Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Azure Makes Me Feel Blue

A few months ago I took a one day crash course on Microsoft Azure from Microsoft.  This particular course was tailored to the small and medium business implementations of Azure.  After an entire day playing in Azure and learning about everything it can do I still don't see why most places would invest in it, specifically small and medium businesses.

There are certainly situations in which Azure would be a great tool to use, but I don't see those being applicable to small and medium businesses.  For example, one of the really cool features of Azure is the ability to remotely host Active Directory.  That's really neat if you have multiple sites and/or remote employees.  But... if you have one office and everyone is on site (which, and I'm just guessing here, is probably most small and medium businesses) you won't really gain anything from that.

I couldn't help scratching my head as I left the Microsoft office and wondering what makes Azure so much better than any other co-located solution.  Maybe I'm missing something, but from where I'm sitting I just don't see it.
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SQL Server Isolation Level

I haven't figured out why this happened yet (and I may not ever), but I wanted to put it up here so that I remember that it did happen.

We had a stored procedure that was used to populate a report.  Our report server was sporadically throwing out a timeout error when the report was retrieved so one of the SQL Server developers modified the isolation level to read uncommitted data, like this:
   1:  SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ UNCOMMITTED

A few weeks later we encountered a problem which, after a bunch of digging and trial and error, turned out to be caused by that change.  Apparently, reading uncommitted data caused the stored procedure to also ignore the clustered index on the table from which it was reading.

I'm guessing this is documented somewhere, but since I spend most of my time on the front-end and middle-tier I'm not sure I'll ever devote the time to figuring this one out.  To fix our problem we just added another field to the order by clause to get the data we wanted.
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Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Featured Directive

I'm trying to learn more about using Bootstrap within a .NET MVC application that uses Angular JS.  I figured I'd start easy on myself and try to just change the default everything to use Angular instead of Razor.  That's going pretty well, but one of the issues I came up against was the sections feature of the Razor syntax.  Basically, creating a section in a layout allows you to implement that section within a view that uses the layout and whatever you implement in that section in the "child" view will render wherever that section is rendered in the layout.  Here's the default layout and a default view:

   1:  <!DOCTYPE html>
   2:  <html lang="en">
   3:      <head>
   4:          <meta charset="utf-8" />
   5:          <title>@ViewBag.Title - My ASP.NET MVC Application</title>
   6:          <link href="~/favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" />
   7:          <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />
   8:          @Styles.Render("~/Content/css")
   9:          @Scripts.Render("~/bundles/modernizr")
  10:      </head>
  11:      <body>
  12:          <header>
  13:              <div class="content-wrapper">
  14:                  <div class="float-left">
  15:                      <p class="site-title">@Html.ActionLink("your logo here", "Index", "Home")</p>
  16:                  </div>
  17:                  <div class="float-right">
  18:                      <section id="login">
  19:                          @Html.Partial("_LoginPartial")
  20:                      </section>
  21:                      <nav>
  22:                          <ul id="menu">
  23:                              <li>@Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home")</li>
  24:                              <li>@Html.ActionLink("About", "About", "Home")</li>
  25:                              <li>@Html.ActionLink("Contact", "Contact", "Home")</li>
  26:                          </ul>
  27:                      </nav>
  28:                  </div>
  29:              </div>
  30:          </header>
  31:          <div id="body">
  32:              @RenderSection("featured", required: false)
  33:              <section class="content-wrapper main-content clear-fix">
  34:                  @RenderBody()
  35:              </section>
  36:          </div>
  37:          <footer>
  38:              <div class="content-wrapper">
  39:                  <div class="float-left">
  40:                      <p>&copy; @DateTime.Now.Year - My ASP.NET MVC Application</p>
  41:                  </div>
  42:              </div>
  43:          </footer>
  44:   
  45:          @Scripts.Render("~/bundles/jquery")
  46:          @RenderSection("scripts", required: false)
  47:      </body>
  48:  </html>


