A new blogging opportunity

A little over a week ago I was contacted for a new blogging opportunity and I decided to give it a try.

When having a blog it’s nice to be noticed by people every once in a while. So when I was contacted by the Technorati Editorial Team (TET, really?) last week with an invitation to write for them I decided to at least investigate. It clearly was a mass-mailed invitation, so I was not as keen as I was when joining SilverlightShow.Net.

So what got me on board then? Well, let’s think about why I stopped writing for SilverlightShow, because let’s be honest, SilverlightShow did pay me for my articles and Technorati is not. Well, obviously there is the decision on stopping with Silverlight as our go-to UI technology, but it was not a deal breaker. In the end I was just to busy to crank out lengthy posts with lots of code and it became increasingly hard to find good topics to write about.

What makes writing for Technorati different is that they are looking for news and opinion posts in IT and they are looking for relatively short posts. Another thing that they allow, which I like, is reposting a post I wrote for Technorati here.

I finished my first post for Technorati last Friday and they published it a few hours later. By Saturday morning the link was Tweeted sixteen times, which means it generated more Tweets on its own than I did with all the posts I’ve done so far. I also got a very informative comment on the post, so to me this was a successful experiment. I do plan on writing more posts for Technorati and I also plan on reposting right here, for your convenience.

Enjoy.

Parsing CSS for analysis

This time we’ll look into parsing CSS so we can use the result for analysis.

The story

As we are starting a new project using ASP.NET MVC3 one of the things I was thinking about was how to better manage our CSS and JavaScript. The first thing that I figured would be great was if you could to some static analysis on all of your CSS files to see if certain situations arise.

The issue with multiple people working on the same HTML based UI is that it can be hard to find out what CSS class to use. Because of that you might end up with classes doing the same thing, classes being defined more then once with different definitions, etc..

All this leads up to a less then ideal situation. Removing the cause of the problem, not knowing what CSS class to use, proves difficult. Helping counter the symptoms of the problem is proving a lot easier, so that’s the path I chose for, right now.

A two part solution

In order to do static analysis on something that is only available to me in plain text, I first need to parse the plain text into something that is easier to analyze. Then I can use the result to do the actual analysis on and communicate the result.

Analyzing how to parse CSS

To write a parser for any language requires a deep understanding of its syntax. Fortunately for me CSS is not a very complex language. W3Schools.com proves to be very helpful in providing us with an explanation on the CSS syntax. It comes down to this:

• A CSS document consists of CSS rules
• A CSS rule consists of a Selector and a set of Declarations
• Each declaration consists of a property and a value
• Comments can exist at the top level of the CSS document (outside of the CSS rules) or in between declarations

In order to do static analysis on this I came up with some interface definitions that allow me to query the structure of a CSS document:

   1: public enum SelectorType

   2: {

   3:     Tag,

   4:     Id,

   5:     Class

   6: }

   7:  

   8: public interface ICSSDocument

   9: {

  10:     string FilePath { get; set; }

  11:     IEnumerable<IRule> Rules { get; }

  12:     void AddRule(IRule rule);

  13: }

  14:  

  15: public interface IRule

  16: {

  17:     ISelector Selector { get; set; }

  18:     IEnumerable<IDeclaration> Declarations { get; }

  19:     void AddDeclaration(IDeclaration declaration);

  20: }

  21:  

  22: public interface ISelector

  23: {

  24:     string Name { get; set; }

  25:     SelectorType SelectorType { get; set; }

  26: }

  27:  

  28: public interface IDeclaration

  29: {

  30:     string Name { get; set; }

  31:     string Value { get; set; }

  32: }

Note that this might not be final as I might come up with requirements implementing the static analysis.

For parsing text like this there are always several approaches. In this case I decided that using plain and simple text parsing would be the most flexible, as I might want to add features to the parser in the future. Here is what I came up with for the main parse loop:

   1: public void Parse()

   2: {

   3:     string data = File.ReadAllText(FilePath);

   4:  

   5:     _position = 0;

   6:     _isInComment = false;

   7:     while (_position < data.Length)

   8:     {

   9:         if (IsEndOfFile(data))

  10:         {

  11:             break;

  12:         }

  13:         HandleBeginOfComment(data);

  14:         HandleEndOfComment(data);

  15:         if (!_isInComment)

  16:         {

  17:             HandleRule(data);

  18:         }

  19:         else

  20:         {

  21:             _position++;

  22:         }

  23:     }

  24: }

As you can see I have a (private) field to keep track of the position within the CSS document and another field to keep track of comments.

You might find the IsEndOfFile method weird as I have a condition within the while loop that should do the same thing. However I need to check ahead one position in case I’m still checking for comments (or are in a comment for that matter). The definition of the method is quite simple:

   1: private bool IsEndOfFile(string data)

   2: {

   3:     return _position == data.Length - 1;

   4: }

The HandleBeginOfComment method checks for the start of a comment:

   1: private void HandleBeginOfComment(string data)

   2: {

   3:     if (data[_position] == '/' && data[_position + 1] == '*')

   4:     {

   5:         _position += 2;

   6:         _isInComment = true;

   7:     }

   8: }

Basically it checks for the string /* and if it finds that string at the current position it moves the cursor by two characters and sets the _isInComment flag. HandleEndOfComment does the same thing for */ and sets the _isInComment flag to false again. Any comments are currently ignored, but it is easy to extend the main parse loop to allow for parsing comments as well.

The HandleRule method takes care of all the parsing magic, which makes sense as the Rule is the main component of a CSS document.

   1: private void HandleRule(string data)

   2: {

   3:     while (_position < data.Length && !StartOfRule(data[_position]))

   4:     {

   5:         HandleBeginOfComment(data);

   6:         if (_isInComment)

   7:         {

   8:             return;

   9:         }

  10:         _position++;

  11:     }

  12:     string selectorData = GetSelector(data);

  13:     string declarationsData = GetDeclarations(data);

  14:  

  15:     IRule rule = _kernel.Get<IRule>();

  16:     

  17:     ISelector selector = _kernel.Get<ISelector>();

  18:     selector.Name = selectorData;

  19:     selector.SelectorType = GetSelectorTypeFromName(selectorData);

  20:     rule.Selector = selector;

  21:  

  22:     HandleDeclarations(rule, declarationsData);

  23:  

  24:     AddRule(rule);

  25: }

The first loop deals with running into a comment later on in the document. If we do run into a comment we simply return to the main loop, which will then deal with finding the end of the comment. In the same loop it checks for the start of a Rule.

If we are still in the method after this loop, we have reached the start of a Rule. As we’ve noted earlier a Rule consists of a Selector and a set of Declarations. The methods GetSelector and GetDeclarations take care of parsing those portions of the CSS document. Once we have that data we can use it to create a rule. We use a Ninject Kernel to create instances of both the IRule and ISelector implementations.

Note that right now we handle the Selector like it’s a single entity. A future improvement might be to split up the Selector into parts and assign types to them individually.

The HandleDeclarations method takes the declarations text, parses it into IDeclaration implementations and adds them to the given IRule:

   1: private void HandleDeclarations(IRule rule, string declarationsData)

   2: {

   3:     string[] declarations = declarationsData.Split(new char[] { ';' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

   4:     foreach (string declaration in declarations)

   5:     {

   6:         if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(declaration))

   7:         {

   8:             continue;

   9:         }

  10:         int splitterIndex = declaration.IndexOf(":");

  11:         string declarationName = declaration.Substring(0, splitterIndex).Trim();

  12:         string declarationValue = declaration.Substring(splitterIndex + 1).Trim();

  13:  

  14:         IDeclaration declarationInstance = _kernel.Get<IDeclaration>();

  15:         declarationInstance.Name = declarationName;

  16:         declarationInstance.Value = declarationValue;

  17:         rule.AddDeclaration(declarationInstance);

  18:     }

  19: }

Note that I use String.Trim to make sure we don’t end up with white space in our declaration data, which could get in the way of our analysis (and is of no value any way in CSS).

So far so good. We can now parse CSS into an object model, which allows us to analyze the CSS in a structured way. I plan on writing a next post that shows the analysis based on this model.

No complete source included: Unfortunately, as this project is owned by my employer, I can not include full source code, however the parts I included should provide you with a good insight into parsing CSS.

Moving from Silverlight to MVC3

In this post I’d like to explain why we felt the need to abandon our Silverlight development in favor of MVC3.

As some of you may very well know, I’ve been pushing Silverlight within our company from as early as Silverlight 2 Beta 1, back in 2008. Still, this last summer I felt I had to raise the question: Is this still the right technology for our company?

Technology choices are about requirements

When we first chose Silverlight as our UI technology, we came up with a set of requirements. Our application should have a (near) zero footprint on client systems. It should be accessible through the web. Deployment on clients should be effortless or none existent. It should look great without a whole lot of effort. Silverlight checks all these boxes (it still does).

We write summer of 2010. The iPad has been around for several months now and it has been a great success. Smartphones are widely adopted to the point that we predict our customers will get interested in support for platforms like these when using our software.

