Quality is important.  I think that deserves repeating.  Quality is important.  Quality of code, quality of process, quality of requirements, quality of communcation, quality of behavior, quality of teams, quality of customers.  I tend to focus on the code side of things, but it is always important to remember that quality matters.

Often times (due to lack of quality in some of the other areas), quality can get pushed aside in the interest of getting things done.  This is a balance that all of us must deal with.  Ensuring good communication can put out fires long before they blow up in your face.  Quality of code can ensure that future maintenance and development goes on without slowing to a crawl in productivity.  Quality in process can guide you automate the tedious repeatable tasks to streamline your work.  Any breakdown in these areas can be catastrophic to a team.

We had a meeting last night at Sogeti, and quality kept coming up as a topic.  I was very proud to see the end result of the meeting:

I've been hosted on webhost4life for about 2 years now, and I was starting to see the pain with shared hosting.  It starts out with a tempting $5/month, but then you want SQL Server 2005, and you want to point many domains to non-root folders and in the end it just isn't that cheap.

It's also really slow and I don't have full control of the box.  Doing a reverse ip check at http://yougetsignal.com (awesome site, hilarious name) i could see hundreds of sites that are on my same server.  I'd rather not be sharing bandwidth and hardware resources with so many.

So I've made the switch to a VPS plan at VPSLand.  VPS is Virtual Private Server, so basically they take a beefy server (8-core cpu, gobs of ram) and then run Virtual Server on it.  They sell a limited amount of virtual machines per actual server, so you are sharing with far less people. VPS plans are a bit more expensive, but they are worth it.  Why you ask?

• Remote Desktop into your box (no more crappy cpanel interfaces)
  
• Install whatever-the-hell-you-want software (provided it's legal)
• Run your sites in .NET 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, 6.0, whatever (ASP.NET MVC sites here I come)
• Run ASP.NET, Rails, PHP all on the same server (if you want)
  
• No more Medium Trust nonsense
• control your own DNS (if you want)
• run your own mail server (I use GAFYD however)
• point as many domains to whatever folders you want

The downside:

• I have to track my bandwidth now.  I have 200gb/month, which is good enough for now, but it could get expensive if I go over.
• I only have 5gb of storage space.  The base install takes 2gb.  Yikes!  I plan on making this 10gb sometime soon.
• a little more expensive.

Ultimately, I'm paying about $10/month more than shared hosting, and I think it's totally worth it.  VPSLand's support is stellar so far.

Oh, and I have a question for you all:  I plan on tinkering with rails, and I've read the long steps to get rails to work in IIS but should I?  Or should I just install apache or Lighttpd and run it on port 81?

This is just ridiculous:

I could seriously eliminate about 10–12 items from there and never miss them again.  For the others that I use occasionally, they would be better served on a top menu, not when I right-click.  All of the source control things should be grouped in a sub-menu or something, because this thing is just way too crowded.

Any way to control this chaos?

Eventually when testing your controllers you will come across an action that sets TempData.

If you didn’t know, TempData is a session-backed temporary storage dictionary that is available for one single request.  It’s great to pass messages between controllers.

Our Controller classes that we derive from have this as a member property.  However, when testing the controller, this always came up as null.

Reflector is our friend here, so I fired it up and loaded the Controller class.  Then I located the TempData member, and looked at the setter.  It’s marked as internal, so somebody inside this assembly is responsible for creating it.  By using the Reflector Analyze feature, I was able to find exactly where the setter is called.  It’s in the Execute() method.  (this is the general “pipeline” method that all IController implementations must override)

Think about that for a second.  At runtime, the TempData dictionary is set because all requests flow through Execute().  But in my test, I am specifically calling my action method.  There is no Execute() in my test.

To top it off, I can’t set this guy to a new TempDataDictionary because the setter is marked as internal.

Phil Haack tells me they’re working on this issue so we’ll likely see an improvement soon.  In the meantime you can get around the issue by using reflection to set the value.  But first, can we create one?

TempData is stored in session, so it needs a reference to IHttpContext.  Thankfully, we can mock this, however we have to make sure and mock the right parts.

