I’m working on a website with a large design aspect, so we have a lot of .psd files (about 200mb) kicking about the place. We want them source controlled, so they live in the TFS 2008 team project folder in source control. But then our Team Build includes them when downloading the source files, so that quickly fills up our build server’s drive and makes a single build take up to 11 minutes, which is far too long for a basic eCommerce website.

So I trimmed these files from our build process. Here’s what I did:

1. Copy the .psd files and any other files that aren’t required for a build into a seperate folder in the root of the team project. (All our website/source files are in another folder called ‘Current’, as in the ‘current version’, as opposed to ‘Phase 1′, ‘Phase 2′)
   
2. In Team Explorer, right click the build you want to edit and selected Edit Build Definition…
3. In the Workspace tab, enter the path within source control where you want to start downloading files from. In our case I chose the $/[project]/Current folder, so the /PSDs folder will be ignored and not downloaded.
   

Now, thanks to the above steps my build history folders are 1/10th the size they were to begin with, and the build process takes less than half the time!

This video is super cool.

I created a Silverlight-enabled WCF service which worked perfectly when running my Silverlight app from Visual Studio, but as soon as I deployed to IIS 7 on my machine and opened it outside of VS I received the following error:

Unhandled Error in Silverlight 2 Application Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. at System.RuntimeMethodHandle._InvokeMethodFast
…… (there was more

I couldn’t be sure whether this was a Silverlight or a WCF issue so I opened the SVC url in my browser and received a (405) Method Not Allowed response. I checked IIS and discovered there was no HTTP Handler set up for WCF services.

I then managed to find this very helpful post about setting up WCF HTTP Handlers in IIS 7, and the solution described worked perfectly for me. Here are the steps:

1. Open a command prompt as administrator
2. CD to c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.0\Windows Communication Foundation
3. Type ServiceModelReg -i and press return
4. A whole load of lines like “Installing: HTTP Handlers” will print out to the console. When it’s finished go into IIS 7 and open the HTTP Handlers list for your website. You should see a couple of new ones for the *.svc extension

Also, another issue I came across while trying to track down how to set these up was where people were deploying their WCF/Silverlight project to IIS 7 without updating their web.config to change the server binding reference. When you add a service reference to your Silverlight project the url is stored in the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file, but if the WCF project is defined in the same solution then the URL will point to the local Cassini server, which means the service call will fail when you deploy the app to IIS.

One solution to the issue is to override the service URL in code, so that you don’t have to keep updating the .config file when you deploy to a web server.

A problem I’ve come across in the past when writing ORM solutions is when I need to create a new instance of generic type T but set to a NULL or 0 value. Value types I need to set to null but reference types I need to set to 0. How do I do the right thing? Here’s a bad way:

if (typeof(container) == typeof(int))
container = 0;
else if (typeof(container) == typeof(Customer))
container = null;

Using this method means lots of if … else if …else by checking type. How ugly! There has to be a better way, I thought. So I gave up and got on with something else.

Months later, it turns out there IS a better way: the default keyword:

t container = default(containerType);

This keyword gives you a NULL or 0 value based on the type you pass it. I don’t know whether it’s faster or more efficient, but hey, it’s a lot less code for you to write, and you can be pretty sure they’ve covered all the edge cases.

More information about the default keyword.

TFS 2005/2008 both ship with the TfsDeleteProject.exe utility.

Open a command line on your team foundation server and cd to

%program files%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE (200 
%program files%\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE (2005)

Then:

tfsdeleteproject /q /force /server:<tfs server> "<project name>"

If you want to include ViewData in the MasterPage UI, you can.

ASP.Net MVC MasterPages are System.Web.Mvc.ViewMasterPage - this is a generic type just like System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage. So you can type it with a ViewData object, like this:

public partial class MyTemplate : ViewMasterPage<SomeViewData>

As soon as you do this you’re saying that the SomeViewData class is the only ViewData object that can be used on any page using this template. Not a problem though, just create a base ViewData class.

public class SiteWideViewData
{
}

public class PageViewData : SiteWideViewData
{
}

This of course means no more default ViewData objects and no more return View(); I found the easiest way to deal with that is to create a static property on the base ViewData:

public class SiteWideViewData
{
public static SiteWideViewData Default { get { return new SiteWideViewData(); } }
}

Now I can do this:

public ActionResult MySimpleControllerMethod()
{
return View(SiteWideViewData.Default);
}

And that seems to work okay.

Check out this page for a nice collection of LINQ to SQL samples:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/bb688085.aspx

The samples are only available in C# though so far as I can see…

Took me ages to find a link to download this sucker, so here’s the download link.

Download MVC Toolkit for MVC Preview 1

Note: As Simone noted in the comments, this toolkit is built against MVC Preview 1 and hence doesn’t work with Preview 2 or 3.

UPDATE:

I thought I needed it because there are so many MVC how-to articles referencing Preview 1, but it turns out much of the functionality is now rolled up into Preview 3. This assembly is now redundant, which is why it’s so hard to find. It’s *supposed* to be.

A couple of weeks ago I bought a Nokia N82 from Ebay, a major step up from my previous phone which, though I can’t actually find a product page for, was not unlike this one. So all this time I’ve been feeling a little left out of the mobile social services game, which is all very exciting. So now that I’ve got the new phone I’ve been going application crazy, and I’m going to share my thoughts and favourite apps here.

The phone supports WiFi and I have an unlimited data plan, so I’ve spare no concern whatsoever for data hungry apps - bear that in mind if your provider charges you per megabyte (is that really still a realistic option these days??).

