All Blogs - Author(s): Christiaan Baes (chrissie1)

There are now Visual studio project templates for Nancy

Christiaan Baes (chrissie1) — Wed, 01 May 2013 11:11:00 +0000

We all know and love Nancy by now. I love it anyway.

Up until now you needed to create an empty ASP.Net project and go from there.

But now you there are templates to make it easier for you to start a new Nancy project.

For now only C#.

You will have to download the vsix from the visual studio gallery.

The restart your VS if it was open.

If you know try to create a new project you will see this list in the web category.

Here I created a Nancy project with ASP.Net hosting and Razor.

Here are the files it creates.

And here is the module it creates.

I'll leave it a surprise for you to discover what is in the other files and project. But needless to say I like.

Thanks to the whole Nancy team for all the hard work.

Original post blogged on LessThanDot.

Fody Anotar weaving and logging combined into one package.

Christiaan Baes (chrissie1) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 06:53:00 +0000

Introduction

I said it once and I will say it again. Logging is very important once your app goes live. It's the best way for you to find out what the user did to destroy your sanity.
I am always on the lookout for new and exiting things that will make logging easier for me. I want less code but maximum information.
You can get lots of information with Gibraltar's Loupe but you can get even less code and more information with Anotar.

The code

It's easy.

Just add the Anotar.Nlog package from nuget and then add some config for nlog. Like this.

Code: xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
<configSections>
<section name="nlog" type="NLog.Config.ConfigSectionHandler, NLog"/>
</configSections>
<startup>
<supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.5"/>
</startup>
<system.serviceModel>
<bindings/>
<client/>
</system.serviceModel>
<nlog>
<targets>
<target name="file" type="File" fileName="_${level}.log" layout="${longdate} ${threadid} [${level:uppercase=true}] ${message}" archiveFileName="_${level}.{#}.log" archiveAboveSize="1048576" archiveNumbering="Sequence" maxArchiveFiles="10" concurrentWrites="true" keepFileOpen="false" encoding="iso-8859-2"/>
</targets>
<rules>
<logger name="*" minlevel="Debug" writeTo="file"/>
</rules>
</nlog>
</configuration>

And try it with this code.

Code: vbnet

Module Module1

Sub Main()
Dim l As New Logthing
l.TestSub()
Console.WriteLine(l.TestFunction)
Anotar.NLog.Log.Info("Some info in a static method")
End Sub

Public Class Logthing
Public Sub TestSub()
Anotar.NLog.Log.Debug("My message for sub")
End Sub

Public Function TestFunction() As String
Anotar.NLog.Log.Debug("My message for function")
Return "This thing"
End Function

End Class

End Module

This is then the resulting debug log file.

2013-04-25 13:24:00.1197 8 [DEBUG] Method: 'System.Void ConsoleApplication1.Module1/Logthing::TestSub()'. Line: ~12. My message for sub
2013-04-25 13:24:00.1387 8 [DEBUG] Method: 'System.String ConsoleApplication1.Module1/Logthing::TestFunction()'. Line: ~16. My message for function

And the info file.

2013-04-25 13:24:00.1387 8 [INFO] Method: 'System.Void ConsoleApplication1.Module1::Main()'. Line: ~7. Some info in a static method

The lines seem to be correct and the other information too.

But how does Fody do it?

Well, it changes your code at compile time.

This for instance is the LogThing class after a decompile by JustDecompile.

Code: vbnet

Public Class Logthing
Private Shared AnotarLogger As Logger

Shared Sub New()
Logthing.AnotarLogger = LogManager.GetLogger("ConsoleApplication1.Module1/Logthing")
End Sub

<DebuggerNonUserCode> _
Public Sub New()
MyBase.New()
End Sub

Public Function TestFunction() As String
Dim V_2 As Object() = New Object(0)
Dim V_1 As String = "My message for function"
V_1 = String.Concat("Method: 'System.String ConsoleApplication1.Module1/Logthing::TestFunction()'. Line: ~16. ", V_1)
Logthing.AnotarLogger.Debug(V_1, V_2)
Dim TestFunction As String = "This thing"
Return TestFunction
End Function

Public Sub TestSub()
Dim V_1 As Object() = New Object(0)
Dim V_0 As String = "My message for sub"
V_0 = String.Concat("Method: 'System.Void ConsoleApplication1.Module1/Logthing::TestSub()'. Line: ~12. ", V_0)
Logthing.AnotarLogger.Debug(V_0, V_1)
End Sub
End Class

As you can see it is not doing any reflection in your code. It just replaces your Log.Debug code with other code. Which means it should be faster at runtime.