First, create a mock for IHttpContext, create the return values for mocked IHttpRequest & IHttpResponse.  Finally setup return values for IHttpSession as well.  I’ve done all of this in a helper method of my test (though it could be an extention method on the MockRepository ala Phil, but whatever you like).

private IHttpContext GetHttpContext(string requestUrl)
{            
	IHttpRequest request = _mocks.DynamicMock<IHttpRequest>();
	SetupResult.For(request.Url).Return(new Uri(requestUrl));
	IHttpResponse response = _mocks.DynamicMock<IHttpResponse>();
	IHttpSessionState session = _mocks.DynamicMock<IHttpSessionState>();
        IHttpContext httpContext = _mocks.DynamicMock<IHttpContext>();

	SetupResult.For(httpContext.Session).Return(session);
	SetupResult.For(httpContext.Request).Return(request);
	SetupResult.For(httpContext.Response).Return(response);
        _mocks.Replay(request);
        _mocks.Replay(response);
        _mocks.Replay(httpContext);

        _tempData = new TempDataDictionary(httpContext);
        SetupResult.For(session[null]).IgnoreArguments().Return(_tempData);			
        _mocks.Replay(session);

        return httpContext;
}

This code is a little verbose, but this is something you write once and use in all of your tests. You should notice that the _tempData property is a local field on my test class. I can then take this _tempData variable and inject it (via reflection) onto the controller under test. Here's how:

typeof(FooController).GetProperty("TempData").SetValue(controller, _tempData, null);

And now we can easily test that messages are set in TempData before redirecting or rendering a view.

*update*:  Will Shaver notified me of a typo in the code.  It has been fixed.  Thanks Will!*

Part of my job is interviewing developers to assess their technical skills.  The majority of these interviews are at the Junior and Senior levels and I have accumulated quite a bank of questions I like to ask to get to the root of technical problems and see how the candidate responds.

ASP.NET is a usual topic of discussion because of the vast amount of work that we do and the wide spread adoption of it amongst developers. 

So, let’s say you want to see how much the candidate knows about ViewState.  I start with an example…

Say you have a page with a dropdown on it.  Listed in the dropdown are various types of fruit that come from the database.  To prevent multiple queries for the same data, the code that loads the fruit is inside an if(! IsPostBack) { } block.  With me?

….yes.

So what happens when we click a button and postback?

It is amazing to me to see how many developers differ in their answers just on this alone.  Some people tell me that the values are cleared, some tell me they stay there but they can’t tell me why, and some mention viewstate but they have no idea how it works.

For those who mention ViewState, I inevitably ask, “What happens when we turn it off?”   Of course the values are erased.  “How can we get around that”

Again, many candidates just don’t know what to do in this scenario.  They fail to understand how ASP.NET works on top of HTML, or they have forgotten how the web works, however it may be, those are two very beginner questions, and about 80% of the people that I talk to on the phone struggle there at least some way.

Now granted, some of our candidates are college grads and folks who haven’t done much (or any) .NET.  I don’t hold this against them.

Another area I like to explore is to the various forms of ASP.NET state management (such as cookies, session, cache, application, request) and this filters out another large portion.  Some suggest storing global data (like US States) in a Session variable.  Others can’t tell me how Session works at all.

I find it very difficult to give my recommendation to most of the folks I talk to.  I know there are lots of smart folks out there, and infinitely more not-so-smart ones, but if you’re going to be interviewed by me I will treat it as if you were joining my team.

At the end of my interviews I always ask a question along the lines of “What’s your favorite book?”  to see if they have gotten excited about a programming book (or any book for that matter).  If they say “Teach yourself X in 24 Hours” I will thank them for their time and hang up.

The technical responsibility we have is too great to leave in the hands of those who don’t know what they are doing and refuse to learn.

What about you?  Do you interview other developers?  How do you weed out the cruft and get to the cream?  Is it simply a numbers game?

It’s been an exciting two weeks.  I visited user groups in San Antonio, Houston, Austin, and Fort Worth, and I got to meet and connect with a lot of interested developers about the new ASP.NET MVC framework.

Two of the events were recorded, so if I ever get my hands on the recorded bits, I’ll post them here in an easily watchable format.  (Don’t hold your breath though.)

My presentation had a minimal amount of PowerPoint.  I decided to focus on real code.  And people have thanked me for it! 