   1:  @{
   2:      ViewBag.Title = "Home Page";
   3:  }
   4:  @section featured {
   5:      <section class="featured">
   6:          <div class="content-wrapper">
   7:              <hgroup class="title">
   8:                  <h1>@ViewBag.Title.</h1>
   9:                  <h2>@ViewBag.Message</h2>
  10:              </hgroup>
  11:              <p>
  12:                  To learn more about ASP.NET MVC visit
  13:                  <a href="http://asp.net/mvc" title="ASP.NET MVC Website">http://asp.net/mvc</a>.
  14:                  The page features <mark>videos, tutorials, and samples</mark> to help you get the most from ASP.NET MVC.
  15:                  If you have any questions about ASP.NET MVC visit
  16:                  <a href="http://forums.asp.net/1146.aspx/1?MVC" title="ASP.NET MVC Forum">our forums</a>.
  17:              </p>
  18:          </div>
  19:      </section>
  20:  }
  21:  <h3>We suggest the following:</h3>
  22:  <ol class="round">
  23:      <li class="one">
  24:          <h5>Getting Started</h5>
  25:          ASP.NET MVC gives you a powerful, patterns-based way to build dynamic websites that
  26:          enables a clean separation of concerns and that gives you full control over markup
  27:          for enjoyable, agile development. ASP.NET MVC includes many features that enable
  28:          fast, TDD-friendly development for creating sophisticated applications that use
  29:          the latest web standards.
  30:          <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=245151">Learn more…</a>
  31:      </li>
  32:   
  33:      <li class="two">
  34:          <h5>Add NuGet packages and jump-start your coding</h5>
  35:          NuGet makes it easy to install and update free libraries and tools.
  36:          <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=245153">Learn more…</a>
  37:      </li>
  38:   
  39:      <li class="three">
  40:          <h5>Find Web Hosting</h5>
  41:          You can easily find a web hosting company that offers the right mix of features
  42:          and price for your applications.
  43:          <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=245157">Learn more…</a>
  44:      </li>
  45:  </ol>

What's going to happen is that when everything renders, the stuff between lines 4 and 20 in the second part of that code up there is going to render on line 32 of the first part of that code up there.  I wanted to replicate that in Angular so I wrote a directive for it.  There are probably lots of other (and possibly better) ways to do this, but this was my first shot and I didn't want to lose that progress.

The directive: 
   1:  learnBootstrap.directive('featuredSection', ['$http', '$compile',
   2:      function ($http, $compile) {
   3:          'use strict';
   4:   
   5:          return {
   6:              restrict: 'E',
   7:              replace: true,
   8:              link: function (scope, el, attr, ctrl) {
   9:                  if (attr.templateurl != null) {
  10:                      $http({
  11:                          url: attr.templateurl,
  12:                          method: "GET",
  13:                          cache: true
  14:                      }).then(function (markup) {
  15:                          var compiledTemplate = angular.element($compile(markup.data)(scope));
  16:                          var placeholder = angular.element(document.querySelector("#body"));
  17:                          placeholder.prepend(compiledTemplate);
  18:                      });
  19:   
  20:                      scope.$on("$destroy", function () {
  21:                          var section = angular.element(document.querySelector(".featured"));
  22:                          section.remove();
  23:                      });
  24:                  }
  25:              }
  26:          };
  27:      }
  28:  ]);

The markup to implement that directive: 
   1:  <featured-section templateUrl="/Features/Home/Featured.html"></featured-section>

The template the directive is going to retrieve on line 10: 
   1:  <section class="featured">
   2:      <div class="content-wrapper">
   3:          <hgroup class="title">
   4:              <h1>{{Title}}</h1>
   5:              <h2>{{Message}}</h2>
   6:          </hgroup>
   7:          <p>
   8:              To learn more about ASP.NET MVC visit
   9:              <a href="http://asp.net/mvc" title="ASP.NET MVC Website">http://asp.net/mvc</a>.
  10:              The page features <mark>videos, tutorials, and samples</mark> to help you get the most from ASP.NET MVC.
  11:              If you have any questions about ASP.NET MVC visit
  12:              <a href="http://forums.asp.net/1146.aspx/1?MVC" title="ASP.NET MVC Forum">our forums</a>.
  13:          </p>
  14:      </div>
  15:  </section>
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Friday, May 15, 2015

Sharing Session in IIS

Forget about why I had to do this and just accept that it was necessary.  I needed to share session between two completely separate applications in IIS.  In my particular setup, one application was a "child" of the other.

After quite a bit of searching and trial and error, I found a pretty simple solution that worked perfectly in my scenario.  This doesn't mean it'll work for everyone, but it definitely did for me.

We had previously configured session to use a SQL database, which I've found to be a pretty common scenario.  In each connection string, I added an ApplicationName piece and specified the same application name in both applications (e.g. ApplicationName = 'WhateverApp').

