P3.NET – Page 8 – Programming pearls for .NET programming

TFS Upgrade Nightmares

12 April 2014

Categories: TFS

UPDATE 1: Unfortuately not everything is going well with the reports. We were finally able to track down that the issue was with the user account I was using to configure TFS. Evidently you need to be an administrator on the machine hosting the SSRS instance (not just an admin for SSRS). Without admin privileges you cannot access the WMI provider remotely which causes the configuration to fail. Needless to say the network admins were not pleased. They tried to strip things down to the minimal privileges but nothing short of full admin worked.

UPDATE 2: We have run into another, more serious issue though, we can no longer create new team projects in any collection. I can create a new collection but creating any team project fails. It always fails when trying to create the SSRS reports and the error message is useless. The error message says it cannot connect to SSRS so the host name is bad, the connection timed out or the database is corrupt. Now I’m really annoyed. In a last ditch effort we are rebuilding the reporting databases. If this doesn’t work we may need to retreat back to the old server.

UPDATE 3: Someone from the TFS team responded that all you need to do to move the database is the following:

Stop the collection
Backup/restore the database
Edit the collection settings to move the database

UPDATE 4: We finally resolve the team project creation issue. It turns out that moving the SSRS database and having TFS reconfigure to use it doesn’t restore all the permissions correctly. Thanks to this post I was able to run just the permission update scripts and we’re back in business.

I do see these options in TFS but I’m not sure whether that would include the configuration database (which got moved as well) or just the collection database. The next time I need to move the database I’ll have to try it and see.

Recently we needed to upgrade our TFS 2012 server to TFS 2013. The last time we upgraded TFS 2010 to TFS 2012 it was a nightmare so we took some more precautions this time. Alas they didn’t help. This upgrade proved to be just as big of a nightmare as the last time. Here’s my story of upgrading TFS based upon my 2 previous attempts.

A Smarter WCF Service Client, Part 4

15 March 2014

Categories: C#, T4, WCF

In the last article we presented a solution for calling WCF services that needed only a single line of code and no using statements. But it had many limitations including

Reliance on a static class
Testability was low for any code using it
Reliance on the WCF client rather than the contract
Not optimized for multiple calls

In reality the previous series of articles where all about setting up the infrastructure to support the final solution. All this infrastructure will be hidden from code when we are done. Let’s get started.

A Smarter WCF Service Client, Part 3

23 February 2014

Categories: C#, T4, WCF

In the last article we replaced the standard WCF service client with an improved version. But beyond solving an issue with cleaning up the client we haven’t really improved the calling code any. In this article we are going to look at one approach for making the calling code cleaner. The less code that is needed to call something the cleaner it tends to make code. We will present one approach for making WCF calls one-liners. This is not always the best solution so we will talk about the disadvantages as well.

A Smarter WCF Service Client, Part 2

9 February 2014

Categories: C#, T4, WCF

In the last article we made a case for why the standard WCF client generated by a service reference is not a great idea. Among the issues listed were testability and proper cleanup. To fix these issues we will need to ultimately replace service references altogether but this is time consuming for large code bases. When we started down this path at my company we did it using an iterative approach. While the intermediate stages may appear to be (and, in fact, may be) a step back we are ultimately working toward a solution that I believe is far better.

A Smarter WCF Service Client, Part 1

2 February 2014

Categories: C#, T4, WCF

WCF is a great way to implement service-based APIs but the standard approach to consuming a service lacks a lot to be desired. In this series of articles I will discuss the approach that I’ve used in commercial applications to make consuming WCF services much cleaner and simpler. We will start with the standard approach and identify its flaws. From there we will work toward a solution that has minimal impact on consumers while providing maximal benefit. The solution itself is large but not overly complex. More importantly, once finished, you never need to worry about it again.

Adding Dates to C#

23 December 2013

Categories: .NET, C#

UPDATE: A bug was recently found when determining the difference between 2 dates across a year boundary. A corrected version has been uploaded to the site.

In .NET the DateTime type represents both a date and a time. .NET doesn’t really have a pure date type. Ironically it does have a pure time type in the form of TimeSpan. In general this isn’t an issue but when you really just need a date (i.e. the end of a grading period) then you have to be aware of the time. For example when comparing 2 date/time values the time is included in the comparison even if it does not matter. To eliminate time from the comparison you would need to set both to the same value (i.e. 00:00:00). Another example is conversion to a string. A date/time value will include the time so you have to use a format string to eliminate it. Yet another issue is that creating specific dates using DateTime isn’t exactly readable (i.e. July 4th, 2000 is new DateTime(2000, 4, 4)).

Entity Framework 6 Conventions

4 November 2013

Categories: Entity Framework

I was incredibly excited when conventions were finally made public in EF6. A convention allows you to set up a policy that a model will follow. For example EF comes with a convention that tables are plural by entities are singular. EF has supported conventions for a while but the necessary public interface was not exposed until EF6. In this post I’m going to walk through creating a simple convention.

Language Friendly Type Names

29 September 2013

Categories: .NET, C#

.NET uses Type everywhere to represent type information.Not surprisingly Type is language-agnostic. In many cases it is useful to get the friendly (aka language-specific) name for a Type object. .NET does not provide this easily. There are several different approaches but none of them work really well if you want the name that would have been used in your favorite language. This post will discuss some of the options available and then provide a more general solution to the problem that doesn’t actually require much effort.

Entity Framework and User Context

13 September 2013

Categories: Entity Framework

Auditing is generally important in most databases because it is important to know who changed data and when. How auditing data is stored depends upon the system requirements but in general the date/time and user who made a change is important. SQL Server already provides the infrastructure to identify the who and what. Setting up EF to provide this information is straightforward once you know how EF works. In this post I’ll illustrate a simple approach we’ve been using in web applications for over a year with no issues and very little effort.

Environmental Transforms/AppSettings Transforms for Visual Studio 2013 Preview

29 July 2013

Categories: C#, T4, VS2013

In a recent series of articles I discussed how to create an environmental tranform template that could be run on each build. I also posted a series of articles on how to generate a template to generate a strongly typed class to back appsettings in a configuration file. Alas shortly thereafter VS2013 Preview was released and changes to VS have broken the code. This post will discuss the minor changes that need to be made to get everything to work.