Nick McKenna's Blog

Reporting Services 2008 And AVG Link Scanner

Nick McKenna — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 14:52:37 GMT

I have been tearing my hair out for weeks on a Report Services 2008 problem. The symptoms are that requests to the web service that are made programmatically never seem to get to the RS ReportServer/ReportService2005.asmx web service never seem to get there and the ReportViewer component hangs try to get the reports.

Interestingly, Report Manager works fine which makes me think it doesn't use the web service!

I have tried all sorts of things including turning off the firewall, reinstalling SQL 2008 etc etc. I was astonished to find out that disabling the LinkScanner in AVG was the final solution to the problem... Wht did AVG not tell me it was blocking these requests?????

Bizarre, but problem solved now!

An Introduction To Agile Software Development - Feb 15th 2010

Nick McKenna — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:11:58 GMT

Just a quick heads up to the Agile community in Yorkshire!

There is another one day course on "An Introduction To Agile Software Development" at NTI in Leeds on February 15th 2010. The course is full of practical advice and aimed at teams who are just adopting Agile or who are thinking about adopting Agile.

The course is suitable for developers, testers, managers, business analysts, directors, product owners and anyone else involved in the Agile process.

For more information about this course, visit the NTI web site.

Agile Yorkshire - 9th Dec - Old Broadcasting House, David Joyce, Kanban for Software Engineering

Nick McKenna — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:07:06 GMT

Details

Kanban focuses on becoming successful, which may lead to being Agile. Lean is a set of principles that are being applied to software engineering by a growing number of practitioners. Kanban is a true pull system implementation in software engineering. The five pillars of Lean, which Kanban fully implements are pull, continuous flow, customer value, waste elimination and continuous improvement. The Principles of Kanban are: to agree a team capacity, to limit WIP (Work in Process) to that capacity, to pull value through the value stream, and to make both work and workflow visible. It has proven easy to adopt and lowers resistance to change. The result is a gradual, incremental approach to change that is empowering for everyone.

This meeting will be a special end of year event held at Old Broadcasting House (http://www.ntileeds.co.uk/old-broadcasting-house/).

Speaker

David is an agile development manager and coach with 12 years technical team management and coaching experience, and 20 years software development experience. In recent years, using Scrum and XP, David has coached onshore and offshore development teams and successfully launched an internet video startup from inception to launch. David currently works for BBC Worldwide as a Development Manager, coaching teams on Scrum, Lean and Kanban. David is a certified Scrum Master and Lean practitioner.

Google Wave For Agile

Nick McKenna — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:00:54 GMT

Now that my Google Wave beta account has been activated I am starting to explore the possibilities! The first thing that came into my head was that Wave could be a great collaboration tool for exploring requirements / User Stories. You can have an ongoing conversation about the requirements that is documented. You can also have people join and leave the conversation as often as you need. You can upload video, photos etc that show details of a bug or a required feature. It is also ready to run and does not need any customisation work.

I think that Wave would be pretty awful for recording the final spec (maybe Google Docs for that), but for the ongoing exploration of requirements, I think it is good. Obviously, there is not substitute for a face-to-face conversation, but where that is not possible, this could be the answer!

Any thoughts?

Microsoft Sync Framework v2

Nick McKenna — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:59:30 GMT

Our work with the MS Sync Framework is going very well and the v2 release could not have been better timed! We are syncing data from a web-based application (which runs under SQL Server 2008) to a local SQL Server Compact Edition (3.5 sp1) cache. It has taken us a couple of weeks to get up to speed with everything. There are a lot of steps involved in our scenario:

Create a Sync Framework project
Get the sync working between databases on a local machine
Switch to using a WCF web service call for the sync
Hack away at the original db schema until it works (primary key issues, clustered indexes etc)
Choose the right security mode for the WCF call (nightmare)
Create a new web service on the test server for the WCF call
Create a Windows app to Sync to
etc etc etc

One of the biggest challenges is retrofitting the Sync Framework on to an existing database schema. My general advice (having been through the pain) would be:

USE GUIDS FOR ALL YOUR PRIMARY KEYS!

