Microsoft`s core data access technology is finally ready

Transcription

VisualStudioMagazine.com
Microsoft’s core data access
technology is finally ready
for prime time—are you?
PLUS
SEPTEMBER 2010
Volume 20, No. 9
On VB: Validate Forms with
ASP.NET MVC 2 Data Annotations
Visual Studio 2010
Debugging Tips and Tricks
SQL Server 2008 R2
for the Developer
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Untitled-1 1
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{ FRAMEWORKS }
12
September 2010 // Volume 20 // No. 9
Michael Desmond, Editor in Chief,
Visual Studio Magazine
Opinions on
LightSwitch
FEATURES
12 Get Ready for the Entity Framework
Modeling your data access in .NET with the Entity Framework 1 presented too many
challenges for n-tier developers. With Visual Studio 2010 and the Entity Framework
4, the Microsoft core data access technology is ready for prime time—and deserves a
second look. BY KATHLEEN RICHARDS
18 SQL Server 2008 R2 for the Developer
Microsoft extends its enterprise-capable database platform with powerful new
management and scalability features—and there’s plenty in the latest rev for developers.
BY DON KIELY
23 Lab Management in Visual Studio 2010
For the first time, Lab Management brings the power of virtualization to your
Visual Studio-based development process. Learn how to streamline debug and test
challenges with the new Microsoft virtualization technology for developers.
BY VIJAY MACHIRAJU
28 LANGUAGE LAB
On VB PAGE 28
How to Validate Forms with ASP.NET MVC 2 Data Annotations
Learn how to develop a custom validator that works at both the client level with
JavaScript and the server level with managed code. BY JOE KUNK AND VIJAY JAGDALE
Ask Kathleen PAGE 34
Tips for Debugging Your Code in Visual Studio 2010
How improvements in the latest Microsoft IDE and underused features in Visual
Studio 2008 support common debugging strategies to help you write better code.
BY KATHLEEN DOLLARD
DEPARTMENTS
6
8
Letters to the Editor
DevInsight VS TOOLBOX, VS INSIDER
VSToolbox: Build Office Apps with Add-in Express PAGE 8
VSToolbox: Create Documents with Aspose.pdf for .NET PAGE 10
VSInsider: Silverlight Surprise PAGE 11
39 Index of Advertisers
COLUMNS
3 Frameworks BY MICHAEL DESMOND
40 Redmond Review BY ANDREW BRUST
When Microsoft announced the launch of its
LightSwitch wizard-driven .NET app tool at
the VSLive! Conference in Redmond, Wash., in
August, it set off a bit of controversy among
developers worried that LightSwitch could
lead to a flood of bad apps. LightSwitch,
currently in beta, is intended to enable power
users, business analysts and those who
would otherwise turn to Office macros and
Excel spreadsheets to craft legitimate,
data-driven .NET apps using a simple and
intuitive interface (You can read more about
LightSwitch in Andrew Brust’s Redmond
Review column on p. 40.). Online readers
offered their own take on the value of
LightSwitch. Here’s a sampling:
“[It] looks like a weak clone of Iron Speed
Designer,” wrote one commenter, who
compared it to the .NET code generation tool.
“There always has been a division
between RAD [rapid application development] and programming for the long term,”
wrote John McFetridge. “By the long term I
mean apps that will be around for years
and need to be extended and maintained—
this is where architecture comes first.
Then there’s RAD, and it sounds like
LightSwitch is a great tool [for RAD] so I
have no problem with it.”
A number of developers said that
LightSwitch is a welcome solution to a
problem that has been years in the making.
“I started as an Access/VBA programmer
when Access came out. I created lots of
productive apps, some of which are still
running good small companies,” commented
a developer out of Pittsburgh, Penn. “I
migrated to .NET and VB.NET, then to C#. I
bemoaned that Access became a dead-end
for many beginning and part-time programmers when .NET arrived. Hopefully that
changes with LightSwitch. Hooray!”
What do you think about the LightSwitch?
Write to me at [email protected].
VisualStudioMagazine.com · September 2010 · VISUAL STUDIO MAGAZINE
3
Online Contents
Get the complete picture—
the latest dev news, analysis
and how-to content—at
and our partner sites in the
Redmond Developer Network.
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Simply type in VisualStudioMagazine.com/ followed by the FindIT code into your URL
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VISUALSTUDIOMAGAZINE.COM
REDDEVNEWS.COM
ADTMAG.COM
Controlling Controllers in ASP.NET MVC
BY PETER VOGEL
Top 10 Things I Wish I Knew Before
I Started My Silverlight 4 Project
Net Neutrality—Why Should Enterprise
Developers Care?
If you’re wondering what ASP.NET
Model-View-Controller (MVC) is and
whether you should be moving to it, this
column is the beginning of an introductory
series on the benefits of the framework for
traditional ASP.NET programmers.
BY LOUIS-PHILIPPE PINSONNEAULT
BY JOHN K. WATERS
Creating a business application is relatively
easy in Silverlight 4 with the right tools
in your toolbox and a little advice. Find
out what 10 things a Silverlight developer
thinks you should know.
It’s not just the liberal-leaning MoveOn
that opposes the Google-Verizon plan.
The framework for net neutrality outlined
by the two companies has come under
widespread criticism.
VisualStudioMagazine.com/Vogel0910
RedDevNews.com/Pinsonneault0910
A Look Inside the Visual Studio
Scrum Process Template
Microsoft Offers New SQL
Migration Tools
ADTmag.com/WatersA0910
Microsoft Lays Out Its
“Open Cloud” Vision
BY MICKEY GOUSSET
BY KURT MACKIE
BY KURT MACKIE
How to create your first Scrum Team
Project in Team Foundation Server 2010,
and a closer look at what the Visual Studio
Scrum Process 1.0 template contains.
The company updated some of its free tools
to help users move from Access to SQL
Server and SQL Azure, and released a new
Oracle MySQL migration tool.
Microsoft used the occasion of an O’Reilly
Open Source Convention to advance its
vision of an open cloud by breaking it down
into four basic principles.
RedDevNews.com/Mackie0910
ADTmag.com/Mackie0910
VisualStudioMagazine.com/Gousset0910
Q&A: Microsoft’s Lisa Feigenbaum
Talks About C#
Try Your Own OData Feed
in the Cloud—or Not!
Analysts: Oracle’s Lawsuit Against
Google Casts Shadow on Java’s Future
BY MICHAEL DESMOND
BY DAVID RAMEL
BY JOHN K. WATERS
The Microsoft community program manager
for the Visual Studio Managed Languages
Team talks about the new capabilities in C#
4 and what we can expect going forward.
SQL Azure Labs has a portal that lets you
turn your SQL Azure-hosted database into
an OData feed with a couple of clicks. It
also lets you try out the Project Houston
CTP1 and SQL Azure Data Sync. Sounds
great, but Data Driver blogger David Ramel
encountered a few glitches.
The analysts say the simple filing of the
lawsuit could risk the future of Java as a
development platform—and not just in the
mobile arena.
VisualStudioMagazine.com/Desmond0910
ADTmag.com/WatersB0910
RedDevNews.com/Ramel0910
4
RedDevNews.com
VISUAL STUDIO MAGAZINE · September 2010 · VisualStudioMagazine.com
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Untitled-2 1
8/11/10 11:23 AM
Letters
Check out our events at VSLive.com
We’ll be in Orlando in November 2010
September 2010 • Volume 20 • No. 9
Editorial Staff
Readers Comment on IntelliTrace
In the August issue we published a walk-through of the new IntelliTrace debugging
feature (“Debugging Applications with IntelliTrace”), which is included with Visual
Studio Ultimate and Test editions. Readers respond:
This feature is a nice idea; but I don’t think that it will get much traction if it’s only
available in the Ultimate version of Visual Studio, which is a significant price jump
from other versions. Also, it requires testers to use Test version. I can’t justify the
additional investment for an entire development team just for this feature.
TC
Submitted via Internet
The IntelliTrace feature is new in Visual Studio, but the concept has been around
for some time. Back in the late ’90s I used the Mutek BugTrapper tool (geyra.com/
mutek/bugTrapper.htm) to track down a couple of elusive issues. BugTrapper gave
at that point only post-mortem dumps, but could (obviously) debug “native” code
and was able to generate the dumps by using only a small agent that could easily
be deployed to a customer’s site. I haven’t used BugTrapper since, so I’m not
up-to-date with its current capabilities.
Eugene_NW
Why is this interesting feature not available for C++ developers? Has all the world
switched to .NET?
Anonymous
Of IE9 and HTML5
Andrew Brust in August wrote that Microsoft faces some important choices as it
decides how it will support the upcoming HTML5 standard. Here a reader responds:
HTML5 will allow us to move a 10-plus-year-old Microsoft Access app from
100-plus client installations (and the necessary tech support) to a centralized
Web interface. Since we’re using HTML5 with LAMP technology, we’ll also be
able to offer our customers tablet functionality. This is a no-brainer and moves
us completely away from Microsoft. In the meantime, we have other teams
constantly struggling with SharePoint deployments and late SAP projects. By the
way, our .NET projects are completing successfully on time and with impressive
functionality, but if Microsoft doesn’t embrace HTML5 as a dev platform, we may
move away from .NET.
Anonymous
Vice President,
Editorial Director
Editor in Chief
Executive Editor
Managing Editor
Associate Managing Editor
Associate Managing Editor
Doug Barney
Michael Desmond
Kathleen Richards
Wendy Gonchar
Katrina Carrasco
Marti Longworth
Tools Editor Peter Vogel
Contributing Editors
Andrew J. Brust, Ken Cox, Kathleen Dollard,
Roger Jennings, Jeff Levinson, Bill McCarthy,
Karl E. Peterson, Keith Pleas, Bill Wagner,
Dan Wahlin, John K. Waters
Art Staff
Creative Director Scott Shultz
Art Director Joshua Gould
Online/Digital Media
Director, Online Media
Executive Editor, New Media
Site Administrator
Designer
Becky Nagel
Michael Domingo
Shane Lee
Rodrigo Muñoz
President
Vice President, Publishing
Director of Marketing
Online Marketing Director
Henry Allain
Matt Morollo
Michele Imgrund
Tracy Cook
President & Neal Vitale
Chief Executive Officer
Senior Vice President Richard Vitale
& Chief Financial Officer
Executive Vice President Michael J. Valenti
Senior Vice President,
Audience Development
& Digital Media
Vice President,
Finance & Administration
Vice President,
Information Technology
& Application Development
Vice President,
Attendee Marketing
Vice President,
Event Operations
Abraham M. Langer
Christopher M. Coates
Erik A. Lindgren
Carmel McDonagh
David F. Myers
Chairman of the Board Jeffrey S. Klein
REACHING THE STAFF
Staff may be reached via e-mail, telephone, fax, or mail.
A list of editors and contact information is also available online
at VisualStudioMagazine.com.
E-mail: To e-mail any member of the staff, please use the
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Untitled-3 1
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</DevInsight>
Toolbox
VS
Build Office Apps with Add-in Express
Add-in
Express 2010
Add-in Express simplifies the process of extending Microsoft Office to let you
concentrate on adding functionality.
PETER VOGEL
Automating Microsoft Office has never
been for the faint of heart. While Visual
Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) allows
developers to use the Microsoft .NET
Framework to create Office add-ins, you
often spend as much time writing and
debugging the utility code that integrates
your add-in with Office as you do actually
adding functionality. Even if your add-in
worked when installed, the differences
between versions of Office could stop your
add-in cold if your users upgraded.
Add-in Express dramatically simplifies
the process of creating and deploying Office
add-ins. For instance, when creating an
add-in, you can specify which versions of
Office you want to support, beginning with
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versions beginning with Office 2000. You
can also, when starting your project, specify
which Office components you want to
support—Add-in Express automatically
generates the necessary support code.
An Add-in Express project includes a
loader that handles integration with Office
and an “add-in module,” where you put the
components of your add-in. The module
follows the .NET Framework paradigm of
having a visual designer, where you place tools
and an accompanying code file. Rather than
adding new tools to the Toolbox, however, the
tools that you use to create your add-in appear
at the top of the designer and are activated by
being clicked.
It’s a great paradigm. For instance,
adding a keyboard shortcut is as easy as
clicking on the tool to add it to the designer,
setting some properties and then adding
code to the tool’s Action event. Predefined
global variables give you access to the object
models for the Office components you
specified when creating your project.
Adding and extending the Office Ribbon
menu is equally easy and includes a visual
designer that lets you see the result of
adding new groups and controls to the
Ribbon (see Figure 1). Similar support
allows you to visually create new TaskPanes.
The add-in designer also offers centralized
management for Office events—just add an
event tool for an Office component to the
Figure 1. The Add-in Express Ribbon designer lets you put new components on the Office
Ribbon by adding tools, setting properties and tying code to events.