This also means that compiling will be slower, because it has to change your code. How much? No idea.

Conclusion

I like this.

Original post blogged on LessThanDot.

Trying out Gibraltar's Loupe with Nancy

Christiaan Baes (chrissie1) — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 03:55:00 +0000

Introduction

I downloaded and tested Gibraltar's Loupe today and tried to find out what it could add to my application. And because Rachel Hawley asked me t review it, and who am I to refuse her anything.

I already add as much logging to my application as possible because it makes it a lot easier to find bugs and fix them once you go into productions.

But log files can get overwhelming sometimes.

This is where Gibraltar analyst can help.

Installation

I downloaded the 3.0 preview 3. Installation is easy and for now I only installed the desktopversion, but there is also a webversion.

I created a small nancy application with the razor viewengine.

With this as my view.

Code: html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Welcome to OUR world!</p>
</body>
</html>

and this as my module.

Code: vbnet

Imports Nancy
Imports Gibraltar.Agent

Public Class MainModule
Inherits NancyModule

Public Sub New()
MyBase.Get("/") = Function(parameters)
Return View("Main")
End Function
End Sub
End Class

I saved all of it and then went into the loupe desktop.

YOu can now click the big green button that says Add Gribraltar now, point it to your project give it a name and whatnot and voila Gibraltar is there.

Logging

When I run it and go to live sessions.
I can see it.

No idea why it is there twice but you can click one of them.

That's already more information than we are used to, and we have yet to add logging.

We can do this by using the Gibraltar Agent logging (but we don't have to).

Just add a line like this.

Code: vbnet

MyBase.Get("/") = Function(parameters)
Log.TraceInformation("Opening mainmodule")
Return View("Main")
End Function

And next time you run this.

you will see this in your logging session.

You can even click on that link and go to your code.

Or see the code in the tab mainmodule.

That is simple enough.

Exceptions

So how do we deal with exceptions and unhandled exceptions?

Let's add this code to our module.

Code: vbnet

MyBase.Get("/test") = Function(parameters)
Try
Throw New Exception("some message loup should pick up")
Catch ex As Exception
Log.TraceError(ex, "something")
Return View("Main")
End Try
End Function
MyBase.Get("/test2") = Function(parameters)
Throw New Exception("some message loup should pick up")
End Function

If I now go to the page /test I will see this.

The exception is nicely logged.

But if I go to page /test2, I see nothing.

Gibraltar does not log unhandled exception automatically. We either need ELMAH or we need to add logging to an event somewhere.

Luckily in Nancy this is easy.

Just add a class that implements IErrorhandler and Nancy will do the rest.

Code: vbnet

Imports Nancy
Imports Nancy.ErrorHandling
Imports Gibraltar.Agent

Public Class Errorhandler
Implements IErrorHandler

Public Function HandlesStatusCode(ByVal statusCode As HttpStatusCode, ByVal context As NancyContext) As Boolean Implements IStatusCodeHandler.HandlesStatusCode
Return statusCode = HttpStatusCode.InternalServerError
End Function

Public Sub Handle(ByVal statusCode As HttpStatusCode, ByVal context As NancyContext) Implements IStatusCodeHandler.Handle
Dim errorObject As Object
context.Items.TryGetValue(NancyEngine.ERROR_EXCEPTION, errorObject)
Dim ex = CType(errorObject, Exception)
Log.TraceError(ex, "unhandled exception")
End Sub
End Class

And now we will see our exception.

Conclusion

Loupe was pretty easy to setup and get going. Loupe does however come at a price. Is that price to high? That depends on the value you place on your business.

Original post blogged on LessThanDot.

Lessthandot has a new server

Christiaan Baes (chrissie1) — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 02:25:00 +0000

You might have noticed a slight glitch in the Matrix yesterday.