Firstly, two obvious ones: the Google Mail and Google Maps applications are essential. Google Mail provides a fast and data-friendly way to check and write emails on the go. Checking your email will cost you about 1k and opening an email another 1-2k, so it’s totally 3G friendly. Google Maps churns though a bit more data when it downloads map tiles, but don’t go overboard with the zooming and you can keep a maps session under 100k easily enough. The address search functionality provides the same intuitive fuzziness as its online counterpart, and in this area it blows the built-in Nokia maps application out of the water. When we were in Berlin last week I couldn’t find anything in Nokia maps because I couldn’t be bothered getting the special characters right - Google Maps figured out what I was looking for every time. It also syncs with your GPS as you’d expect, and will provide directions for you in the same manner as the web app. In both applications the shortcuts are cleverly chosen and they’ve made excellent use of screen real estate when providing popup information.

I’m also really interested in always-connected applications and the clear and inevitable merge of desktop and mobile, so I wanted apps that will allow me to be productive on my phone and let me communicate with people in a variety of ways. The main methods of communication I’m interested in are Twitter, Skype and IM (GoogleTalk in my case).

Twitter provides a really simple way to use their service. Once you provide your mobile number you can elect to receive SMS updates from people you follow (you don’t have to receive SMS updates from everyone you follow - this provides a really nice level of spam control). You can broadcast your tweets by sending SMS messages to a phone number provided by Twitter, and using clever symantics you can reply and DM people as you need to.
http://twitter.com

For Skype and IM services there are two applications to consider: Fring and Nimbuzz (I don’t consider the S60 Skype application because it sucks). Both are conduits for a number of other services; Skype, GoogleTalk, AIM, Yahoo, MSN are fully supported by both. Both applications will hang around as background tasks once connected so you can do other things on your phone while still remaining available to receive chat and calls. I like the Nimbuzz interface a lot, but Fring is the only app I’ve been able to make a true VOIP call with. Fring only seems to like WiFi connections though, whereas with Nimbuzz I was able to connect via 3G and maintain a GTalk chat with someone. Bit of a shame that, so for the time being I’ll keep both apps installed and choose the appropriate one for my connection.

I’m also an enthusiastic last.fm user so I was stoked to discover that some bright chap had written an audioscrobbler application for S60 phones called Mobbler. Again it just lurks around in the background and keeps a record of what you’ve listened to on your music player, and once you’re connected (as far as I know this is a manual process) it then uploads to last.fm servers. Very very slick application. I listen to a lot of music on my IPod, and while I prefer it to the music player on my phone, I just love the fact that my tracks are being scrobbled. So I’m making a concerted effort to not hate the phone’s player.

On the user-generated content front, I also want to be able to upload my photos and video directly to *some service* from my phone. I *hate* synchronising, I *hate* the Nokia PC Suite. I don’t want to have to deal with that stuff.

Enter Shozu. Create an account with them and you’ll be given the option to add sites to publish content to. Facebook, Flickr, PicasaWeb, Friendster, Blogger, Kodak, LiveJournal, YouTube, PhotoBucket, Seesmic, SmugMug, Twitter, WordPress - to name about 1/3 of all the supported services. The genius thing about this app is that you can nominate a service to be your 1-click photo or 1-click video service. When you take a photo or record video on your phone you’ll immediately be presented with a little prompt - “Upload to [your service]“. Just hit the ‘Yes’ key and the Shozu app queues the media for upload and sends it when you’re connected. Just brilliant.

I’m also looking forward to trying out Jaiku, the location-based chat/networking service. I’ve requested a beta invitation so if/when I get one I’ll give it a go.

Cool! Hope all this gives someone a way to kill a few hours

Boy, the weeks have really flown by.

Lately I’ve been working on a WSS 2007 project which has been keeping me quite busy. I’ve been learning a great deal about Sharepoint development but I’ve been recording my learnings in the form of documentation rather than blog posts. My co-worker Scott Cowan has been keeping a thorough blog though. Initially my point of view was that I was being invested in to learn this stuff, so to broadcast my knowledge as I gained it would be ethically murky. But I’ve changed my mind about that now, so from now on whatever I learn I’ll post.

I’ve also been working on my CMS recently, trying to get it into shape so that it doesn’t disgust me anymore. It’s like a love-child I concieved during a more irresponsible time in my life and it’s turned out not only to be a time-suck but also just disappointing. I’m really trying to dig in, improve, refactor and rerelease. But I’m happy with the key features and with time and effort I think it will become a good product.

I hosted my blog for a while on it, but I switched because the features I wanted to include in my blog would have taken my too long to implement when I could just sign up for a free one and set it up in a few minutes. That was a good time but now I’m getting more serious about finishing the project I’m going to migrate back to my CMS. I realise now that in the long run I actually want my blog to be hosted on my own software, so to avoid messing up people’s bookmarks andRSS subscriptions (20 people a day and counting!) I’m going to cross-post everything I blog on the wordpress site to my original site. That way when the switch finally happens most of the content will just be there. It’s going to be annoying but hopefully I’ll find a way to automate it.

I managed to get a beta license for ping.fm so it’s going to be cool playing with that. It was really, really hard to get the license (hint: just email them and ask).

I’m also in the process of shifting my hosting from www.enom.com to DiscountASP.Net. So far they seem really cool - pages load in a heartbeat whereas enom was dead slow, and my sites are running on a Windows Server 2008 box. I can manage things like Http Handlers through my IIS7 Management Console, and it’s bliss! They also answer questions promptly which is a huge bonus.

Also I have a Nokia N82 on it’s way to me. It’s about time I had a smartphone and I’m super excited about building some J2SE apps. I have a couple of ideas for things I want to try out.

And I’m using www.rememberthemilk.com, it’s actually really good.