8
Add-in Express 2010 for
Microsoft Office and .NET
Add-in Express Ltd.
Web: add-in-express.com
Phone: 375-291-944101
Price: $349 (standard package)
Quick Facts: An add-in to Visual
Studio for creating Office add-ins in
the Microsoft .NET Framework
Pros: Solves many problems that
Office add-in developers face,
including changing the Ribbon,
handling version differences and
accessing events
Cons: Documentation is written by
the application’s programmers and
translated into English
designer. Each of the event tools lists all the
global events for the Office component (for
example, for Excel, the tool includes the
SheetActive and NewWorkbook events,
among four dozen others). Code you add
here is automatically attached to the event in
the appropriate Office component.
In addition to general support for Office,
Add-in Express offers support for some
specific Office technologies. You can use
Add-in Express to simplify the process of
extending the Outlook shortcut bar,
creating SmartTags or creating Excel Real
Time Data components (which provide a
stream of data to an Excel formula). You’ll
still have to learn how to manipulate the
object models for the various Office
components (some of which are especially
bizarre), but Add-in Express makes
integrating your code into Office
almost trivial. I can no longer imagine
doing Office development in the .NET
Framework without this tool.
The package includes an almost-200page PDF user guide. Your best strategy for
this guide is to read through the sample
project you’re most interested in first—
earlier sections of the guide assume that
you’re familiar with later sections. While I
tested the 2010 version, Add-in Express
works in all versions of Visual Studio since
version 2003 and with all versions of Office
since version 2000. VSM
Peter Vogel ([email protected]) is the tools editor
for VSM and a principal in PH&V Information
Services, specializing in ASP.NET development.
Imagine...
...an intranet employees want to use
Why is user adoption
such a large hurdle for intranets?
Learn more:
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Copyright © 2010 Ektron, Inc. All rights reserved. | http://www.ektron.com | 1-877-4-WEB-CMS
Untitled-1 1
6/11/10 11:49 AM
</DevInsight>
Toolbox
VS
Create Documents with
Aspose.Pdf for .NET
Aspose.Pdf
When it’s time to create a document, PDF is often the format that your users prefer.
Aspose.Pdf provides the coding support that lets you build PDF documents on the fly.
PETER VOGEL
About a month ago, in a ToolTracker blog
post entitled “Tool Markets You Don’t Even
Know About” (VisualStudioMagazine.com/
Vogel0910), I mentioned PDF document
creation as a tool market that you may not
have heard of. In that market, Aspose is
one of the leaders with a suite of tools for
creating PDF documents.
The Aspose.Pdf document-creation tool
is more than just a PDF printer driver.
Aspose.Pdf allows you to build a PDF
document on the fly, inserting text, tables,
graphs and more as you need them.
And, unlike creating a document in
Microsoft Word using automation,
Aspose.Pdf does it using a set of native
Microsoft .NET Framework tools—you
don’t even need to have Adobe Acrobat
installed on the computer.
Creating simple documents is easy with
Aspose.Pdf. More importantly, from a
database developer’s point of view, the
software lets you create data-driven
templates. You define an XML template
using Extensible Stylesheet Language
Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) and
bind it to the Aspose.Pdf document to
specify the structure of your document.
While you can’t load a complete document from your data as you would load a
grid control, slotting data into your
document is easy. The Aspose.Pdf
FillTable method lets you transfer data
from .NET DataTables to a document
table in a single statement.
I found the Aspose.Pdf object model
clean and easy to understand. However, as
with any document-creation system,
creating complex documents can be
challenging, especially if you’re worried
about aesthetics.
I have two criticisms, one major and
one minor. First, the major complaint:
Creating XSL-FO templates is key to
10
generating data-driven reports with
Aspose.Pdf. Unfortunately, Aspose.Pdf
doesn’t include a tool to support creating
those templates—your best strategy
is to start with one of the templates
included in the many sample applications
provided with Aspose.Pdf and modify it.
You can download the schema for
XSL-FO from Aspose and use that within
Visual Studio to ensure that the templates
you create are valid.
Which leads to my minor criticism:
While Aspose provides a full range of
sample applications, they’re all Visual
Studio 2003/2005 projects. When I
converted the sample applications to
Visual Studio 2010, I had to re-reference
the Aspose library and reset the application’s .NET version before they would run.
That took me five minutes that Aspose
could have spent on its end. Still,
Aspose.Pdf
Aspose
Web: aspose.com
Phone: 888-277-6734
Price: $599 for developer Enterprise
license with Standard Support
Quick Facts: Native .NET objects
for creating and displaying PDF
documents with Adobe Acrobat in
both Web and desktop environments
Pros: Powerful data-driven tools
for creating simple and complex
documents on the fly
Cons: No support tools (other
than a schema) for creating
document templates
Aspose.Pdf is a capable and easy-to-use
PDF creation tool with some intriguing
data-centric talents. VSM
Peter Vogel ([email protected]) is the tools
editor for Visual Studio Magazine and a
principal in PH&V Information Services,
specializing in ASP.NET development.
ToolTracker
Documentation Gripes
As a reviewer, my main goal is to figure out how to use a new piece of software quickly
so I can focus on seeing how well it does its job. Unfortunately, product documentation
is usually of little help. Here are my three biggest documentation gripes:
Documentation is missing: Sometimes a feature or component isn’t covered
because it’s too new or simply wasn’t considered that important. For some free
tools, I’ve found no documentation at all.
No walkthroughs: When the documentation is present, it’s at the lowest level—
what this property or method does. For a product of any complexity, I need to know
how to string those method and property calls together. Developers need a
walkthrough of typical scenarios.
Documentation written by the developer: The people who wrote a tool know it
best—unfortunately, they often can’t explain it best. Developer-written guides are often
poorly organized and focus on what’s clever or difficult, rather than what’s important.
Find more coverage of Visual Studio tools and solutions online at the ToolTracker
blog on VisualStudioMagazine.com. —P.V.
</DevInsight>
VS
Insider
BY SEBASTIAN HOLST
PreEmptive Solutions became a Visual
Studio insider (literally) when Microsoft
began shipping our Dotfuscator CE code
obfuscation module with Visual Studio back
in 2003. Three Visual Studio launches later,
the 2010 release of the IDE is still special for
us. It began in early 2008 when we extended
Dotfuscator CE beyond preventing reverse
engineering of code to include applicationusage monitoring in the wild.
Today, every version of Visual Studio
2010 except Express embeds Dotfuscator
CE. The new application-monitoring
capabilities include the injection of
instrumentation, post-compile, into any
managed assemblies that stream usage data
at runtime to an endpoint for processing and
analysis. We call it Runtime Intelligence.
Developers can check out the Runtime
Intelligence Endpoint Starter kit—available
for download from CodePlex at tinyurl.com/
y37p4w7—to learn how to stream runtime
data to any endpoint.
We worked closely with Microsoft to
enable these new capabilities under Visual
Studio 2010, but even with Redmond’s
aggressive ecosystem support, it wasn’t
surprising that we found some gaps. Our
work to integrate Runtime Intelligence into
Silverlight served as a case in point.
Silverlight sits at the crossroads of a
rapidly evolving, heterogeneous computing
landscape where developers, designers, end
users and a complex network of stakeholders
all have a vested interest in knowing their
applications are being used. Developers need
analytics to work across all of their Microsoft
.NET Framework components (not just
Silverlight), but designers are looking for
Web analytics in line with existing services
(not just managed code). ISVs need to
include customer opt-in logic, while Web
sites do not. In order to be effective,
Silverlight instrumentation and analytics
have to be broad enough to satisfy this
diverse set of stakeholders, yet provide
specific optimizations for each surface,
development workflow and use case.
Figure 1. Runtime Intelligence was missing critical data when
tracking Silverlight applications.
Hidden by Design
As part of the Visual
Studio launch, the crew
of the .NET Rocks! talk
show undertook a
multi-city, crosscountry roadshow, and
published a very cool
Silverlight 4/Bing
application that would
organize tweets and
show their location in
real time. They chose
to inject Runtime
Intelligence to show
how Visual Studio
2010 instrumentation could be applied.
Figure 1 shows a surprise we got when the
monitoring results came back. All
Silverlight sessions seemed to end
prematurely, unique user count was clearly
inaccurate and there was no information
on the runtime OS.
Many of you probably already know how
this part of the story ended. Silverlight by
design does not allow service calls from the
Application Exit event; therefore, the final
Runtime Intelligence posts were all silently
failing. Furthermore, the Silverlight
sandbox hid the underlying runtime details
used to identify unique users and the
underlying OS—again by design.
To address this behavior, we’re updating
Dotfuscator to inject logic for Silverlight
programs that write to isolated storage, so
data saved at application exit is available at
the next startup. The next time the
instrumented application is fired up, it will
check isolated storage for the information
from earlier sessions and post it. The
instrumentation will also generate an
arbitrary value and write it to isolated
storage to track unique user sessions.
Filling Gaps
As much as Microsoft works to support
ISVs like PreEmptive with detailed
documentation, early code previews, and
direct access to product engineers and
managers, at the end of the day it was up to
us to discover—and ultimately fill—an
unanticipated gap between our product
and the Microsoft Silverlight platform. The
result benefits everyone. We end up with a
more capable service, Microsoft gets better
support in Visual Studio for its vital
Silverlight platform and developers gain
access to vital application runtime data. VSM
Sebastian Holst is chief marketing officer at
PreEmptive Solutions LLC and has been a member
of the W3C Advisory Committee for three years, a
board member of IDEAlliance for four years and a
cofounder of the Compliance Consortium.
11
Remote
Monitoring
Silverlight Surprise
VSM COVER STORY
Get
Ready
for the
Entity
Framework
The industrial-strength
Microsoft ORM is finally
ready for prime time.
Are you?
BY KATHLEEN RICHARDS
12
0810vsm_GrapeCity_Insert.indd 1
7/14/10 12:14 PM
0810vsm_GrapeCity_Insert.indd 2
7/14/10 12:15 PM
VSM COVER STORY
The ADO.NET Entity Framework 4, updated
and released alongside the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 in April, is emerging as the default way to do
data access in .NET-based applications. With the
second generation of Entity Framework and related
tooling in Visual Studio 2010, the Microsoft data
access technology is better positioned for enterpriselevel projects with a host of new functionality that
brings it more in line with other object-relational
mapping (ORM) tools.
The protests have died down with version 2 and the
question of whether to use the implementation of LINQ
known as LINQ to SQL—the lightweight ORM that
Microsoft shipped in 2007—or the Entity Framework,
has been put to rest. LINQ to SQL is still an option but
Microsoft has indicated that the Entity Framework
now supports much of the functionality offered in
LINQ to SQL and the company isn’t putting any more
resources behind it.
Enterprise-Level Framework
The Entity Framework 1, which shipped out of band in Visual Studio
2008 SP 1 and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP 1 after dropping out of
the beta cycle, was only braved by early adopters. It was deemed unusable for enterprise projects by many developers based on feature
limitations and lack of adequate support for n-tier architectures.
“Until the most recent version of the Entity Framework, you
could not easily build n-tier applications with it,” says Lenni Lobel,
chief technology officer at Sleek Technologies Inc. and principal
consultant at twenty-six New York. Lobel says he’s stayed away
from the technology for enterprise-level production, but thinks the
Entity Framework 4 is now viable for n-tier apps.
Many of the advances in the Entity Framework 4 were driven by
feedback from developers who already used ORM tooling, according
to Lerman. It now supports n-tier architectures within the framework
via API and T4 templates, such as self-tracking entities. Microsoft
also added key functionality, such as support for foreign key associations, lazy or deferred loading, and Plain Old CLR Objects (POCOs).
Go to VisualStudioMagazine.com/EF0910 for more on the Entity
Framework and POCOs.
“To me, the most important enhancement is the ability to support
self-tracking entities once they’re disconnected from the object context, but there’s still a lot of work to be done,” says Lobel, who notes that
the POCO template is now a separate download after the beta cycle.
The Entity Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 support ModelFirst development, offering a Generate Database Wizard to create
the database and parts of the EDM (SSDL, MSL) from a conceptual
model. An Update Model Wizard helps you update the EDM when
the database changes.
The EDM Designer has had a lot of improvements, such as how
it handles complex types, but Microsoft couldn’t come up with a
way for people to deal with large models outside of a “large canvas,”
a complaint from the Entity Framework 1. “If your model is so
large—lots of entities—that it’s problematic in the designer, then
you should probably be breaking the model up anyway, rather than
asking the designer to enable you to work with it,” says Lerman.
