So you have your shiny OS X connected to a VPN, good deal! The problem is, you can’t connect to any of the servers and workstations on the VPN. What could be wrong?

It could be that OS X is still trying to find those machines on the internet instead of looking for them on the VPN connection. We can tell OS X to check the VPN connection first by giving it a higher priority than the other network connections on your Mac.

To change the priority of your VPN connection:

1. Choose Apple menu > System Preferences and click Network.
2. Choose Set Service Order from the Action pop-up menu (looks like a gear).
3. Drag your VPN connection to the top of the list.
4. Click OK, and then click Apply to make the new settings active.

This solution saved my day when I couldn’t Remote Desktop into my workstation over the VPN.

For more information, refer to Apple’s documentation for this.

Are you tired of having to remember that ALT+0176 is the degree symbol ° ? Maybe there are other special characters that you want to be able to type easier.

Personally it was the degree symbol that got me, and since I never use my numpad, I decided it would be much more useful if those keys actually entered stuff that I cared about.

Here is a quick tutorial in using AutoHotkey to remap one of your numpad keys to the degree symbol. Of course you can expand on this beginning easily to solve whatever woes you are having.

Start out by going to the AutoHotkey website.

Download the AutoHotkey_L installer. This is the most recent version of AutoHotkey and specifically supports Unicode which is important for us.

Run the installer and leave all the defaults.

Look in your My Documents folder and open up AutoHotkey.ahk in a text editor that you can save as UTF-8 in.

If you don’t know what this means or don’t have an editor that can do this then download Notepad2 and open the file in that program.

Now that you have AutoHotkey.ahk opened, delete everything in there (after reading it if you care) and paste the following in its place.

NumpadIns::
Send °
return

Now save this file with UTF-8 encoding. If you are using Notepad2 you can do this by going to File | Encoding | UTF-8 and clicking Yes to the warning. Then click File | Save as usual.

Finally, run the AutoHotkey program from your Start Menu.

Now to try it out!

Put your focus in any text box. Anywhere. Go ahead. Now make sure you have NumLock turned OFF and hit the 0 key on your numpad.

See what just happened? No, that’s not a superscripted zero. That’s a degree symbol. Now that they are easy to type you are going to have to learn what it is! ;)

You can get a list of other special key names here: http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/KeyList.htm

This is just scratching the surface of what you can do with AutoHotkey scripts. Be sure to read up on the documentation for more ideas. Knowledge is power!

Here is a teaser of just a few of the tricks you can do:

• Create global shortcuts to run programs (ex. CTRL+Z to open a browser and navigate to a specific website.)
• Replace acronyms or common spelling mistakes (ex. replace “restraunt” -> “restaurant” automatically.)
• Toggle hidden files in Windows Explorer with a shortcut key.

For the past week or so I’ve gone without any Visual Studio enhancements. No ReSharper. No CodeRush. I knew that I didn’t leverage even a fraction of what these tools offer so I wanted to find out what I would miss.

Here’s what I’m missing the most. In no particular order.

1. Detection of errors before I compile.

2. Shortcut for moving a class to its own file.

   I like to build up features in the same file (for speed) and then refactor the classes into their own files later. A tedius process of copy/paste.

3. A rename function that is smart enough to rename the file as well.

4. Unit Test debugger.

   I don’t mind running tests in the NUnit GUI, it even feels faster sometimes, but I miss the ability to step into my tests. I use this feature a lot for exploring APIs.

5. Ability to generate constructors.

   Especially useful for creating custom exceptions where you want to implement all of the base constructors.

6. Fast code snippets.

   Visual Studio’s built in snippets are functional, but slow to access compared to the alternatives so I ended up not using them. I definitely prefer CodeRush’s snippets.

Do you work from the command line? Use PowerShell? SVN?

While the SVN command line client is certainly usable, there are definitely times where a GUI is more convenient. Specifically during a commit where you want to easily check/uncheck files and view diffs.

I got tired of having to open an explorer window to get into Tortoise SVN’s commit screen so I wrote this helper function.

Put this into your profile and you can start typing tsvn commit (or just tsvn) to open the Tortoise SVN commit dialog. Enjoy!

# Helper function for opening the Tortoise SVN GUI from a PowerShell prompt.
# Put this into your PowerShell profile.
# Ensure Tortoise SVN is in your PATH (usually C:\Program Files\TortoiseSVN\bin) 
function Svn-Tortoise([string]$Command = "commit") {
<#
.SYNOPSIS
  Launches TortoiseSVN with the given command.
  Opens the commit screen if no command is given.
  
