Earlier this week, one of my co-workers renamed an assembly to consolidate some functionality in our application yesterday, and even though TFS said the changes were checked in, they weren’t.

I got the latest code the morning after the change, and got nothing but build failures. We’re using the latest version of TFS and it’s very frustrating that something like this still doesn’t work properly.

Ultimately, the solution was found at the bottom of this thread.

The only way I’ve found to avoid this kind of hassle is to create a new assembly, copy your code from the old assembly to the new one, change any references to the old assembly to use the new assembly, then delete the old assembly once you’ve verified the new one is working.

Here’s a much better post on the same subject by Jon Galloway (hat tip Scott Hanselman, and his e-mail Newsletter of Wonderful Things).

While I understand Jon’s sentiment, “cleansing” vs. “expanding” just isn’t going to happen. Computer science as an academic discipline didn’t even exist until the 1950s, so it’s a very long way from having the sort of regulations and licensure of a field like engineering (a term that dates back to the 14th century). Combine that with the decreasing number of computer science graduates our colleges and universities graduate each year (much less the elimination of a computer science department), and it’s no surprise that people without formal education in computer science are getting paid to develop software.

While it does sound crazy that Mayor Bloomberg made learning to code his 2012 new year’s resolution, I’m glad someone as high-profile as the mayor of New York is talking about programming. When I was deciding what to study in college (way back in 1992), computer science as a discipline didn’t have a very high profile. While I knew programming was how video-games and other software was made, I had to find out about computer science from Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

Jeff’s “please don’t learn to code” is counterproductive–the exact opposite of what we should be saying. Given a choice between having more people going into investment banking and more people going into software development, I suspect a large majority of us would favor the latter.

I also don’t believe that the objective of learning to code has to be making a living as a software developer in order to be useful. The folks at Software Carpentry are teaching programming to scientists to help them in their research. People who test software should know enough about programming to at least automate the repetitive tasks. If you use a computer with any regularity at all, even a little bit of programming knowledge will enable you to extend the capabilities of the software you use.

We need only look at some of the laws that exist in this country to see the results of a lack of understanding of programming by our judges and legislators. I think that lack of understanding led to software patents (and a ton of time wasted in court instead of spent innovating). The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are other examples of dangerous laws proposed by legislators that don’t have even the most basic understanding of programming.

As someone who writes software for a living, I prefer customers who understand at least a bit about programming to those who don’t, because that makes it easier to talk about requirements (and get them right). They tend to understand the capabilities of off-the-shelf software a bit better and understand the tradeoffs between it and a custom system. In my career, there have been any number of times where an understanding of programming has helped me find an existing framework or solution that met most of a customer’s requirements, so I and my team were able to focus our work just on what was missing.

I appreciate the gesture, and thank StackOverflow Careers and the StackExchange team not only for the portfolio (which I’ve already replaced my previous portfolio with), or for creating a great site for connecting developers with employers that value developers, but for the whole collection of Q & A sites that make software development (and many other fields of endeavor) easier to learn.

No Controls

There are none of the controls I’ve become accustomed to using over the years.  So in addition to learning the ins-and-outs of MVC 3, I’ve been learning some jQuery as well.

No ViewState

Because there’s no viewstate in MVC, any information you need in more than one view should be available either in the url’s query string, the viewmodel, or be retrievable via some mechanism in your view’s controller.  In the application I’m working on, we use Agatha.

More “Pages”

Each CRUD operation gets its own view (and its own viewmodel, depending on the circumstance).  This actively encourages separation of concerns in a way that webforms definitely does not.

A Controller is a Lot Like Code-Behind

I’ve been reading Dino Esposito’s book on MVC 3, and he suggests thinking of controllers this way fairly early in the book.  I’ve found that advice helpful in a couple of ways:

1. This makes it quicker to understand where to put some of the code that does the key work of the application.
2. It’s a warning that you can put far too much logic in your controllers the same way it was possible to put far too much into your code-behind.

Using Agatha has helped to keep the controllers I’ve written so far from being too heavy.

More to Come

This barely scratches the surface of my experience with MVC so far.  None of the views I’ve implemented has been been complex enough yet to benefit from the use of Knockout JS, but future assignments will almost certainly change this.  We’re also using AutoMapper to ease data transfer between our domain objects and DTOs.  In addition to using StructureMap for dependency injection, we’re using PostSharp to deal with some cross-cutting concerns.  Finally, we’re using RavenDB for persistence, so doing things the object database way instead of using SQL Server has required some fundamental changes as well.

I wouldn’t have been aware of this company, or this opportunity without Stack Overflow Careers.  I was a beta tester on the original site (Stack Overflow), and since it launched it’s been a big help to me in solving a number challenging technical problems on a variety of projects.  Both the career site and Q&A site are worth your while if you write code for a living.

This American Life has fully retracted the story, so I thought I would do the same since I linked to it when it first aired.

One thing we found that the original blog post didn’t mention is that this approach works with table variables as well.  Here’s the original example revised to use a table variable:

CREATE PROC test_proc
AS
SET NOCOUNT ON
SELECT TOP 10 id, name FROM employee

declare @sometable as table([id] int, name varchar(64))

INSERT INTO @sometable
exec test_proc

Fortunately, this blog post directed me to the setting I needed to change in order for SSMS to do what I wanted.

In addition to enabling developers to write and execute LINQ queries, LINQPad can be used to execute SQL queries as well as compose and run code snippets in C#, VB.NET, and F#.  LINQ can query a wide variety of collections and data, including SQL databases and XML.  The ability to query XML with LINQ becomes quite powerful when the XML comes from WCF Data Services (an implementation of the OData protocol).

During my presentation, I queried a local version of the Northwind database, as well as the OData endpoint of Netflix.  StackOverflow publishes their data via an OData endpoint as well. Additional producers of OData services can be found here, or in the Windows Azure Marketplace.

One of the nice features of LINQPad is the number of export options it provides for your query results.  The results of any SQL or LINQ query written in LINQPad can be exported to Excel, Word, or HTML.  The Excel and Word export capabilities give you the option of preserving the formatting LINQPad provides, or leaving it out.  Once you’ve queried a database with LINQ, the results display allows you to toggle between the equivalent fluent LINQ, SQL and MSIL syntax.  I demonstrated this feature by executing a SQL query against the Northwind sample database, then cutting and pasting the equivalent syntax to new query windows and running them to show that the query results were the same.

The LINQPad website pitches the tool as a replacement for SQL Server Management Studio.  To test this proposition, I demonstrated LINQPad’s ability to execute stored procedures.  I used the TenMostExpensiveProducts stored procedure in the Northwind database, and this script to show one way to use LINQPad to run stored procedures that take parameters.

LINQPad’s capabilities as a code snippet runner are further supported by its ability to reference custom assemblies and namespaces.  So instead of dealing with all the overhead of Visual Studio just to write a console application, you could simply write them in LINQPad and reference any custom assemblies you needed.

The latest version of LINQPad also has an extensibility model, if you wanted to query databases other than SQL Server (or different querying sources).

One feature I wished I’d had time to delve into further was LINQPad’s ability to query Entity Framework models defined in Visual Studio.  There’s a brief description of that capability here.

All of the query files from my presentation are available on Github.