Visual Studio 2015, ASP.NET 4.6, ASP.NET 5 & EF 7

VS 2015 is released on Monday 7/20/2015. You can download it now from MSDN subscriber downloads. 

The feature list is:

• JSON editor
• ReactJS editor
• Grunt/Gulp support
• Bootstrap support
• EcmaScript 6
• HTTP/2
• and many more

NodeJS in Action - 1

Node.js is an event-driven, server-side JavaScript environment. Node runs JavaScript using the V8 engine developed by Google for use in their Chrome web browser.  The major speed increase is due to the fact that V8 compiles JavaScript into native machine code, instead of interpreting it or executing it as bytecode. http://blog.modulus.io/top-10-reasons-to-use-node

Node.js way: synchronous.

To perform a filesystem operation you are going to need the fs module from the Node core library. To load this kind of module, or any other "global" module, use the following incantation:

var fs = require('fs')

Now you have the full fs module available in a variable named fs. All synchronous (or blocking) filesystem methods in the fs module end with 'Sync'. To read a file, you'll need to use fs.readFileSync('/path/to/file'). This method will return a Buffer object containing the complete contents of the file.

Node.js way: asynchronous.

Instead of fs.readFileSync() you will want to use fs.readFile() and instead of using the return value of this method you need to collect the value from a callback function that you pass in as the second argument.

Remember that idiomatic Node.js callbacks normally have the signature:

                function callback (err, data) { /* ... */ }

Also keep in mind that it is idiomatic to check for errors and do early-returns within callback functions.

Node.js module

Create a new module by creating a new file that just contains your directory reading and filtering function. To define a single function export,

you assign your function to the module.exports object, overwriting what is already there:

module.exports = {

    foo: function () {

        console.log("foo is here.");

    },

    bar: function () {

        console.log("bar is here.");

    }

};

To use your new module in your original program file, use the require() call in the same way that you require('fs') to load the fs module. The only difference is that for local modules must be prefixed with './'. The '.js' is optional here and you will often see it omitted. So, if your file is named mymodule.js then

var mymodule = require('./mymodule.js')

DB Tables Growing Big?

There were these transaction tables (only a few) in my database for trade data (trade, trade legs etc) growing bigger and bigger over the years. To a certain point, it SLOWED down noticeable on updating any trade data. Although it was easy to blame the database server was not powerful enough, there are better designs to avoid this.

How can I keep up the read/write performance for these ever-growing tables? There are many ways from database-level technologies, such as partitioning tables. But I want to a simpler, tangible, easy-to-maintain, and all-in-control design. 

I figure that an easy way to boost the performance is to create one archive table and one active table for each growing table. I created the jobs to archive the records over night. Any records older than one day will be pushed over to archive table. Now Read operations are against a view which union the active tables and the archive tables. CRUD operations are on active table. It worked out really well. Atlas, until I needed to update the archived table. 

UPDATE, hmm....can it be just read-only? No. So, how to solve this problem? Since insert is much faster than update, can we change the UPDATE operations against archived data into INSERT operations? Yes but before doing so, version mechanism has to be introduced for the row records. In my solution, I simply introduced an IDENTITY (SQL Server) column. Now I can have the same record with multiple reversions. For the update and delete actions, I choose to archive the records using triggers. For the insert actions, I choose to update the unique record ID with PK if it is the first revision. The last catchy point I have to consider is that the archiving job might break the integrity of the active tables. In the case when I insert to active tables, I need to clean up the active tables before the insert action. In the end, this solution worked out pretty well.

Microsoft's Domain-Driven Design

Here is an excellent mapping between the Domain-Driven Design patterns and the technologies from Microsoft. Each layer will usually implement different patterns like Domain Entity, Aggregate, Aggregate-Root, loose coupling between aggregates, Aggregate storage, Value-Object, Repository, Unit of Work, Domain Service, Factory, Domain events, eventual consistency and so on. 

• Unity
• WCF
• SPA
• Enterprise Library Application Blocks
• AppFabric Cache
• Entity Frameworks
• Lamda Expression LINQ
• Windows Azure | Database
• WIF Azure AD | Server AD

CodeMaid for Visual Studio 2012

I used macros often before Visual Studio 2012. Although it was awkward to write it in VBScript, it did the tricks. For example if you wanted to join two lines in visual studio, you could create the macro and assign a keyboard shortcut (I usually assigned ALT+J). Here is the Macros I used to join two lines. It worked like a charm.
 

Imports System

Imports EnvDTE

Imports EnvDTE80

Imports EnvDTE90

Imports EnvDTE90a

Imports EnvDTE100

Imports System.Diagnostics

Public Module TonyJiang

    Sub JoinLines()

        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.EndOfLine()

        DTE.ExecuteCommand("Edit.Delete")

        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.Insert(" ")

        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.EndOfLine()

    End Sub

End Module

 

Now macros are gone in Visual Studio 2012, which triggered me to bing if there were any options to do the tricks for me. It turned out that a pleasant surprise was waiting for me. I found www.codemaid.net, which owned the functionality of join two lines and much way way much more by pressing CTRL+M, J. But what really excited me was there were so much more functionalities to clean the code, such as sorting the using clause and adding endregion name etc. It was so cool that I would encourage for every .NET developer to install it. Solute to the developers of codemaid!

