I just moved the Redwerb Visualizers project to CodePlex. If you want to download the visualizers, please head over there (Redwerb Visualizers on CodePlex). If you want to report any problems with the visualizer, please use the Issue Tracker on CodePlex.

This is my first CodePlex project. I was pretty happy that I could use my subversion client to access the source code. I purchased a license for VisualSVN (a Subversion client for Visual Studio) a while ago and really like it.

Another nice thing about CodePlex is that you can view the code without having to download it. You can even view the history of the code as well as differences between versions. It may not be as good as Beyond Compare, but it certainly is convenient.

I chose the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL). This seems to be a simple, straight-forward, permissive license to allow people to use the code any way they want without having to worry about copyright infringement.

I’ve updated the Redwerb Image Visualizer. The Image Visualizer is a Visual Studio visualizer. Visualizers allow developers to view an object in the debugger. Visual Studio comes with a couple of visualizers, but unfortunately, an image visualizer is not one of them.

The Redwerb Image Visualizer includes the following features (new features are in bold):

• Move the image by dragging with the mouse (no more scrollbars)
• Zoom the image from 10% to 300% (slider is now continuous with several convenient stop points)
• Change the background of the frame from light to dark
• View a border around the image (useful if the background is transparent)
• Includes the following information about the image
  • Height
  • Width
  • Image type
  • Horizontal resolution
  • Vertical resolution
  • Size in memory (an approximation)
• Quick access to features via keyboard shortcuts (lots of new shortcuts, plus a nicer shortcut dialog)

[Download]

The source code is also available.

I’ve been using the Logitech Cordless Wave Keyboard for some time now and I have to say that I am liking the keyboard. As a developer, I spend a considerable number of hours every day using a keyboard so I tend to be a bit picky when it comes to purchasing a keyboard. Because of this, I almost always cruise over to the keyboard aisle in any store that happens to have one so I can see if there is a keyboard that meets all my requirements.

The Wave keyboard meets almost every requirement. It is ergonomic, has an extended delete key, does not have the F-Lock feature, wireless, arrow keys are arranged properly, and the useless media features don’t get in the way of the operation of the keyboard. The software also allows you to disable the Caps Lock key (as well as a couple others), a must-have feature of any keyboard.

The Wave keyboard is so cool, they even have a “making of” documentary.

The one feature that is missing on the keyboard that caused me a lot of problems at first was that it doesn’t have a scroll lock key. I use two computers at home, my personal desktop and my work laptop. I had a KVM (Keyboard Video Mouse) switch that used a double press of the scroll lock key to change machines. Without that key, I had to use a double press of the Ctrl key instead which caused a lot of accidental switches. However, I have since switched to the IOGear GCS22U 2-Port USB KVM Switch. This switch doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut (at least, I’m not using one), but it does have a convenient remote that I can keep next to me that switches the machines.

I have since purchased this keyboard at work, though I upgraded to the Logitech Cordless Desktop Wave Pro. This set includes a mouse with the hyper-scroll wheel. I’ve had once since they first came out and I love having the ability to just whiz through a long page to get to the content I want. The mouse that comes with the standard set is adequate, though you will need to disable the forward button. For some reason they placed the button exactly where I press on the mouse when I am pushing it to the left. I’ve heard this complaint from other reviews as well.

I lost the BizArk framework when I changed web hosts, but it is back now. Check out the full list of features on the BizArk page.

There are a few updates since the last release, but unfortunately I don't remember what they are (I made the updates a long time ago, but haven't gotten around to posting them). I believe that I've fixed some problems with the ConvertEx class as well as added some new functionality to it. I've also added some useful extension classes and fixed some problems with the splash screen not working quite right under certain circumstances.

I was in need of an image visualizer for Visual Studio today and I was dismayed that I wasn't able to find one that I could just download and install. Don't get me wrong, I found plenty of image visualizers, but they all required me to compile it myself. So I decided to go ahead and build one myself.

The image visualizer includes the following features:

• Scrolls if the image is too large
• Zoom the image from 10% to 300%
• Change the background of the frame from light to dark
• Includes the following information about the image
  • Height
  • Width
  • Image type
  • Horizontal resolution
  • Vertical resolution
  • Size in memory (an approximation)
• Quick access to features via keyboard shortcuts

[Download]

The source code is also available.