The EDM Wizard in Visual Studio 2010, which is used to create
a conceptual model from an existing database (reverse engineering)
and provide the database connections to your app, now supports
foreign key associations and pluralization, which is important if
you want to follow any kind of naming conventions for your entities.
“Previously, you had do lots of modifications to the model afterward,” Lerman explains.
The Entity Framework is becoming a core part of the Microsoft
technology stack. It works with WCF Data Services, WCF RIA Services, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight, which
does not support ADO.NET data sets.
“You can use LINQ to SQL or use your own classes as long as you
follow certain rules, but a lot of those technologies are depending
on a model. Entity Framework provides that model and Microsoft
has built them so that they will very easily use an Entity Data Model
from Entity Framework,” says Julie Lerman, an independent .NET
consultant who specializes in data platforms.
The Entity Data Model (EDM) provides a uniform way for developers to work with data by specifying the data structure of a client
application through business logic, namely entities and relationships.
EDM consists of a conceptual data model (domain), model-based
storage structures and a mapping specification that connects the
two. It exposes ADO.NET entities as objects in .NET, providing an
object-layer for Microsoft LINQ. Using LINQ to Entities, Entity SQL
or query builder methods, developers can write queries against the
conceptual model and return objects.
“It does remove all of the data access code that we used to have to The Microsoft Edge
write,” says Lerman, who finished the second edition of her book, “Pro- A few months after its release, the Entity Framework 4 seems to
gramming Entity Framework” (O’Reilly, 2010) in August. The book be holding up in comparisons with longstanding open source
was rewritten to cover the Entity Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010. ORM NHibernate.
Mark Shiffer is a software architect for consultancy Capitol StratThe Entity Framework takes a different approach than a lot of
typical ORMs because the model has a mapping layer, which egies. He’s working on a pilot project using the Entity Framework 4
allows developers to really customize the model, Lerman says. “It’s for the data access layer of an IT operations system for a benefits
not just a direct representation of the database and that’s a really administration agency that handles the Illinois state retirement system.
“We looked at NHibernate and Entity Framework; it was a toss
important distinction.”
“The goal of the Entity Framework is to be an abstraction layer on up between the two. The shifting factor was Microsoft’s backing
top of your database, so in theory it’s supposed to reduce complexity,” of Entity Framework and it appears that they’re going to stick with
says Steve Forte, chief strategy officer at Telerik, which offers a it,” says Shiffer.
The project team, which consists of two consultants and four state
competing ORM tool called OpenAccess. “However, developers know
how to build applications the traditional way—data over forms—so employees, is rewriting the back-end IT operations. The design phase
the Entity Framework is something new that needs to be learned and started a little less than a year ago, but the actual coding didn’t start until
February, when the Entity Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 were
the jury is still out on whether the learning curve is worth it.”
13
COVER STORY
Entity Framework
“You can use LINQ to SQL or use your own classes as long as you
follow certain rules, but a lot of those technologies are depending on
a model. Entity Framework provides that model.”
Julie Lerman, Principal, The Data Farm
Work in Progress
still in beta. The pilot project focuses on a human resources system.
The architecture for the project uses a Model-View-ViewModel The Entity Framework 1 only supported Database First (reverse
design pattern with Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows engineering). The Entity Framework 4 added a somewhat limited
Communication Foundation, Unity (an IoC container) and the Model-First option. The Database Generation Power Pack available
Entity Framework 4 with Self-Tracking Entities. It also requires a for download in the Visual Studio Code Gallery gives you more
repository pattern, and a Unit of Work pattern to provide transac- control over how the database schema is created by that domain
model, according to Lerman.
tional boundaries for data processes, according to Shiffer.
“I’m a huge fan of the Model-First [option],” says Dane Morgridge,
The IT operations system is a complete redesign, so the team is
starting from scratch and using the new Model-First options in a Microsoft MVP for Data Platforms and solution architect at LiquidVisual Studio 2010 to create the conceptual model, and then generate Hub Inc. Morgridge has several projects using the Entity Framethe rest of the EDM and the database schemas. Shiffer is among the work 1 in production. “Previously, I was doing the database design
developers who ran into a problem with the number of entities in in SQL Server Management Studio and ever since I started working
with Visual Studio 2010, I’ve been doing all of my modeling within
his model and limitations in the EDM designer.
Even so, he contends that the flexibility and level of customization Visual Studio as opposed to SQL Server. And for what I’ve been
supported in the Entity Framework 4 is critical for enterprise-level doing, it has been working great.”
Morgridge’s team is using the Database Generation Power Pack—
systems. “We had to write some custom workflow processes for the
database generation piece and that’s all pretty easy to figure out which he says has huge potential—to figure out templates, but he
because it just runs off of some workflows and we use the Self- points out that the Power Pack forces developers to modify the T4
Tracking Entities template, too … It was pretty easy to accomplish templates to create their own.
Lerman says that Microsoft got a lot of feedback from the
that, so that level of customization control was nice to see.”
Shiffer says it’s a matter of understanding the pieces of the Entity ALT.NET community about things such as lack of POCO support.
Framework, because the resources to plug in and extend the Entity “POCO support in Entity Framework 4 opens up the possibilities
Framework are there. “The Object State Manager and the Object for architecting with repositories, if that’s what you want to do, and
Context [entity container] are key concepts to the framework and doing unit testing and really building applications where you can
once you understand those concepts, it makes implementing some have a good separation of concerns, which is really important when
of the more intense features that we have to do for enterprise soft- you’re architecting large applications,” she says.
Morgridge says ORMs have made things easier for developers
ware easier,” he says.
“We’re still in the middle of digging around in there and imple- but they don’t necessarily follow accepted patterns, such as reposimenting some of this stuff,” he continues, “but the Repository pattern tory patterns, out of the box.
“My recommendation to anybody starting out is to look at blogs
was very easy to implement within Entity Framework. Unit of Work
was fairly easy as well, with the Object Context the way it’s set up. But that talk about how to use repository patterns and things like that,
we’re still having some issues with threading because the Object Con- so that you can have clean separation,” he says. “Unfortunately, a lot
text isn’t thread-safe, so that’s sending us for a bit of a loop right now.” of sample code just talks about dropping an EDMX file right in the
Performance issues are the greatest concern in the pilot project, same folder as your project, and while that works, that’s really not
namely errant SQL generation, which has the project team trying to the right way to do things. So, Entity Framework really is what it is,
figure out whether the Entity Framework 4 is going to be efficient it’s just a matter of how you use it and what you do with it.”
Morgridge’s T4 Template for Repository and Unit of Work patenough in the end. Shiffer describes a simple join and select for one
record out of five or six tables, which ended up yielding up to 5,000 lines terns in the Entity Framework is available on CodePlex at efrepository.codeplex.com.
of SQL code for the select statement under the Entity Framework SQL.
“That’s the biggest question mark right now for us, because it can
Reality of Stored Procedures
spit out some pretty nasty SQL at times,” says Shiffer.
Microsoft responded to Shiffer after he discussed some of these How the Entity Framework works with stored procedures was another
issues in his blog. “They’re working on it and working to get it better,” bone of contention in the Entity Framework 1, specifically in the area
of data security requirements. Database administrators had a problem
he says. Microsoft declined to comment for this article.
Will Shiffer and his team switch frameworks? That depends, he with letting the Entity Framework access database tables directly and
says, on what his team can do to optimize the SQL code coming out do all of the command generation (SELECT, UPDATE, INSERT and
DELETE), instead of using pre-defined stored procedures.
of the Entity Framework.
“If those stored procedures use output parameters, you’re out of
“There are various ways we could do that,” Shiffer explains. “We
could stick with Entity Framework and write stored procedure luck,” says Sleek Technologies CTO Lobel. He says Microsoft needs to
processes and have them called from there, but that takes away support stored procedures, “not just stored procedures with caveats.”
Microsoft has done a lot to improve in that area, according to
some of the benefits of using Entity Framework for an ORM. So
that decision hasn’t been made yet, that’s why we’re in the middle Lerman. “They worked really hard on how the queries are compiled,
which essentially is the process by which you go from a LINQ to
of a pilot project trying to test everything out.”
14
Project3
12/16/09
11:55 AM
Page 1
COVER STORY
Entity Framework
“To me, the most important enhancement is the ability to support
self-tracking entities once they’re disconnected from the object
context, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.”
Lenni Lobel, Chief Technology Officer, Sleek Technologies Inc.
Entities query to a stored query, whether that’s a T-SQL query in
SQL Server or something in another database,” she says.
Even in the Entity Framework 1, you could build models just
from using stored procedures, according to Lerman, by building
views on top of tables and then building a model around the views
and stored procedures.
and chief of new technology at twenty-six New York. “I think they
add an extra layer, which although elegant and helpful for large
apps, is often overkill for smaller ones.”
Many developers who use the Entity Framework aren’t using the
entities that it produces directly, but instead create their own wrapper
classes, according to Brust. “As long as they’re doing that then why
not wrap ADO.NET objects directly?” he asks.
Morgridge says there are lots of advantages to using an ORM and
while the complexity is there, he doesn’t think it’s great enough to
warrant not using it. “It’s really never overkill. The only place I
wouldn’t use an ORM is in a case where performance was an utmost
factor because the whole additional layer can add some performance
issues potentially,” he says. “Sometimes you’re not going to get the
most performant-generated SQL out of LINQ expressions. If it’s a
case where performance is really an issue, then that’s when I will go
back and do a stored procedure or some other ADO.NET method.”
Even with small projects, Morgridge says he saves a lot of time by
using an ORM. “It cuts my data access code time by 70 percent easy,
because I don’t have to write hand-coded SQL statements and
things like that.”
“It’s definitely worth taking a look at, especially if you’re trying to
compare using Entity Framework to using ADO.NET directly,” says
Shiffer. “It provides that wrapper that you need to separate your
data layer out, and to abstract your concerns about SQL statements
and not having to really be concerned with the data structure as
much as you normally are if you didn’t have an object-relational
mapper in the middle of it all.”
Just Programming
In late July, Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Platform at Microsoft, got domain developers’ attention with
a series of blog posts about the upcoming Code-First option, a
longstanding feature of NHibernate, OpenAccess and other ORM
frameworks. Microsoft has talked about the Code-First feature
since the Entity Framework 1, but has yet to deliver it.
“Depending on what you’re doing, Code First is going to be as
easy as LINQ to SQL,” says Lerman. “It eliminates writing the visual
model, you just write classes and then configure them a little further
if you need to, to make them work for the Entity Framework.”
She cautions that Code-First is still in the preview stage—it’s
part of the Entity Framework Feature CTP 4—and not available for
go-live production. But if Guthrie is blogging about it, chances are
Microsoft has the features fairly nailed down.
Microsoft is responding to a “decently sized” segment of the
market that would stay away from the Entity Framework without
the Code-First design pattern, observes Forte.
“Microsoft’s target audience with both LINQ to SQL and the
Entity Framework is probably not the developer that goes Code
First,” he says, “but I think that the market dragged them in that
direction, so it’s actually pretty interesting and there’s a good level Riding the Coattails
of innovation that’s coming out of it.”
Telerik’s Steve Forte expects the growing popularity of other MicroOther API enhancements in the Feature pack should make pro- soft technologies—WCF RIA Services and OData with WCF Data
gramming against the Entity Framework in the next release simpler. “In Services—to help drive Entity Framework adoption, and says he’s
the core API, they’re kind of wrapping some of the other functionality already fielding questions along those lines from customers.
so that it’s easier to find and easier to write,” says Lerman.
Brust holds a similar view. “Silverlight, WCF Data Services (aka
When the simpler API was first announced in June, Rowan Miller, a “Astoria”) and ASP.NET MVC are proving very popular; Entity
Microsoft program manager on the Entity Framework Team, blogged: Framework gets to ride coattails.”
At the heart of the Entity Framework Productivity Improvements
Hybrid applications are another form of adoption. “If you have a
are two new types, DbContext and DbSet<TEntity>. DbContext is a brownfield app and you’ve invested heavily in data over forms and
simplified alternative to ObjectContext and is the primary object for stored procedures, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for an
interacting with a database using a specific model. DbSet<TEntity> ORM like Entity Framework, or OpenAccess or NHibernate in
is a simplified alternative to ObjectSet<TEntity>and is used to your project,” says Forte. “They have the ability to hook into reporting
perform CRUD operations against a specific type from the model. engines and hook into OData, and all three now hook into RIA
These new types can be used regardless of whether you created your Services. That’s one thing that should be obvious, but it may not be.”
model using the Entity Designer or code.
It even works with the cloud. The Visual Studio 2010 design
tools didn’t initially support SQL Azure, so you couldn’t point to a
SQL Azure table and create a model from it, but that’s changed.
