ASP.NET Weblogs

LIDNUG: Online chat with me Monday Nov 23rd

ScottGu — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:30:16 GMT

This past week was a busy one – with lots of announcements and cool releases happening at this year’s PDC conference. All of the PDC keynotes and breakout sessions are now posted online for anyone to watch for free. You can find sessions to watch here.

My PDC keynote covered our new Silverlight 4 release and was on Day 2. You can watch it here (I start at the 1 hour, 2 minute, and 45 second mark).

LIDNUG Online Chat Monday November 23rd

I’ll be doing a free online web chat Monday November 23rd at 11:30am PST where you can ask any questions about anything (including PDC announcements).

The chat is hosted by the LIDNUG user group. You can sign up and attend for free here. The chat will be recorded and I’ll update this post with a link to the recording when it is over.

You can ask questions either through the chat tool – or by posting them to Twitter. To ask questions via twitter simply post a tweet using this format:

@ScottGu #LidnugLiveQ question goes here

Other PDC Resources

I’ll be doing more blog posts about some of what was announced at PDC this past week. Below are a few good posts that summarize some of the announcements from my team in the meantime:

Silverlight 4 Overview
Silverlight 4 Resources (includes links to all SL4 videos at PDC)
ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta
ASP.NET AJAX Library Beta

Hope this helps,

Scott

P.S. In addition to blogging, I’m also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu (@scottgu is my twitter name)

Ness Tziona Usergroup 1 Year Birthday Party

Ohad Israeli — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:49:23 GMT

Last Wednesday we celebrated a year of community work with the Ness Tziona Usergroup !

The meeting which included a lecture by Pavel about What’s new in C# 4.0 & Visual Studio 2010 grouped together more than 100 attendees who enjoyed a great lecture, 2 cakes, lots of pizza slices, balloon and a handful of books that were given over the presentation.

C-Ya on our next meeting.

Ohad.

Recent Podcasts

Latest Microsoft Blogs — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:58:02 GMT

Just wanted to highlight a couple of podcasts that were suckers gracious enough to have me as a guest. HerdingCode In this podcast I join the fellas at HerdingCode . Although this podcast came out after the Hanselminutes one, it was actually recorded Read More......(read more)

Speaking at the 5th UgiALT.Net Conference on Monotouch

Chris Hardy (ChrisNTR) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:10:00 GMT

Good evening! Just a quick note to say that I'm going to be speaking at the 5th Italian UgiALT.NET conference in Milan, Italy on Saturday 23rd January 2010. The conference will mainly be in Italian (apart from my session and maybe a few others) so that's something to be aware of before you go and book your tickets. I'm going to be talking about Monotouch/C# on the iPhone. You can get more information about the conference here: http://www.microsofttranslator.com/BV.aspx?ref=Internal&a=http%3a...(read more)

Nullable data types in Visual Basic 9.0

nikolaosk — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 13:46:00 GMT

I know we are in Visual Studio 2010 and VB 10.0 version of the language-compiler.Most people I know (in my country anyway) work still with VS 2008 and .Net 3.5 SP1 version. In this post I would like to talk about language improvements in visual basic 9.0 and more specifically about nullable data types . The largest improvement in Visual basic 9.0 is LINQ . So all these enhancements that were made in the VB 9.0 language (the same goes for c# 3.0 enhancements) had LINQ in mind and how LINQ will be...(read more)

Daily tech links for .net and related technologies - November 21-23, 2009

SanjeevAgarwal — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 06:52:00 GMT

Daily tech links for .net and related technologies - November 21-23, 2009 Web Development ASP.NET MVC: Creating reports using Chart control T4MVC 2.5.01: added support for Html.RenderAction and Html.Action Web Application Configuration Analyzer (WACA) The Search Developer Story in SharePoint 2010 – Query Interfaces Using the Microsoft Ajax Library 3.5 with the CDN Microsoft AJAX Library Preview 6 & Data Binding Web Design User Interface Design Is Not About Lorem Ipsum And Pretty Boxes The Ultimate...(read more)

Resources for my SharePoint Services Talk

Bil Simser — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:30:49 GMT

As promised here are some resources for my recent talk on creating and consuming services in SharePoint that I delivered at TechDays. You’ll be able to get the full slide deck, video, and code later at http://my.techdays.ca but here are the links from the slide deck and things I mentioned during the talk.

Links

Writing Custom Web Services for SharePoint (MSDN)
Developing SharePoint Applications guidance from the Patterns and Practices group
The SharePoint Service Locator pattern

Books

Developing Service-Oriented AJAX Applications (Book)
Developers Guide to WSS 3.0 (Book)
Professional Reporting with SharePoint 2007 (Book)

Tools

U2U CAML Builder (2003 and 2007 versions)
CAML.NET (.NET Library for writing CAML queries in code)

ASP.NET MVC: Creating reports using Chart control

DigiMortal — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:36:00 GMT

ASP.NET Chart control is powerful control you can use to add charting support to your web applications. Although chart controls are mainly used with ASP.NET forms it is not very hard to use them also in ASP.NET MVC applications. In this posting I will show you how to use ASP.NET Chart control in ASP.NET MVC application and I will illustrate how to do it easily so you don’t mess up your views.