Another thing we see is people working on more different platforms than before. Was it ok to ask for a certain browser in 2009, in 2010 our customers began to ask for a browser independent UI, not only on Windows, but also on a lot of other platforms.

To see what exactly would be the response of our customers we decided to build a native iPhone application with a limited set of functionality. We started the project early 2011 and published the first Dutch HRM app for any smartphone platform in may. It was a hit, not only because of responses by our clients, but also because of responses by our competitors.

Requirements shift, the world changes

This lead us to conclude that we needed to do something to support a new requirement. Our application, at least in part, should be available on mobile devices and tablets. And we should make sure we could drop the browser requirement we had active, even with our Silverlight 4 UI*.

That is why, during one of our meetings about what to build next, I felt the need to ask “Shouldn’t we move away from Silverlight and adopt ASP.NET MVC3 with HTML5?” It sure was painful, after investing over two and a half years in Silverlight to even suggest dropping it. However I felt then, and I still do, that a change had to be made. After some more debate on the consequences and some research, we are now putting in the effort to build the first parts of an MVC3 UI with the first steps into HTML 5 and CSS 3.

Luckily not all our efforts with Silverlight where in vain. We did deliver a good working product and we are committed to using, expanding and improving the middleware we developed for it. (Do you see the power of a Service Oriented Architecture?).

So is Silverlight really dead now?

Some of you may remember this post. In that post I state that Silverlight is actually the better technology for writing Line Of Business Applications. Even after researching ASP.NET MVC3 and HTML 5 further, I do still believe that, however because of the changes in how people use computers it simply fails to check one box for our customers.

Silverlight is no where near dead. It will still be used in many ways, including new platforms like Windows 8 and, for example Microsoft CRM 2011. Microsoft is integrating Silverlight in more and more of their own platforms. Also with the introduction of Silverlight 5 there will be many cool new features coming to the browser. Therefor I doubt Microsoft will drop Silverlight any time soon.

Consequences for Developers 42

Unfortunately our move away from Silverlight does have some consequences for this blog. First of all, my long running series of posts “Adventures while building a Silverlight Enterprise application has ended with part 41 (which is slightly painful for an obvious reason).

It also means I will no longer be writing posts for SilverlightShow.net. I’d like to use this opportunity to thank Svetla for supporting me for the past years.

And finally, it will also mean a lot less content on Silverlight, but hopefully a lot more content on MVC3, HTML 5, CSS 3, jQuery, etc..

It’s the end of another interesting period in my professional live and the start of a new one. I hope you have enjoyed my articles on Silverlight and I hope to see you around.

 

 

* The IE dependency was not actually caused by Silverlight, but by the integration with the Microsoft Report Viewer we used.

Trivialities about nullable types

Sometimes things in the world of software are not that hard. They are just poorly documented or documentation is hard to find. This surely applies for some use cases of nullable types. This post shows the use of nullable types in generic methods and how it’s easier than you might think.

An introduction to nullable types in C#

In order to understand the use of nullable types, it is imperative that you understand the difference between a value type and a reference type. For a complete description of these things have a look at chapter 4 of the C# 4.0 Language Specification (included with Visual Studio 2010). In short it comes down to this: value types directly contain their value, while reference types contain a reference to their value. Value types are always either a struct type or an enumeration type. Struct types include things like numeric types.

As value types always directly contain their value, they can not be null. However, in some cases, you might want to have a structure where you can identify if a value type is actually not defined. In lots of cases simply defining 0 as the undefined value for an int, for example. will not suffice. 0 might actually be a meaningful value for an int.

To provide a way of declaring a variable of a value type that can be null, C# introduces the question mark as a suffix to a value type:

int nonNullableInt = null;
int? nullableInt = null;

Line 1 doesn’t work, because null can not be assigned to a value type. Line 2 does work, because of the question mark behind the variable type.

Under the hood of nullable types

So what happens here? In fact the question mark in this context is syntactic sugar for Nullable<T>. So what happens is that nullableInt in the previous example is actually of type Nullable<int>. Because of this the variable now has a property Value, which contains the actual value if one is a available, and it gets HasValue of type bool, which indicates if a value is actually available.

Note that Nullable<T> is defined as a struct and is therefor a value type itself. Also note that T is limited to contain structs. Therefor it is not possible to apply Nullable<T> (or the question mark suffix for that matter) to a reference type.