Hard Sell
The effort to reduce the complexity of the Entity Framework under- SQL Azure also lacked support for Multiple Active Result Sets
scores Microsoft’s task of pleasing enterprise-level ORM developers, (MARS), which would have affected Entity Framework 4 features
many with a Java background, and others in the .NET community, like lazy loading, but Microsoft’s database in the cloud has since
added MARS support. VSM
who still need to be sold on the ORM concept.
Andrew Brust thinks Entity Framework should be an option,
rather than the default way to do data access in .NET-based apps. Kathleen Richards ([email protected]) is the executive editor of
“First of all, I don’t love ORMs,” says the Redmond Review columnist Visual Studio Magazine and the editor of RedDevNews.com.
16
Project1
10/30/09
1:28 PM
Page 1
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FEATURE
SQL Server 2008 R2
FOR THE DEVELOPER
In April, Microsoft released a new version
of its flagship database server, with the unwieldy
name SQL Server 2008 R2. Version R2 leaves the
core database engine of SQL Server 2008 almost
completely untouched, but adds a slew of new
features that can dramatically expand the role of
SQL Server in managing an enterprise’s data.
Microsoft only occasionally uses the R2 moniker for its applications, usually for point releases that add a few new features. By
contrast, major new versions deliver a host of new features and
fixes, while service packs mostly fix bugs. The nice thing about
SQL Server 2008 R2 is that it leaves intact what is now a very stable, 2-year-old database engine. Enterprises should be comfortable installing SQL Server 2008 R2 and benefiting from its new
features without worrying about breaking changes to the core engine. With SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft is filling out the feature
set of a mature database product.
There are two new top-end SQL Server editions with the R2
release: Datacenter for the biggest and most heavily used enterprise
databases, and Parallel Data Warehouse with massively parallel
processing to support intensively used data warehouses. A few
features from the original release of SQL Server 2008 are migrating
to less-expensive editions. For example, backup compression,
originally available only with the Enterprise Edition, is now part of
the Standard Edition. And the largest database supported by SQL
18
Server Express is going up from 4GB to 10GB, a welcome change to
allow more flexibility for desktop applications.
When reading the Microsoft marketing materials you might get
the impression that SQL Server 2008 R2 is targeted only at DBAs
and enterprise system architects, cementing the company’s increasingly enterprise-centric focus. But dig more deeply and you’ll find
plenty of goodies for developers. In this article, I’ll briefly cover
some of the more interesting new features that you can use in
application development, as well as a few features that you may
encounter that will affect how you write applications.
Deep security is one of the primary reasons to use a database
server product like SQL Server. But the only significant new security feature in SQL Server 2008 R2 is Extended Protection for authentication, used to prevent authentication relay attacks. This is an attack
in which a malicious server uses the credentials of an authenticated
user contained in client software to masquerade as the user, thereby
giving the attacker access to whatever data the user can access.
Extended Protection uses a combination of service and channel
bindings to validate that the user is not an attacker and establish a
secure channel to verify the authenticity of the client. Extended
Protection requires versions of Windows with the feature installed
and activated (it’s turned off by default).
Application and Multi-Server Management
Some new developer features are tightly coupled to server instance
management, as is the case with application and multi-server management. The new SQL Server Utility lets a systems administrator create a
utility control point on a single instance of SQL Server 2008 R2, which
ILLUSTRATION BY RYAN ETTER
Microsoft extends its enterprise-capable database
platform with powerful new management and
scalability features—and there’s plenty in the
latest rev for developers. By Don Kiely
FEATURE
acts as a central repository for configuration and performance data
that it collects for all instances of SQL Server enrolled in the utility.
The utility control point provides a DBA with far more control
and monitoring features than have been previously available to
apply policies and analyze resource utilization trends, which help
predict and prevent failures due to resource depletion. A companion
Utility Explorer displays a dashboard and detailed viewpoints to
monitor enrolled instances of SQL Server.
As part of these multi-server management features, either a
developer or a DBA can define a data-tier application (DAC) that
simplifies developing, deploying and managing database objects
that support data applications. (Yes, the acronym is DAC and not
DTA, which already means Database Engine Tuning Advisor.) A
DAC defines all of the database objects—including schemas—
needed to support an application. By extracting the database
objects and creating a single unit of deployment in a single file type,
you can migrate them to the centrally managed world of multiserver management as well as apply upgrades to the various objects.
Figure 1 shows the wizard from Management Studio that DBAs
use to extract a DAC from an existing set of database objects and
generate a DAC package file. You can create a DAC from scratch in
Visual Studio 2010 with the SQL Server Data-Tier Application project
template. The project Visual Studio creates from this template
looks similar to a Database Edition project (the SQL Server 2008
Database Project template), but the end result of building a DAC
project is a DACPAC file you can deploy to a SQL Server instance.
The SQL Server Data-Tier Application project template hooks
into the Code Analysis feature in Visual Studio, shown in Figure 2
(p. 20). Code Analysis helps you improve the quality of your database code every time you build the project. The Design, Naming
and Performance categories can help ferret out some of the most
basic and common problems that can hurt performance and
Figure 1. The SQL Server 2008 R2 Extract Data-Tier Application
wizard lets you extract an existing database as a data-tier
application (DAC). You can also register a database as a DAC with
the accompanying Register Data-Tier Application wizard.
complicate code maintenance over the long term. As with all code
analysis in Visual Studio, you can select the tests you want and
choose to correct or ignore any problems they find.
It remains to be seen whether this first version of DAC is robust
enough to handle more than applying small changes to departmental
databases. For now, DACs are best suited for deploying and updating
Microsoft SQL Azure databases.
R2 Gives Reporting Services a Boost
Reporting Services probably received the biggest number of
enhancements in SQL Server 2008 R2 of any feature that shipped
with the original SQL Server 2008.
SQL Server 2008 R2 includes a number of general reporting
enhancements. The improved lookup functions let you join datasets
within Reporting Services using new functions. The LookupSet function returns a set of matching values and the Multilookup function returns the set of first-match values for a set of names. You can now build
an aggregate on top of other aggregates, for instance, to average a
sum of values. RenderFormat lets you control the output formatting of
data based on where you’re rendering out the data, such as to Excel or
a report, and provides far more control over page breaks and numbering.
SQL Server 2008 R2 includes four new data visualization features:
sparklines, data bars, indicators and maps. Data bars indicate the
magnitude of a value by its length, while a sparkline displays multiple
data points. These often show the trend of a single variable, such as
sales, over time in a small area of screen or report space. Indicators let
you display different icons based on a single data value. Finally, maps
let you hook into the spatial data features of SQL Server 2008 R2 in
a report, so you can display maps based on a report’s data. Reporting
Services still doesn’t include any calendar controls, so there’s still room
for data-visualization improvement.
Report Manager and Report Viewer have both gotten significant
upgrades. Report Manager has an improved interface that’s easier
to use, while Report Viewer uses AJAX and a JavaScript object
model in Web reports to make it easier to respond to client-side
events. Report Viewer also supports additional browsers, including
more recent versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Reporting Services has long had the ability to share and use
multiple data sources, but now you can share datasets to provide
consistent data for multiple reports. You can cache the query
results for various combinations of parameters and refresh on
demand or on a defined schedule.
Microsoft made lots of enhancements to Report Builder 3.0.
The datasets that it uses are now cached for faster rendering in
the current session for up to two hours. It now supports relative
references that let you access different parts of reports as action
targets. Report Builder also includes a report part gallery that lets
you search for reusable report parts.
The most intriguing new feature in Reporting Services is using
reports as a data source, exposing the data as an ATOM data service.
This allows you to provide the report data to other applications, such
as sending it to PowerPivot or exposing it though a URL for direct
access to the feed.
Make sure you check out the “What’s New (Reporting Services)” topic
in MSDN Books Online at tinyurl.com/25ld4od for a complete rundown
of all the enhancements. Reporting Services has gotten more powerful,
—D.K.
giving users better insight into their data than ever before.
19
FEATURE
SQL Server 2008 R2
Figure 2. The Code Analysis tab in a DAC project properties
window lets you analyze your database code. The checks are
straightforward, but can help improve your code and make it more
consistent for better maintainability.
BI for the Power User
Probably the most dramatic and visually striking new feature in
SQL Server 2008 R2 is PowerPivot for Excel and for SharePoint.
PowerPivot provides self-service business intelligence (BI) so end
users can create and manipulate data, letting them slice, dice, analyze, and share data and reports. PowerPivot for Excel is a sepa-
rate free download for Excel 2007 and 2010 (although you need
Excel 2010 to make use of all the PowerPivot features), and
PowerPivot for SharePoint adds shared services for working with
Excel PowerPivot workbooks that you can publish to SharePoint.
Microsoft calls the set of PowerPivot features “managed selfservice business intelligence,” and that’s an apt description. Enterprise BI is beyond the understanding of mere mortals, yet it’s
mere mortals who need the information and analyses that BI generates to make business decisions. For power users, PowerPivot
provides tools in the familiar Excel environment. It also gives systems
administrators the tools they need to provide data in a form that
users can utilize, as well as to facilitate sharing the resulting data
and analyses. Most importantly, users can make their own analyses
without waiting for IT to generate reports.
The Excel add-in provides several components on the user’s
local machine, including a PowerPivot menu in the Excel ribbon to
launch the design window and work with data, and a PowerPivot
window that provides all the design tools the user needs. There’s
also a local Analysis Services engine that compresses and
loads data, and other tools for accessing various sources of data.
Figure 3 shows most of the visual components at work with the
design window in the foreground, after loading data from the
FactInternetSales and related tables from the AdventureWorks2008R2 sample database.
Over the years, Microsoft and other vendors have made various
attempts to make BI data available to power users. PowerPivot
seems to be the first attempt to deliver sophisticated tools that can
fully leverage the information
locked in data warehouses. The
tool is certainly not targeted at
the casual user, but neither does
it require a degree in computer
science to extract valuable data
and information.
I’ve just scratched the surface
of what is new, shiny and
exciting in SQL Server 2008 R2.
There’s a lot more there for DBAs,
including features like Master
Data Services for streamlining
enterprise data into a single
version of the truth, and StreamInsight for event processing to
handle massive volumes of complex data in real time. Database
compression supports Unicode
now, and Microsoft has added
features to support high-volume
data warehouses. Developers, of
course, will find plenty to help
their applications make better
use of better data. VSM
Figure 3. Excel power users will be immediately comfortable with using the PowerPivot add-in for Excel. The
PowerPivot window shown here lets users access data sources and manipulate data to their hearts’ content.
20
Don Kiely ([email protected]),
MVP, MSCD, is a senior technology
consultant. When he isn’t writing
software, he’s writing about
technology, speaking about
technology at conferences and
training others.
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Untitled-12 1
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Untitled-1 1
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FEATURE
LAB MANAGEMENT IN
2010
Visual Studio
Visual Studio Lab Management promises to
streamline thorny debug and test challenges by enabling
an efficient, virtualized test environment.
BY VIJAY MACHIRAJU
Many teams have started improving their
software development lifecycle using Visual Studio
2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010. Developers
can now easily track their work items, version
control their source code and manage builds using
Visual Studio 2010. In addition, Visual Studio 2010
brings in a great set of architecture and testing tools
to integrate the work of all software engineering
disciplines in a project. For instance, software testers
can use the new testing tools in Visual Studio to
create test plans, run tests on various configurations,
collect logs to be included in bugs and generate
test reports. So, what else can you do with Visual
Studio 2010 to increase your productivity?
What if you could do the following:
■ Easily create multi-machine test environments to aid in your
development or testing activities.
■ Deploy build after build into test environments without
having to worry about re-imaging the machines or
uninstalling the earlier builds.
■ Increase the build quality by running a set of automated
integration tests in addition to unit tests after every build.
■ Collect and attach server logs with bugs in addition to
client-side logs, so that developers can fix those bugs faster.
In August 2010, Microsoft made Visual Studio Lab Management
available without any additional cost for all MSDN subscribers of
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Visual Studio Test Professional 2010.
For the first time, Lab Management brings the power of virtualization
to your Visual Studio-based development process. This article will
help you navigate this new technology by describing how it works
and how you can realize scenarios such as the ones just described.
How Lab Management Works
Using virtual machines (VMs) for software development has many
benefits. Developers can create sand-boxed environments using
VMs and install different software components in them without
having to worry about conflicts. They can create a virtual hard disk
called the golden image with the base OS and all the necessary
prerequisite software for their development needs. After working
on a copy of that golden image for a while, they can simply discard
that and start fresh from another copy of it without having to
re-install the OS or prerequisites.
