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Deploying ASP.NET MVC Apps to Shared Hosting Providers – Webhost4life.com

kellyb — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:18:24 GMT

Are you getting 404’s on your deployed site when it works perfectly on your development machine?

There’s a number of hidden gotchas when deploying an ASP.NET MVC application to a shared hosting providers. My provider of choice is Webhost4life.com. Here’s a list of issues I ran into and the solutions for each.

IIS 6.0 vs IIS 7.0

There’s a number of issues you need to be aware of here. If you using IIS 6 -- and if you’re on Webhost4life there’s a good chance you are – then you need to make sure you’re virtual directory is configured w/ the “Wildcard application map” ISAPI setup that Phil talks about in his ASP.NET MVC on IIS 6 Walkthrough post. The short answer is – you have to contact Webhost4life to do this. As of this writing, this is not available through their Control Panel.

MVC Binaries

As of this writing, Webhost4life.com does not have ASP.NET MVC installed on their servers and therefore none of the assemblies are installed in the GAC. At a minimum, you need to bin deploy System.Web.Mvc.dll assembly. Follow the instructions from Phil on how to do this in his post Bin Deploying ASP.NET MVC – the abbreviated version is: mark the references to MVC assemblies in your project as CopyLocal=true.

Route Setup

Make sure that your routes our setup in a way that jives with your domain. In other words, make sure that http://www.yourdomain.com/ will go to the proper route. This is easy to overlook since your Startup Page in Visual Studio is set to something like /Site/Home while debugging. However, this isn’t how people are going to navigate to your site on your hosting provider. In my case I setup routes with the code below. This allows folks coming into my site via http://yourdomain.com and http://yourdomain.com/Site/Home to all end up in the same place

    public class MvcApplication : System.Web.HttpApplication
    {
        public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
        {
            routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

            routes.MapRoute("Default", "{controller}/{action}/{id}",  new { controller = "Site", action = "Home", id = "" });
            routes.MapRoute("Root", "", new { controller = "Site", action = "Home", id = "" } );
        }

        protected void Application_Start()
        {
            Global.RuntimeSettings = new RuntimeSettings {MachineName = base.Context.Server.MachineName};
            RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
        }
    }

Link Round Up

Here’s a list of things I found helpful when debugging this stuff

ASP.NET Routing Debugger: Phil provides a debugging tool for routes
ASP.NET Forum – How to deploy MVC app to shared hosting: This is the post I ran across that connected all the dots for me and the Webhost4life.com tech support

Taking WPF and Silverlight Seriously

kellyb — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 17:15:21 GMT

Over the last six months, I’ve been working with a team of good folks building a pretty serious set of WCF based web services. These services were intended to be the next generation of products that will hopefully reinvent the systems that support a large percentage of our business. It’s been a fun ride and I’ve definitely learned WCF inside and out. Part of this effort involved building out a semi-customer facing client application. We needed a harness to drive development of our service-oriented features as well as something that showcased the platform independence of the services we were building. We’re primarily a traditional Win32 shop with a bunch of C++/MVC and Windows Forms, but WPF was the presentation technology we choose. I was vocally against this choose at the time. I didn’t think it was a wise selection from a learning curve and maturity standpoint. I saw many more risks than rewards. In the end, I think I was right and wrong. WPF has a ridiculously high learning curve and IMO they arbitrarily veered from many of the API and naming conventions/standards which steepened this learning curve unnecessarily. But, in the end… we had a team that was strong enough to do what we needed to do and we were able to overcome the learning curve. Luckily we had one teammate that had strong skills in XAML and WPF and he did most of the work. I think we would have been in big trouble if we needed to actually build a real client application with real-world complexity. Knocking out a client application that display data from WCF services was pretty straightforward.