On March 30th, Microsoft released the MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework for ASP.Net (see the press release). Apparently they have also just licensed the source code under MS-PL (see ScottGu's Blog post), which is an open source license (could this be an April Fool's joke?).

WebForms in ASP.Net is a decent framework for building web applications. WebForms allows you to build web applications in a manner similar to building WinForm applications. This is a powerful concept and one that has made many developers lives better. However, it comes with some cost, especially to how much control you have over the end result.

MVC is an alternative to WebForms that provides the developer more control over how content is rendered, not to mention using a well known, yet underused pattern for building applications with a user interface. One of the features of this pattern is the ability to unit test your code, which can be very difficult to do in WebForms.

Here's the description of ASP.Net MVC from the Microsoft download page:

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 provides a new Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework on top of the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime. This means that developers can take advantage of the MVC design patterns to create their Web Applications which includes the ability to achieve and maintain a clear separation of concerns (the UI or view from the business and application logic and backend data), as well as facilitate test driven development (TDD). The ASP.NET MVC framework defines a specific pattern to the Web Application folder structure and provides a controller base-class to handle and process requests for “actions”. Developers can take advantage of the specific Visual Studio 2008 MVC templates within this release to create their Web applications, which includes the ability to select a specific Unit Test structure to accompany their Web Application development.

The MVC framework is fully extensible at all points, allowing developers to create sophisticated structures that meet their needs, including for example Dependency Injection (DI) techniques, new view rendering engines or specialized controllers.

As the ASP.NET MVC framework is built on ASP.NET 3.5, developers can take advantage of many existing ASP.NET 3.5 features, such as localization, authorization, Profile etc.

For convenience, here are some of the resources available out there for ASP.Net MVC:

• Download ASP.Net MVC
• Official MVC Site
• MSDN documentation
• Free ASP.NET MVC eBook Tutorial by Scott Guthrie (part of a larger book on MVC coming out soon)

From Mix 09 (list of all videos). I haven't seen all these videos yet, but here are the ones on MVC:

• Microsoft ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC): Ninja on Fire Black Belt Tips
• See a walkthrough of several tips and tricks for getting the most out of the ASP.NET MVC framework.
• Choosing between ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC
• Come hear about the key concepts and features behind the two primary user interface technologies available for ASP.NET: MVC and Web Forms. Learn the pros and cons of both MVC and Web Forms, how to determine the best choice for a specific project, various techniques and patterns used to build MVC applications vs. Web Forms applications, and the implications for using each approach.
• File|New -> Company: Creating NerdDinner.com with Microsoft ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC)
• No slides. Just code. Start with File|New and build a real Web site with ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Authentication, Authorization, MVC, Microsoft SQL Server and jQuery in sixty-five minutes or less.
• ASP.NET MVC: America's Next Top Model View Controller Framework
• See how to build a simple application that highlights some of the key capabilities of ASP.NET MVC. Also, learn how to improve productivity using some of the cool new tooling features.

On February 2nd, Groundhogs Day (3rd favorite holiday :), I started a new job. I am now the Vice President of Product Development at TourFactory, a small company based in Spokane. They provide a web-based service to real-estate agents to help them market the homes they are selling.

The application is built primarily in classic ASP and I've been a bit nostalgic over the years for the simplicity of that platform, but I'm over that now :). I can't wait to begin the process of converting the product to .Net (one of the reasons I was hired). Classic ASP is simple, unfortunately it's a bit too simple. There is not very good support for debugging or Intellisense and there are many language features that I've grown accustomed to in my years as a .Net developer that are missing.

So far the job has been great. The people there are very easy to work with and are excited about some of the changes that I want to make, especially to the deployment cycle (more on this in another post).

This is my first management position, but I only have to manage 3 other developers, so hopefully I will be able to handle it. I've had the opportunity to work for a couple of great managers that I really respect over the years, so hopefully I have picked up a few good habits from them.

For those that know me, I still live in Arlington Washington, a town over 300 miles away and on the other side of the Cascade mountains from Spokane. I work every other week in Spokane and am in the process of getting an apartment there.