To create VMs, developers often use desktop virtualization tools,
such as Microsoft Virtual PC, because they’re easy to install on
their desktops. However, to run VMs more efficiently, you need a
layer of software called hypervisor that runs directly on physical
hardware. Microsoft Hyper-V is a hypervisor that’s included as
part of the Windows Server 2008 R2 OS, or as a standalone, free
download product. Using Hyper-V, you can easily host multiple
VMs on a single physical computer. The physical computer is then
called a Hyper-V host. But, what if you want to set up a shared lab of
Hyper-V hosts for the benefit of the entire team? Or, what if you
want to manage a library of golden images? That’s where Microsoft
System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 comes
in. SCVMM 2008 R2 is a tool for managing multiple hypervisors.
23
FEATURE
Lab Management
Using SCVMM 2008 R2, you can pool several Hyper-V hosts into a
host group. You can also set up a few machines called library servers
to store and manage golden images of various OSes that are
commonly used in your project. Every time you need to create a
new VM, SCVMM 2008 R2 lets you pick a golden image and one of
the host groups and provision a VM in a self-service manner.
Although SCVMM 2008 R2 is a great management tool for IT
administrators, Visual Studio Lab Management makes virtualization
features more easily accessible to developers and testers. It’s implemented as a service in Team Foundation Server, just like version
control or work-item tracking. Internally, this service uses SCVMM
2008 R2 and lets you create and use VM environments on Hyper-V
hosts right from Microsoft Test Manager or Visual Studio (see Figure 1).
Detailed steps for setting up Lab Management can be found in
MSDN documentation. In addition, there are several articles on
the Visual Studio Lab Management team blog (blogs.msdn.com/b/
lab_management) that provide additional guidance on topics such
as capacity planning and supported network topologies as you
adopt Lab Management.
Creating Environments
Setting up and maintaining environments for development, testing,
integration and staging is a painstaking task for software teams.
Visual Studio Lab Management enables your team members to create
environments easily in a self-service manner without having to
incur long lead times for IT to provision them. An environment in
Lab Management is simply a collection of virtual machines, each
fulfilling a role for the application you are developing. For instance,
an environment can consist of a virtual machine serving as a database
and another virtual machine serving as a Web server. Using Lab
Management, you can create environments in one of three ways:
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate or Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 Clients
Team Foundation Server 2010
System Center
Virtual Machine
Manager 2008 R2
Library Servers
Hyper-V Hosts
Figure 1. Lab Management Architecture
24
From VMs you already have
From a set of golden images stored in the library
■ By cloning another environment
Creating environments from golden images reduces the duplication of effort because these images can be created once and then
reused multiple times.
To prepare a reusable golden image, follow these steps:
■ Create a VM with all prerequisites: Prepare one VM for each
role that you need for your application under test, and for each
configuration that you need of that role. As an example, if your
application requires a Web server that has to run on a Windows
Server 2008 OS, create one VM with a Windows Server 2008
OS, and enable the IIS role in it.
■ Install Visual Studio Agents 2010 in the VM: Visual Studio
Agents 2010 is additional software that’s available as a free
download with Visual Studio 2010. Lab Management requires
that you install three agents in the VMs—Test Agent 2010, Lab
Agent 2010 and Build Agent. The software for the first two
agents is part of Visual Studio Agents 2010. The software for
Build Agent is part of the Team Foundation Server installation.
There’s a great utility called VM Prep Tool at vslabmgmt.codeplex.com, which can help you simplify the installation of all
three agents into a VM.
■ Store the VM in the library: The VM Prep Tool also generalizes
the VM and stores it as a golden image in the library. Every
time you use the golden image for creating a new environment,
it’ll be customized with a unique computer name. To create an
environment from golden images, follow these steps:
1. Import the golden images into your team project: Before
using the golden images, you have to first import them
into your project. Do this from the Library tab under Lab
Center in Microsoft Test Manager 2010. When you import
the golden image, you have to provide information on
how it should be customized every time an environment
is created from it. For example, you have to enter a product
key and the Active Directory domain it should be joined
to, among other things.
2. Create a new virtual environment: Using the Creation
Wizard in the Lab tab, select the golden images and create
a new environment.
This paradigm of creating an environment on demand from a
set of golden images and making that accessible to developers and
testers changes the way software teams provision environments.
You don’t have to perform the repetitive tasks of installing OSes
and prerequisites. Later in this article, we’ll explore another way of
creating environments by cloning them.
■
■
Deploying Application Builds
Self-service creation of environments is only the beginning of what
you can do with Lab Management. The real value of this technology
comes when you start using the rich integration features of those
environments. The first such integration is with build automation.
Project teams spend significant resources in deploying every build
on multiple environments before an application goes into production.
Ad hoc processes are followed to roll back an environment to a clean
state and to re-try the process each time a deployment fails. Furthermore, test teams have to repeat the same tests on every build to catch
regressions. Although it’s expensive for regression tests to be re-run
on every build, not doing so often would only delay the detection of
problems, thereby affecting the quality of your application.
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Untitled-1 1
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FEATURE
Lab Management
In addition to deploying builds on a clean snapshot, Lab Management
also allows you to run a set of automated regression tests on it.
This entire build-deploy-test workflow is available just as
another build template in Visual Studio.
■ Reproduce the bug: When a developer sees the bug in Team
Lab Management exploits the power of snapshots to simplify the
deployment of application builds into an environment. A snapshot
Explorer, he or she can open the snapshot to connect to the same
is a “marker” of an entire state of an environment at a given point in
environment, provided the environment is not in use by the tester.
time. A user can revert to that snapshot at any time, and resume the
With this feature, testers don’t have to spend time finding a conexecution of the machines from exactly the same state they were in sistent reproduction for an accidental bug they discovered. Coupled
when the snapshot was taken. This makes it convenient to preserve with the rich data collection features, snapshots provide all the
the clean state of an environment. One can revert to this clean state information necessary for a developer to act upon an issue. The
before deploying a build or after running tests.
turnaround of a bug that’s otherwise spent by developers in reproIn addition to deploying builds on a clean snapshot, Lab Manage- ducing it or in recreating the environment is cut down.
ment also allows you to run a set of automated regression tests on it.
This entire build-deploy-test workflow is available just as another Cloning Environments
build template in Visual Studio.
Wouldn’t you want the testers to use the same environment on which
Follow these steps to create a build-deploy-test workflow:
the build-deploy-test workflow was run? When a tester finds a bug,
■ Create a build-deploy-test workflow definition: Using Visual
wouldn’t you want a developer to use the same environment to verify
Studio Team Explorer, create a new build definition starting the fix? But, all this sharing diminishes the productivity of a team,
from lab default template. While creating the definition select because it requires team members to schedule their time to share
the virtual environment, the clean snapshot to restore the envi- environments. Lab Management allows cloning of environments so
ronment to, the definition for compiling sources, the scripts that every developer and tester can get his own private copy.
Bringing up multiple clones of environments at the same time causes
for deployment and the test suite.
■ Queue the new build definition: You can either set the buildcomputer name and other networking conflicts. Lab Management
deploy-test workflow to be triggered manually or on a schedule. solves this problem through a technology called network isolation,
With this, dev teams don’t have to worry about consistency of which automatically configures the network of VMs and their IP
the deployment process in various environments. You don’t have to stack to avoid conflicts. Follow these steps to copy environments:
■ Configure network isolation: When creating the environment,
spend time running rollback scripts or performing additional procedures when deployment fails. Simply revert to the clean snapshot
ensure that network isolation capability is selected.
■ Store a fully prepared environment in the library: After
of the environment before deploying the next build. You can also
run regression and integration tests in addition to unit tests, because
working with it (or after filing a bug with snapshot), shut
you have a real environment on which the build is deployed. Testers
down the environment and store a copy in the library. Once
will now have a better sense of the build quality.
the copying is done, you can continue working with it.
■ Create clone: Deploy another copy of the environment from
Running Tests
the library. At this point, you have two deployed environments.
Finding bugs and identifying steps to reproduce them is still more of
an art than science. And because of project deadlines, developers often Save Time and Resources
don’t have the time to re-create environments to adequately verify their Visual Studio Lab Management enables teams to accelerate setup
fixes. These problems often cause software teams to remain inefficient. and restoration of complex multi-machine environments to a
All the testing features of Microsoft Test Manager can be exercised known clean state for test execution and build automation. It also
on environments created by Visual Studio Lab Management. By allows testers to file rich bugs with links to environment snapshots
using environments either in manual or automated testing, you can that developers can then use to re-create complex environments,
collect logs of various forms from all machines in the environment. effectively reducing wasted time and resources in development and
Testers can attach these logs when they file bugs. In fact, testers can test lifecycle. With the August release of Lab Management, this set
also include a snapshot of the entire environment to the bug. of features is available for you to use, if you’re a Visual Studio
Developers can then connect to the same environment or to a copy 2010 Ultimate with MSDN or Visual Studio Test Professional 2010
of the environment to reproduce the problem or to validate their with MSDN user. VSM
fix. Follow these steps to file a bug with snapshot:
■ Configure to run your test cases on an environment: Create
Vijay Machiraju is a senior program manager at Microsoft with the Visual
a Test Settings in Microsoft Test Manager using the same set of Studio Team, leading the engineering effort of various features in Lab
roles that you used when creating the environment. Use the Test Management. Being in the software industry since 1997, he specializes in
Settings tab under Lab Center to do this. While running your application lifecycle management, systems management and virtualization.
manual tests, select the option to run the tests on an environment. He’s the coauthor of “Web Services—Concepts, Architectures and Applica■ File a rich bug: During your testing session, when you find a bug,
tions” (Springer, 2004) and has published at various conferences. Machiraju
take a snapshot of the environment. When a bug is filed, the snap- has a master’s degree in computer science from University of Utah in Salt
shot and a variety of logs are automatically attached to the bug. Lake City. You can reach him at [email protected].
26
Gantt Chart
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Untitled-12 1
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</Language Lab>
YO U R C O D E S O U R C E
IN THIS SECTION:
On VB · 28 // Ask Kathleen · 34 //////////////////////
ASP.NET MVC 2
{ ON VB }
How to Validate Forms
with ASP.NET MVC 2 Data
Annotations
Simplify the task of validating Web form input by using
attributes. If standard validators don’t meet your needs, you
can create custom data annotations for richer validations.
BY JOE KUNK AND VIJAY JAGDALE
The movement toward declarative statements over detailed
procedural programming and convention over configuration
signify growing trends in application development. Declarative
statements instruct the compiler more on what to do and less on
how to do it. “Convention over configuration” refers to the
practice of organizing and naming application elements in a
predictable and expected manner so that the desired behavior can
be inferred by the compiler. Both of these practices result in
increased developer productivity and reduced complexity by
offloading routine tasks to the compiler. Developers should
welcome these changes and strive to take full advantage of them.
Data Annotations, introduced in version 2 of the Microsoft
ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC) platform, offer a declarative
way to validate Web form fields and provide important error messages
to users when necessary. In this article, we’ll look at the standard
validators in the ASP.NET MVC 2 platform and demonstrate the
development of a custom validator that works at both the client level
with JavaScript and the server level with managed code. You’ll see
how easily a functional Web site can be built by taking advantage of
the convention over configuration provided by ASP.NET MVC 2.
Basic CRUD Applications
First, let’s move through the process of building a standard ASP.NET
MVC 2 Web application that provides basic Create Read Update
Delete (CRUD) capabilities (the full source code of the sample
application is available for download from VisualStudioMagazine.
com/Kunk0910). The Visual Basic sample application was
developed in Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC 2, which is
part of the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.
Select the ASP.NET MVC 2 Web Application template from the
New Project dialog. Although you won’t be building unit tests in
this article, we recommend always responding yes to the Create
Unit Test Project dialog for easier unit test coding at a later date.
Right-click the App_Data folder, add new item and select the SQL
Server Database template. Using Server Explorer, create a Customer
table with the fields as shown in Figure 1. The CustomerId field is an
identity seed column and must be marked as the primary key. Create
a few rows of data for the Web site to work with when completed.
28
Figure 1. Customer table fields.
LINQ to SQL is a quick way to build interaction with the database.
Right-click the Model folder and create a data context by choosing
the LINQ to SQL Classes template. Add the Customer table by
dragging it from the Server Explorer to the LINQ to SQL design
surface. Use the SQLMetal utility to create a data context for any
non-trivial database. More information on LINQ to SQL and
SQLMetal can be found in Roger Jennings’ cover story, “Speed
O/R Mapping with LINQ to SQL” (December 2008).
Controller and Action Methods
Add a controller named CustomerController, which will perform
the interactions between the customer table and its related Web
pages. Right-click the Controller folder and choose Add Controller
or use the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+M, Ctrl+C. Be sure to check
the option “Add action methods for Create, Update, Delete and
Details scenarios” of the resulting Add Controller dialog. This
creates the scaffolding for all the action methods required for a
simple CRUD controller. At this point, build the solution. This is
an important step, required to see strongly typed classes in the
Add View dialog box in the following step.
At the start of the Controller source, add Imports Models. Create
Web page views for each of the actions defined within the CustomerController. Place your cursor within an action method in the
CustomerController then right-click and choose Add View or use
the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+M, Ctrl+V. Figure 2 (p. 30) shows how
to create a strongly-typed List view for the Index action. Similarly,
create strongly typed views for the other GET actions, using the
corresponding View Content for each action. You should now have
Create, Delete, Details, Edit and Index .ASPX files in the Customer
folder within the Views folder. This ability to create default controllers
and views is convention over configuration at work for you.
Complete the basic ASP.NET MVC 2 Web site by adding LINQ
to SQL code to interact with the database. Listing 1 (p. 30) shows
the code for the Index method that lists customers and the Edit
methods that retrieve an existing customer for editing and
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Untitled-11 1
8/17/10 3:51 PM
</Language Lab>
{ ON VB }
ASP.NET MVC 2
similar to the <HttpPost()> attribute in Listing 1. By applying
these attributes, you can specify which validations are appropriate
for the particular field. Both server-side and optional
client-side JavaScript validations are supported. The included
standard validation annotations are Required, StringLength,
RegularExpression and Range.
Each annotation provides parameters for a custom error
message and resource support to optionally globalize the error
message. In addition, the Required annotation provides a Boolean
flag to allow empty strings. The StringLength annotation provides
parameters for a maximum length and a minimum length. The
RegularExpression annotation provides a parameter for the Regex
match pattern. The Range annotation provides a lower limit and an
upper limit parameter (both of the double numeric type, but able to
support other data types). A Range annotation of DateTime type is
shown on AnniversaryDate in Listing 2 (opposite page).
Listing 1. The Index() and Edit() Methods
for the Customer Controller
Dim DBContext As New Database1DataContext
Figure 2. Create a strongly typed List view for the customer
Index action.
updating; see the sample application online for the remaining
controller methods.
To force the application to start with the Customer List page, add
the statement Return RedirectToAction(“Index”, “Customer”) as the
only statement in the Index method of the HomeController.vb file.
For a production application, it would be appropriate at this
point to clean up the Views by removing the prompt for the
CustomerId field (it’s automatically generated by the database),
change the MarketingOptIn field to a checkbox and generally
modify the Views to be more visually attractive. For our purposes,
what we have now is sufficient to proceed to the discussion of
validation with data annotations.
Why Data Annotations?
Data validation rightfully should be the concern of the Model.
Unfortunately, the form data resides with the View. The ModelState
property of the controller tracks errors to populate the next view.
This makes data validation in ASP.NET MVC 1 particularly
challenging. A quick look at the “Validating with a Service Layer”
tutorial (tinyurl.com/29f9ld5) shows just how involved this can get.
DataAnnotations introduced in ASP.NET MVC 2 greatly
simplify the task of validating the form input by using attributes.
They also reduce code and ease application maintenance.
DataAnnotations have the nice feature of automatically generating
client-side JavaScript validations for the four built-in validation
attributes. If the standard validators don’t meet your needs, you
can create custom validations and implement a wide variety of
validation actions such as a database lookup, a Web service call,
cross-field validations and so on.
Standard Data Annotations
Data Annotations are attributes that can be applied to the class
properties of the objects that are represented in the Web form,
30
' GET: /Customer
Function Index() As ActionResult
Dim customers As List(Of Customer) =
DBContext.Customers.ToList()
Return View(customers)
End Function
' GET: /Customer/Edit/5
Function Edit(ByVal id As Integer) As ActionResult
Dim CustomerRecord As Customer =
(From item In DBContext.Customers
Where item.CustomerId = id
Select item).SingleOrDefault
If (IsNothing(CustomerRecord)) Then _
Return View("CustomerNotFound")
Return View(CustomerRecord)
End Function
' POST: /Customer/Edit/5
<HttpPost()> _
Function Edit(
ByVal id As Integer,
ByVal CustomerData As Customer) As ActionResult
Dim CustomerRecord As Customer = Nothing
Try
CustomerRecord =
(From item In DBContext.Customers
Where item.CustomerId = id
Select item).SingleOrDefault
If (ModelState.IsValid) Then
UpdateModel(CustomerRecord)
DBContext.SubmitChanges()
Return RedirectToAction("Index", "Home")
Else
Return View(CustomerRecord)
End If
Catch ex As Exception
ModelState.AddModelError("GeneralError",
"Error Updating Database: “ & ex.Message)
Return View()
End Try
End Function
You may put multiple validation attributes on a single data field. The
validations occur in the following order: Required, Custom Validation
Attribute, StringLength, Range and, finally, RegularExpression.
You can’t directly annotate the customer table in the DataClasses1.designer.vb file as produced by the LINQ to SQL design
surface because it would be overwritten by any subsequent change
to the designer. The solution is to create a “buddy” class called
CustomerMetaData, which has public properties with the same
field names. You can now put data annotation validators on these
properties. To relate this new class back to Customer, create a
partial customer class and decorate it with a MetadataType
attribute of type CustomerMetaData, as shown in Listing 2.
Right-click the Models folder and add a new class named
DataAnnotations.vb to hold the data annotations for all of your
tables. Replace the default code with the code as shown in Listing 2.
The data type of each property in CustomerMetaData is
ignored; we express the data type as Object for consistency and to
avoid confusion if the underlying type changes.
If a field doesn’t need validation, it doesn’t need to appear in the
CustomerMetaData class. Additional MetadataType classes can be
defined for other tables in the database in a similar fashion.
With these changes, error messages are shown after entering
intentionally incorrect responses on the Create Customer form, as
shown in Figure 3. The ModelState.IsValid method is false when
any validations fail and should always be checked as shown in the
Edit method of Listing 1.
For a more responsive UI, client-side JavaScript validations can
be enabled in a view with a single line of HTML markup and the
inclusion of three script tags. Add the line below just before the
Html.BeginForm() tag in the view:
<% Html.EnableClientValidation()%>
Then add the following three script tags to the end of the View.
An easy way to do this is to drag them over from the Scripts folder
into the View markup:
ASP.NET MVC 2
{ ON VB }
Figure 3. Validation errors from the standard data annotations.
custom JavaScript as a validation rule and associate it with its
server-side equivalent.
Server-Side Custom Data Annotation
The code in Listing 3 is added just before the last line of Listing 2,
after the CreditLimit property. In Listing 3, the AnniversaryDate
property has been extended with our custom WithinDays()
validator in place of the Range() validator. This custom validator
inherits from the ValidationAttribute class and overrides the
IsValid() method. This is the place where you code your custom

<script src="../../Scripts/MicrosoftAjax.js"
type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="../../Scripts/MicrosoftMvcAjax.js"
<script src="../../Scripts/MicrosoftMvcValidation.js"
Custom Data Annotations
Professional-grade Web forms may require more advanced
validation than what’s available from the standard validators.
Custom validators can be defined server-side and optionally
client-side with custom JavaScript. An appropriate use of custom
validators would be to overcome the limitation that attribute
parameters must be constants. To perform a validation with a
dynamic range of values, we must create a custom validator.
The custom validator WithinDays, which replaces the Range
attribute, ensures the AnniversaryDate is within 30 days of the
current date. This is shown in Listing 3 (p. 32). More complex
validators are certainly possible but this will suffice as an example.
Creating a custom validator for both server-side and client-side
consists essentially of three steps. First, create a class that inherits
from ValidationAttribute to define the server-side validation by
overriding the IsValid() function. Second, create the JavaScript to
perform the validation in the browser. Third, create a class that
inherits from DataAnnotationsModelValidator to identify the
Listing 2. Customer Fields Modified with the
Standard Data Annotation Validators
Imports System.ComponentModel
Imports System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations
<MetadataType(GetType(CustomerMetaData))>
Partial Public Class Customer
End Class
Public Class CustomerMetaData
<Required(ErrorMessage:="Name is Required")>
<StringLength(25)>
<RegularExpression("^[A-Za-z\-\.\' ]+$",
ErrorMessage:=
"Only letters, hyphen, apostrophe and period are allowed")>
Public Property Name As Object
<StringLength(50, ErrorMessage:=
"Email Must Be No Longer than 50 Characters")>
Public Property Email As Object
<Range(100, 1000)>
Public Property CreditLimit As Object
<DisplayName("Anniversary Date")>
<Required()>
<Range(GetType(DateTime), "01/01/2000", "12/31/2010")>
<DisplayFormat(DataFormatString:="{0:d}",
ApplyFormatInEditMode:=True)>
Public Property AnniversaryDate As Object
End Class
31
</Language Lab>
{ ON VB }
Listing 3. Server-Side Custom Validator
for WithinDays()
ASP.NET MVC 2
<DisplayName("Anniversary Date")>
<Required()>
'<Range(GetType(DateTime), "01/01/2000", "12/31/2010")>
<WithinDays(PriorDays:=-30, SubsequentDays:=30, ErrorMessage:=
"Date Must be Within 30 Days")>
<DisplayFormat(DataFormatString:="{0:d}",
ApplyFormatInEditMode:=True)>
Public Property AnniversaryDate As Object
End Class
Public Class WithinDaysAttribute
Inherits ValidationAttribute
Public Property PriorDays As Integer
Public Property SubsequentDays As Integer
Private ParmDate As DateTime
Public Overrides Function IsValid(ByVal value As Object)
As Boolean
If IsNothing(value) Then _
Return False
If (DateTime.TryParse(value.ToString(), ParmDate) = False)
Then Return False
Dim WithinRange As Boolean =
(ParmDate >= DateTime.Now.AddDays(PriorDays)) And
(ParmDate <= DateTime.Now.AddDays(SubsequentDays))
Return WithinRange
End Function
End Class
business-validation rules and return true if the field meets the
requirements to be considered valid.
In addition, the DisplayName attribute has been added for a
slightly more attractive error message and the DisplayFormat
attribute has been added to suppress the display of the time
portion of the Anniversary Date. You’ll need to change the
HTML markup for the Anniversary Date from TextBoxFor to
EditorFor in the View for it to honor the DisplayFormat attribute,
as shown here:
<%: Html.EditorFor(Function(model) model.AnniversaryDate,
String.Format("{0:g}", Model.AnniversaryDate))%>
Client-Side Custom Data Annotation
The custom JavaScript to perform the WithinDays validation in
the client browser is shown in Listing 4. The code is assigned as a
member of Sys.Mvc.ValidatorRegistry.validators, identified by
withindays. It accepts a single parameter of type ModelClientValidationRule named “rule,” which contains the attribute parameters
defined in the WithinDaysValidator class shown in Listing 5
(opposite page), and provides a mechanism for returning an error
message if appropriate.
Now we’re ready to add a WithinDaysValidator class at the end
of the DataAnnotations.vb file, as seen in Listing 5. This class
identifies the custom JavaScript as a validation rule and associates
it with its server-side equivalent.
Finally, the custom attribute needs to be registered in the Global.
asax as a member of the DataAnnotationsModelValidatorProvider,
32
as shown by the last statement of the Application_Start() method
of Listing 6 (opposite page).
Go ahead and build the project and run it to test out the new
custom validator; check out the client-side validation. Note that
the date validator expects input in the format of mm/dd/yyyy. As
soon as you tab out of a field, the validator is instantly called and
you’ll see an error message. When you go back to the field, it
validates on every keyup event.
It’s worthwhile to note that the client-side validations don’t have
to be an exact replica of the server validations. A good rule of
thumb is to treat client validations as a quick check—a first line of
defense. Then, when the user posts the form, more complete
server-side validations can be put in place. Also note that client
validations are just a convenience to the user, and shouldn’t be
trusted. It’s the server validations that have the final say on the
veracity of the data.
Room for Improvement
ASP.NET MVC is still a young and evolving Web applicationdevelopment platform. While preparing this article, we identified
a few issues of which you should be aware:
Listing 4. JavaScript to Perform WithinDays
Validation in the Client Browser
<script type="text/javascript">
Sys.Mvc.ValidatorRegistry.validators["withindays"] =
function (rule) {
// convert prior and subsequent parameters to
// milliseconds(multiply by 86400000).
var prior = rule.ValidationParameters["prior"] * 86400000;
var subsequent = (rule.ValidationParameters["subsequent"]
+ 1) * 86400000;
// Today’s date minus the time component
var today = Date.parse((new Date()).toDateString());
var priorDateValue = today + prior; // prior is
// already negative
var subsequentDateValue = today + subsequent;
// we return the function that
// actually does the validation
return function (value, context) {
//expected date format: mm/dd/yy or mm/dd/yyyy
var mdy = value.split("/");
var mm = parseInt(mdy[0]) - 1; // Note month is zero-based
var dd = parseInt(mdy[1]);
var yy = parseInt(mdy[2]);
yy = yy < 30 ? yy + 2000 : yy; // need to make Y2K behavior
// conform with .NET
// Basic validation for day & month because
// JS Date function allows higher/lower values
// Yes, I know Feb has 29 days only during
// leap year ... like I said, basic validation.
if (mm < 12 && dd <=
[31, 29, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31][mm]) {
var inDate = new Date(yy, mm, dd);
var inDatevalue = inDate.valueOf();
if (inDatevalue >=
priorDateValue && inDatevalue < subsequentDateValue)
return true;
}
return rule.ErrorMessage;
};
};
</script>
{ ON VB }
Public Class WithinDaysValidator
Inherits DataAnnotationsModelValidator(Of WithinDaysAttribute)
Private _priorDays As Integer
Private _subsequentDays As Integer
Private _message As String
Public Sub New(ByVal metadata As ModelMetadata,
ByVal context As ControllerContext,
ByVal attribute As WithinDaysAttribute)
MyBase.New(metadata, context, attribute)
_message = attribute.ErrorMessage
_priorDays = attribute.PriorDays
_subsequentDays = attribute.SubsequentDays
End Sub
Public Overrides Function GetClientValidationRules() _
As IEnumerable(Of System.Web.Mvc.ModelClientValidationRule)
Dim Rule As New ModelClientValidationRule _
With {.ErrorMessage = _message, .ValidationType =
"withindays"}
Rule.ValidationParameters.Add("prior", _priorDays)
Rule.ValidationParameters.Add("subsequent", _subsequentDays)
Dim ModelClientValidationRule() = {Rule}
Return ModelClientValidationRule
End Function
End Class
1. The RegularExpression attribute has limitations. RegularExpression pattern-matching options such as ignorecase are absent from
the implementation. These can be specified inside a parenthesized
group as a modifier; however, client-side JavaScript (ECMAScript)
doesn’t support them, therefore they don’t translate well if you
want to do client-side validations. So, if you need an
ECMAScript-incompatible regular expression and have client
validation enabled, you’ll need to create a custom validator.
2. The DisplayFormat attribute doesn’t emit the correct helper
methods in the generated views. You’ll have to manually change
the helper method to use EditorFor templates.
3. The Range attribute for Date type doesn’t work with client-side
validation. A custom validator such as the one we created may be
a better solution, but it does require additional coding.
4. If you override the default error message in a custom validator,
the error message doesn’t propagate into the client-side validations.
Only an explicitly specified error message parameter in the
attribute propagates.
5. Putting the StringLength attribute on a field that’s associated
with an underlying numeric data type gives an InvalidCastException error.
6. The default validators don’t allow for non-string literal
error messages.
7. If a validation attribute is applied to a collection type, you
can only apply the exact same validation rules to each item of
the collection.
The ASP.NET MVC 3.0 preview is already out and has many
nice features and additions. Hopefully, it will address some of
these issues in its final release.
In this article we saw how quickly you can create a fully functional
CRUD Web application using ASP.NET MVC 2. Version 2
introduces data annotations, which provide a non-procedural
Listing 6. Registering the Custom Attribute
in Global.asax
Sub Application_Start()
AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas()
RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes)
DataAnnotationsModelValidatorProvider.RegisterAdapter(
GetType(WithinDaysAttribute),
GetType(WithinDaysValidator))
End Sub
way to add common validations. Standard data annotations can
provide commonly used declarative validation on HTML form
fields. Custom data annotations can be created to provide richer
validation rules for almost any needed rule. VSM
Joe Kunk ([email protected]) is a Microsoft MVP in Visual Basic,
three-time president of the Greater Lansing User Group for .NET and senior
developer for A. J. Boggs & Company of East Lansing, Mich. He has been
developing software for more than 30 years and has worked in the education,
government, financial and manufacturing industries. Vijay Jagdale
([email protected]) has been developing software and leading software teams
for more than 20 years. Jagdale is an IT manager with the Michigan Department
of Technology, Management and Budget (DTMB), a regional conference
speaker, and board member of the Greater Lansing User Group for .NET.
GO ONLINE
Go to VisualStudioMagazine.com/Kunk0910 to read and download
sample code for this article.
ASP.NET MVC 2
Listing 5. WithinDaysValidator Class to Define
the Custom Client Validation Rule
</Language Lab>
{ AS K KATHLEEN }
Tips for Debugging Your
Code in Visual Studio 2010
Improvements in the latest Microsoft IDE and underused
features in Visual Studio 2008 support common debugging
strategies to help you write better code.
VS 2010
Debugging Tools
BY KATHLEEN DOLLARD
Every developer should know how to use debugging tools to their
fullest advantage. This month, I’ll give a lightning overview of
debugging strategies and show you how Visual Studio 2010
supports them.
Visual Studio 2008 debugging tools are underused, so I’ll cover
new and existing features. I’m skipping the historical debugger in
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate—while it’s very powerful, it’s not
available to many developers.
I commonly see four debugging strategies: Help Please, Divide
and Conquer, Wandering Minstrel and the Scientific Method.
Divide and Conquer determines parts of the application that can
be excluded from further consideration. The Wandering Minstrel
explores with minimal planning; a debugging episode generally
includes many approaches. For years, the Help Please strategy
was secondary. Someone looked over your shoulder or you
explained the problem and noticed the answer (even if you
explained it to your dog). The Internet rocketed the Help Please
strategy to front and center. At the same time, increasing quirks
and bugs in the Microsoft .NET Framework and Visual Studio
require programmers to be good Internet sleuths.
The Scientific Method puts the other approaches in a formal
context. Haphazard debugging works on simple bugs. With more
difficult bugs, you’ll waste time performing meaningless trials,
leaving holes in your exploration, staring at the screen hoping for
inspiration and, worst of all, getting stuck on an incorrect theory
of what’s wrong.
I wrote about debugging with the Scientific Method years ago
with Nancy Folsom, who introduced me to the concept. You
gather theories—notions of what the problem might be—and
perform a series of experiments with a clear goal for each
experiment. The critical nuance is that you design your experiment to disprove your idea, or theory, of what’s wrong. Creating
theories integrates other strategies: checking the value returned
from a Web service (Divide and Conquer) or articulating a gut
feel (Wandering Minstrel).
The biggest change in my thinking about debugging in the
past few years is the importance of intuition. Gathering theories
sometimes involves stepping carefully through the possibilities,
but more often relies on your intuition. Intuition is rooted in
your knowledge, but unfortunately it encourages you to become
infatuated with your expectations. The formality of the Scientific
Method offsets this tendency. Experiments to prove your theory
is false are a psychological release because you’re never wrong—
your theory survives another test or your experiment succeeds.
Perhaps more important than the psychology is the nature of
34
truth—it can rarely be proven. I’ll let you meditate on the
philosophical aspects of science, truth and expectations. I’ll stick
to the pragmatic implications of debugging. The key route to
efficiency is minimizing time on invalid paths. Your goal is to
articulate as many theories as possible, achieve a definitive
failure on almost all of them as quickly as possible, rinse, lather
and repeat. Until you fix the bug, experiments against your code
could succeed for multiple reasons. But if it fails, it fails and you
can quickly go on.
Q: How does Visual Studio 2010 support debugging?
A: Debugging features of Visual Studio allow you to do
experiments with your code. You phrase theories in your
mind—out loud if working with someone else—and with a record
for complex nasty bugs. Then you look for the quickest way to
disprove your idea—often the first one you think of. The job of
Visual Studio is to make that easy, assuming you can reproduce the
error on your machine.
The two most important experiments to disprove invalid
theories during debugging are whether a piece of code runs and
the current state, or the current values of variables and fields.
Breakpoints and tracepoints determine whether a particular line
of code runs. It’s easy to forget about conditional breakpoints, hit
counts and breakpoint filters. Once you’re interested in a piece of
code, it’s nice to know how you got there. Visual Studio 2010
extends the call stack with a parallel thread-based call stack.
Tracepoints are perhaps the most underused debugging
feature. Since the beginning, programmers have done Printf or
Console.Writeline debugging, but these mechanisms affect the
code for everyone working on the project. Tracepoints are stored
in your user files, and thus affect only your instance (assuming
you don’t share the user files in source control). The tracepoint
dialog explains the content you can include in tracepoints. You can
record the value of any state visible to the code and display a
half-dozen important system states such as the method name,
calling method, thread or even the full call stack.
The big changes to breakpoints and tracepoints in Visual Studio
2010 are that you can label, search, export and import. While I don’t
think you’ll use the export/import feature often, the scenarios
where you’ll use it are the tricky ones where you want to share part
of your debugging process. The sad fact is that certain aspects of
code are more problematic than others, and you can also export and
save tracepoints and breakpoints for particular problem scenarios.
Searching and labeling help you organize breakpoints. I tend to
leave certain tracepoints and breakpoints in place during development
in problematic locations. Labeling groups of related points allows you
to search for them, then enable or disable them as a group. Each point
can have multiple labels, thus appearing in multiple groups.
Once you find an interesting location, you may want to step
through code. It’s easy to forget about the “Step into specific,” “Step
over properties and operators” and “Set next statement” options
on the right-click context menu, or that you can navigate by
double-clicking the call stack.
Improved DataTips
The second big aspect of questioning your code is checking the
state. You have multiple routes—the immediate window, Watch
Window and Locals Window. You also have DataTips, which are
displayed when you hover over a variable. Starting with 2010, you
can now pin the DataTips. As you hover, you’ll see a pin on the
right side of the box. Clicking on it pins the DataTip, or you can
right-click the tooltip and select Pin to Source. Once the DataTip
is pinned, you’ll see a small vertical toolbar as you hover over the
DataTip. The pin in this toolbar allows you to unpin the DataTip
from the source code to create a floating DataTip. Pinned
DataTips stay with the code and will scroll off screen as you scroll
your code. Unpinned DataTips retain their relationship with the
visual screen. These two types of DataTips are different colors and
you can drag both types around with the mouse.
The down-facing chevrons on the DataTips toolbar let you
associate a comment with the DataTip. You can use this as a
reminder of why you’re interested in the tip or a target value you
wish to compare. You can remove DataTips individually or as a
group using Remove DataTips and Remove All DataTips from file.
You can copy the expression or value and later paste them
somewhere interesting like a Watch Window. You can also edit
values in place within a DataTip. Many of these special DataTip
features are available through the context menu, which can be a
little tricky to activate. Right-click on a portion of the DataTip
other than the value, expression or comment; for example, you
might click on the symbol category icon.
But wait, there’s more … DataTips can contain more than one
value. By adding expressions, a single floating or pinned DataTip can
contain all of your DataTips for a particular context. Unfortunately,
you can’t drag additional expressions onto the DataTip. If you enter
a comment, it will appear once for the entire DataTip, allowing you
to express why these values should be considered together.
But wait, there’s still more … You’re solving a particular problem,
or working in a problematic piece of code. You create a set of
DataTips to explore this problem and you think it’s solved. Before
you delete the DataTips, export them. Assuming you name and
store them logically, you can import if you need to return to the
problem. They’ll often give a clue to some of the theories you
explored. You can also export DataTips if you need to pass the
problem on to someone else. Unfortunately, this release does not
yet offer a way to export a group of DataTips or a way to see the
entire list of active DataTips.
If you’re debugging a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
application, Visual Studio 2010 supplies a special DataTip visualizer.
After the page is constructed, with the DataTip displayed, click the
magnifying glass. Figure 1 shows the visualizer for a simple form
with a ListBox and Button. You can see the full visual tree on the
left, values of the currently highlighted element on the right and a
rendering of the elements at the bottom-left.
Another trick for WPF is to supply specific trace levels to
individual controls. If FirstName doesn’t exist on the DataContext,
you’ll get a single error message from commonly used XAML:
<TextBox Text="{Binding Path=FirstName}" />
Figure 1. The WPF Visualizer is a tremendous step forward
in understanding the Visual Tree in your WPF applications and
quickly exploring settings on each part. The visualizer won’t give
full results until the tree is completed; specifically, it won’t appear
complete when accessed from the constructor.
It provides in the Output Window:
System.Windows.Data Error: 40 : BindingExpression path error:
'FirstName' property not found on 'object' ''MainWindow'
(Name='')'. BindingExpression:Path=FirstName;
DataItem='MainWindow' (Name=''); target element is 'TextBox'
(Name=''); target property is 'Text' (type 'String')
You can specify a different level of tracing with the PresentationTraceSources attached property:
<TextBox Text="{Binding Path=FirstName,
diag:PresentationTraceSources.TraceLevel=High}" />
With the high level of tracing set, and the Tools/Options/
Debugging/OutputWindow/WPF Trace Settings set to Warning,
you’ll see nearly a dozen warnings about this failed binding, as
well as the error.
Most programmers spend more time debugging than writing
new code, but we spend the majority of our effort improving our
development and workflow techniques. Spending time exploring
the debugging features of Visual Studio and examining your habits
will make you better at debugging.
Q: How do I debug when I can’t reproduce the problem on my system?
A: Debugging on a running system that you don’t control involves
data-collection tools. The two main avenues are logging/tracing
and capturing dumps. Visual Studio 2010 adds the capacity to
open mini-dumps in Visual Studio.
Tracing tools depend on the platform. Silverlight doesn’t
include tracing APIs, so you’ll have to kludge together your own
system or use a third-party tool such as Clog. I suggest you create a
log class so you can control the output location and insert a
standard tracing mechanism if a future version of Silverlight
supports tracing. You can write output to a service that manages
logs server-side, cache to isolated storage for later transmittal to
the server, or possibly use the Internet Explorer 8 and Mozilla
Firefox browser consoles. Depending on the audience for your
application, there will be privacy issues regarding sending logs of
client actions to your server without consent.
The big changes to breakpoints and tracepoints in
Visual Studio 2010 are that you can label, search, export and import.
35
VS 2010
Debugging Tools
{ ASK KATHLEEN }
</Language Lab>
VS 2010
Debugging Tools
{ ASK KATHLEEN }
Event Tracing for Windows Within the CLR
If you’re in the Microsoft .NET Framework, you can use built-in
tracing features. The .NET Framework 1.0 introduced a set of
static methods on the Trace and Debug classes. These static
methods force all log information into a single set of listeners and
allow filtering only on the verbosity of the output. The .NET
Framework 2.0 introduced the TraceSource class.
The .NET Framework 4 added Event Tracing for Windows
(ETW) support within the CLR. CLR ETW support allows
automatic access to information such as loader behavior that
would otherwise be tricky to catch. The .NET Framework has a
number of logging statements that appear in the ETW system.
Each ETW keyword represents a handful of events, and you
configure data collection by specifying the CLR provider and a set
of keyword to a tool like LogMan.
For example, imagine a Managed Extensibility Framework
(MEF) application that failed on a user’s computer. The failure
appears to the user as missing menu items, and you have little
knowledge of the code. If you’re able to work with the user, you
can ask them to run a batch file that begins ETW with the rather
arcane log request:
logman start clrevents -p {e13c0d23-ccbc-4e12-931b-d9cc2eee27e4} 0x8008 0x5 -ets -ct perf
And another batch file to stop logging:
logman stop clrevents –ets
The parameter clrevents indicates the log file, which will have
an .ETL extension. The GUID indicates the type of logging—in
this case, CLR event logging via the CLR provider. The 8008
hexadecimal indicates the “keywords” that the event system will
report. This is an odd use of the phrase “keywords”; each keyword
is identified by a number, which is a flag within the 64-bit integer
parameter. Each keyword defines a set of events to be reported.
The second hex number is the verbosity—5 is verbose and 1
reports only exceptions.
The .ETL output file is a binary-encoded file, which makes it smaller
when the user sends it to you. Once you have the log in hand, you can
get a readable version at the command line using:
Tracerpt clrevents.etl
This produces an .XML file of the events and a text summary. If
you install the Windows Performance Toolkit as part of the
Windows 7 SDK, you’ll also have access to XPerf for a graphical
version of the .ETL file.
The key differences between ETW and tracing through Trace or
TraceSource are how much work you must do and how tailored
the output is. ETW is in place and you merely need to activate it by
starting capture. TraceSource requires that you write logging code
into your application, but that code includes exactly the things
important to your scenario.
The TraceSource class offers more granular tracing than the
static methods of the Trace class. You supply a name to each
Listing 1.
You can use the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) to
create a provider that returns an existing TraceSource, creates or accesses one as a MEF part, or creates one through
traditional means. I don’t like calling this a factory, because
in most cases calls don’t create a new item. You can use a
similar pattern in many other scenarios.
[TraceSourceProvider()]
public class TraceSourceProvider : ITraceSourceProvider
{
[ImportMany()]
private IEnumerable<ITraceSource> sources = null;
private IEnumerable<TraceSource> traceSources = null;
public System.Diagnostics.TraceSource
GetTraceSource(string traceSourceName)
{
if (traceSources == null)
{
traceSources = from x in sources
select x as TraceSource;
}
var matches = from x in traceSources
where x.Name == traceSourceName
select x;
if (matches.Count() > 0)
{
var ret = matches.FirstOrDefault() as TraceSource;
return ret;
}
var traceSource = new TraceSource(traceSourceName);
traceSources =
traceSources.Union (new TraceSource[] {traceSource});
return traceSource;
}
instance and configure output based on the named instance. This
isolates different types of information, such as validation or MEF
issues. Because TraceSources are often treated as singletons,
they’re a great use for MEF. (For more on MEF, see “Getting
Current on MEF,” October 2009, and “Stable Composition in MEF,”
November 2009.) In theory, you can either import the TraceSource
or you can use a provider or factory. If you know only one
TraceSource exists, you could just import it. However, that
undermines the value of individual TraceSources, ties you to a specific set of TraceSources with unique interfaces, or is fragile.
An MEF-based provider allows you to apply logic to the selection
and build a robust system. If needed, the provider can do other
work, such as converting types. Listing 1 shows a TraceSource
provider, which uses a contract of one type but returns the value as
a different type. This is helpful when you wish to isolate classes
with a particular interface but use the result in a general manner
coupled to the underlying class—especially important when
retrofitting MEF in existing systems. You can download a sample
application that shows this TraceSource in use.
The key differences between ETW and tracing through Trace or
TraceSource are how much work you must do and how tailored the output is.
36
{ ASK KATHLEEN }
The TraceSource could be exported either through a class
derived from TraceSource or through an exported property. This
provider is neutral about whether a specific TraceSource is
available. If it doesn’t exist yet, the provider creates a new instance
of the TraceSource class with the requested name and tracks it for
future use. While this approach isolates the conditional creation,
it’s a little messy in use, so you might want to create a helper
method. A field for the provider is created at the class level:
[Import]
private ITraceSourceProvider _traceSourceProvider;
And, when needed, the provider returns the TraceSource
(MEFTraceSource is a string constant):
_traceSourceProvider.GetTraceSource
(TraceSourceNames.MEFTraceSource).
TraceInformation("There were {0} parts composed",
_container.Catalog.Parts.Count());
With or without MEF, TraceSources are a great tool. Adding
TraceSource statements to your application during development
will give you tools to solve problems that occur later. Until
needed, tracing is turned off. It won’t present a performance
problem when turned off, unless there are adjacent, expensive
logic statements. If you can redeploy your application to the
problem situation, you can add tracing during debugging.
Q: I have a DataForm on a user control on a tab in a user control.
After I display a child window, the DataForm appears disabled.
What do you think is going on?
A: There are a couple of reasons this can happen. If you set the
DialogResult and also call Close (generally setting the result inside
the ChildWindow and calling Close from outside), the ChildWindow
gets confused and leaves the underlying visuals disabled.
It sounds like you’ve encountered a different problem when the
DataForm doesn’t correctly re-enable itself. This is a bug that you
can work around by altering the DataForm or issuing an explicit
BeginEdit after the ChildWindow closes. The second approach
works if the user expects to be editing the otherwise grayed-out fields.
I found the more involved fix of changing the DataForm on
Stefan Olson’s blog (tinyurl.com/2g4vnff). The basic problem is
that the DataForm doesn’t correctly reset its visual state. Derive a
new class from the DataForm, add a handler for IsEnabledChanged and explicitly set the visual state:
void wi_IsEnabledChanged(object sender,
DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e)
{
if (!IsEnabled)
{ VisualStateManager.GoToState(this, "Disabled", true); }
else
{ VisualStateManager.GoToState(this, "Normal", true); }
}
This fix isn’t free. Deriving a new class changes the control
you’re using. Theming works on the specific control, not its base
classes—therefore the implicit styling associated with themes
won’t work unless you update the theme. VSM
Kathleen Dollard is the chief technologist for AppVenture (appventure.com).
She’s been a Microsoft MVP for 11 years and is a member of the INETA
Speaker’s Bureau. Dollard has worked extensively with application code
generation and is the author of “Code Generation in Microsoft .NET”
(Apress, 2004). She speaks at dozens of conferences and user groups each
year, and is also active in the Northern Colorado .NET SIG, Denver Visual
Studio User Group, Northern Colorado Architect’s Group and IASA Denver.
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37
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11
Sleek Technologies Inc.
13, 14
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39
</Redmond
Review>
BY ANDREW J. BRUST
Lauding LightSwitch
I’ve said it before: the Microsoft .NET Framework is too complex.
There are too many ways to build client applications in the .NET
Framework, too many ways to build Web applications and too many
data-access technologies to choose from. Even worse, there’s too
much code to write, and the tooling for newer technologies, such
as Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight,
represents a step backward in productivity, compared to the
Windows Forms designer that debuted a little more than eight
years ago and the Visual Basic 6 forms designer before it.
A new product from Microsoft called Visual Studio LightSwitch
could help reverse this regressive tide. Now in beta, it’s a development
environment totally focused on data and data-centric applications.
The apps consist of useful data query and maintenance screens, and
building them in LightSwitch requires little or no code. LightSwitch
can create SQL Server databases or work with existing databases,
be they in SQL Server or just about any other database product.
LightSwitch caters to business developers who need to get apps
done. It understands the typical line-of-business app paradigms of
search screens, record-creation screens and record-edit screens, and it
supports typical business data types such as phone numbers and
e-mail addresses, rather than just the primitive data types in
databases and the CLR, such as integers and strings. LightSwitch
generates modern UIs, which are configurable through a code-free
design interface. As you change the layout of your screens,
LightSwitch lets you preview them, with data loaded, in real time.
And the UI help keeps coming: LightSwitch apps are skin-able and
third parties can offer custom themes that make this capability
extremely valuable. Extensibility is core to the product, as third parties
can also offer custom controls, custom business data types and
custom screen layouts. With custom controls and a largely code-free
design environment, LightSwitch seems a lot like pre-.NET Framework
Visual Basic. Sounds good to me: Visual Basic was a productive
environment for business apps built by business developers.
Honoring the Old, Enhancing the New
LightSwitch gives us back that old productivity, but no one wants
to go back to old technology and specialized runtimes. The good
news: No one has to. LightSwitch projects are .NET Framework
projects, and the code-behind can be written in VB.NET or C#. The
LightSwitch IDE comprises special designers within Visual Studio,
and LightSwitch solutions are manifested as Silverlight applications
that can run in or out of browser. Applications built in LightSwitch
use the Entity Framework and WCF RIA Services, and they can read
from and write to SharePoint lists. The apps can be deployed to the
desktop and use SQL Server, and can be easily redeployed to the
cloud, running on Windows Azure and SQL Azure.
Unifying these Microsoft technologies and lowering their barrier to
entry is the LightSwitch value proposition, and I think it’s compelling.
LightSwitch is not meant to displace conventional .NET Framework
development, but rather to extend it to audiences that might
otherwise go elsewhere. Microsoft is serving enterprise developers
with an enterprise dev environment—and renewing its support for
the productivity programmer market that made Redmond a dev tool
leader in the first place. LightSwitch transcends the false choice
between serving one constituency or the other. I should ask Microsoft,
“What took you so long?” But at the moment I’ll just say, “Bravo!”
Is LightSwitch a slam dunk? I may hope so, but there are people
who don’t want the barrier to entry lowered, and they won’t like
LightSwitch. Some people might be more receptive, but will regard
LightSwitch as just a suite of screen-generating wizards inside Visual
Studio. Others may complain that Microsoft is trying to streamline its
development stack by adding yet more ways to build apps for it. And
some may say all this is too little too late, and that PHP and Adobe AIR
have already won the hearts and minds of productivity programmers.
Those people may have a point, but LightSwitch does something
PHP and AIR cannot—leverage the .NET Framework platform. PHP
and AIR rely on runtimes that are less rich and, frankly, less robust
than the .NET Framework. If Microsoft can wed streamlined
productivity with the strong foundation of the .NET Framework,
the results will be impressive.
More importantly, LightSwitch could be part of a long-overdue
turnaround for Redmond. Microsoft has spent the last decade
courting complexity, shaping the .NET Framework into an
enterprise-scalee difice; yet today we’re seeing a return to roots. As
a developer who got his start on Visual Basic 17 years ago, I’d like
to be the first to say, welcome back, Microsoft. VSM
With custom controls and a largely code-free design environment,
LightSwitch seems a lot like pre-.NET Framework Visual Basic.
40
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Microsoft`s core data access technology is finally ready

Transcription

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