Before we start coding I want to make some notes about my solution:

this solution is pretty new and it is sure that one can improve the code provided here,
using this solution I’m trying to generalize in-place reporting for MVC applications,
also I’m trying to keep my views as clean as possible – chart definitions are not small if you have more complex charts or if you want very nice looking charts.

If you are not familiar with ASP.NET Chart control then please read my blog posting <asp:Chart>. You find there simple introduction to this free control and also all necessary links.

Solution overview

What we are trying to build here is shown on the following diagram. Our main goal is to avoid using ASP.NET forms elements in our MVC line user interface. Also we want to generalize reporting support so we have one interface for all reports.

I introduce here pretty simple report. If you have more complex reports then you can extend reporting interface shown below later. You may also find useful to reorganize outputing system. I am using here simple works-for-me or works-for-prototyping solution. I want to focus on point and let’s try not to lose it.

Reporting interface

Before we create our first report let’s define interface for it. This interface must define all basic actions we need to do with reports:

set source with report data,
bind data to report,
write report image to some (output) stream.

This is my reporting interface. Note that DataSource has only setter – it is because I don’t have currently need to ask data from chart. I only provide data to it.

public interface IReportControl : IDisposable
{
    void DataBind();
    object DataSource { set; }
    void SaveChartImage(Stream stream);
}

As you can see this interface is pretty thin. I am sure that it will grow in the future when need for more complex reports appears.

Sample report

Let’s define one report for testing purposes. Add web user control called MyReport.ascx to Reports folder of your web application and drag ASP.NET Chart control on it. Here is definition of my control.

<%@ Control Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true"        
    CodeBehind="LastEnquiriesChart.ascx.cs"      
    Inherits="ReportingApp.Web.Reports.LastEnquiriesChart"        
%>
<%@ Register        
    assembly="System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"
    namespace="System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting" 
    tagprefix="asp"        
%>
 
<asp:Chart ID="Chart1" runat="server" Palette="Excel"
    Height="200px" Width="200px">
    <series>
        <asp:Series Name="Series2"
            CustomProperties="DrawingStyle=Emboss" 
            XValueMember="Date"        
            YValueMembers="Count"        
            IsValueShownAsLabel="True" 
            Font="Microsoft Sans Serif, 8pt"        
            LabelBackColor="255, 255, 192" 
            LabelBorderColor="192, 192, 0"      
            LabelForeColor="Red">           
        </asp:Series>
    </series>
    <chartareas>
        <asp:ChartArea Name="ChartArea1" BorderDashStyle="Solid">
            <AxisX        
                IntervalAutoMode="VariableCount"        
                IntervalOffsetType="Days" 
                IntervalType="Days"        
                IsLabelAutoFit="False"        
                IsStartedFromZero="False">
                <MajorGrid  
                    Interval="Auto"        
                    IntervalOffsetType="Days"        
                    IntervalType="Days" />
            </AxisX>
        </asp:ChartArea>
    </chartareas>
    <Titles>
        <asp:Title  
            Font="Microsoft Sans Serif, 8pt, style=Bold"
            Name="Title1" 
            Text="Last week enquiries">
        </asp:Title>
    </Titles>
</asp:Chart>

If you look at the definition and consider it as simple one you understand why I don’t want this mark-up to be there in my views. This is just one simple report. But consider for a moment three complex reports. 90% of my view will be one huge report definition then and I will miss all the good things that views have.

As I want this report to be interfaced with my reporting mechanism I make it implement IReportControl interface. Code-behind of my control is as follows.

public partial class LastEnquiriesChart : UserControl, IReportControl
{
    public object DataSource
    {
        set
        {
            Chart1.DataSource = value;
        }
    }
 
    public override void DataBind()
    {
        base.DataBind();
        Chart1.DataBind();
    }
 
    public void SaveChartImage(Stream stream)
    {
        Chart1.SaveImage(stream);
    }
}

All other user controls we are using for reporting must also implement IReportControl interface. This leads us to one interesting finding – we don’t have to host only chart control in our user controls, we have to host there whatever ASP.NET forms control we need for reporting. We can also create wrapper controls that get report image from some other external source (let’s say we have some COM component that is able to return reports as images).

