Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Projects

Download it from here.

Best feature you can get from this, "Create a single assembly" for all your files in your web project. It also offers a lot more customisation for MSBuild. For me, creation of single assembly for all the files became so important because of library management issues.

Scott Guthrie has couple of nice blog entries on this read it here
and here.



Cheers

Visual Studio 2008 and VSS 2005

Installed Visual Studio.Net 2008 Team System today. First thing noticed was VSS integration was not there. I use VSS 2005 for source control not Team Foundation Server(TFS). It didn't take much time on google to find an update for VSS 2005 and a useful blog entry in Richard Berg's Blog.
Once you apply the VSS update from this link you are all set to use VS.Net 2008 with VSS. (This update fixes a whole bunch of VSS issues as listed here.)

(Make sure that in Visual Sudio 2008, Tools > Options - Source Control, Microsoft Visual Sourcesafe is selected as current source control plug-in)

Cheers!

Welcome 2008!

Welcome 2008!
We hope New Year brings new hope and cheer in everyone’s life.
We are glad to announce that we are back to blogging our .Net life. We had taken a nice long break from all these and now back to explore more in .Net world.

Cheers!

What is *.VSHost.Exe?

If you are using Visual Studio 2005, when you build your application, you might have noticed a new file named .vshost.exe in your bin directory. This file is a required file for Visual Studio to give some new and improved debugging features. These files are not be deployed and for Visual Studio IDE use only. More information on this can be found here -> http://blogs.msdn.com/dtemp/archive/2004/09/09/215764.aspx

Cheers!

Visual Studio.NET - Web Reference Static v/s Dynamic

Visual Studio makes it very easy to create and consume web services. This note explains how to set up the references to consume a web service with Visual Studio.NET.


In order to start using a web service, you should make a reference to this from Visual Studio,to acheive this,

• On your VS Solution Explorer, select your project, expand to References,Right click and click on Add Web References


• Type in URL of your web service and click on Go


• This will bring up your Web service's wsdl, you can change your web reference name to anything you want and click on Add Reference

Thats it, at this point, Visual Studio does all the work required (like creating your proxy class) and you are set to call your web service's web methods.


Now for some important and interesting observations!


The web reference you just created is a static reference, meaning it is always linked to the web service URL you just typed in. You can verify this by right clicking on your web reference to view the property sheet. You will notice that the URL Behavior is set to "static" with the Web Reference URL pointing to the URL you typed in. This is fine as long as you have only one environment (to TEST,QA,Stage, PRoduction....). But when you have to move your application through various environments in its life cycle, you will need to change this reference and rebuild the application. This leads us to the URL Behavior of "dynamic", when dynamic is set, your refrence.cs file (proxy) will include a property to read the URL from a Config File.


Code will look something like this...



public MyWebReference() {
string urlSetting = System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["MyWebRef"];
if ((urlSetting != null)) {
this.Url = string.Concat(urlSetting, "");
}
else {
this.Url = "http://myWS/myWS.asmx";
}
}




Depending on the type of Visual Studion Project your web service client is, it works slightly different,

• If your app is a web application and making the web reference from your application, this App Setting entry will go into its web.config file


• If your app is windows application, making a dynamic reference will create an app.config entry and when built will be part of your app.exe.config


• If you are referencing web service from a Class library project, the entry should be made to the client of that class library, if web project is using this class library then entry should be in web config or if its a win app using the class library, app setting entry will goto app.config!

Happy coding !!


Cheers!

ASP.Net - Some performance myths.

Here is some performance myths in .net world as explained by Rob Howard in an article in MSDN Magazine along with what we think!

• C# code is faster than Visual Basic code - False! Rob says that there is a grain of truth in this mainly because VB.Net allows performance hindering actions like not explicitly declaring types.I think both should be comparable because all the .net languages are ultimately creatingt code targeting the framework CLR and CTS. If you follow good programming practices, VB.Net and C# should provide with same features and performance (pretty much!)
  


• Code-Behind is faster than Inlince code - False! Rob points out that sometimes it is advantageous to just change inline (or add inline) code because touching code behind means a Dll rebuild. If you ask me, I would say NO to inline code, haven't we had enough of spaghetti coding with all than classic ASP?
  


• Components are faster than Pages- False! True in classic ASP, no longer in ASP.Net, since page is also a class, it provides the same performance as components. Again from a modular design point of view, lets go with components!
  

Cheers!

Clear your web applications Cache

We all know that Cache class provides an implementation for cache for a web application in ASP.net. Cache provides fast access to frequently used data. You can add your not so frequently changed data to Cache for a speedy access. Cache has an application scope, what ever is in cache is used by all users of your web application.

Being said that, I find sometimes a need to clear my web applications cache without affecting anything. In order to do that, this is the trick I have come up with (nothing genius here :)

I created a secure page (admin login required) with a "Clear All Cache" Button,
and here is what I do in that button click!



private void ClearCache_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
IDictionaryEnumerator CacheEnum = Cache.GetEnumerator();
string cacheKey="";
while (CacheEnum.MoveNext())
{
cacheKey = Convert.ToString(CacheEnum.Key);
Cache.Remove(cacheKey);
}

}



VS.net project, accessing from Network Share !

Level: Intermediate

If you place your VS.Net projects (Windows App) in a network share and try to work off that share, you might end up with an error message like this "The project location is not fully trusted by the .NET runtime". This message pops up when you try to open the project file. If you say Ok, to that "long" message and continue working you might end up with some security permissions issue when you try to debug. (In my case, I was trying to open a file using StremReader and it threw an Security Exception !)

In order to successfully run the projects, you will need to play around a bit with .Net configuration tool. Launch mscorcfg.msc (you should be able to find this under your current version of .Net Framework dir)

Under My Computer > Runtime Security Policy, you can either add a new code group and give "Full Trust" permission for the URL(File/Http) or you can use the adjust the security policy link, give Full Trust to Local Intranet.

Try one or the other and see what works for you !