The next part made me feel a little icky, but it worked.  In the SQL Server ASPState database I modified the TempGetAppID stored procedure to
use [ASPState]
GO
SET ansi_nulls ON
GO
SET quoted_identifier OFF
GO

ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[TempGetAppID] 
(
     @appName tAppName
    ,@appId INT OUTPUT
)
AS
BEGIN
    -- Use the application name specified in the connection for the appname if specified
    -- This allows us to share session between sites just by making sure they have the
    -- the same application name in the connection string.
    DECLARE @connectionStringApplicationName NVARCHAR(50)
    SET @connectionStringApplicationName = App_name()

    IF @connectionStringApplicationName = 'WhateverApp'
    BEGIN
        SET @appName = @connectionStringApplicationName
    END

    SET @appName = Lower(@appName)
    SET @appId = NULL

    SELECT @appId = AppId
    FROM [ASPState].dbo.ASPStateTempApplications
    WHERE AppName = @appName

    IF @appId IS NULL
    BEGIN

        BEGIN TRAN

        SELECT @appId = AppId
        FROM [ASPState].dbo.ASPStateTempApplications WITH (tablockx)
        WHERE AppName = @appName

        IF @appId IS NULL
        BEGIN
            EXEC GetHashCode @appName, @appId output

            INSERT [ASPState].dbo.ASPStateTempApplications
            VALUES (@appId,@appName)

            IF @@ERROR = 2627
            BEGIN
                DECLARE @dupApp tAppName

                SELECT @dupApp = Rtrim(AppName)
                FROM [ASPState].dbo.ASPStateTempApplications
                WHERE AppId = @appId

                RAISERROR( 'SQL session state fatal error: hash code collision between applications ''%s'' and ''%s''.
                    Please rename the 1st application to resolve the problem.'
                    ,18,1,@appName,@dupApp)
            END
        END

        COMMIT
    END

    RETURN 0
END 

This relatively small change allows us to detect whether an application name was passed in the connection string.  If it was (which it would be in both of our applications) then we set the @appName variable to be the name that was passed in the connection string instead of whatever it was going to use originally (for sub-applications, this can look like /lm/w3svc/1/root).  Since both connection strings pass the same application name, they're now sharing session.
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Using MOQ to Test Whether a Method Was Called

I use MOQ for my server-side unit testing.  It's pretty easy to get started with and it's always done everything I needed it to do... until recently.

I needed to test whether a method was called with a specific set of parameters.  The result wasn't really important (because the method being called was mocked to do nothing anyway) and the method didn't have a return type so there was no way to validate the results of the method call.  I really just needed to know whether the method was called at all.  It turns out MOQ can do that, too.

The method that needs to be tested: 
   1:  public void MethodUnderTest(CustomComplexObject customComplexObject)
   2:  {
   3:      var someLocalVariable = false;
   4:      
   5:      MethodThatShouldBeCalled(customComplexObject.Id, customComplexObject.UserId, someLocalVariable);
   6:      
   7:      /*snip*/
   8:  }

The method that should be called by the method that needs to be tested (this method must be virtual): 
   1:  public virtual void MethodThatShouldBeCalled(int id, int userId, bool shouldDoSomethingSpecial)
   2:  {
   3:      if (shouldDoSomethingSpecial)
   4:      {
   5:          /*snip*/
   6:      }
   7:      else
   8:      {
   9:          /*snip*/
  10:      }
  11:  }

The test (an important note is the usage of "CallBase = true"; this won't work unless you include that): 
   1:  [TestMethod]
   2:  public void MethodUnderTestShouldCallMethodThatShouldBeCalled()
   3:  {
   4:      // arrange
   5:      // create a new mocked BusinessManager
   6:      // note that this is mocking a concrete object and not an interface
   7:      var moqBusinessManager = new Mock<BusinessManager>{CallBase = true};
   8:      
   9:      // create a test object to pass to MethodUnderTest
  10:      var customComplexObject = new CustomComplexObject
  11:      {
  12:          Id = 123456789,
  13:          UserId = 987654321
  14:      };
  15:      
  16:      // setup the mocked BusinessManager so that MOQ knows what it should keep track of
  17:      moqBusinessManager.Setup(p => p.MethodThatShouldBeCalled(It.IsAny<int>(), It.IsAny<int>(), It.IsAny<bool>()))
  18:          .Verifiable("MethodThatShouldBeCalled was not called");
  19:      
  20:      // act
  21:      // execute MethodUnderTest with the test object
  22:      // note the user of .Object
  23:      moqBusinessManager.Object.MethodUnderTest(customComplexObject);
  24:      
  25:      // assert
  26:      // use MOQ to verify that MethodThatShouldBeCalled was called with the expected parameters
  27:      moqBusinessManager.Verify(p => p.MethodThatShouldBeCalled(123456789, 987654321, false));
  28:  }
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Angular JS Service Contents

I was stumbling around the other day trying to figure out what a value was on my service during a call.  Eventually I found that you can get any injected service as long as you have the scope it was injected into.  Since we already know you can get scope in the Chrome console by selecting an item, I mashed those two things up and got this:

angular.element('[ng-controller="homeController"]').injector().get('homeService')

That gets me the service that was injected as "homeService" into whatever element has the ng-controller of "homeController".

The only hitch with this one is (I think) you have to have jQuery included in order for this particular selector to work.
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