 

 

Code Cleaning

Cleanup random white space into a simple standard order. Add unspecified access modifiers. Utilize Visual Studio's built-in formatting capabilities. Remove and sort using statements. And do it all automatically on save or on demand, from an individual file to the entire solution.

 

 

 

 

 

Windows 8 Doesn't Woo Enterprise Users

Last week I attended an event hosted by Markus Egger about .NET and Windows 8 Developer know-how! I felt a bit of pressed to write something about it because I am concerned about Microsoft's strategy for one OS to combine metro and desktop. I don't question Microsoft can produce a stunning OS to compete with iOS + MacOS on consumer tablets market. If there is one company other than Apple on the earth, it got to be Microsoft. However, is it really a good idea to combine metro with desktop? Really? How soon will the laptops and desktops all have the touch screens? How about multiple monitors?

My concerns were mainly for enterprise users and how Windows 8 would roll into enterprise domain:

• Windows 8 customer preview doesn't provide the flexibility to configure WorkStation only or Metro mode only. I hope Microsoft will fix this. For enterprise users, there is no need to have metro mode. Windows 7 is a huge success. Windows 8 desktop mode didn't do much to improve it further. There will be a new windows explorer with ribbons panes for documents and library. The task manager will be revamped to have more information. So instead call the workstation windows 8, we can call it Windows 7.1. The good thing about the workstation mode is that it supports everything Windows supports before.

• Metro mode can run on ARM processors for power efficiency and long battery life. Microsoft appears not to want existing applications to run on ARM unless they are redesigned for Metro – though it says there will be a version of its Office suite for ARM systems. But there is No Office suite for Windows 8 metro mode. You have to use desktop mode to run office suite. How can you imagine the enterprise Windows users not use Office?

• There will be Two Version of IE(s). As a developer, I can foresee the compatibility issues just between these two versions of IE. According to Markus, one IE will run with System32.dll and the other runs on WinRT. One supports plug-ins (Flash and Silverlight) and the other will not. How the enterprise web site to adjust that? Does enterprise have to convert everything to HTML5?

• The metro mode will Not Support Multi Monitors. Can you imagine the user with multiple desktops to switch to metro style and see other screens blank. I am not sure if this is the final decision yet but it doesn't make senses to me if it is to-be-shipped "feature". We should not call Metra mode Windows. Instead I think Windows 8 should call it Window 8 (Windows without s).

• The metro mode has Limited Multi-Tasking Support. It makes sense for slate-and-touch devices because everything is running as full screen. Limiting tasks will save the power assumption. However, does it make sense for plugged in desktops and laptops? Especially for multi-monitor desktops. This is doesn't make sense for enterprise users.

• Deployment metro style application will be a chore. The only way to deploy metro application is through AppStore. I don't think this is very friendly for enterprises. Does enterprise will allow Microsoft check the source code before the application get approved to be added to the store?

• Xaml Compatibility is very low according to XAML Comparer Tools between WPF and Metro. It's about 20-% compatible between existing WPF and Silverlight xaml application (This tool allows for comparison of different XAML dialects and utilized framework namespaces. Want to know if your Silverlight project will translate well to Windows 8 Metro? And whether your Metro assets can be reused in your Windows Phone app? And how about that WPF app?)

• No Start Menu for workstation mode, really???

In the end, I have to come to the conclusion – Windows 8 doesn't have enough attractions for the enterprise users. It might be a huge success in consumer market. All the opinions are personal and based on what I got from the meeting. So they could be biased and not accurate.

We will see.

Configure NLog ColoredConsole

I like NLog because it is probably the easiest logging framework I used. By simply copying NLog.config file to the project and set the Build Action to Content, I can use NLog in my code now. NLog support ColoredConsole. However, the default color scheme doesn't seem to make sense to  me. Here is the example, you can see the Error level is yellow. The Debug level is the same white color as Info level.

Fortunately, it's very easy to configure NLog to use different color scheme. Here is the color scheme I used.

Error/Fatal level: Red

Warn level: Yellow

Info level: White

Debug level: DarkGreen

Here is the configuration file correspondingly.

  <nlog xmlns="http://www.nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
    <targets>
      <target name="console" xsi:type="ColoredConsole" layout="${longdate} [${whenEmpty:whenEmpty=${threadid}:inner=${threadname}}] ${level} ${logger} ${message} ${exception:format=tostring}">
        <highlight-row condition="level == LogLevel.Error" foregroundColor="Red" />
        <highlight-row condition="level == LogLevel.Warn" foregroundColor="Yellow" />
        <highlight-row condition="level == LogLevel.Info" foregroundColor="White" />
      </target>
      <target xsi:type="File" name="file" layout="${longdate} ${level} ${logger} ${message} ${exception:format=tostring}" fileName="${basedir}/logfile.log" keepFileOpen="false" encoding="iso-8859-2" />
    </targets>
    <rules>
      <logger name="*" minlevel="Info" writeTo="console" />
    </rules>
  </nlog>