Once in a while I like to browse around Codeplex to see what’s new and if I found anything interesting.

Today I found this Gem of a project called Catharsis.
To be able to use it you will need VS 2008 with SP1.
The Guidance Automation Toolkit  and I also installed the GAX SP1. 
The ASP.NET MVC (BETA) installed via the installer.

What is Catharsis? You may ask. It’s a complete application framework that uses ASP.NET MVC for the UI layer, they mention to support WPF projects as well but I haven’t see it yet, maybe 1.0 version, the current release is 0.95.

But it’s more than that. It’s also a set of tools that integrate with Visual Studio and provide several Wizards to do most task in a very simple way. The solution created is quite complicate but very well organized.

Installing Catharsis

In the documentation of how to install Catharsis they recommend using the msi file, but I couldn’t find it in the release, so I have to open the Guidance projects, do a build and them run the msi. This was a non issue, you will be prompted to remove the references to Source Control from the solution when you open it for the first time, just click yes.

Creating your first project.

It’s very simple open the Create new project dialog and you will see a new Catharsis type of project

Enter the Name and click Ok, another window shows

Click Finish, sit and wait.

At this moment you should be able to set up you Web project as the startup project and the Default.aspx file as the Star up page, hit F5 and see it work. I had a few issues at this point.

The first one was that the project did not compile:
The problem was an extra comma on the file: BaseEntityControllers.cs in the Controllers project under the Project.Web folder. This comma is in the list of Interfaces the class implements.

Once fixed the project compiled with no problems but when trying to run it I had my second issue, the tables in the database have not been created. So I had to run the scripts located at DB_SQLServer in order 01_ first and 02_ afterwards. Notice that the connection string I provide in the wizard was correct since NHibernate can connect to the database, so no sure why the scripts didn’t run.

Note: To run the scripts make sure you change the first line of them to point to your database (they are pointing to a Catalog called Project, maybe this is the problem during the setup wizard?)

Once you have done this, make sure you rebuild the project and hit F5 again and, another problem (the last one). The log4net.dll wasn’t copy into the bin folder of the web solution, so copy it from Assemblies/Log4Net into the proper bin or add a reference from you web project to the log4net dll and rebuild.

After that everything worked fine for me. I will try to port an old asp classic application using this architecture and see what I like and what I don’t, but I suggest you give it a try.

There are several articles at CodeProject on how to do different things and in more details about the architecture, Ioc, Tracking Changes and more.

I was going to write a post about this but my thoughts are exactly the same as Fredrik Normen’s.

For example, one thing that creeps me out is seen think like this in the Controller.

Or even worse:

I don’t think that the controller should ever touch the repository and of course it shouldn’t do any type of validation besides data entry from the view.

How many times have you done this?

public void Delete(IEnumerable objectsToDelete)

{ 


if (objectsToDelete == null)

{

throw new ArgumentNullException("objectsToDelete");

}

//More code here

}

Every time I wrote this code I think, I should write a library to do this for me. So I went ahead and wrote this simple class. The idea is to use the Introduce Assertion Refactoring in this cases and write this code in this way.

public void Delete(IEnumerable objectsToDelete)

{

Check.That(objectsToDelete).IsNotNull();

//Mode code here

}

If the parameter is null an Exception of type NullReferenceException will be thrown. Of course, this is not the right Exception in this context, so you should do this.

public void Delete(IEnumerable objectsToDelete)

{

Check.That(objectsToDelete)

.IsNotNull(new ArgumentNullException("objectsToDelete"));

//More code here

}

Of course, I may want to check more than one thing at a time, and I may not want to throw an Exception but look at the errors and pass them all at once to a higher tier, maybe a UI so the user can fix the problem.
In that case I can use it like this.

public void Delete(IEnumerable objectsToDelete)

{


//I want to make sure that the IEnumerable is not null

//And I also want to check that is not an empty collection


var errors = Check.That(objectsToDelete, "objectsToDelete")

.IsNotNull().CountMoreThan(0).Errors;




//More code here

}

At this moment the Check class has methods to validate String, IEnumerable, IEnumerable<T>, object, int, decimal, double and DateTime.
This is not complete by any stretch of the imagination but I like it so far.

You can download a Release of my base library on Google code.
You can also download the code from: http://code.google.com/p/latrompa/source/checkout

My previous post got me thinking, what are the things I will considered as minimum requirements for me to work in a project even when I have serious constrains on time?