That's because LessThanDot is now no longer hosted on a dedicated server over at godaddy.com but we moved to host4geeks

You might be interested to know that we have moved up in the world.

Our old server was a dual core intel processor with 2GB RAM and 2x300GB disks with linux on it.

To our new server being a similar dual core intel celeron processor with 8GB RAM and 2x250GB disks. We needed the RAM more than anything.

The transition was smooth and not too many people noticed. Except for Ted who lost a few views on his last post, sorry Ted.

Enjoy.

Original post blogged on LessThanDot.

Crazy stuff I do with Nancy

Christiaan Baes (chrissie1) — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 12:58:00 +0000

No, not that.

I had the need to write documentation for my services. I thought having them as html would be nice and good enough.

So I made a bunch of vbhtml razorviews because I want my pages to be pretty and use the masterpage I already made for my main site. You know, to be consistent.

So I had this.

page1.vbhtml
page2.vbhtml
page3.vbhtml
page4.vbhtml
index.vbhtml

And to show those pages I just have this in my module.

Code: text

MyBase.Get("/{Title}") = Function(parameters)
Return Negotiate.WithView("documentation/" & parameters.Title)
End If

So calling page1 is as easy as

/documentation/page1

But what if someone did

/documentation/page12

They would get an error.

But, meh, I don't want that. I want them to return to the index instead.

So here is my solution.

Code: text

Public Sub New(viewlocator As IViewLocator)
MyBase.New("/documentation")
MyBase.Get("/{Title}") = Function(parameters)
If viewlocator.LocateView("documentation/" & parameters.Title, Context) IsNot Nothing Then
Return Negotiate.WithView("documentation/" & parameters.Title)
Else
Return Negotiate.WithView("documentation/index")
End If
End Function

With help from GrumpyDev.

Quick and easy.

I do not want to put to much work in the documentation since noone will ever read it anyway.

Original post blogged on LessThanDot.

Nancy, IIS 7 and the PUT command

Christiaan Baes (chrissie1) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 06:49:00 +0000

When you use PUT in your Nancy application and you host your application on an IIS 7 server then you might get a 405 error (Method not allowed).

The solution to this problem is very simple but I will put it here for me.

The problem is that you might have the webdavmodule installed on your IIS and that is gobbling up all the PUT requests.

So the simple solution is to remove the webdavmodule.

You can do this via the IIS manager and just remove it from your site, but if you use webdeploy it will add it back in the next time you deploy.

So it is better to use the webconfig to tell IIS you really don't want it for your particular site.

So you add this to the web.config

Code: xml

<system.webServer>
<modules>
<remove name="WebDAVModule"/>
</modules>
</system.webServer>

Simple, and it works. Let's move on.

No TDD was involved in the making of this blogpost.

Original post blogged on LessThanDot.

Another solution for my caching problem with servicestack.text, dapper and sql server.

Christiaan Baes (chrissie1) — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 16:23:00 +0000

Introduction

My problem is the speed of the datastore I am querying. I won't name the vendor but their API is horrible. If I want to get all 3000 objects of a certain type I need to first get all the Id's from the latest versions of those objects, then I have to get the properties of each of those objects, if I am unlucky those objects have subobjects and then I have to query those too. So to get 3000 objects with 2 subobjects I need to do 9001 queries. Needless to say this will be slow.

Last week I had a look at redis to easily cache these objects on my webserver.

Redis is a good solution but it is only production ready on Linux, and our ops-team was not really happy with it. Even though I got permission to set up the linux server on our ESX-servers, I was still looking at other solutions.

Today I might have found such a solution. I can use SQL-server and serialize the objects as json.

The database

Not really a database since it is just one table.

Code: tsql

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[objects] (
[Id] INT IDENTITY (1, 1) NOT NULL,
[version] INT NOT NULL,
[objid] INT NOT NULL,
[language] INT NOT NULL,
[value] NVARCHAR(MAX) NOT NULL,
[objtype] INT NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([Id] ASC)
);

Not sure how this will scale but I am pretty sure that we will not get more than 1 million rows in there any time soon. At the moment it is less than 100k rows.

I can now use dapper and servicestack.text to get the data in and out of there.