All that was a good toe-dipping exercise into the world of WPF and XAML. I learned enough to not hate XAML, but I certainly have yet to embrace it. In the coming weeks I’m moving on to a new project entirely based on Silverlight and Prism, so it’s time to start taking this stuff seriously. Here and now I’m pledging to open my mind and mentally embrace WPF and XAML. I’ve read WPF Unleashed, but I just didn’t absorb much of it, and that’s been the extent of my exploration.

Here’s what I plan to power through to get serious about this:

Read (again) WPF Unleashed by Adam Nathan
Customize Data Display with Data Binding and WPF (Advanced Data Binding)
Data Binding in WPF
WPF Apps With The Model-View-ViewModel Design Pattern
Understanding Routed Events and Commands In WPF
Patterns For Building Composite Applications With WPF

I’ll need to find a pet project… my go-to pet project is a Family Tree web site. I think I’ll build a single codebase with a WPF and Silverlight client.

Missing Status Bar in Visual Studio?

kellyb — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:14:31 GMT

From time to time, my status bar disappears. I used to believe this was due to a botched install or add-in. I recently upgraded to Team System Test Edition, and my status bar again disappeared. For the last few weeks I’ve been trying to figure out a time to do a full reinstall.

Today, I discovered this is a setting in Visual Studio (duh). So, if you see this:

and you can’t figure out how to get your status bar back, go to Tools –> Options –> Environment –> General section and check the “Show status bar” checkbox:

And you’ll have your status bar back:

Day 1: .NET Memory Leak Indicators

kellyb — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 13:22:53 GMT

Open Windows PerfMon and…

Is “% Time in GC” is greater than 30%?
Is “# Gen 0 Collections” sustaining a ratio less than 10:1 to “# Gen 2 Collections”?

You’ve probably got a leak or two or ten

WCF on IIS 7/Vista – No .svc file mappings

kellyb — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 02:12:09 GMT

I’ve been battling this literally for months. I couldn’t seem to get .svc files hosted on my Vista machine. It wasn’t until tonight that I really needed to get it working. It took me the better part of an hour to find Guy Burstein’s WCF on IIS7 on Vista - Adding .svc Handler post (no idea why this wasn’t ranking higher on Google).

If you’re seeing this:

Server Error in Application “Default Web Site/...”
HTTP Error 404.3 - Not Found

Then do the following:

Start the command window (cmd) as an Administrator.
Navigate to: C:\windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v3.0\Windows Communication Foundation
Run the following command: ServiceModelReg –i

Hand-Shaping the XML Schema of your data contract using IXmlSerializable

kellyb — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:14:55 GMT

I’ve been getting into some pretty advanced scenarios with WCF where we need to precisely shape the XML on the wire and the schema’s that are produced by svcutil.exe. Trust me, the moment you start using WCF for exposing services to Java clients, those Java clients are really going to care how the XML looks. WCF makes .NET-to-.NET very easy, and .NET-to-Java doable, but I wouldn’t call it easy. For vanilla scenarios (simple contracts with simple types and basic complex types), it’s pretty easy. The hooks exposed by WCF for shaping the XML are pretty poor in my opinion.

IXmlSerializable is your friend when it comes to shaping the xml on the wire. It will work with the Data Contract Serializer in WCF, but if you google around trying to find info on people using IXmlSerializable, you’ll quickly get confused. I wanted to hand-roll how my entity serializes, and this interface is very straightforward for that. For shaping the schema, it’s not straight forward in the slightest. Below are several lessons I learned over a number of days while working with IXmlSerialiable:

GetSchema is not what you use to shape the schema!

I don’t know what this method is for, but it’s not what it sounds like. Everything you’ll find on google is people returning null. If you programmatically construct an XmlSchema instance, and return it from GetSchema(), it won’t be used. As far as I can tell, the Data Contract Serializer never calls this method. Instead, you have to decorate your class with the XmlSchemaProvider attribute and specify the static method that should be called for shaping the schema. This method should accept an argument of type XmlSchemaSet and in that method is where you should construct your schema, and add it to the XmlSchemaSet. It appears the method you implement must return either an instance of XmlQualifiedName or any derivative of XmlSchemaObject (i.e. XmlSchemaComplexType or XmlSchemaSimpleType). Here’s an example:

    [XmlSchemaProvider("ConstructSchema")]
    public class Product : IXmlSerializable
    {
        private bool _deserializing;
        protected object _data;

        public virtual object Data
        {
            get { return _data; }
            set { _data = value; }
        }

        public static XmlQualifiedName ConstructSchema(XmlSchemaSet schemaSet)
        {
            const string theNamespace = "http://webservices.kellybrownsberger.com/1.0";

            XmlSchema schema = new XmlSchema
            {
                TargetNamespace = theNamespace,
                ElementFormDefault = XmlSchemaForm.Qualified
            };

            schemaSet.Add(schema);

            return new XmlQualifiedName("Product", theNamespace);
        }

        public XmlSchema GetSchema()
        {
            throw new NotImplementedException("Not implemented - the XMmlSchemaProvider attribute specifies calling the static GetSchema method instead");
        }

        public void ReadXml(XmlReader reader)
        {
        }

        public void WriteXml(XmlWriter writer)
        {
        }
    }

Shaping Schema using a read-in xml string

This is handy for two things in my mind – readability and code-gen. People tend to like looking at a schema in an xml representation. It’s more error prone, and not refactor-tool-friendly, but it’s more readable to the masses I think. Secondly, I like to code-gen my contracts in batch (using T4). Typically, I’ll define some XML grammar (DSL if you will), that describes my entities. I can then gen them all and make sure all of the correct attributes are applied. This might seem silly, but in large systems with interoperability being a top-priority, keeping all of your DataContract and DataMember attributes correct (one forgotten or botched namespace declaration can hose our consumers) is a bit daunting. When you get into the more complex things like contract versioning, and types implementing IXmlSerialable, it’s very daunting. Being able to code-gen this stuff has a lot of advantages. Reading in XML Schema as text is code-gen friendly as it can easily be captured as part of the DSL/grammar I mentioned, and the necessary code can be generating quickly and easilyand because your generating it, it’s less error prone.

Example:

        public static XmlQualifiedName ConstructSchema(XmlSchemaSet schemaSet)
        {
            const string theNamespace = "http://webservices.kellybrownsberger.com/1.0";

            StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
            builder.AppendLine(string.Format("<xs:schema xmlns:tns=\"{0}\" elementFormDefault=\"qualified\" targetNamespace=\"{0}\" xmlns:xs=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema\">", theNamespace));
            builder.AppendLine("<xs:complexType name=\"Product\">");
            builder.AppendLine("<xs:sequence minOccurs=\"1\" maxOccurs=\"1\">");
            builder.AppendLine("<xs:any />");
            builder.AppendLine("</xs:sequence>");
            builder.AppendLine("</xs:complexType>");
            builder.AppendLine("</xs:schema>");

            XmlSchema schema = XmlSchema.Read(new StringReader(builder.ToString()), null);

            schemaSet.Add(schema);

            return new XmlQualifiedName("Product", theNamespace);
        }

Shaping Schema programmatically

It took me longer than I care to admit to figure out how to do this correctly (it took me forever to figure out that I needed to sequence to the XmlSchemaComplexType’s Particle property). Here’s an example:

        public static XmlSchemaComplexType ConstructSchema(XmlSchemaSet schemaSet)
        {
            const string theNamespace = "http://webservices.kellybrownsberger.com/1.0";

            XmlSchema schema = new XmlSchema
            {
                TargetNamespace = theNamespace,
                ElementFormDefault = XmlSchemaForm.Qualified
            };

            XmlSchemaComplexType type = new XmlSchemaComplexType { Name = "Product" };
            schema.Items.Add(type);
            