In requirements I mean methodologies and practices that I will need to use. After some thinking this is what I came up with.

There are at least three things, commonly associated to an Agile project that I will want to have in place.

• Source control (yes, there are still companies that don’t know what this is). Installing Subversion (VisualSVN server + TortoiseSVN) usually takes 30/60 minutes.
  
• Continuous Integration server, CC.net, TeamCity: install and configuration 3 hours maybe half a day.
  
• Using TDD as a design tool at least for the domain but only If I can use ReSharper or a similar tool (I can do with the free version of CodeRush as well).

This is the type of things that I use, even when writing some demo code or my own applications that I’m playing with. At home I have Subversion installed in my dev machine and in and old Pentium 4 that runs TeamCity.

I don’t think that this will add any significant amount of time and the benefits are such that I can see myself not using them.

I will probably don’t do much in the sense of integration test, (of any at all) in the automated UI test fields and code coverage. I like to do that but not in circumstances as described in the previous post.

Mohammad Azam has a post entitled When Being Agile Kills the Project. He mentions a project were the client gave a one month deadline not negotiable and so, he had to go and start cutting corners to make the deadline since, he wanted needed to keep his job (totally reasonable, keeping the job I mean).

Unfortunately, in this case the owner was fixed with the deadline and was not willing to move it further. The other option was to leave the project and search for a different one. This option was not reasonable for me as I was on a worker visa and finding another company to sponsor a new worker visa is like finding a needle in a hay stack

There is no discussion on this, but this post got me thinking. First the things that they have to sacrifice.

I said earlier that the reasonable deadline for the project was 3 months. This will include all levels of testing, clean separation of code, automated build etc. When the project was to be completed within a month I had to compromise many of the agile methods. The application was a simple 3-layer application with no unit tests and no automated deployment.

All this make me think that the company, the development team/division and everything else in general weren’t Agile (in a sense of practicing Agile methodologies). Mohammad was in a non Agile company, with totally unrealistic deadlines and in a terrible position due to the sponsorship. He manage to keep his client happy and keep his job.

The project was finish in exactly 29 days. I had to work some late nights but the project was deployed successfully.

But I had to disagree with the conclusions draw from his experience.

This experience led me to believe that all the projects cannot be agile projects. Sometime you will have to give up agile principles just to meet the deadline. Yes, the resultant code was messy but at the end I get to keep my job.

This is only true in situations like the one he described. I will paraphrase and said: Not all companies are ready to work in an Agile manner. This is true and will be true for a while, maybe for ever. I think that been in Mohammad situation I will probably do the same, write the code the faster I can to have it shipped. This doesn’t mean that projects can’t be Agile, any and all projects can be Agile. This is a question of the people involved in the project and not the project per se.

As a comment to the post mention:

• by Domingos on 12/23/2008 6:07:49 AM
• That's why being agile is not only about engineering practices.
  In order to be Agile, a company needs to change the way it does business.
  At the end of the day, it is about what applies to your situation. No one should never adopt all practices blindly without consideration.
  I would have done exactly what you did: put everything in a balance and decide what practice to use in your specific case. And you were 'agile', but no Agile. And I think that it is the the former that really matters.
  http://www.codeinstructions.com

Mohammad post reminded me how lucky I’m to be able to work in a company were not just Agile but even Lean principles are applied, and not only at the development level but by our clients.

A post by Igor Brejc with a set of valid points when implementing Continuous Integration.

Derick Bailey is doing a very good series on Kanban.

So far he posted about: The board, queues, order points, pipelines, handling bugs and emergency fixes.

You can find all the posts under the Kanban tag.

CAT is a Visual Studio Add-in that analyze your code and all the references in your project looking for vulnerabilities to common attacks.

According to the copy in the download page this version deals with:

• Cross Site Scripting
• SQL Injection
• Process Command Injection
• File Canonicalization
• Exception Information
• LDAP Injection
• XPATH Injection
• Redirection to User Controlled Site

At least two really good post today about the future RC1 for the ASP.NET MVC framework. Scott Gu has a very detailed post with some of the new features expected in RC1. Phil Haack talks about the delay and the improvements with the Views.

Scaffolding, views without code behind (yeah!), new HtmlHelper<TModel> and AjaxHelper<TModel> types to build strongly typed HTML and AJAX helpers (this should remove the need for magic string.

The feature that got most exited was the changes to the Views, no code behind is, IMHO the way the Views should be.

I can’t wait to put my hands in this release.