The code

Code: text

Imports Dapper
Imports System.Data.SqlClient
Imports ServiceStack.Text

Module Module1

Sub Main()
Dim con As New SqlConnection("Server=christiaan-pc;Database=cache;Trusted_Connection=True;")
con.Open()
con.Execute("delete from objects")
Dim object1s = New List(Of object1)
Dim object2s = New List(Of object2)
Dim s As New Stopwatch
Console.WriteLine("Adding to database")
s.Start()
For i = 0 To 10000
object1s.Add(New object1() With {.id = i, .name = "object1_" & i, .version = 1})
object2s.Add(New object2() With {.id = i, .name = "object2_" & i, .version = 1})
Next
Dim objects = New List(Of databaseobject)
For Each object1 In object1s
objects.Add(New databaseobject() With {.language = 102, .objid = object1.id, .version = object1.version, .value = object1.SerializeToString(), .objtype = 1})
Next
For Each object2 In object2s
objects.Add(New databaseobject() With {.language = 102, .objid = object2.id, .version = object2.version, .value = object2.SerializeToString(), .objtype = 2})
Next
con.Execute("insert objects(objid, version, language, value, objtype) values (@objid, @version,@language,@value,@objtype)",
objects)
s.Stop()
Console.WriteLine(s.ElapsedMilliseconds)
Console.WriteLine("Fetching from database")
s.Restart()
Dim l = con.Query(Of databaseobject)("select objid, version, language, value, objtype from objects where objtype = 1")
Dim obj1 As object1
For Each m In l
obj1 = m.value.FromJson(Of object1)()
Next
l = con.Query(Of databaseobject)("select objid, version, language, value, objtype from objects where objtype = 2")
Dim obj2As object2
For Each m In l
obj2 = m.value.FromJson(Of object2)()
Next
s.Stop()
Console.WriteLine(s.ElapsedMilliseconds)
Console.ReadLine()
End Sub

Public Class databaseobject
Public Property id As Integer
Public Property objid As Integer
Public Property version As Integer
Public Property language As Integer
Public Property objtype As Integer
Public Property value As String
End Class

Public Class object1
Public Property name As String
Public Property id As Integer
Public Property version As Integer
End Class

Public Class object2
Public Property name As String
Public Property id As Integer
Public Property version As Integer
End Class
End Module

So I am adding 2 times 10k objects to the database and after that I rehydrate them again.

On my computer this is the result.

Adding to database
13317
Fetching from database
199

That's more then reasonable. Considering it takes 28 seconds to get 3000 objects from the datastore.

Conclusion

All though I think redis would be a good solution, I don't think it is an ideal solution for our situation.

Original post blogged on LessThanDot.

Redis and VB.Net

Christiaan Baes (chrissie1) — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 17:36:00 +0000

Introduction

So I thought I needed redis to do some much needed caching for an app I am writting. And I was right, as I often am.

So I installed redis and used the .net redis client from the always brilliant Demis Bellot.

Redis is a key-value database, a dictionary on steroids. It is great for caching. And it is fast at what it does by keeping most things in memory.

Redis

First I used the windows version of redis and that even worked, but it is not production ready. So I decided to install a linux VM with redis on it.

I downloaded mint 14 and did apt-get install redis-server. Then you need to change the file in /etc/res/redis.conf and comment the line bind 127.0.0.1 or change it to bind 0.0.0.0.

I used VMWare workstation 8 and I had to use NAT translation for the network and add forward the 6379 port.

you can check if your redis server works by doing redis-cli ping on the server. This should return PONG. To be sure the binding works you should try redis-cli -h ipaddress ping. where you change ipaddress with the ip-address of the linux machine. This should also give PONG.

You can now do the same on the host to check if you can connect.

If all works well you can start writing to your redis server. And we might do some reading to.

Redis-client

Here is our model.

Code: vbnet

Public Class Mandate
Public Property Id As String
Public Property Version As Integer
Public Property Name As String
End Class

Firstly you need to nuget servicestack.redis.

The following code writes some entries to our redis server.

