented Programming allows for the separation of true business logic and the code written allowing interaction with user interfaces. The Core framework is a generation model that dynamically adds common services, such as logging, auditing, persistence, and security to business objects. Aspects, or behaviors, are requested using attributes or configuration files which allows services to be included only where necessary eliminating overly bloated objects and tailored for the environment into which the object is loaded.

TIP - Disable full row selection in Vista's Explorer

2008-09-30T17:43:00Z

I've been using Vista since the official release (skipped the betas) and I've been trying to convince myself that some of the changes were made for the better.

In particular, I've made some effort to get used to the new file explorer but somethings have been harder to put up with. Anyway, little by little I "fix" some of the new features.

Today, I had it with the unnecessary full row selection. It makes right-clicking the directory listing background much harder. The fix isn't trivial. It involves setting a bunch of flags in the Explorer settings in the Registry. The good news is that you can get it in a .vbs file (I don't recommend downloading and executing scripts from the Internet, so open the file in a text editor and inspect what it does to make you feel comfortable with what it does). There are other handy utilities there as well.

Next up is changing the selected/hovered-over item's background color in Explorer (Aero). That choice of blue is way to pale for me. I've read that it cannot be changed easily because it comes from a bitmap embedded in the theme itself.

By the way, I'm mainly using Windows Server 2008 with Aero turned on and the fix works there too.

Created with Community Server

2008-09-25T12:33:00Z

Don't you hate when tools try to promote themselves in your work, especially if you paid for them?

Last night I was noavigatin around in Reflector when I stoped by the embedded resource named System.Data.Odbc.OdbcMetaData.xml (in System.Data.dll 2.0). What I saw was both familiar and a little aggravating.

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<!-- edited with XMLSPY v5 rel. 4 U (http://www.xmlspy.com) by Carl Perry (Microsoft) -->
<NewDataSet>
    ... xml content here ...
<NewDataSet>

In a way I also felt vindicated that MS is also a victim of this shameless, intrusive advertisement after inflicting it on many others as well (I'm talking to you ASP.NET HTTP Headers). BTW, thank you Visual Studio webforms designer for getting rid of those Meta tags you once put in my pages.

What other big offenders are out there? Free tools need not apply.

Video - ORM Discussion/Fishbowl

2008-09-23T17:11:00Z

After the IoC talk we had the monthly discussion. This time we tried the fishbowl format (or some approximation of that). The topic was ORMs.

Video - IoC with StructureMap

2008-09-23T11:47:00Z

I finally got some time to import and upload the videos of September's Chicago ALT.NET meeting that happened almost 2 weeks ago.

In this first video jdn shows how DI and IoC containers can be used to add flexibility to an application design.