  List of supported commands can be found at:
  http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/release/TortoiseSVN_en/tsvn-automation.html
#>
  TortoiseProc.exe /command:$Command /path:"$pwd"
}
Set-Alias tsvn "Svn-Tortoise"

I’ll cover these prerequisites in brief, but for this tip I’m going to assume a few things:

• You are running Windows and have PowerShell installed.
• You are familiar enough with PowerShell to care about your $PROFILE.

What is PowerShell?

In short, PowerShell is a new scripting language from Microsoft designed to replace the use of batch files and VBScript for administrating and automating Windows machines. The language leverages the .NET Framework such that anything you can do with .NET you can do with PowerShell. Typically you will be using PowerShell from the command line but there are lots of other ways to use it.

What is a PowerShell profile?

PowerShell has the concept of a script that will run each time you launch PowerShell. This is a really handy place to put any functions that you want to be available all the time. Initialize some variables, create some aliases, anything you do here will be there when you need it.

What are we doing here?

I’m going to give you one possible solution for keeping all of your scripts and settings (i.e. your profile) in sync no matter which computer you are on. No copy/pasting. No more wearing that USB dongle around your neck - seriously, that just screams geek.

Most steps have a sample PowerShell command that will do the trick. So fire up PowerShell and put on your scripting hat ‘cuz here we go!

1. Get Dropbox.
   Among other things, Dropbox makes keeping your files in sync across computers dead simple. If you aren’t using it you should be. It’s just that good.

2. Create a folder in Dropbox to hold your scripts.

   PS> New-Item $dropbox\scripts

   Anywhere you see $dropbox, assume this to be the path to your Dropbox folder. By default on Windows 7 this is %USERPROFILE%\Dropbox.

3. Copy your profile ps1 file into your new scripts folder.

   PS> Copy-Item $PROFILE $dropbox\scripts\profile.ps1

4. Edit your profile ps1 file (the original one) and “dot source” the one in your Dropbox folder.

   PS> ". $dropbox\scripts\profile.ps1" > $PROFILE

Pro Tip! As an alternative to dot sourcing your profile from Dropbox, you could instead create a symlink to it.

PS> /cmd /c mklink `"$PROFILE`" `"$dropbox\scripts\profile.ps1`"

Here’s my recipe for a painfree installation of Ruby on Windows.

1. Use the RubyInstaller from www.ruby-lang.org. I used Ruby 1.9.2-p0.
2. Install the Ruby DevKit by following the instructions in the Installation Overview. I used version DevKit-4.5.0-20100819-1536-sfx.

The DevKit is needed so that you can install gems that need to build native extensions. Without it when you try to gem install jekyll you will see an error like this:

ERROR: Error installing jekyll:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

'make' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

After installing DevKit gem install jekyll will work like a champ.

Good luck!

Recently my company has been working on a rewrite of one of our line-of-business applications. We have decided to leverage RIA Services in the new application. At the moment we are also using Entity Framework; that may or may not change.

Here are a few lessons I’ve learned so far when working with RIA Services.

Potentially massive (in terms of lines of code & logic) domain services

RIA doesn’t handle multiple domain services well. What I mean by this is that an entity cannot be shared between multiple services. This means that in most cases you are going to have domain services with lots of methods. Worst case, think having an insert, update and delete method for each entity in your domain.

Lesson: Accept that having lots of methods in your domain service is inevitable.

Aid: Keep the methods slim by not putting any business or data access logic in them.

Shared database entity temptation

LinqToEntitiesDomainService<> wraps up your Entity Framework ObjectContext and lets you access it directory in your domain service. There is also a LinqToSqlDomainService<>. This makes it really tempting to simply return your Entity Framework or LINQ to SQL entities from your domain service methods. This is a very bad idea.

Lesson: Don’t return your database entities from your domain service.

Aids:

• Create a new DTO (Data Transfer Object) for each entity you need to return from your domain service.
• Make sure your domain service operations return these DTOs and not the entities that Entity Framework or LINQ to SQL generate for you.

DomainService.Submit() summary

When your client application makes changes and then calls SubmitChanges() on the client-side, RIA Services sends this set of changes to the server as a ChangeSet. This ChangeSet will include deletes, updates and inserts - basically anything your client did before calling SubmitChanges().

DomainService is the base class that all RIA Services inherit from. This includes the LinqToEntitiesDomainService<> and LinqToSqlDomainService<> classes.

