Moving On…

I have moved to a new location for a fresh start. No new posts will show up here moving forward.

Adding Viemu to the Toolbelt…

{EAV:c17259d988f193ac}

Setup

Since I’ve been using MacVim more and more in my personal development projects, I’ve grown to have a significant amount of muscle memory. Pretty frequently now I find a string of ‘jjjj’ in the middle of my C# code as I’m trying to take a look at what it’s doing. So I figured it was time to explore the possibilities of getting viemu up and going. The biggest hurdle was my concern about losing CodeRush/Refactor Pro! support. I am heavily dependent on them so they had to play nice together. Good news. This worked out of the box. After a quick install of viemu and a firing up Visual Studio, I was off and running.

Small tweaks

I did have to make a couple of small adjustments. First was my key re-mappings. In my configs , I snagged a couple of key mappings that I’ve found really helpful. I needed these same behaviors in viemu in order to take advantage of all my muscle memory. The key was creating the .viemurc file in my home directory since it picks that file up by default.

I also had an issue with colors – I prefer dark themes both in vim & Visual Studio. By default, the highlight in viemu clashes so strongly with my theme that I had to disable it. I couldn’t get it to switch up the color schemes appropriately either so I’m guessing I’ll have to dig a bit more to get that working but overall I’m pretty happy. If I find a way to get this working properly, I’ll update the post.

---

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.

Agile.NET Conference…

On April 30th, Improving Enterprises and Microsoft are hosting the Agile.NET conference at Microsoft’s Irving office. It’s a conference that will showcase agile principles and practices as well as tools in the .NET ecosystem. I’m excited to be doing a talk on git as it’s become a big point of evangelism for me personally but I’m also interested to hear some of the other tracks of great speakers.

Regardless of whether you’re new to agile concepts or already moving towards adoption, you will have an informative and good time. Space is limited so be sure to go sign up while there are still spaces available.

---

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.

Using Interfaces for Model in ASP.NET MVC (Impl)…

I mentioned in my first post that we were using interfaces to represent our models and WHY we did it. So here’s the HOW of doing it.

Binding

As I mentioned, we used the model attribute to decorate our models when they are in the method signature. This attribute was based on the AbstractParameterBinderAttribute from MvcContrib (if you’re using ASP.NET MVC and NOT using MvcContrib, you’re probably re-inventing more than a few wheels) which is just a CustomModelBinderAttribute with a little bit of happy sprinkled in. Here’s what our binding looked like:

public override object BindModel(ControllerContext controllerContext, ModelBindingContext bindingContext)
{
	ViewDataDictionary viewData = GetViewData(controllerContext.Controller);
	object result = null;
	if (viewData != null)
	{
		result = viewData.For(controllerContext, bindingContext);
		SetViewData(result, controllerContext, bindingContext, viewData);
	}
	return result;
}

The GetViewData and SetViewData are pretty self-explanatory but the real heavy lifting is in that extension method. Let’s take a look at it.

DictionaryAdapter

We know that we have a giant dictionary holding on to our data and tedious mapping using strings make me itchy, not to mention it breaking my refactoring tool, so how do we push the values without them? DictionaryAdapter from Castle. This little known, under utilized piece of work was shown to me by Craig Neuwirt, it’s creator, and I’m constantly amazed at it’s usefulness. Observe the following extension method for ViewData:

private static readonly IDictionaryAdapterFactory
	ViewDataFactory = new DictionaryAdapterFactory();

public static object For(this ViewDataDictionary viewData, ControllerContext controllerContext, ModelBindingContext bindingContext)
{
	ViewDataAdapter data = new ViewDataAdapter(viewData);
	object adapter = ViewDataFactory.GetAdapter(bindingContext.ModelType, data);

	IDictionaryAdapter meta = adapter as IDictionaryAdapter;
	meta.FetchProperties();
	
	return adapter;
}

It’s that simple. No, really. The DictionaryAdapter will match up the properties on the interface you defined with the corresponding elements in the ViewData and push their values into an instance of the model. All of that, without you even having to buy it dinner.

There’s more??

This approach worked great for us and gave us most of what we needed, however, this code doesn’t handle rehydrating objects from ActiveRecord – yet. But that’s a post for another night…

CORRECTION: Craig informed me that he did not create it originally but re-wrote it’s initial implementation to what it is now. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

---

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.

Improving Podcasts…

My first podcast (the fifth for the series) is up – we discussed technical presentations and had a great time doing so. I’m very fortunate to work with such great people and had a wonderful time. Thanks to Allen and Mike for moderating and putting the whole thing together.

Check it out at: Improving Podcasts

---

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.