It is always nice when there is a new version available from an operating system! I am currently using Windows 7 as primary OS on my development machine for Asp.Net development.

Disclaimer: Before you start, make sure that you have a Live ID and a powerful machine to run virtualization software!

I have downloaded this ISO from Microsoft.com:

Windows 8 Developer Preview with developer tools English, 64-bit (x64)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/br229516

I have tried dual boot solutions several times. With Ubuntu, Fedora etc. But this time, I didn’t want to come near a boot loader. So my only option was virtually. Even though when I read a nice post about attaching a *.vhd file. My favorite and easiest virtualization software (Microsoft Virtual PC) didn’t want to run this ISO. So I had to use different virtualization software. I decided to go with VMware player. VMware player is free, it only requires a registration, but that is totally worth it! VMware has a lot of experience with virtualization software, but upgrading from 4.0 to 4.0.1 is really annoying, because of all the reboots. It took me a lot of time. (I have a 2,5 year old notebook)

When you install Windows 8 in VMware you can get an error because it requires a product key. After searching the web for a while, I found a good workaround which is to disable the floppy disk reader in VMware.

Have fun testing Windows 8 with VMware!

A few screenshots:

Today I have installed NDepend for the first time! I was really convinced because of this short video and the 7 minute version. Too bad that it isn’t really a human voice, but the feature set of NDepend will make up for that. I followed these instructions for the installation and installed the Visual Studio Add-In.

All I had to do was select NDepend –> attach new NDepend project to current VS Solution. NDepend immediately showed that two critical rules are violated!

1. Method too complex (well some programmers might see this one as a compliment, but this does affect maintainability and scalability of your code)
2. Methods with two many parameters

so just two issues, I am flattered!

When you click on the ‘Show CQL Explorer’ You will see the Code Query Language which is required to select the critical rules. So you can simply navigate to the issues.

FXCop vs. NDepend

As you all know, you can also choose to use FxCop to check your source code against a coding standard. Here is a link where you can see how you can check your code for the use of the object ‘Arraylist’ instead of the generic ‘List<obj>’ http://www.binarycoder.net/fxcop/html/ex_usegenericlist.html

With NDepend this can be done with CQL like this:

SELECT TYPES WHERE IsDirectlyUsing "System.Collections.ArrayList" More...

Years ago, everybody made a column layout with an Html table. If you do not remember why tables are bad, I recommend reading these nine reasons not to use tables. Today we use (external) cascading style sheets to solve it. Most of the time with the famous ‘faux columns’ trick.

<div id="left">
    leftside
</div>
<div id="right">
    <div>block one</div>
    <div>block two</div>
    <div>block three</div>
</div>

More...

So we have all used FxCop before haven’t we? Well I found out, that my version was 9.x and it prompted with an available update! So Microsoft’s download page opened. http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=6544 

It only displays a small 1 kb file! a “readme.txt” file. That’s strange. So I checked again for an available download link, but ended up with the same readme file.

This is the content of the text file:

FxCop Installation Instructions 1. Download the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4 version 7.1. 2. Run %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Bin\FXCop\FxCopSetup.exe to install FxCop.

More...

I recently stumbled upon a small bug which had to do with a part of C# code that cleans up an HTML string which came from a database. This string is used as output on the web and therefore needs to be w3c and tidy!

I always used Tidy.Net for it. Really liked it and decided to check for a new version of that library while I was doing some code maintenance. That library's latest release date is from June 2005! that’s over 6 years old!

So I decided to go and look for a better solution. I found the TidyManaged project from June 2010. I wasn’t directly motivated to migrate to this library so my next step was a showdown between the two. More...

Today I had a DataTable object with the top x rows of a query.

select top 23 * from products

So my Asp.Net C# code looked like this:

private void SampleMethod(int toShow)
{
    string sql = "SELECT top " + toShow + " * from products";
    SqlCommand com = new SqlCommand(sql);
    DataTable dt = dal.GetDataTable(com);
    if (dt.Rows.Count > 0)
    {
        var a = dt.AsEnumerable().Where(
                p => p.Field<int>("stock") > p.Field<int>("ProductMinStock"))
        DataList2.DataSource = a;
        DataList2.DataBind();
    }
}

This crashed as you might have noticed. The error was: