Lance Larsen – .NET Architect Madison Wisconsin

Feb

StopwatchLog – Easy Method Timing in C#

Categories: .NET, Code, Visual Studio

Was looking for a simple and elegant way to log some metric for methods (mainly method name, start time, stop time and elapsed time) – I’ve done this in PostSharp in my article “Holy Grail of Application Profiling with AOP” – but client wasn’t using them.

I’ve used reflection with success in the past, but was having some issues with Async methods not giving their real method names, was getting “MoveNext” instead — so sleuthed around for an alternative and found some awesome C# attributes that I’d never seen…

[CallerMemeberName] – gets the method name calling the attribute
[CallerFilePathAttribute] – gets the path to the C# file
[CallerLineNumberAttribute] – gets the line of the method in code

Combining those with the C# Stopwatch Class – and using the Dispose patter that I love because you can easily code the “using” statement around what you’re looking at ( see below ) – came up with the following cool code that – as always – I love to share.

Emphasis on elegant, to call this code – you can easily do the following…

using (StopwatchLog.Track())
{
   // Your code here...
}

It collects the information about executing method and logs metrics when the stopwatch log is disposed.

Feb

Surface 3 Tip: Screen Brightness Shortcut “Fn” + “Del” / “Backspace”

Categories: Uncategorized

Comments: No

A lot more Surface 3 owners out there as sales of the Surface topped $1 billion in revenue for Microsoft – so more tips for my primary development computer!

Screen Brightness Shortcut: Press “Fn” + “Del” to increase brightness, and “Fn” + “Backspace” to decrease brightness. Love it.

If there are more cool tips that others have – ping me, love to know them.

Feb

Training Event: Microsoft WebCamp

Categories: Events, Web

Comments: No

As I always emphasize – invest in yourself first! So attend education events, user group meetings, sent aside time specifically to learn, etc.

Today I drove down from Madison to Chicago area to attend a free Microsoft WebCamp event. Worth the ~3+ hour drive. :)

“The new release of ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 make it easier than ever to build cutting-edge websites – and once you create a beautiful, interactive site, you can quickly deploy and scale it with Microsoft Azure! … no-fluff events created for developers, by developers.”

For those in Wisconsin, there is another one coming up in Waukesha on March 24th 2015 – but I didn’t want to wait… :)

Click here to Register — and here’s the Source and Slides.

Thanks to David Giard, our Microsoft Evangelist for leading the event.

Twitter: @DavidGiard, Blog: http://davidgiard.com

Jul

Surface 3 Tip: Function Key Lock – “Fn” + “Caps”

Categories: Surface, Tips, Visual Studio

Comments: No

Surface Pro 3

Firstly, love my new Surface Pro 3 – finally the tablet PC I’ve been waiting for! Have all of my development tools; Visual Studio 2013, SQL 2014, etc loaded up and running very quickly.

As a developer in Visual Studio however I need to use the function keys more than using the shortcuts across the top of the keyboard – and didn’t want to always have to press “Fn” + “F5” – so looked for a solution and found one and wanted to share…

Function Key Lock Tip: Press “Fn” + “Caps” and now all the Fn keys work without having to hold down the “Fn” key! w00t

Jun

EF5 DropDownListFor for enums

Categories: Uncategorized

Comments: No

Love sharing little gems of knowledge – this is a good one for anyone using Entity Framework 5 and the new’ish enumerations (emums) inclusion in EF5.

So working on a MVC5 Code First application for a project of my own – and had the following Model.

namespace GeoBucketlist.Model
{
    public enum TagType { Location, Bucketlist, Member }

    public class Tag : Base.Model
    {
        public long Id { get; set; }
        [Required]
        [StringLength(25, ErrorMessageResourceType = typeof(ResourceMessages), ErrorMessageResourceName = "LengthMax25")]
        public string Name { get; set; }        
        public string Description { get; set; }
        public TagType TagType { get; set; }
    }
}

When you auto-create the View templates for editing / adding that model in MVC through T4 templates – the html is as follows follows…

<div class="form-group">
    @Html.LabelFor(model => model.TagType, new { @class = "control-label col-md-2" })
    <div class="col-md-10">
        @Html.EditorFor(model => model.TagType)
        @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.TagType)
    </div>
</div>

Which then shows up in your pages as a plain textbox – not a good solution for choosing an enumeration value… :(

So simple but elegant solution is to change that line to the following… (Note, would be lovely if this was the default behavior for the @Html.EditorFor – but alas that is a blog article (and more work) for another day – but if anyone else has that complete, always loved to see great code!)

<div class="form-group">
    @Html.LabelFor(model => model.TagType, new { @class = "control-label col-md-2" })
    <div class="col-md-10">
        @Html.DropDownListFor(model => model.TagType, new SelectList(Enum.GetValues(typeof(GeoBucketlist.Model.TagType))))
        @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.TagType)
    </div>
</div>

Good coding!

