Finally managed to solve a weird issue with external Google authentication in a new MVC 5 application I am working on (CrowdBacklog). This is to help me remember what to do and hopefully help others fix their issues if they stumble upon it… The Scenario VS2013 update 2 Brand new MVC 5 project targeting .Net 4.5.1 – no old MVC4 / Web Forms crud messing things up Startup.Auth.cs has been updated with Google clientid and […] Read more »
Features help us plan work better in Team Foundation Service Scrum process
Recently a new work item type named “Feature” popped up in the web UI for Team Foundation Service in both the Scrum and generic Agile process templates. Unfortunately it was not included in any of the backlogs or standard queries by default and I have been experimenting with using it for solving some issues we have been having with longer term planning and the Scrum process template and I believe I have found a good […] Read more »
Cross platform tooling and iOS / AppStore PIE requirements
Apple have recently introduced an additional verification for iOS Appstore submissions. Developers (including myself) have received warnings that their applications are not Position Independant Executables: Non-PIE Binary – The executable ‘myapp.app’ is not a Position Independent Executable. Please ensure that your build settings are configured to create PIE executables. For XCode based objective-c developers the fix is easy just enable PIE in XCode (your deployment target must be >= 4.3) – disregard the double negatives, […] Read more »
Getting into iOS and Android development with Xamarin
I haven’t posted for a while (like 6 months or so) due to a really exciting project that I have been working on. I have been bound by a confidentiality agreement and so have avoided posting in order to not cross any lines that may cause legal issues… The project that I have been working on is a multi-platform native mobile app for a major European travel company. We looked at several ways to deliver the project […] Read more »
Fixing Cross Appdomain Call Timeouts
Working with dynamically loaded assemblies in a separate AppDomain is a powerful tool for protecting your execution context and creating a pluggable arcitecture. Brad Smith has written a great post on how to set it up using a generic architecture. There is one issue with the way he set it up for a project I have been involved in which resulted in us getting the dreaded remoting exception “Object: has been disconnected or does not exist […] Read more »
Mocking a LINQ Queryable Repository for TDD
Using ORM frameworks like Entity Framework and NHibernate has become standard practice for many developers. POCO using Entity Framework also supports test-driven-development nicely since we can create tests for our business domain objects without having a dependency on the repository used to store them. Entity Framework also supports LINQ queries which allows us to avoid defining every conceivable query necessary for our application ahead of time, instead letting the code that uses the domain objects construct a […] Read more »
WP7 Emulator No Go on Windows 8 inside Parallels 8
After a bunch of work trying to get the WP8 emulator running, and failing miserably, I set to work on trying to get a Windows 8 Parallels 8 environment set up for working with Visual Studio 2010 and Windows Phone 7.5. After hours of installing Visual Studio 2010, Service Packs, Microsoft Games for Windows (required by the SDK on Windows 8?!), WP SDK 7.1 and the WP SDK 7.1.1 update I was finally ready to […] Read more »
6 Steps To Get Entity Framework 5 Working with MySql 5.5
After much battling with configuration and such I have finally managed to get EF5 Code First and MySql 5 working together using the Oracle/MySql .NET Connector 6.5.4 or the official Connector version 6.6.4. This configuration does not currently support Migrations. The steps are as follows: Grab EF 5 from NuGet Grab MySql.Data and MySql.Data.Entity from NuGet (6.5.4) or MySql (6.6.4) Configure a MySql Data Provider Configure a MySql Connection String Create a Custom MySql Database […] Read more »
Using MySql 5 as Membership Backend for ASP.NET 4.5 MVC 4 Application
Oracle provide MySql ASP.Net web providers through NuGet – search for MySql.Web. Using the MySql providers you can easily use MySql as your membership/profile/role backend for an ASP.Net application. But beware the MySql providers do not currently support the ASP.NET 4.5 templates since those templates use ExtendedMembershipProvider and SimpleMembershipProvider and they have an internal dependency on MS SQL Server… I am going to demonstrate using it as the membership provider for an MVC 4 application […] Read more »
Using NuGet and Git Together
Just had to setup a new project with NuGet packages using Git as source control. In order to set this up properly you need to add #Nuget packages/ to your .gitignore file so that all the binaries, configs and what ever other resources the NuGet packages contain don’t get committed to your repository. This can significantly speed up push and pull requests between repositories with .NET code since you can exclude many megabytes of unnecessary synchronisation and rely […] Read more »