Code: vbnet

Using redisClient = New RedisClient(ipaddressofthelinuxvm)
Dim client = redisClient.As(Of Mandate)()
client.GetAllKeys().Count.PrintDump()
For i As Integer = 1 To 500
client.SetEntry(i, New Mandate() With {.Id = i, .Version = 1, .Name = "Name" & i})
Next
Dim mandate5 = client.GetValue(5)
mandate5.Version += 1
client.SetEntry(5, mandate5)
client.GetValue(5).PrintDump()
client.GetAllKeys().Where(Function(x) Not x.Contains("ids")).Count.PrintDump()
client.Save()
End Using
Console.ReadLine()

If you run the above you will get.

0
{
Id: 5,
Version: 2,
Name: Name5
}
500

On a second run you will get.

501
{
Id: 5,
Version: 2,
Name: Name5
}
500

So I add 500 objects but it tells me I have 501. The 501st is the id of the mandate class.

I don't really need to do the save, since redis will do an autosave every so often (depends on your redis.conf).

Conclusion

It is here that I pretend that redis is easy to use and to set up. And it is, just not for me ;-).

I would like to thank Demis for setting me on the way to solving my connectivity problems with the VM.

The second time it won't add another 500 entries, it will update the ones that are there.

Original post blogged on LessThanDot.

All new ChocolateyGUI

Christiaan Baes (chrissie1) — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 14:55:00 +0000

Introduction

I admit I had been neglecting ChocolateyGUI for the last year or so. And it was no longer compatible with the current version of Chocolatey.

But a few weeks ago a gentle soul called Miracula decided it was time to help and I made her a contributor the moment she did. After all it was my very first pull request ever and I was happy.

This weekend I decided to give ChocolateyGUI some more of my love and attention. And noticed that Miracula had been very busy indeed.

So I decided that it was time for a new package.

And here it is.

Installation

Installation is very simple.

Code: text

cinst ChocolateyGUI

That's it. As long as you have Chocolatey installed of course. But even that is easy to install.

New features

Just look how pretty it is.

You can search in the list. It is a StartsWith list.
You can install the available package by clicking on the checkbox.
You can uninstall a package.
You can update chocolatey, because it will be in the list of installed packages.
It is a lot faster.
It shows a lot more information about the selected package.

Open source

And the code is still open source. And we accept pull-requests and feature requests.

Conclusion

I want to thank Miracula again for the awesome work she did.

Update

ChocolateyGUI has a dependecy on powershell 3.0. You can install that by doing cinst powershell. In the next version we wil install this as a dependency package.

Original post blogged on LessThanDot.

Making your own Local root CA and using it as an SSL certificate for intranet websites.

Christiaan Baes (chrissie1) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 11:11:00 +0000

Introduction

I had my intranet site selfsigned before. But the problem with self signing is that the user gets a warning.

And of course we all click continue and then you get this.
Which makes the addressbar totally useless because gray on pink is not very readable.

So I set out to fix it. And here is my story.

Installation

You should install the Active directory certificate services. Go to technet to learn how to do that for your server, I did.
This should apparently be installed on your domain controller. And yes I tried on a member server and no that was no success, so just listen to me.

IIS

Now go to you IIS manager and click on your server and find the option Server certificates.

Then in the Actions menu select Create Domain certificate.

You will then see this.

Be careful to fill in the correct common name, the common name should be the domain name of your website. The part that comes after the https:// part and before the next /.

Then next.

Then pick your authority service, if all went well that should be the one you installed on your domain controller.
And give it a friendly name.

Now go to your site and click on Bindings in the Actions thing.

Select https as the type and set the port and select your certificate by its friendly name.

The clients

Now it's time to configure our clients.

Since we are on a domain controller we can use a group policy for that.

First we need to get the certificate.

Now open MMC on your webserver and add certificates for your computer account on your local machine.

Then go to personal and certificates. Right-click on your certificate and select export.

Remeber where you parked it and copy it to your domain controller.

Now open the Group policy manager.

Click on your Default Domain Policy.

Go to Computer configuration -> Policies -> Windows settings -> Security settings -> Public key policies -> Trusted Root Certification Authorities -> Take a deep breath.

Now right click that and select import.

Select your certificate that you exported a while ago and wait for the clients to replicate.

Done.

Now you get this.

No, it's not fully trusted but it no longer gives a warning either.

And Chris is happy.

Conclusion

This is here for my own reference.

Original post blogged on LessThanDot.