We did not do this in our production database (we didn't know about the need to Sync way back then) and it adds some interesting technical issues! We use Integers with Identity set for primary keys. I should also mention that are attempting bi-directional synchronisation... The main problem is that after the initial sync, the seeds of identity fields are all set to 1. This means that all of the clients and the server will insert records using the same primary key values! The Sync framework cannot handle this, so we need to make a manual intervention.

The solution is to seed the server at a high value and the clients at lower values. We are using 32 bit integers for PKs, so we simply allocate a client id to each client (we actually allocate a low number and shift it left 24 bits to give the new seed). We tries some other schemes such as having the server start at 1, but we had problems with syncing.

The other problem is that the documentation for the Sync Framework is not great at the moment. We spent a lot of time working some basic stuff out for ourselves. If I ever get some free time I will do a tutorial based on our product going from nothing to have a complete and working Sync Framework application... It might happen...

Overall, working with the Sync framework is good, but you need to be prepared to get technical and work through problems yourself as the documentation is still a little light!

Agile Training Course Funded By Train To Gain

Nick McKenna — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:10:36 GMT

From November, I am teaching a new Agile software development course for NTI (NTI is part of Leeds Metropolitan University’s Innovation North faculty). If your employer is in Yorkshire or Humber, then you will qualify for the Train To Gain funding which reduces the cost of the course from £290 to only £120.

The course is great for people who are new to Agile (thinking about adopting or in the process of adopting). Attendees include:

Developers
Testers
Product Owners
Business Analysts
Project Managers
Executives

Topics covered include:

Problems With Waterfall
What Is Agile?
Who Is Who?
Agile Teams
Agile Artefacts
Agile Process
Agile Tools
Scaling Up Agile
Agile Client Relationships

If you are interested in finding out more, please visit:

Yorkshire And Humber NTI Agile Course Description

Method is only supported if the user name parameter matches the user name in the current windows identity.

Nick McKenna — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:07:51 GMT

I've been doing an Intranet application with ASP.Net 3.5, WCF and Silverlight 3 for the last few weeks. It seems that getting these things to play together is not so easy at the moment!

I am using Windows Integrated Authentication for the whole shooting match since it is on an Intranet. I thought that this would make it easy!

The functionality of the Silverlight application changes depending on the roles that the user has. First off, there don't appear to be any user querying facilities in Silverlight (e.g. like the Role Manager method Roles.IsUserInRole(username)). The general consensus seems to be that you should call a WCF service to get this kind of functionality. That is no problem as my Silverlight app already uses WCF!

I have impersonation configured in the web.config for the WCF services and the ASP.Net web site. I can call the services and see that WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name is set to the name of the user accessing the Silverlight app. Great! I can also use the WCF Security Context and see that the current user is the Windows user using the Silverlight app. Happy days!

HOWEVER

Whenever I use a Role Manager method such as Roles.IsUserInRole(username) I get the error:

"Method is only supported if the user name parameter matches the user name in the current windows identity."

I have scoured the Internet looking for a way to get this to work, but alas, I cannot find one. It appears that Role Manager does not work in the ASP.Net, Silverlight and WCF scenario. My solution is this:

///

/// Find information about a user's roles.

/// </summary>

/// <returns>The list of roles for the specified user.</returns>

[

{

WindowsIdentity id = WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent();

foreach (var group in id.Groups) NTAccount account = (NTAccount) group.Translate(typeof (NTAccount));

{

string name = account.Value;return userRoles;

userRoles.Add(name);

}

Obviously, I'm stuck with Windows Authentication now, but that doesn't really matter to me!

