Who gets the money?

Recently I had to decide on merit salary increases. One of the toughest decisions came down to a couple of folks that I'll call Yin and Yang.

Yang is an expert developer, technically brilliant, always has a clever answer to a problem.

Yin is dependable, reliable, always gets the job done. I can always count on Yin to cheerfully accept and complete any task.

But...

Yang's hubris sometimes causes careless mistakes. Yang is also high maintenance, frequently requiring meetings to discuss the most minute of details and risks. Yang requires a surprising amount of micromanagement to ensure that assignments stay on track, and don't veer off into the realm of overarchitecture.

Yin stopped learning new things years ago. Yin gets the job done through brute force.

Ultimately I ruled in favor of Yin. Both developers adequately complete their tasks but take different approaches. Both are important parts of the team. I went with the person who made my life easiest. Though Yang's solutions are technically superior to Yin's, at the end of the day the user doesn't care about elegant code- users just want their applications to work.

ASP.NET MVC Action methods called twice

I'm converting an ASP.NET Web Forms application to ASP.NET MVC. The UI is not changing, so I'm copying and pasting chunks of ASPX and ASCX files into my Views, and then replacing the Web Forms-specific code (example: tags with 'asp' prefixes) with HTML and/or calls to the System.Web.Mvc.HtmlHelper class. But this conversion doesn't happen instantaneously - there might be a period of time between the creation of the view and completion of conversion.

I had a breakpoint set in an action method and noticed that the method was being called twice. Once with the parameter that I expected (an int representing a primary key in a database) but then also with the default value specified when the route was registered. The net effect was that the desired View was displayed, but that also a call was made to the previous View. Not good.

I spent time with Fiddler, and I got an idea. I replaced all of the remaining legacy asp tags that I hadn't yet converted, and the problem disappeared. Sure, sooner or later the problem would have resolved itself as the conversion process progressed, but I'm (unfortunately?) not the type of person who can let a mystery like this one remain unsolved.

Translating Data With PowerShell

I recently was confronted with a situation where I needed to transform a list of developer-friendly filenames contained in a text file into a user-friendly list of report names. In the past I probably would have written a Console app to do this work but PowerShell is a much more lightweight solution to this problem.

The filenames were the result of a query against TFS version control and were in the format of $/[TFS Project Name]/Reports/[Codeline]/[Visual Studio Project Name]/*.rdl. A given *.rdl file, for example "UpcomingBdayRpt.rdl", would be represented in the application as "Upcoming Birthdays Report". I needed to provide the names which the tester was familiar with in the application. Providing a list of cryptic names like "UpcomingBdayRpt.rdl" would be as useful as providing a list in cuneiform (assuming that the tester doesn't read cuneiform).

The first step was to get the list into PowerShell. (For the purposes of this demonstration assume that I've already navigated in PowerShell to the directory that contains the source files.)

$allReportFiles = Get-Content .\MyInputFile.txt

Because I had a predictable path pattern I could use Split on the forward slash to get a list of only the filename. I removed the extension on the filename with -replace.

$rdlNames = $allReportFiles | ForEach-Object{ $_.split("/")[5] -replace ".rdl", ""}

The database that supports our application has a cross-reference table that relates the *.rdl name to the user-friendly name. I exported the two columns that I needed into a comma-delimited file named "reports.txt". The format of the text file looked like this:

DocumentLetter,Document Letter
InterviewReport,Interview Report
OutstandingItemsLetter,Outstanding Items Letter

I got lazy during the next step. Pipelining the contents of $rdlNames to ForEach-Object, I used GetChildItem to get a reference to my data file, searched that file for a line that contained the filename contained in "$_", and, when the line was found, got the FileName, Pattern, and Line properties. Note that I don't need the FileName property, but included it so that I could confirm that my data was coming from where I expected it. I'm paranoid about things like that.

$data = $rdlNames | ForEach-Object { Get-ChildItem * -include reports* | Select-String -pattern $_.Trim() -SimpleMatch} | Select-Object -property FileName, Pattern, Line -unique

So why do I consider this lazy? Well, there are almost certainly more elegant solutions to this problem. But then again, this is just a trivial script meant to solve a unique problem. The solution doesn't have to stand the test of time nor be incredibly efficient- it just needs to get the job done.

The final step is just to extract the user-friendly names from the objects in $data using $_.Line.split(",")[1]. In case I need to discuss one of the reports with the tester, I provide the developer-friendly filename in brackets so that we can translate between the two names (developer and tester).

$data | ForEach-Object{$_.Line.split(",")[1] + " [" + $_.Pattern + "]" } | Sort-Object

So that's it. I copied and pasted the output from the final line into an email and I was done. The tester had the information that she needed, all was right in the world, and I could leave on time for once.