This base class has a Submit() method. This is basically what is being called when your client calls Submit(). The DomainService’s Submit() method handles parsing that set of changes and invoking the methods on your domain service that you have written to handle the inserts, updates and deletes of your entities.

Think of the Submit() method as a router that takes all the changes and routes them to the specific operations that need to happen in order to persist those changes to your backing data store.

Using DAOs (or Repositories)

I realized early on that I didn’t want to shove all my data access code directly into my domain service methods. I like to isolate the code that talks to the database in DAOs (Data Access Objects). These DAOs act as a weld point between the world of my database and the world of my application. This makes it easier for me to handle inevitable database changes or to switch out my entire data access strategy without having to rewrite the whole application. (See why.)

At first I thought that to use my DAOs I couldn’t/shouldn’t use a LinqToEntitiesDomainService<> and should instead just inherit from DomainService. So this is how I started and I had my DAO methods handle the creation (and disposing) of my ObjectContext as needed.

Come to find out, this works; however, it isn’t the best way to do things. As I said before, RIA Services will ask your domain service to process a whole set of changes at once. If you have 5 changes to save, do you really want to create a new ObjectContext for each one? Or would you rather create the ObjectContext once, do the 5 changes and then save them all at once to the database?

Here’s what I ended up doing:

• Went back to using LinqToEntitiesDomainService<> as my base class.
• Updated my DAO constructors to take an instance of the ObjectContext.

The LinqToEntitiesDomainService<> will handle creating my ObjectContext as well as calling SaveChanges() on it when all the changes have been processed. This is much more efficient.

In code

Here’s a code example of what I discovered:

This is bad.

public class PersonDomainService : DomainService
{
    public void UpdatePerson(Person dto)
    {
        var dao = new PersonDao();
        dao.Update(dto);
    }
}

public class PersonDao
{
    public void Update(Person dto)
    {
        using (var context = new MyObjectContext())
        {
            var existingPerson = _context.People.Where(p => p.ID == dto.ID).SingleOrDefault();
            if (existingPerson != null)
            {
                existingPerson.Name = dto.Name;
            }
        }
    }
}

This is good.

public class PersonDomainService : LinqToEntitiesDomainService<MyObjectContext>
{
    public void UpdatePerson(Person dto)
    {
        var dao = new PersonDao(ObjectContext);
        dao.Update(dto);
    }

    public override bool Submit(ChangeSet changeSet)
    {
        //  base.Submit() is what will take all the changes in the ChangeSet
        //  and call your insert, update and delete methods for each one.
        //  When this is all done, the ObjectContext.SaveChanges() method
        //  will  be called.
        return base.Submit(changeSet);
    }
}

public class PersonDao
{
    private readonly MyObjectContext _context;
    public PersonDao(MyObjectContext context)
    {
        _context = context;
    }

    public void Update(Person dto)
    {
        var existingPerson = _context.People.Where(p => p.ID == dto.ID).SingleOrDefault();
        if (existingPerson != null)
        {
            existingPerson.Name = dto.Name;
        }
    }
}

Further Reading

Here are some things I’ve found helpful thus far:

• Brad Abrams' entire series on Building Amazing Business Applications with Silverlight 3

• Brad Abrams' Silveright 4 + RIA Services series

• Example of using a DataSet with RIA Services - This is what opened my eyes to the true purpose of the Submit() method in the DomainService.

• Example of returning DTOs from your domain service

• Example of Composition support in RIA Services

• Nikhil Kothari’s

• MIX10 talk on Developing with WCF RIA Services Quickly and Effectively

• Good blog post describing Change Sets in detail

• Google – ‘nuff said.

Update on June 9th, 2012

It is now the year 2012. All of the previous love I had for Silverlight has long since moved on to web standards, specifically HTML5. I don’t miss Silverlight, even a little bit. Even so. I will leave this post around for fun.

…

Silverlight is at the top of my “to learn” list this year. I’m already pretty familiar with the basics but now I need to dig in and write some real apps using it.

This afternoon I decided to outline why I’m so excited about Silverlight. Enjoy.

• Cross-platform. Microsoft supports Silverlight on Windows and Mac. This is ground breaking for me. I can write applications using .NET and they will run on a Mac. Score. Moonlight also enables some Silverlight support on Linux. As of this writing I believe they support Silverlight 2.

• Rapid development. Not my rapid development but Microsoft’s! Microsoft has been ramping up Silverlight at a phenomenal rate. This says a lot. At the very least it says Silverlight is here to stay. More than that, it says if Silverlight isn’t a viable medium for your application now… it probably will be soon.

• Web technology. I’ve ventured into WinForms and desktop apps since my beginnings as a web developer, but I still favor the always up-to-date, easy deployment and lack of client install that web applications offer. Being a web technology, Silverlight brings all this to the table.

• User experience and easy UI building. Another reason I prefer web apps is that I prefer building my UI in HTML/CSS instead of with WinForms/GDI. Designing a unique and creative UI in WinForms is very difficult. Restyling controls, complex layouts, and theming an application are all painful in WinForms but very natural and easy with HTML/CSS.

  XAML is what makes this so much better in Silverlight. The often annoyingly verbose syntax aside, you get all the easy creativity and power of HTML/CSS.

• Offline and out of browser. Silverlight apps can be installed to run offline and out of browser on users' machines. Remember, this isn’t just on Windows, either. Mac and Linux users get to share the love. This is the feature that makes me say Auf Wiedersehen to WinForms and even WPF. Not only do I get all the deployment and easy update benefits of a web app, but I can also interact with the user’s desktop, have shortcuts, file associations, and drag & drop, just like a native application.

WPF may be the next WinForms, but for me, Silverlight is the next WinForms and the next ASP.NET. Sure Silverlight won’t work for everything but this year I’m hoping to make Silverlight my MasterCard. As in, “…for everything else, there’s MasterCard Silverlight.”

While I was updating this blog to use Jekyll, I wanted to enable some nice syntax highlighting for any code snippets I may post. Jekyll provides support for this through Pygments which is a pretty mature and widely used syntax highlighter built on Python.

I find it a little ironic that I need to install Python to enable a feature in a Ruby program. Though it is nice to see that the Jekyll team isn’t afraid to leverage great tools even if they aren’t written in Ruby.

I should note that this is my first experience doing anything with Python. That said, here are the steps I fumbled through to install Pygments. This is officially the first Python egg I’ve ever hatched.

What the heck is an egg? Eggs are one way to package up a group of Python scripts for easy distribution. This makes eggs the equivelant of Ruby gems.

To create or install eggs you need to have easy_install installed.

Here are the steps I took to do that.

1. Download ez_setup.py from http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py

   Note: The official documenation for easy_install can be found at http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall.

2. From the command line run: python ez_setup.py. This will put an easy_install.exe file (and related scripts) in your C:\Python2x\Scripts folder.

   Note: If your Python scripts folder is not already in your PATH environment variable you may want to add it. This will make it easier to run scripts from that directory later on.

Now that easy_install is available, I can download and install the Pygments egg that I need.

1. Download the latest Pygments egg for your version of Python from http://pygments.org/download

2. From the command line run: easy_install Pygments-x.y.z-pyX.egg.

3. This will put add a ‘pygmentize’ script to your default Python scripts folder (probably C:\Python2x\Script).

And that’s it. Of course after going through all of that I discovered that there is a bug in the current release of Jekyll that breaks its pygments support on Windows. Fortunately someone has fixed this bug in a fork of Jekyll but I haven’t gotten around to trying that out yet. So for now I have no fancy syntax highlighting, but I did learn how to install an egg!

You can find much more knowledgable information on Python Eggs here and here.

The other night I received a recommendation to try out Dropbox. If you don’t know what Dropbox is, here’s the short of it. Post-install, you’ll see a “My Dropbox” folder on your desktop (or wherever you chose to place it) and anything you put in there gets automagically sync’d with every other computer you have Dropbox installed on.

From random documents and OneNote Notebooks to my Keepass Database and books I’m reading, I have quite a few files that I like to have access to no matter which computer I’m on. I could use a thumb drive for this… and I have in the past, but the convenience of having everything synchronized automatically for me and not having to remember to carry around the thumb drive is too much to pass up.

For the past 6 months or so I’ve been using Windows Live Mesh to synchronize these files between my computers. Before that I was using Windows Live Sync. I’m actually still using Live Sync for some things (more on that later) but I have made the switch from Mesh to Dropbox. Bottom line, Dropbox “just works” and it keeps me in the loop while it’s doing it. Let me explain.

Windows Live Mesh

This is Microsoft’s vision for your personal cloud. You get 5GB of online storage known as your Live Desktop. You get file synchronization between your computers (just like Live Sync). And you get remote desktop baked in.

Mesh is still a beta product and things seem to be moving slowly on it judging by the sparse updates and lack of news via the blogging community.

The best part of Mesh is that in addition to syncing folders across your computer, you can optionally have it sync the folder to your Live Desktop. Anything in your Live Desktop is available from any web connected computer and this is very handy. Don’t miss the key word though. Optional. This is very important because I may have 20+ GB of music that I want to sync between my computers, but I don’t want that eating up my 5GB of cloud space. With Mesh, this is easily handled by configuring exactly which devices you want to sync each folder with. Guess what? Your Live Desktop shows up as a device!

What’s the catch? Well for me the whole syncing part was too opaque. I never felt like I really ‘knew’ if my latest changes had been sync’d yet or not. Even with the fancy News sidebar that Mesh attaches to each of your sync’d folders.

All too often I would update files and trust Mesh to sync them only to find out later that Mesh never picked up on the changes. Maybe it’s just the fancy UI they’ve given it, but I don’t feel like the News pane is giving me all the details about which files have been uploaded, when, and which ones are still in progress.

Maybe if Mesh had been faithful in keeping my files in sync I wouldn’t care about seeing these details. Unfortunately it failed me and now I want to see everything.

I only used the built in remote desktop a couple of times but I was impressed that it worked pretty well, even when the computer I was connecting to was behind a proxy.

Dropbox

Whereas Mesh and Live Sync allow you to synchronize multiple folders between your computers, Dropbox only syncs one folder. Your My Dropbox folder. This was a small adjustment for me to make but it was worth it.

Dropbox is completely cross platform with support for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone and other mobile phones. I only care about Windows and the iPhone though.

I get 2GB free from Dropbox which is plenty for my critical files. Unlike Mesh, you can’t choose to not have some files sync’d to the cloud. Everything in your My Dropbox goes to the cloud, as well as your other computers. This is the only thing that I see Mesh having an upper hand in and its actually the reason I’m still using Live Sync for some things.

The Windows client for Dropbox is perfect. I get status overlays on all of the files and folders in My Dropbox that indicates whether they are up-to-date or downloading (+1 for acting like TortoiseSVN!). I get real-time balloon messages from my notification area whenever a file is changed, even when it’s on another computer. For instance if I update a file on my desktop, I’ll get a notification as soon as my laptop receives the update. This does wonders for making me feel “in the loop” and confident that my files are being kept up-to-date.

Dropbox has the cloud part covered by letting you login and access all your files via the browser. On top of this, they also keep past versions of your files (think shadow copy) as backups.

The iPhone application (free) is a real work of art. I expected slow and clunky and I got fast and simple. Once you login you see a list of all your files and folders alphabetized. If its a file type that the iPhone supports (i.e photos or Office docs) you can open it up right on your phone. You can also add photos to your dropbox from your iPhone.

Of course all of these apps offer great support for sharing files with your friends and colleagues, but Dropbox offers one stand out feature here. In addition to being able to share specific folders with friends, they give you a built-in Public folder that you can drop any file into, then right-click on the file to select an option to Copy a Public Link to that file. You can send this link to anyone and they’ll be able to access the file. This enables a very quick workflow for sharing documents.

Windows Live Sync

This one has been around for awhile and (unlike Mesh) its not a beta. Also unlike Mesh, this one hasn’t lost my confidence.

There is no cloud storage with Live Sync. It only syncs directly between your computers peer-to-peer style. This means to stay up to date your computers really need be online all the time. When you change a file on computer A it checks if computer B is online and if so it will upload directly from A to B. If computer B is offline, it doesn’t get the update. When computer B comes back online it will look for updates from A, if A is offline it won’t get updates until it comes back.

Oh, and it has an activity log:

No cloud storage means no piddly size limitations. Well, sort of. You are limited to syncing 20 folders (top-level folders, this doesn’t include children) with up to 20,000 files in each. I’m not sure what the per-file size limits are.

I mentioned above that I’m still using Live Sync in addition to Dropbox. This is for 2 reasons:

1. I have a C:\tools folder that I want to sync. I don’t want this to become C:\My Dropbox\tools.
2. I have some larger files (like music) that I don’t care if its stored in the cloud, I just want it sync’d. If I used Dropbox for this my free storage limits would have run out within the first hour…

At the end of the day, if you need to sync files between computers, I highly recommend either Dropbox or Windows Live Sync. As for Live Mesh? This is admittedly still a BETA product and it acts like one. I’d wait until it’s more mature before going this route.