Op 15 februari vanaf 18u15 geeft Beth Massi een gratis Masterclass Visual Studio LightSwitch. Wees er snel bij, want je kunt je tot 10 februari inschrijven en er is een beperkt aantal plaatsen. Zie de uitnodiging hieronder voor meer informatie.

I sometimes use the Visual Studio Class Diagram when I'm designing a system. Because I like to test my assumptions in such a situation I want to be able to quickly create classes that just work. Unfortunately, when you add a property in a class, Visual Studio generates code like this:

public string SomeProperty
{
    get
    {
        throw new System.NotImplementedException();
    }
    set
    {
    }
}

In most cases what I need is:

public string SomeProperty { get; set; }

Fortunately, the PowerToys for the Class Designer and Distributed System Designer solve this problem. After installing these (and turning it on in the Add-In Manager), the right click menu is enhanced with a lot of new options. One of the is Add->Auto-Imlplemented Property, as shown below.

Earlier I blogged about finding performance issues in an ASP.NET app "in the large" (see here). I'd like to reiterate that doing this for a web app is critical, because it not only shows you where the bottlenecks are, but also how these affect the entire application. I said I'd follow up on profiling, so here it is...

Once you know what the bottlenecks or "hot spots" are, you can dive into figuring out what the problem is with these pages. This is where profiling comes in. Profiling lets you know what is happening inside your code. It shows you how long a method call is taking and how often a call is made. Both of these are interesting, because performance bottlenecks can be caused by calls taking long, but also by too many calls to a method. Now, I won't get into the details of how to profile with Visual Studio 2010 (you can read Beginners Guide to Performance Profiling for that), but when you use this tooling, you should focus on one page at a time. The profiler will throw a heap of information at you, so dealing with one page is hard enough. Once you have this information you have to determine what's really going on. Is this somehting you can fix by changing a few lines of code, or is there a more structural problem you need to solve? Pages that under no load take 10 seconds or more likely have a structural problem, so you need to check if there is a lot of code being executed that is just waste. Also, be sure to focus on big fish first. You can worry about micro-optimizations (such as a different string compare mechanism) later. That said, you should try to make such optimizations part of your coding  guidelines, rather than looking at that afterwards. Micro-optimizations are only really interesting for very high performance apps. A 10th of a second loss here and there isn't going to make a lot of difference apart from maybe needing to scale-out a little earlier.

I've been trying to find a way in which I can easily map competences, books, certifications etc. The goal here is to be able to determine what you need to do to reach a certain competence or certification. Now, there may be some fancy tool out there to do this, or you could just whip up Visio and start drawing, but a) I don't want to buy a new tool, and b) I want this to be interactive.

I just finished a demo that uses the Dependency Graph functionality in Visual Studio Ultimate. I've used similar tooling before (from NDepend) for auditing and reviewing, but this time around I'm using it as part of my solution rather than to review a solution. I've expressed compentencies and books in classes, and if a competence is required for another, I'm adding a reference to it in a prerequisites list. The same happens with books you could read to learn about the competence.

After letting Dependency Graphing do its thing, you end up with a graph such as the one below. The great thing is that it's interactive. You can delete/colapse in the diagram what you don't need, and you can select the items for which you want to see more detailed dependencies. In the graph below, I've selected several constructors to show me all the dependencies.

With everything in code, I could now create a user interface that enables you to query the map for what you still need to do to get to the competence/certification you want.

I will be speaking at VSLive! again, this time in Dallas from 8 until 11 December. I'll be doing the following sessions:

• Introduction to ASP.NET Dynamic Data (Tuesday 9 December, 11:15 AM)
• POX/REST Strategies with WCF (Thursday 11 December, 1:45 PM)
• Understanding Transactions in WCF (Thursday 11 December, 4:45 PM)

VSLive! is a very nice and relaxed event with great content. So it's a great opportunity to learn new stuff and new people. If you want to attend the Dallas show and see me speak, you can get a $300 discount by entering the discount code SPVAN. I hope to see you there.

JavaScript Intellisense in Visual Studio 2008 is een prachtig stukje demoware. Het lijkt op het eerste gezicht allemaal heel aardig te werken... totdat je er zelf echt mee aan de slag gaat. En met "echt" bedoel ik voor productie, niet die leuke demotjes. Dan loop je tegen zoveel problemen aan dat je wat mij betreft moet concluderen dat het (op z'n zachts gezegd) "nog niet biedt wat je ervan zou verwachten". Ik heb al heel wat tijd verspijkerd om de comments van mijn scripts goed te krijgen, zodat VS ermee overweg kan. Niet zelden zonder het gewenste resultaat. Deze blogpost van OpenSource Connections geeft een goede opsomming van wat ik bedoel.