            XmlSchemaSequence sequence = new XmlSchemaSequence {MinOccurs = 1, MaxOccurs = 1};
            sequence.Items.Add(new XmlSchemaAny());
            type.Particle = sequence;

            schemaSet.Add(schema);

            return type;
        }

Testable WCF ServiceHost

kellyb — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 03:50:00 GMT

I’m finally getting a chance to sink my teeth into Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). I’m finding quite a few gaps on the interoperability side of things, and I think it’s overly complex in it’s configuration schemes and extensibility points, but it’s light years beyond what we had previously in ASMX. From what I can tell, the WCF adoption was just much slower than everyone anticipated. I’m not sure why that is – perhaps it’s the vastness of it that’s intimidated people. Perhaps it was the quality of the the .NET version 2.0 release that resulted in a slow adoption of all of version 3.0+. For whatever reason, this seems to have caused a number of rough edges in the product to sit dormant for a couple of years now.

At any rate, WCF is now part of my every day day-job, and I’m trying to find ways to make it more testable. We have a suite of what I’d call System Tests. Unit Tests by my definition, test at the object (or component) boundary while System Tests test at a collection of objects (or components). Our system is highly configurable, and behaviors vary dramatically from one configuration to the next. We’d like to have the ability to have a repeatable suite of automated test that can test all of our out-of-the-box configurations.

To date we’ve been executing our tests by .bat file (shelling to MbUnit.Cons.exe) after copying copies of our config files to our hosting IIS project. This is less than awesome for a few reasons:

It’s Slow and Flakey – Running test out of process (which is what IIS is) is always slower than in-process. Keep our test suite blazing fast is highly desirable. Also, when you’re doing this kind of thing, it’s not uncommon to need to restart IIS between tests (IIS caching certain types of config data, etc.), which can really slow down the party.
It’s Heavy and Hard to Setup – IIS is required to be installed on any machine that wants to run the tests.
It’s Awkward – We must have .bat files that copy around our Web.config files that contain our test configuration before executing our tests. The natural experience of running our tests directly from the IDE is lost.

Luckily, WCF is highly extensible and customizable in it’s hosting infrastructure. In the System.ServiceModel of the .NET Framework, they expose everything you need to easily create your own host for your WCF services. We’ve all seen the MSN samples that hosts your hello-world service with a Console app. To make our automated tests more awesome, I created a TestableServer service host implementation.

The Service

Lets say we have a service like this…

    /// <summary>
    /// Here's my service implementation
    /// </summary>
    public class SomeService : ISomeService
    {
        public DateTime GetCurrentDate()
        {
            return DateTime.Now.Date;
        }
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Here's my service contract for my implementation
    /// </summary>
    [ServiceContract]
    public interface ISomeService
    {
        [OperationContract]
        DateTime GetCurrentDate();
    }

The Test

With the TestableServer, I can write a tidy little test like so…

    [TestFixture]
    public class SomeServiceFixture
    {
        [Test]
        public void Can_We_Invoke_GetCurrentDate()
        {
            using (TestableServer<SomeService, ISomeService> server = new TestableServer<SomeService, ISomeService>(new BasicHttpBinding()))
            {
                ISomeService proxy = server.CreateProxy();

                DateTime actual = proxy.GetCurrentDate();

                Assert.AreEqual(DateTime.Now.Date, actual.Date);
            }
        }
    }

By passing a few generics, it has all the information it needs to host my service in-memory and I can execute tests against it directly. Notice in the TestableServer constructor, I’m passing in the binding I’d like to use. Here I can specify netTcpBinding, msmqBinding, or any of they other support bindings. Here I’m using vanilla HTTP.