Phantom TNSNAMES entries

I have a PowerShell script that uses Oracle.DataAccess. It retrieves its connection information from an existing configuration file on a server. The connection information is as basic as you can get: Data Source, User Id, Password. I had already successfully installed and executed the script on a development server but received the following error when I attempted to run the script on my test server: "ORA-12505: TNS:listener does not currently know of SID given in connect descriptor".

I was baffled. The test server is an application server that has been running in good order for a couple of years. The application that runs on it (let's call it SERVICE) successfully talks to the "missing" database almost continuously. The TNSNAMES file on the test server contains a single entry, and I knew that entry was valid because SERVICE was up and running.

I immediately started checking event logs, experimenting with case sensitivity in the connection string and the PowerShell script, and tweaking environment variables. I executed the relevant steps from the script in the PowerShell console. I scoured the server's file system for extra TNSNAMES.ORA files but found only the one that I expected. I stopped SERVICE in case it was somehow blocking my script's database calls. To make the issue even more confounding, I could specify a Data Source that wasn't even listed in the TNSNAMES file and I could then open the OracleConnection!

After several hours I gave up. I returned to the problem over a week later with a strange notion to check any mapped network drives. I've got a default mapped drive created (I assume) when my domain account was created. Looking in this drive I had a Eureka! moment: an old TNSNAMES file from my development machine that was full of entries. Suddenly it all made sense: I could connect to databases not present in the test server's TNSNAMES file because the entries were present in the 'network' TNSNAMES file. And, conversely, I couldn't connect to the test server's TNS entry because the port value had changed in the past couple of months and my 'network' TNSNAMES file had the old, invalid port.

What I had expected to be a trivial smoke test turned out to be much, much more. There's a lesson in here somewhere. The obvious one is that I probably should have initially started off configuring the script with the credentials with which it will be used in production. Another lesson is that software development can be maddeningly frustrating and that sometimes you just have to walk away. We don't all have the luxury of time that I did during this exercise, but sometimes some distance from a problem really brings clarity.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 uninstall

There's a new Visual Studio 2010 beta available. I wanted to see if the problems that I've experienced using TeamFuze with beta 1 were still present in the new bits. I hit what seemed to be a showstopper uninstalling from Windows 7 Professional x64: a prompt for the media installation path so that the 'TFS Object Model' could be removed. Uh-oh, I thought- I had just deleted the installation iso file AND recycled. I thought for a moment that I was either going to have to pull out a file undelete tool or download the beta 1 again.

Luckily, I found Scott Hanselman's post and was able to uninstall beta 1 without resorting to extraordinary measures.

Windows 7 is satisfactory

I won't state anything profound or even moderately interesting in this post. I've been using various flavors of Windows 7 RTM for almost two months now and can report no problems. A friend of mine thought that I should have a more enthusiastic view of Windows 7. My response: "It's an OS. I've seen them come and go." But don't take my lack of excitement for a negative viewpoint. In fact, lack of excitement is a good thing when it comes to an operating system. I want something stable that allows me to get my work done. I want an OS that doesn't annoy or frustrate me whether it is at home or work. Windows 7 fulfills those requirements. It is pleasingly adequate.

When "Copy Local" doesn't copy locally

There are days when software development is fun, challenging, rewarding. Then there are days like today when frustration makes me want to hurl my monitors against the wall and generally destroy my office like Keith Moon.

The day started innocently enough as I tried to wrap up some final release details by executing my stable old deployment scripts. By 'stable' and 'old' I mean they haven't had to change in over a year and have staged several successful releases. One of the scripts reported that it couldn't find Oracle.DataAccess.dll. That's odd, I thought, and proceeded to waste 2 hours investigating why my reference wasn't copying locally. Because the scripts had been so seemingly reliable for so long, I had forgotten their flow. I couldn't remember who was responsible for copying Oracle.DataAccess.dll to the proper deployment location so I had to take a trip down memory lane and get reacquainted.

The bottom line is that though the reference is set to "Copy Local", its presence in the GAC causes MSBuild to not copy it to the output directory. Here's a great description of the problem and solution. And here's a second post on the subject.

I don't know how long the build and deployment system has had this problem. Probably a long time. There are a few key files, such as Oracle.DataAccess.dll, that get injected into the build process. The deployment scripts package everything and were probably obscuring the issue so that it didn't surface until now. Ultimately the problem is mine since I am the de facto build engineer here. I think that the best course of action is to rebuild the build and deployment environments after this release. There could be other lurking problems like this one that would be discovered by a fresh build server.