Nullable types in generic methods

Now let’s get to the point. Let’s say you want to do some generic handling of input. So write a generic method with a signature like the following:

static string GetStringRepresentation<T>(T value)

You can simply call this with both non-nullable and nullable types. Because the compiler infers the type variable T I don’t even have to tell it what type value is explicitly. Let’s say we have the next program.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
	int nonNullableInt = 0;
	int? nullableInt = null;

	Console.WriteLine(GetStringRepresentation(nonNullableInt));
	Console.WriteLine(GetStringRepresentation(nullableInt));

	Console.WriteLine("IsNullable(int): {0}", IsNullable(typeof(int)));
	Console.WriteLine("IsNullable(int?): {0}", IsNullable(typeof(int?)));

	Console.ReadLine();
}

The output of line 7 is actually an empty string. This is because the call to value is actually boxed because the call to ToString() is actually a call to object.ToString(). Because nullableInt is in effect null, it will return an empty string.

Obviously there are many reasons why that might not be correct for a nullable int, so let’s find a way to handle nullable types better in our generic method. The first thing to do is to detect if the passed in value is actually a nullable type. To do this we can use the type system:

static bool IsNullable(Type valueType)
{
	return valueType.IsGenericType && valueType.GetGenericTypeDefinition().Equals(typeof(Nullable<>));
}

What this method does is use the type passed in and checks if it’s a generic type. If it isn’t, it can’t be nullable. It needs that check because otherwise our second check on GetGenericTypeDefinition would throw an exception as it would not have a generic type definition to return. Our second check compares the returned generic type definition with the Nullable<> type. Another task we need to accomplish is to get a default value for a nullable type, or, more specifically, get a default value for it’s generic argument:

static object GetDefaultValue(Type nullableType)
{
	Type valueType = nullableType.GetGenericArguments()[0];
	return Activator.CreateInstance(valueType);
}

This method takes a type and gets the first generic argument. This code assumes that you’ve already made sure this type is actually a nullable type. Normally you could use the default keyword to get a default value from a generic argument by writing default(T). As in this case we don’t have an actual type declaration, but a Type instance, we need a different approach to get a default value. If you’d check out the C# 4.0 reference you’d find out that the default keyword simply calls a default constructor on the type passed in and returns the result. To mimic that behavior, I simply call Activator.CreateInstance with the underlying type to get a default value. Now if we rewrite our GetStringRepresentation method to use the new methods above, we would end up with something like this:

static string GetStringRepresentation<T>(T value)
{
	if (IsNullable(typeof(T)) && value == null)
	{
		return GetDefaultValue(typeof(T)).ToString();
	}
	return value.ToString();
}

Now, if we call this method with a int? it would return 0 instead of an empty string. For your convenience, I’ve uploaded a sample project here. I hope you’ve found this an interesting tour around nullable types. If you have any questions or comments, please use the comments form below. Thank you for reading.

Bigger is not always better: Communication breakdown

Using Excel 2010 on Windows 7 to make an estimate for a new project, I ran into this problem that I think is both funny and a bit frustrating.

As we all know, Microsoft is a huge software company, with many developers and lots of QA people. Where they used to suffer from a reputation of poor quality, recent years have shown us Microsoft can make decent quality software with great features. Part of that ability comes from having lots of people working on projects. However, it can work against you as well, as Microsoft demonstrates in the following bug.

I’ve been a keen user of Excel for the past decade for a lot of different tasks. From simple estimations to long-list and complete data conversions, I’ve done it all with Excel. One of the long used features is the ability to block indent inside a cell. You know, these two buttons:

I use this feature frequently, so I figured a keyboard shortcut would make me more productive. Fortunately for us Microsoft makes finding out shortcuts very easy. Just hover over the button:

Mm, something is not smelling right, but hey, maybe the Office developers did a great job on implementing these shortcut keys. So let’s just try it…

…No. That’s not what I wanted to happen. Instead of indenting the contents of my cell, it showed the Windows 7 process switching dialog thingy or whatever it’s called. You know, the preview of your open windows?

Turns out both the Windows 7 team and the Excel team are using the same shortcut here. Excel has been using it for a while (since before Excel 97!), but in Windows this was only introduced in Windows 7 for the first time! Didn’t anyone figure “hey, we wanted to use this keyboard shortcut in Windows 7, but it’s already used in Excel 2010 so let’s have a meeting to discuss this”? In fact, shouldn’t a company like Microsoft have some sort of registration on what keyboard shortcuts are used where?

Even worse, Microsoft knows about the problem right now and has it published on their website. Is it really that hard to get a patch out for Excel to assign a different shortcut key to this function?

There is a lesson to be learned here. If you work at a small software company (with say, under 20 developers), make sure you utilize this advantage of a small team and communicate! It can make sure that your next product / project will be great.

Code generation is a basic developer skill

“Give a good developer a 40 hour task and he’ll spend 39 hours writing a program that can do the task in 1 hour.” – unknown

Really? This seems risky!