In my machine at work I can’t install ASP.NET MVC (it installs but fails to install the project templates, I don’t know why and I haven’t had time to look into it). When I installed Sharp Architecture everything went well, but running the project template yields and error. I was doing this at a Starbuck’s, trying to build a proof of concept and was a bit frustrating. I was sure that the culprit was related to the error I had installing MVC.

Last night I run across a thread entitled Removed dependency on installed ASP.NET MVC Beta on the Sharp Architecture discussion group. In this thread in reference to a post by Kyle Baley where he mentions the same problem, Billy McCafferty notes that the reference to the MVC templates have been removed on the trunk.

Kyle’s post mentions a few alternative solutions and further down the thread there is a discussion about losing the item templates for the MVC project and Replacing them with ReSharper templates.

I will suggest just that you can also use Visual Studio Item Templates, creating them yourself in case you don’t have ReSharper.  You can see an example on building this item templates in this old post of mine Nant build scripts template for Visual Studio.

On December 2nd Sharp Architecture released version 0.9.114.

Sharp Architecture is a project created by Billy McCafferty. It’s an architecture framework for web application that uses ASP.NET MVC, NH 2.0.1, NHibernate.Validator, Fluent NHibernate, and Castle Windsor.

From their site:

Pronounced "Sharp Architecture," this is a solid architectural foundation for rapidly building maintainable web applications leveraging the ASP.NET MVC framework with NHibernate.

The overall goal of this is to allow developers to worry less about application "plumbing" and to spend most of their time on adding value for the client by focusing on the business logic and developing a rich user experience.

• Focused on Domain Driven Design
• Loosely Coupled
• Preconfigured Infrastructure
• Open Ended Presentation

There is of course a strong focus on TDD as well. New on this version (from the change log)

* A Visual Studio 2008 template project has been added under /TemplatesAndCodeGen to get your own S#arp Architecture project up and running quickly
* Replaced Ninject with Castle Windsor
* Added support for behavior driven unit testing
* Unit tests now use an in-memory SQLite database for testing data access methods along with providing an integration verification mechanism to check mappings against a live database
* This will likely be the last interim release before version 1.0

I think that the project templates and wizards are a big plus on this package. In the roadmap for version one this is what we can look for:

* WCF integration
* Hone CRUD capabilities
* Support for multiple databases
* Example of using a Unit of Work to encapsulate non-trivial controller logic
* Scaffolding generators!

There is a discussion group on Google groups to provide support and ask for help.

Another thing that really impress me was the 34 pages Word document included with the release. It’s very detailed, from configuration to usage. There is a explanation for each of the Tiers in the architecture, a tutorial to develop with it that covers the TDD cycle and a set of best practices.

The documentation is very detailed, specially on thing that may seem of minor importance as on how to configure the IDE to be consistent with the sample code!!!

If you haven’t do so, go download it and play with it.

SVN Notifier is a nice little tool that sits on your Tray and let you know when a folder under source control on your system goes out of date. It’s useful is you are working on several projects with several developers or you follow the trunk of an open source project. This will let you know as soon as your project gets outdate.

You will need to have TortoiseSVN and a Svn client installed in your machine, I use SilkSvn.

Once installed you configure witch folders you want the tool to monitor. The icon on your system tray will be Green or Orange to indicate if your projects are up to date or not.

Right click on it and you can Update all or open the status window (double click on it also opens the status window).

You can also use this tool to do commits for each project. This is really nice, sometimes I work using just a simple text editor and I don’t want to navigate to the folders to do the commits, with this tool I just click in the System Tray icon, right click in the project I want to commit and that’s it, the TortoiseSVN dialog will open and you go from there like you usually do.

The other thing is nice is that before updating you can check all the logs right clicking in the project and selecting Change log.

This is a plug-in for Resharper that allows you to use Reflector and and the .Net framework source code to navigate your code.

You can download it from the Google code project page.

Install it is a non issue. Once installed open VS and the Resharper options page. Under environment go to Search and Navigation-> Scout

Clicking into it will ask you if you want to download Reflector, click Yes if you haven’t done this before. Since I already have Reflector I just browse to the exe file. You can them can set some configuration options like using the same instance of Reflector each time or set some configuration per solution or custom.

To configure the MS server reference follow the instructions on Scott Gu site.

Once you are done you can do right click in a class or method and hit Go to declaration, is the class is in an external assembly reflector will open up and navigate to the given method showing the code in it. For example HttpContext.Cache().

Very powerful.