//L2

Jun

AngularJs: Custom Decimal Filter

Categories: AngularJS, Code, JavaScript, Web

Comments: No

So AngularJs is pretty sweet – especially considering the power and elegance of how you can use “filters” to change the way values appear in the UI. There is a built in “number” filter that you can apply to a number value and have it always display a set number of decimal places, i.e. “1″ -> “1.0″ But, we wanted a filter that did the following…

“1.56″ => “1.6″
“1.5″ => “1.5″
“1.0″ => “1″
“1″ => “1″

So I wrote a simple custom filter, setDecmial!

As I love jsFiddle – here’s the live working version: http://jsfiddle.net/lancelarsen/Tx7Ty/

If anyone has suggestions for further improvements, always love to keep making the code better. :)

<div ng-app="myApp">
    <div ng-controller="Ctrl">
        setDecimal Filter (1): <span>{{val | setDecimal:1}}</span><br>
        setDecimal Filter (2): <span>{{val | setDecimal:2}}</span><br>
    </div>
</div>

var app = angular.module('myApp', []);

app.filter('setDecimal', function ($filter) {
    return function (input, places) {
        if (isNaN(input)) return input;
        // If we want 1 decimal place, we want to mult/div by 10
        // If we want 2 decimal places, we want to mult/div by 100, etc
        // So use the following to create that factor
        var factor = "1" + Array(+(places > 0 && places + 1)).join("0");
        return Math.round(input * factor) / factor;
    };
});

app.controller('Ctrl', function ($scope) {
    $scope.val = 1.56;
});

Apr

Upcoming Dev Events in-and-near the Midwest!

Categories: .NET, Events, thatConference

Comments: No

Event	Dates	Location
Chicago Code Camp	April 26	Grayslake, IL
Kalamazoo X	April 26	Kalamazoo, MI
Azure Developer Camp	April 30	Chicago, IL
ALM Chicago	May 1	Chicago, IL
Virtual Hackathon	May 1- June 5	Chicago and online
VSLive	May 5-8	Chicago, IL
Code For Rockford Brigade Kickoff	May 10	Rockford, IL
//PUBLISH Hackathon	May 16-17	Chicago, IL
//PUBLISH Hackathon – Milwaukee	May 16	Milwaukee, WI
SharePoint Saturday	May 17	Addison, IL
GoTo Conference – Chicago	May 20-23	Chicago, IL
Codestock	July 11-12	Knoxville, TN
Iowa Code Camp	July 19	Des Moines, IA
That Conference	August 11-13	Wisconsin Dells, WI
Madison Ruby	August 21	Madison, Wi
Devlink	August 27-29	Chattanooga, TN
Chippewa Valley Code Camp	Fall

Thanks to David Giard {djgiard@hotmail.com} for compiling these!

Feb

Web Development Tools: ColorZilla

Categories: Tools, Web

Comments: 1

Little things make me happy…

Easy way to get the RGB value for images / web pages

Check out ColorZilla plugin for Chrome.

Feb

Visual Studio: SideWaffle Angular Templates

Categories: .NET, AngularJS, JavaScript, MADdotNET, Visual Studio

Comments: 1

At the February 2014 MADdotNET (@maddotnet) meeting – had David Manske (@davidemanske) from Centare out to talk on what’s new in Visual Studio 2013! Couple absolute gems of knowledge were passed on – one of them was “SideWaffle Templates for Visual Studio” – I had never seen this – so figure some others may not have seen this either!

Specifically liked seeing the AngularJS templates… Check them out!

Jan

AngularJS: Sharing Data Between Controllers

Categories: .NET, AngularJS, Code, JavaScript

Comments: 1

Always loved JavaScript and client side scripting ( where appropriate <grin> ) – so when we had a new green field project to start, looked to what the best-in-class technologies were – settled on AngularJS (@angularjs).

It is a client-side MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern and it rocks for making SPA (Single-Page-Applications) that emphasize responsiveness. Take a look at either the AngularJS site, or there are a couple great AngularJS videos on Pluralsight – specifically “AngularJS Fundamentals” and “AngularJS for .NET Developers”.

I know that I have a ton to learn about AngularJS – and wanted to share what I’m learning along the way…

Specifically, have a page that has a list of items to be displayed – and want to filter them by a parameter based on what the user clicked. So in AngularJS we can separate showing the items to be displayed into one controller – the “CollectionController” – and the filters to be applied into another controller – the “FilterController”. Found many examples / discussion on how to communicate between the controller, but some seemed to be way overkill or confusing – so got the following code crafted – and wanted to share as it turned out pretty slick! :)

To boot, have the live code running on JSFiddle – which again, if you haven’t played with is WAY awesome!

http://jsfiddle.net/lancelarsen/qjkyM/

StopwatchLog – Easy Method Timing in C#

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Surface 3 Tip: Screen Brightness Shortcut “Fn” + “Del” / “Backspace”

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Training Event: Microsoft WebCamp

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Surface 3 Tip: Function Key Lock – “Fn” + “Caps”

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EF5 DropDownListFor for enums

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AngularJs: Custom Decimal Filter

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Upcoming Dev Events in-and-near the Midwest!

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Web Development Tools: ColorZilla

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Visual Studio: SideWaffle Angular Templates

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AngularJS: Sharing Data Between Controllers

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