It can look risky, can’t it. You might end up with a half working program and not enough time to do the job. There are approaches that reduce this risk, but more on that later.

Why should you even bother? Simple math tells us it’s not faster to do so (at least not in the above example). However, experience tells us that in general most jobs will be repeated. Now, with the above example, if it’s only repeated once, you have a 39 hour profit, as you can now do the job in 1 hour.

Obviously, things don’t work like that in the real world. Automating a process usually takes longer than actually manually doing the work. In fact, when you want to automate something, that usually means you first have to do it by hand at least once, so you know what you’re automating.

But it’s also unlikely that you will only repeat a process just once. Often tasks are done many times and then it becomes worth the effort of automation. Let’s look at a current example.

A common case

As some of you may know, I’m working on a line of business application with a Silverlight UI and a WCF service layer (although the used technology doesn’t really matter for this case). Part of writing most line of business applications is writing business objects that represent your model and writing logic to retrieve data from the database, either directly or through some ORM.

Another part is writing lot’s of “forms” if you will, to input data into. Usually these forms follow a common pattern. Both of these parts, the business objects and the forms, contain a lot of repetitive work to do manually. Some of the code can be moved into generic super classes, but most of the code is of a nature that doesn’t allow for generalization. This is where automation comes into play. In this case, why write all that code yourself if you can also generate it?

When we first started out with this application, we did set out to build some code generation. Unfortunately most of us didn’t have a lot of experience with code generation as such, so wrong choices were made (C# generation with a StringBuilder is not the way to go and the same goes for Code DOM). After the initial versions of our code generation engine, we were forced to spend all our time on getting a first release out to our customers and no more work on automation in any form was a predictable result.

So, are you a good developer?

We all fall into this trap at some point. I know I have several times. You let a deadline pressure you to much, or you go back to your old naïve thinking saying that this will just be some demo code and it won’t end up in production anyway. Whatever the reason, we all end up breaking our own rules from time to time.

Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t make you a bad developer. In fact it means you are focusing on how to providing value to your customers, which is key for a good developer. Also, breaking these rules from time to time keeps us alert on why they are rules in the first place.

However, we should also take time every now and then to take a step back and have a look at what we are doing. In my case I found we should put a lot more effort in making our development process more efficient. This means making more code generic, refactoring existing generic code to fit our needs better, and generating more code.

Generating code, a daunting task?

To some developers generating code may seem like a daunting task. Don’t worry. That’s a good thing, because you won’t just dive in without giving it some thought. As you can see from our example, having a developer that things “Oh, this is easy. I’ll just take a StringBuilder and push out lots of .cs files" is far from ideal.

Actually the first step in code generation is not writing a code generation process. It all starts with meta data. If you don’t have something to base your code generation process on, then how are you going to generate code in the first place?

In case of a line of business application, often your data model can provide you with some meta data. In fact we started out with a stored procedure that would take meta data from our data model in SQL Server and put it in another database. Then we would generate source from that data.

Another source for meta data may actually come from people entering that data into an application. We use that too, to allow our functional specialists to provide us with information to generate the forms in the GUI.

Once you have your meta data in some form or the other, you can write your generation process. Actually, that part doesn’t have to be hard. In the end it’s just creating text from data, which most web developers have been doing for years. The main problem is integrating your process with your IDE. That is where T4 comes in.

As some of you may know T4 is already used in Visual Studio to generate source code. It also provides you with a simple button to trigger the execution of all T4 templates within your solution. This is obviously a lot easier than adding files generated by some external program.

As for editing these templates, Visual Studio doesn’t come with standard support for this (it’s treated as text by default, so no IntelliSense). If you are serious about T4, you should check out Tangible. They have an editor for T4, integrated in Visual Studio, both in a free edition as well as a pro edition with more features. Both features do come with IntelliSense and Highlighting, but the free edition only supports limited namespaces and assemblies. You can find them here.

But what about those risks?

I hear you. Starting with this it can be scary. The trick is to start small and then keep on growing your code generation process to support more and more scenario’s. This way you can work on your code generation in iterations and have a working end result often. This reduces the risk, because you can, at any point, decide that you will no longer extend the code generation process, but extend the generated code by hand.

Also, before generating any code, you should have at least written and tested it once, to make sure you know the structure of your code and what meta data is needed in order to generate it. This way you also know you will end up with code that works.

Conclusion

I hope you realize the potential of code generation and how this can really make you more productive. I can tell you from experience that it also makes software development more fun, even if you have to build a lot of the same. With the right tools I’m confident that any development team could benefit from automating their work.