I covered:

• Basics of MVC
• Default Routes
• Simple Controller / Action
• Passing data to the views
• passing strongly typed view data
• Custom Routes
• new/edit form for an entity
• writing tests for controllers
• rhino mocks for mocking out dependencies
• dependency injection for controllers (using Windsor)
• ajax integration with prototype

This is a lot to tackle in my 1/1.5 hour time slot.  And I do get a lot of blank stares when I talk about mock objects and dependency injection, but I think more presentations need to present realistic code, rather than simple examples.  The feedback I’ve gotten about this has been overwhelmingly positive, and I’m really glad people liked it.

Some questions that were asked during my tour…

“Ben, you are phenominally good-looking?  Are you available?”
—umm no, I’m married (and now terrified)

“What is that cool zoomey tool you used?  That’s awesome!”
—that is called ZoomIt, by sysinternals.

“What are you using for data access on your entities?”
—It’s called Castle ActiveRecord, which uses NHibernate underneath.

“Can I use ASP.NET validators?”
—Well not really.  The validators have viewstate, which won’t work.  Your validation definitely belongs in the Model, so you could just do server-side if you want.  If you want clientside validation, you could accomplish a similar result by using marker css classes and some clever javascript  (think <input type=”text” class=”required” name=”address1” /><span class=”error_message”>This is required</span>

“If we use this on IIS6, will performance suffer?”
— Probably.  On IIS 5/6 you have to send all requests through ASP.NET, which can be slower.  I’m not an expert in this area, so definitely do your research before making any rash decisions.  When we have Windows Server 2008 and IIS7, expect vast improvements.

“Do you know Justice Gray?”
—Sure do.  I’m a bona-fide potential friend of Justice Gray, and even have the certificate to prove it.  It’s serial number marked 00000000000003.  I carry it with me at all times for just such a question.

“Can you use co-exist with webforms?”
—Yes!  If you hit a page with the .aspx extension, the PageHandlerFactory will pick it up and you will be in WebForms Land.  If you instead hit a route, you’ll be in MVC Land.  Learn to know the difference and you’ll be fine.

“Isn’t it dangerous to output strings directly like that?”
—Yes it is.  Read my post about html encoding your values.

“Your hair is impeccable?  What kind of gel do you use?”
— It’s called Fructis something-or-other… and it’s awesome!

“So Microsoft has two methods of developing web applications?  Which should I choose?”
—If you like the rich eventing model and the ability to save state and mimick a smart client ui, then choose web forms.  If you value clean html, urls, separation of concerns, and testability, then choose MVC.  I will be choosing MVC more often than not from here on out.

“When will it be released”
—Gawsh, I don’t know?  Fall 2008?  As soon as I know I’ll post it here.

(admittedly, a couple of those questions were not asked — I’ll let you guess which ones)

You can download the code and the presentation here:

File Attachment: save the world with asp.net mvc.zip (1612 KB)

I’d like to thank the user group leaders for having me speak, it was certainly a pleasure.  Where will the next tour be?

I got the chance to meet an enthusiastic bunch of folks in Austin and Fort Worth this week, and I wrapped up my Texas Tour of MVC.  I really want to say thanks to groups for having me.  It was a pleasure to speak and connect with fellow developers in Texas.

I’ll be posting a massive recap this week that includes the code and powerpoint that I delivered.  I’d appreciate any and all feedback.

Now for that long drive home…

One of the often-touted new features of VS 2008 is the improved CSS support.

I like having intellisense for CSS, sure, but I dont’ want to have a warning for classes that don’t exist…. like this:

That green squiggly indicates a compiler warning.  It can’t find the CSS class, (which is referenced in the Master Page). 

But there are other reasons why you might want to define a class without defining an associated style.  You might be using it to distinctly select elements from the DOM using javascript. 

The ever-so-awesome prototype framework introduced this syntax:

$$(‘.info’)

which would select all of the elements with a class name of “info” for you to work with.

Just about every other javascript library out there now supports this syntax (or a similar one).

If this bugs you, you can turn it off by checking this box (in Tools -> Options) :

You may not want to do this, though…  it could potentially save you time if you’re looking for a rendering bug.

Another part of VS 2008 that I don’t really care about is this CSS designer.  I can’t imagine anyone who would actually use this.

I mean, come on… look at it!

I guess if you don’t know CSS very well, you might want some options.  But that form is more confusing to me than border-top: solid 1px #999;.

(and one could argue, if you don’t know CSS, should you be defining styles at all?)

I really applaud Microsoft’s attempt to bring a better CSS development experience to the masses, but I think they missed the mark on this one.