The Code

There’s not much to it at all, but here’s the code behind TestableServer…

    public class TestableServer<TServiceImp, TServiceInt> : IDisposable where TServiceImp : class
    {
        private ServiceHost _host;
        private readonly Type _serviceImplType = typeof(TServiceImp);
        private readonly Type _serviceIntType = typeof(TServiceInt);
        private readonly string _url;
        private readonly Binding _binding;
        private ChannelFactory<TServiceInt> _factory;
        private TServiceInt _channel;

        public TestableServer() : this(new NetTcpBinding()) { }

        public TestableServer(Binding binding)
        {
            _host = new ServiceHost(_serviceImplType);
            _binding = binding;

            _url = string.Format("{0}://localhost/{1}", _binding.Scheme, Guid.NewGuid());
            _host.AddServiceEndpoint(_serviceIntType, _binding,  _url);

            try
            {
                _host.Open();
                
            }
            catch (TimeoutException timeoutEx)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Failed to close the service host - Exception: " + timeoutEx.Message);
                throw;
            }
            catch (CommunicationException communicationEx)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Failed to close the service host - Exception: " + communicationEx.Message);
                throw;
            }
        }

        public TServiceInt CreateProxy()
        {
            _factory = new ChannelFactory<TServiceInt>(_binding);
            _channel = _factory.CreateChannel(new EndpointAddress(_url));
            
            return _channel;
        }

        public void Dispose()
        {
            if ( _factory != null )
            {
                _factory.Close();
                _factory = null;
            }

            TearDown();
        }

        private void TearDown()
        {
            if (_host != null)
            {
                try
                {
                    if ( _host.State == CommunicationState.Opened || _host.State ==CommunicationState.Opening)
                    {
                        _host.Close();
                    }
                }
                catch (TimeoutException timeoutEx)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("Failed to close the service host - Exception: " + timeoutEx.Message);
                }
                catch (CommunicationException communicationEx)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("Failed to close the service host - Exception: " + communicationEx.Message);
                }
                finally
                {
                    _host = null;
                }
            }
        }
    }

The Ultimate Goal

So, I haven’t actually achieved my ultimate goal yet, which is to be able to programmatically configure the server/service for each of our supported configurations and execute our test suites against those configurations. That’s what I’m going to work on next, and without IIS between my test fixture and my service implementation, achieving that goal should be relatively simple.

ASP.NET States DropDownList

kellyb — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 04:00:00 GMT

I've had to build one of these a few times over the years. If you want a very quick and dirty dropdown of US states in an ASP.NET app, here is the code

