Monthly Archive for: ‘November, 2008’

I’m currently enjoying setting up a Greenfield implementation of Team Foundation Server 2008 for a new client, and getting the development and test teams up to speed on TFVC, work item tracking, continuous integration, and all that groovy agile stuff that Team System make so easy.

After six months away from TFS, it’s nice to get reacquainted with my old friend, and realise that the product has come a long way since the original 2005 release.

I’m delighted to see that MS have continued their tradition of releasing frequent enhancements as a pack of downloadable “Power Tools”, one of the coolest of which is the Build Notification Tool.

When running, an icon will appear in your system tray which looks something like this (the symbol within the circle will differ depending on the current status of the builds being monitored):

Right-clicking on the icon and selecting options allows you to specify the builds and the events in which you’re interested:

Having done that, you’ll get toast popping up above your system tray when any of the specified events occur. Also, the icon changes accordingly.

Here’s what it looks like when a build starts. Note the hyperlink to stop the build if desired:

When a build is successful, the toast includes hyperlinks to view the associated work items, or open the build drop location:

If When a build breaks, the toast includes a hyperlink to the associated changesets, and the icon turns into a red cross:

At any time, you can right-click on the Build Notification icon and select “View Build Status” to get a summary of the current status of all the builds in which you’ve expressed interest:

It really is quite neat, and I prefer this approach to subscribing to the automated build event emails, which I tend to overlook.

Interesting article from Patrick Smacchia (the NDepend guy) in which he runs some benchmarks on the cost of looping in different ways over different constructs and comes to the conclusion that:

“looping on array using for is 5 times cheaper than looping on List<T> using foreach (which I believe, is what we all do)”

Well worth a read, although I suspect that in my solutions the bottlenecks will remain the out-of-process calls, i.e. database access and web service calls. Still, a 5x gain is not to be sniffed at.

Patrick Smacchia – An easy and efficient way to improve .NET code performance.

Uncle Bob Martin on Dot Net Rocks:

“The programmer becomes this choreographer of a dance of code as it’s flinging around the system, becoming better organised and better strucutred…”

Awesome. I’m gonna stick that on my CV…

Just when I thought I’d seen it all, I’ve encountered a mutant web project containing a mixture of VB and C# pages. I kid you not.

This online converter from DeveloperFusion is proving invaluable for sorting out this abomination. It’s not perfect, but it cuts out a huge amount of busywork.

IM received this morning:

Morning young man. Do you know of anywhere that I can get hold of best practices for stored procedure source control?

My response was to recommend checking out the series of articles on this subject by K. Scott Allen. They’re in my del.icio.us bookmarks at http://delicious.com/ianfnelson/databases+alm

For .NET developers with MSDN premium licenses, achieving this through the use of Visual Studio 2008 Team System for Database Professionals is the obvious way to go. Since the start of October, this Team System SKU has been available to anyone with the Team System for Developers SKU (see Soma’s post). An updated, General Distribution Release, is due for release soon, and as usual GertD has been blogging frequently about the forthcoming enhancements.

Alternatively, I know of people who swear by Red Gate Software’s SQL Toolbelt suite, in particular the SQL Compare tool, which is available from just £245.

Oh, my eyes! I’m currently looking at a VB.NET class which includes a dozen examples of the following exception "handling" anti-pattern:

'Send e-mail
Try
Dim smtp As New SmtpClient()
smtp.Send(message)
Catch ex As Exception
ThrowException(ex)
End Try

Why would anyone write code like this?!

This violates some of the most fundamental of best practices to be followed when writing exception handling code, including:

• Not catching System.Exception (which should really only be caught in one place per thread, at the top of your stack).
• Not throwing System.Exception (instead of an appropriate custom exception class).
• Not catching exceptions that you can’t handle (if the best you can do is rethrow the exception like a hot potato, then why bother? Just let it bubble up).
• Clearing the stack trace when rethrowing (in the example above, a new exception is thrown, with a cleared stack trace. Valuable debugging information has been lost).

I can only assume that the original author of this code didn’t understand the concept of exception handling whatsoever.

Still, this is all easily solved by me and my trusty Delete key