P3.NET

Visual Studio 2015 RC NuGet Package Bug

3 July 2015
Categories: VS2015

UPDATE: NuGet Package Manager 3.1 has been released to Visual Studio Gallery. It resolves the issue mentioned here.

For those of you using the Visual Studio 2015 RC/RTM release you should be aware of a bug in the version of NuGet that ships with it. The bug manifests itself when building or debugging a project. When you first start VS the package is fine and you can go to ToolsOptionsNuGet Package Manager and adjust settings. Clearly the package has been successfully loaded. But when you start to build the project (or start to debug which triggers a build check) then VS may report that the package failed to load.

The problem is that NuGet is attempting to update the nuget.config file to a new version and the file is read only causing the package to fail. The file can be read only for a number of reasons but the most likely case is when you are using source control (like TFS) and the file is checked in. The bug has been reported to NuGet and appears to be resolved in future versions.  For now the workaround, if you encounter this issue, is to simply modify the nuget.config file to not be read only (or check the file out of source control) so that the update can succeed.

Using Parallel HttpClientConnection objects in SSIS

25 May 2015
Categories: SSIS

In SSIS (SQL Server Integration Service) you often need to talk with web resources like WCF services. To do that you will generally define the connection using Connection Manager and HTTP. This sets up SSIS to communicate with the remote resource. To use the connection you normally use a script task to get the connection from Connection Manager, create an HttpClientConnection object and then use the methods on the connection to communicate with the remote server. You will generally find code similar to the following.

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Creating a Money Type

16 February 2015
Categories: C#

.NET does not have a type to represent monetary values. In general you will simply use Decimal as it has the necessary accuracy. This has some limitations though:

  • Without looking at surrounding code it is difficult to tell if a variable represents money or simply a large decimal value
  • Currency information is not part of the type so it is possible to incorrectly mix monetary values in systems that support multiple currencies at once
  • Displaying money requires that you use a format string to indicate the currency

There have been many implementations of money in .NET. This is my version. Please note that this code is new so bugs may exist. Additionally I’ve taken the requirements and implementation from my own needs. Your needs may differ so you may need to modify the code to behave differently for your applications.

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Simplifying ADO.NET Data Access, Part 6

3 January 2015
Categories: ADO.NET, C#, Data Access

Time to finish up the series on simplifying data access using ADO.NET. We have simplified everything around ADO.NET except for actually retrieving the results. This is probably the most complicated part of ADO.NET given the need for cleaning up the reader, enumerating the results and reading the actual data. We can simplify all this logic down to a single line (plus any action to take for each row).

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Simplifying ADO.NET Data Access, Part 4

22 November 2014
Categories: ADO.NET, C#

This is a continuation of a series on simplifying the use of ADO.NET. In the last article we added the ability to cleanly separate query definition from the underlying data provider. But we left out parameters which are generally critical (and specific) to ADO.NET providers. In this article we will add support for parameters and add a fluent interface to make it easy to use.

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