   1: <asp:DropDownList runat="server" ID="StatesList">

   2:     <asp:ListItem Value="AL" Text="Alabama"></asp:ListItem>

   3:     <asp:ListItem Value="AK" Text="Alaska"></asp:ListItem>

   4:     <asp:ListItem Value="AZ" Text="Arizona"></asp:ListItem>

   5:     <asp:ListItem Value="AR" Text="Arkansas"></asp:ListItem>

   6:     <asp:ListItem Value="CA" Text="California"></asp:ListItem>

   7:     <asp:ListItem Value="CO" Text="Colorado"></asp:ListItem>

   8:     <asp:ListItem Value="CT" Text="Connecticut"></asp:ListItem>

   9:     <asp:ListItem Value="DE" Text="Delaware"></asp:ListItem>

  10:     <asp:ListItem Value="DC" Text="Dist of Columbia"></asp:ListItem>

  11:     <asp:ListItem Value="FL" Text="Florida"></asp:ListItem>

  12:     <asp:ListItem Value="GA" Text="Georgia"></asp:ListItem>

  13:     <asp:ListItem Value="HI" Text="Hawaii"></asp:ListItem>

  14:     <asp:ListItem Value="ID" Text="Idaho"></asp:ListItem>

  15:     <asp:ListItem Value="IL" Text="Illinois"></asp:ListItem>

  16:     <asp:ListItem Value="IN" Text="Indiana"></asp:ListItem>

  17:     <asp:ListItem Value="IA" Text="Iowa"></asp:ListItem>

  18:     <asp:ListItem Value="KS" Text="Kansas"></asp:ListItem>

  19:     <asp:ListItem Value="KY" Text="Kentucky"></asp:ListItem>

  20:     <asp:ListItem Value="LA" Text="Louisiana"></asp:ListItem>

  21:     <asp:ListItem Value="ME" Text="Maine"></asp:ListItem>

  22:     <asp:ListItem Value="MD" Text="Maryland"></asp:ListItem>

  23:     <asp:ListItem Value="MA" Text="Massachusetts"></asp:ListItem>

  24:     <asp:ListItem Value="MI" Text="Michigan"></asp:ListItem>

  25:     <asp:ListItem Value="MN" Text="Minnesota"></asp:ListItem>

  26:     <asp:ListItem Value="MS" Text="Mississippi"></asp:ListItem>

  27:     <asp:ListItem Value="MO" Text="Missouri"></asp:ListItem>

  28:     <asp:ListItem Value="MT" Text="Montana"></asp:ListItem>

  29:     <asp:ListItem Value="NE" Text="Nebraska"></asp:ListItem>

  30:     <asp:ListItem Value="NV" Text="Nevada"></asp:ListItem>

  31:     <asp:ListItem Value="NH" Text="New Hampshire"></asp:ListItem>

  32:     <asp:ListItem Value="NJ" Text="New Jersey"></asp:ListItem>

  33:     <asp:ListItem Value="NM" Text="New Mexico"></asp:ListItem>

  34:     <asp:ListItem Value="NY" Text="New York"></asp:ListItem>

  35:     <asp:ListItem Value="NC" Text="North Carolina"></asp:ListItem>

  36:     <asp:ListItem Value="ND" Text="North Dakota"></asp:ListItem>

  37:     <asp:ListItem Value="OH" Text="Ohio"></asp:ListItem>

  38:     <asp:ListItem Value="OK" Text="Oklahoma"></asp:ListItem>

  39:     <asp:ListItem Value="OR" Text="Oregon"></asp:ListItem>

  40:     <asp:ListItem Value="PA" Text="Pennsylvania"></asp:ListItem>

  41:     <asp:ListItem Value="RI" Text="Rhode Island"></asp:ListItem>

  42:     <asp:ListItem Value="SC" Text="South Carolina"></asp:ListItem>

  43:     <asp:ListItem Value="SD" Text="South Dakota"></asp:ListItem>

  44:     <asp:ListItem Value="TN" Text="Tennessee"></asp:ListItem>

  45:     <asp:ListItem Value="TX" Text="Texas"></asp:ListItem>

  46:     <asp:ListItem Value="UT" Text="Utah"></asp:ListItem>

  47:     <asp:ListItem Value="VT" Text="Vermont"></asp:ListItem>

  48:     <asp:ListItem Value="VA" Text="Virginia"></asp:ListItem>

  49:     <asp:ListItem Value="WA" Text="Washington"></asp:ListItem>

  50:     <asp:ListItem Value="WV" Text="West Virginia"></asp:ListItem>

  51:     <asp:ListItem Value="WI" Text="Wisconsin"></asp:ListItem>

  52:     <asp:ListItem Value="WY" Text="Wyoming"></asp:ListItem>

  53: </asp:DropDownList>

The Entity Framework team should talk to the MVC team

kellyb — Wed, 21 May 2008 04:00:00 GMT

Two product efforts at Microsoft have spun up this year and both are new implementations of very old ideas:

ASP.NET MVC Framework - Microsoft's upcoming implementation of a Model View Controller architecture for their web application platform. MVC has been around for a long time on other development platforms, but only recently has there been a push in the .NET community demanding for this.
ADO.NET Entity Framework - Microsoft's next rev of data access technology (ADO.NET) contains a lot of new ways to work with data. EF is their implementation of an Object-Relational Mapping framework. Again, OR Mapping has been around for a very long time on other development platforms such as Java, but only recently has there been a push in the .NET community asking for this.