Creating loader

Now we have sample report control and interface we can use to provide data and catch output of report. It is time to create meeting place for two worlds: ASP.NET forms and ASP.NET MVC framework. I created class called ReportLoader. The name of this class is good enough for me because it tells me that this is the integration point between two worlds. Let’s look at loader implementation now.

public static class ChartLoader
{
    public static void SaveChartImage(string controlLocation,      
    IEnumerable data, Stream stream)
    {
        using (var page = new Page())
        using (var control = (IReportControl)      
               page.LoadControl("~/Reports/" + controlLocation))
        {
            control.DataSource = data;
            control.DataBind();
            control.SaveChartImage(stream);
        }
    }
}

Loader does one trick: it doesn’t render the control. It only runs as long as report is written to stream and then it disposes user control and temporary page instance to avoid all other actions they may take. I made ChartLoader and SaveChartImage methods as static because I don’t need hell load of classes and super-cool architecture right now.

Creating controller action

We are almost there… Let’s create now controller action that returns chart image. As I am prototyping my application I use very robust controller action. You may be more polite coders and I strongly suggest you to read Bia Securities blog posting BinaryResult for Asp.Net MVC. You can find BinaryResult implementation also from MVC Contrib project.

[HttpGet]
public ActionResult GetChart()
{            
    var repository = Resolver.Resolve<IPriceEnquiryRepository>();
    var enquiries = repository.ListPriceEnquiries();
    var data = from p in enquiries
               group p by p.Date.Date into g
               select new { Date = g.Key, Count = g.Count() };
 
    Response.Clear();
    Response.ContentType = "image/png";
    ChartLoader.SaveChartImage(
                "LastEnquiriesChart.ascx",
                data, 
                Response.OutputStream);            
    Response.End();            
 
    return null; // have to return something
}

Now we have controller action that asks data from somewhere, prepares it for report and asks report as image from ChartLoader. Before outputing the report Response is cleared and content type is set to PNG. After writing image to response output stream the response is ended immediately to avoid any mark-up that may be written there otherwise.

As you can see I created special automatic objects for reporting. If you look at my report definition you can see that x-axis is bound to Date and y-axis to Count. You can also prepare reporting data in some near-DAL class methods and then slide this data through controller to report. The choice is yours.

Adding report to view

Now let’s link report to view. We just have to add one simple img tag to our view and make it src to call out GetChart() method defined above.

<img        
    src="<%= Url.Action("GetChart")%>"  
    alt="Last week enquiries"  
    title="Last week enquiries"      
/>

Output of report is shown on right. I don’t have much data here and my report is not very nice but it works. Now, if you are not too tired or bored, it is time to make your chart very nice and show it to your boss or customer.

Conclusion

Mixing forms and MVC worlds of ASP.NET doesn’t always have to end up with hard mess. In this posting I showed you how to add simple but pretty generic reports support to your ASP.NET MVC application. Due to good interfacing we achieved separation between forms and MVC templates and linking reports to views is very-very simple.

Of course, code and interfaces represented here are not production-ready examples. But they give you right direction and you can always improve design of my solution. My point was to illustrate how to mix MVC and forms world in reporting context and I feel like I succeeded this time. What do you think? :)

Unit Testing and Integration Testing in real projects

oazabir — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:52:00 GMT

I am yet to find a proper sample on how to do realistic Test Driven Development (TDD) and how to write proper unit tests for complex business applications, that gives you enough confidence to stop doing manual tests anymore. Generally the samples show you how to test a Stack or a LinkedList, which is far simpler than testing a typical N-tier application, especially if you are using Entity Framework or Linq to SQL or some ORM in data access layer, and doing logging, validation, caching, error handling at middle tier. There are many articles, blog posts, video tutorials on how to write unit tests, which I believe are all very good starting points. But all these examples show you basic tests, not good enough to let your QA team go. So, let me try to show you some realistic unit and integration test examples which should help you write tests that gives you confidence and helps you gradually move towards TDD.

I will show you tests done on my open source project Dropthings, which is a Web 2.0 AJAX portal built using jQuery, ASP.NET 3.5, Linq to SQL, Dependency Injection using Unity, caching using Microsoft Enterprise Library, Velocity and so on. Basically all the hot techs you can grasp in one shot. The project is a typical N-tier application where there’s a web layer, a business layer and a data access layer. Writing unit tests, integration tests and load tests for this project was challenging, and thus interesting to share so that you can see how you can implement Unit Testing and Integration Testing in a real project and gradually get into Test Driven Development.

Read this codeproject article of mine to learn how I did Integration Tests and Unit Tests using Behavior Driven Development approach:

Unit Testing and Integration Testing in business applications

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/testing/realtesting.aspx

If you like it, please vote for me.

T4MVC 2.5.01: added support for Html.RenderAction and Html.Action

Latest Microsoft Blogs — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 02:10:19 GMT

To get the latest build of T4MVC: Go to download page on CodePlex MVC 2 Beta introduces two nice helpers called Html.RenderAction and Html.Action. Phil Haack described them in detail on his blog , so you may want to read through that before Read More......(read more)