OperationBehavior(Impersonation = ImpersonationOption.Required)]public IList<string> GetRolesForCurrentUser()List<string> userRoles = new List<string>();

Silverlight 3 minRuntimeVersion

Nick McKenna — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 08:22:42 GMT

I've been doing a lot of Silverlight lately for a couple of projects. I upgraded them to the new Silverlight using the Visual Studio upgrade wizard that started automatically. It all works fine other than the minRuntimeVersion attributes on HTML pages that reference Silverlight xap files.

The problem is that if the Silverlight control was compiled under version 3 and you specify the version 2 runtime in minRuntimeVersion, you get an ugly error and download instruction:

If you update the minRuntimeVersion, then you get a much more user friendly version:

For the record, the old minRuntimeVersion was 2.0.31005.0 and the new runtime version appears to be 3.0.40624.0

asp:menu And Internet Explorer 8

Nick McKenna — Sun, 17 May 2009 15:07:48 GMT

Now that IE8 has become an important download from Microsoft, I expect to see the asp:menu bug raising its head more frequently. Mostly the asp.Net controls seem to work well in IE8. Unfortunately there is a bug in the menu control that is highlighted when using a standards compliant browser (like IE8, but interestingly Firefox does not comply with this particular standard).

The symptom is that the dynamic portion of an asp:menu is rendered entirely in white (i.e. unreadable) in IE8. There are several solutions:

View the site in compatibility mode
Download the hotfix from Microsoft
Use a CSS adapter for your controls
Add a z-order to the CSS for your dynamic menu
Add a meta tag to the web site

Personally, I went for the z-order solution as it was the quickest to implement (am I not Agile?). To implement this, change the CSS class of your Dynamic menu. I do this using the DynamicMenuStyle-CssClass attribute of the asp:menu control.

e.g.

<asp:Menu ID="Menu1" runat="server" DataSourceID="StdSiteMapDataSource" Orientation="Horizontal"
  StaticMenuStyle-CssClass="StaticMenu" StaticMenuItemStyle-CssClass="StaticMenuItem"
  DynamicMenuItemStyle-CssClass="DynamicMenuItem" DynamicMenuStyle-CssClass="DynamicMenu"
  StaticHoverStyle-CssClass="StaticMenuHover" StaticSelectedStyle-CssClass="StaticMenuSelected"
  OnMenuItemDataBound="Menu1_MenuItemDataBound" StaticEnableDefaultPopOutImage="False">
  <StaticMenuItemStyle ItemSpacing="0" />
</asp:Menu>

In my CSS file I have this:

.DynamicMenu
{
  background-color: #3e6fc8;
  margin-top: 1px;
  z-index: 100; /* IE 8 menu fix */
}

Check this blog entry out for some futher information about this.

64 Bit Update

Nick McKenna — Sun, 17 May 2009 14:50:32 GMT

After my debacle a couple of days ago removing my RAID array, I was thinking about how undramatic the shift to 64 bit has been for me.

I moved my server and principle development PC to 64 bit over the last few weeks. For the server I bought a completely new machine and installed 64 bit from scratch. My server and desktop are similar specs, both having quad core processors with 4Gb RAM (I'm thinking about upgrading the RAM further...)

In general, the move to 64 bit has been pretty simple. Almost everything I have installed works without problems. My desktop PC feels faster now and certainly gets to the Windows login screen much faster than it used to. It is tricky to specifically attribute that to the 64 bit move as I completely reinstalled Windows which always makes things move a bit faster! However, weeks (and several program installations) later, things are still moving along pretty quickly. I even installed Elder Scrolls Morrowind which runs without a hitch on a 64 bit platform!

My only real problem as been IIS 7 on a 64 bit platform. On the server I struggled to get Outlook Web Access working (and any other web site). I had to do a bit of Googling, but I eventually found out how to configure the server to permit 32 and 64 web sites to run side by side.

So overall, I would recommend looking at 64 computing for developers (and Morrowind fans).