My personal opinion is the recent increase in the popularity of Agile development methods has had a large part in driving out these products from Microsoft. Agile development tends to accentuates everything in a development ecosystem - the good and the bad. Agile teams using the .NET platform have been feeling a lot of pain in certain areas - namely, data access and web app development. Writing automated-test-friendly code using these parts of the framework has been a nightmare for me personally, and I know there's scores of people that feel the same way.

To be fair, there's a large part of the .NET community that just doesn't care about any of this. By and large, they don't care about Agile and they don't care about automated test friendliness and they think the current implementations of ASP.NET and ADO.NET are just fine. I'm not going to argue with any of that because those people are in the best position to know what's best for them. However, there are people out there that loudly crying for change, and I'm one of them (though most of my crying is done in my own head).

What's really interesting I think is to watch how the MVC team has went about this charge in comparison to the EF team. I pay a lot more attention to the MVC stuff just because I've been a long time reader of Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, and Rob Conery (the 3 main guys Microsoft hired to make lead the MVC effort). If you read through these guy's blog's and the content they're producing to support this product, their "this is for a certain set of people with a certain set of concerns that doesn't apply to everyone and we want this product to delight those people" attitude is obvious, which is very refreshing. Scott posted some very cool video's of his talks on MVC at Mix this year. This refreshing attitude shines thoroughly repeatedly in these talks.

Dan Simmons from the Entity Framework team posted a break down of the data access technologies in ADO.NET and compares and contrasts them for different types of jobs. As expected, the Agile/TDD zealots are pounding on him (i.e. Jeremy Miller and the CodeBetter crew). The zealots don't like the EF team's model and they take every opportunity to remind them of that. The EF team seems view these folks and their viewpoints as a small subset of the community. They seem to be applying the 80/20 rule, and they seem to think that if only 20% of the community is pissed, then that's pretty good.

What I think Dan is missing here, unlike the MVC team, this 20% of people that are displeased with their model, is the majority of people that care about this stuff. The other 80% are the people that don't care about Agile and don't care about automated-test-friendliness. They are the people that are more than happy cranking out dataset based app after dataset based app. I would argue, they are the definitely NOT the people that are creating conceptual data models for reuse across their domain (the EF's big selling point). I think the EF team needs to watch the MVC team and start listening to the zealots. Those zealots are your customer.

My prediction:

ASP.NET MVC Framework: Huge Success
ADO.NET Entity Framework: Huge Failure

I would love to be wrong about #2. #1 seems to already be in the bag :)

Solving Real Problems with Access Modifiers 101

kellyb — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 04:00:00 GMT

Its refreshing when you solve what appears to be a nasty problem with a simple and clean solution. It's an even better feeling when you solve it with Computer Science fundamentals. I solved something this morning by releaning how acces modifiers work (access modifiers in C# in my case).

We have a basic data transfer object that has some private state that handles change tracking. Something such as:

public class ProductDTO
{
    private bool _isDirty = false;
    private string _name;
    
    public string Name
    {
        get { return _name; }
        set
        {
            if ( value != _name )
            {
                _name = value;
                _isDirty = true;
            }
        }
    }
}

This of course is a contrived example, but it illustrates the crux of my problem.

The _isDirty flag is managed internally and marked private as you'd expect. What I need to do is transfer state from one instance of ProductDTO to another. I need the public state as well as the private/internal state. Over the years I've been lulled into thinking of private members as things that cannot be accessed outside of an instance. This isn't true. Private members cannot be accessed outside of the class. In other words, two instances of the same class can happily access each other's private/internal members.

With this lesson relearned, I'm able to create a Copy() method such as:

public void Copy(ProductDTO copy)
{
    _name = copy.Name;
    _isDirty = copy._isDirty;
}

Note the get of the _isDirty from the copy instance.

I'd forgotten this how Access Modifiers work and from the majority of code I've seen in recent years, most developers out there have as well. You typically see numerous forms of encapsulation violation or leaky public contracts to accomplish something like this.