Paul Brown

The user story screen is the starting point for all work. It tells a story from the user perspective that we can use to determine what work needs to be done. This story should be short so that the work can be done in a couple of days. More complicated stories should be broken up into smaller stories so the work can be broken into pieces. My rule of thumb is if the story is takes more than a paragraph or so, you need to break it up. Here’s the User Story screen from VS.   Title – A one sentence description of the story. Assigned To – The single individual responsible for the story. State – Indicates the current state of the story. Active – The story is currently being worked on or waiting to be worked on. Closed – The story was closed without being resolved. Resolved – The story was completed and implemented. Reason – The reason the item is in the current state. Matching states are in parenthesis. New – A new story (Active). Abandoned – The st...

One of the areas I personally struggle with is planning and organizing. I’m a doer. Git-r-dun! I can see a task and wiz through coding it. As long as I’m the only developer, this works great. When you’re the team lead, it’s not a good thing. What ends up happening is that everything is in your head. The team doesn’t know what to work on and the users don’t know the status of the project. Want to know if you’re in this category? Take a day off and see what happens! If you come back and find that things have gone haywire, welcome to the club. So what’s the solution? For me, learning Agile and Scrum basics and using VS/TFS 2010 to keep track of stuff. For the next several posts, I ‘m going to document how we’re going to use VS/TFS 2010. If you’ve done it differently, please let me know. I’ll update this post as the master to keep track of everything together. The first step will be to create a user story for each discrete activity. Then we’ll write the test cases that insure things ...

One thing I like to do in all my apps is create a static class that holds constants for all Column/Property names. This just avoids messing up names in places where I need to use strings. This is particularly useful when checking that attributes have been applied. select 'public const string ' + COLUMN_NAME + ' = "' + COLUMN_NAME + '";' from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS where table_Name in ('Agencies', 'Customers') group by COLUMN_NAME order by COLUMN_NAME The code produced looks like this: public static class ColumnNames { public const string AgencyName = "AgencyName"; public const string CustomerName = "CustomerName"; } I can then refer to the name using something like VerifyPropertyHasAttribute(ColumnName.AgencyName, typeof(RequiredAttribute));

UPDATE: Here's the same thing for EF 4.1 and Code First. I’ve been using the DataAnnotations for a validation with MVC2 and Silverlight 4. They both rely on metadata (buddy) classes. The Entity Framework now will create metaclasses for you but LinqToSql didn’t get this feature. This short script will create a partial class and a metaclass for the specified table.   declare @TableName varchar(256) = 'Agencies' declare @EntityName varchar(256) = 'Agency' declare @TableSchema varchar(256) = 'dbo' declare @ColumnName varchar(256) , @DataType varchar(256) , @MaxLength int , @Nullable varchar(5) declare @Lines table (Line varchar(1000)) insert into @Lines select 'partial class ' + @EntityName insert into @Lines select '{' insert into @Lines select '}' insert into @Lines select 'public class ' + @EntityName + 'MetaClass' insert into @Lines select '{' declare cols cursor for select COLUMN_NAME...

In MVC1, by default an empty textbox was sent as string.Empty to the controller on POST. In MVC2, it now sends the value as NULL. See ModelMetadata.ConvertEmptyStringToNull . I think there are some valid reasons for why they made the change – see Brad Wilson’s comment for more. If your system relies on string.Empty, you’ve got a problem. There are several options for handling this. The first is using the DisplayFormatAttribute on every property that needs it. Painful. Here’s an example: [DisplayFormat(ConvertEmptyStringToNull=false)] public string FirstName { get; set; } You can also write a custom binder that sets this value to false. Like so: public class CustomStringModelBinder : DefaultModelBinder { public override object BindModel(ControllerContext controllerContext, ModelBindingContext bindingContext) { var value = bindingContext.ValueProvider.GetValue(bindingContext.ModelName); if (bindingContext.ModelType == typeof(string)) { ...

Asp.Net MVC2 introduced Areas as a feature part of the framework. Areas allow you to divide your application into logical units. It also makes your Url’s look more accurate. Thinking of a generic store they might have areas such as Inventory, Payroll, Employees and Sales. Here are example ActionLinks for each area. <%= Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home", new { area = "" }, new { })%> <%= Html.ActionLink("Payroll", "Index", "Main", new { area = "Payroll" }, new { })%> <%= Html.ActionLink("Inventory", "Index", "Main", new { area = "Inventory" }, new { })%> <%= Html.ActionLink("Employees", "Index", "Main", new { area = "Employees" }, new { })%> <%= Html.ActionLink("Sales", "Index", "Main", new { area = "Sales" }, new { })%> Notice that the area is pass...

Working in VS2010, I suddenly lost my Find /Replace window. I found this post from Rick Strahl but unfortunately that doesn’t work for me since ALT-M is mapped as a menu shortcut. Solution: Window –> Dock. This will dock the window and then you can move it to your desired location. Cheers!

I needed to format a bunch of strings in SQL Management Studio (this works for VS also) and finally took the time to figure out Find/Replace with Regular Expressions. The first thing to note is that VS/SSMS use different regex codes (don’t know why but I’m sure they have their reasons). You can find the list of codes here . I have list of 3 strings containing 10 digits followed by a space and then 3 letters. I wanted to replace the digits with the word Descriptor. Here’s my data: 1234567870 ABC 1234567880 DEF 1234567890 GHI Here’s my find expression: [0-9]^10 {[A-Z]^3} Here’s my replace expression: Descriptor: \1 Here’s my result: Descriptor: ABC Descriptor: DEF Descriptor: GHI The key is the {} brackets and \1. The {} brackets tell the engine I want to keep whatever matches the expression. This is called a Tagged Expression. The \1 says place the first tagged expression here. I can create multiple tagged expressions and place by using \1, \2, etc. I can even chan...