Spokane is a neat city to work in. You can get through most of downtown without going outside through a series of pedestrian walkways that go through many of the buildings. This is nice because it can get pretty cold in winter and awfully warm in summer. There is also a nice park within a couple blocks of the office that includes rides, trails, trees, a river, and more. There are also a bunch of restaurants in the area that look pretty good, though I've only had the opportunity to go to one so far.

The building I work in is the Fernwell Building. It was build in 1891, almost 120 years old! Thankfully the building does have electricity, air conditioning, and fiber optics. It is a nice building and has been well maintained. My office is on the 3rd floor, far left corner (see picture below).

If you haven't heard yet, IE 8 was released today (March 19th) at 9am (PDT). IE 8 is supposed to be faster and more standards compliant than its predecessor. However, there doesn't seem to be any big, noticeable improvements to the browser like there were in IE7 (like tabbed browsing) so it will be interesting to see what the adoption rate for IE 8 will be.

Download Internet Explorer 8

If you like following the browser wars, Firefox 3.5 (codenamed Shiretoko¹) seems to be just around the corner. This is a major update to the current version of Firefox (3.0).

1. Shiretoko: according to Wikipedia, this is an Ainu word meaning "end of the earth".

Over the last few months I've had a bunch of problems with my web host (UltimaHosts.Net) so I decided to drop them in favor of free web hosting at my new work (more on this in a future post).

I didn't want to mess with installing Community Server (a bit overkill for what I do), so I figured I would try a new blog engine as well. My new blog engine is BlogEngine.Net. It seems to be a decent, light-weight blog engine with enough features to keep me happy, but without all the extra features that I didn't use and that just made it difficult to manage. I'm sure I'll be changing things around in the next few weeks such as figuring out how to get my color scheme, fav icon, logos, etc.

Unfortunately Google failed me recently. I needed to get the value of an identity field in a Sql Server database after I inserted a record from an ASP.Net application. I'm sure the information is out there somewhere, but I wasn't able to find it (OK, I didn't really look that long).

The key to making this work was knowing two basic things.

1. You can batch statements in a SqlCommand.
2. SCOPE_IDENTITY is a T-SQL method that returns the last identity assigned within a particular scope.

Here is the code I wrote that gets the identity for a record that is just inserted and uses it in a second SQL statement. See line # 6 for the SCOPE_IDENTITY usage.

   1:  var conn = new SqlConnection(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["Gleneagle"].ConnectionString);

   2:  conn.Open();

   3:  var trans = conn.BeginTransaction();

   4:  try

   5:  {

   6:      var cmd = new SqlCommand("INSERT INTO Business (Name, Description) VALUES (@Name, @Description); SELECT SCOPE_IDENTITY();", conn);

   7:      cmd.Transaction = trans;

   8:      cmd.Parameters.AddWithValue("@Name", txtBusinessName.Text);

   9:      cmd.Parameters.AddWithValue("@Description", txtContactInfo.Text);

  10:      var busId = Convert.ToInt32(cmd.ExecuteScalar());

  11:   

  12:      cmd = new SqlCommand("INSERT INTO BusinessRecommendation (BusinessID, Name, DisplayName, StreetAddress, Description) VALUES (@BusinessID, @Name, @DisplayName, @StreetAddress, @Description)", conn);

  13:      cmd.Transaction = trans;

  14:      cmd.Parameters.AddWithValue("@BusinessID", busId);

  15:      cmd.Parameters.AddWithValue("@Name", txtName.Text);

  16:      cmd.Parameters.AddWithValue("@DisplayName", txtDisplayName.Text);

  17:      cmd.Parameters.AddWithValue("@StreetAddress", txtAddress.Text);

  18:      cmd.Parameters.AddWithValue("@Description", htmDescription.Html);

  19:      cmd.ExecuteNonQuery();

  20:   

  21:      trans.Commit();

  22:   

  23:  }

  24:  catch

  25:  {

  26:      trans.Rollback();

  27:      throw;

  28:  }

  29:  finally

  30:  {

  31:      conn.Close();

  32:      conn.Dispose();

  33:      conn = null;

  34:  }

If you are wondering why line # 10 converts the value to an Integer, SCOPE_IDENTITY returns a numeric value which is translated to be a Decimal because an identity field in Sql Server is not required to be an integer.