I put quite some effort into v0.4 before realising that rebuilding the application would take too long for just for the sake of doing it. 

But then I had an idea for another project in which I can play with razor, Specflow, Raven DB etc. So I concentrated on the biggest pain points and some features which hab been on my list for some time and called it v0.3.5. I refactored the Data Access, got rid of countless SELECT N+1 and upgraded countless libraries and tools e.g. MVC from 2 to 3, nHibernate from 2 to 3. I also merge all runtime projects, cleaned up the code and fixed several security issues. Furthermore the new version needs much less setup effort (from 13 to 3 steps) and has less external dependencies.

As new features there are notification for new posts/topics, photos or videos as well as an url parser for the forums.

Everybody has probably read a dozen times about how important backups are and how much you are screwed if you don't have a backup (or a wrong/old/incomplete one). So it should be save to assume that at least every IT-Pro makes regular backups.

That was what I thought when a co-worker of mine had a HDD crash some weeks ago. I said to him "You're an IT-Pro so you do have a backup, don't you?" His answer was simple: "Yes, but ..."

This little "but" got me thinking about my own backups. OK, all source code (and important docs) are checked in. It's unlikely that the VC server, its backup and clients crush, so it's save enough, for me. But the rest? The weekly, manual backup on an external HDD didn't seem too save when thinking about it. And what about my servers? Damn, I wanted to created a backup plan for the databases and files ... some month before.

After a few thoughts it was obviously not a good plan, so I started planning. The first step was to make a list of data I wanted to backup and then to decide how to back it up. But that list was just too heterogeneous for a single backup plan. I decided to group the data into categories, depending on importance and size (You can't backup all you VMs in real-time with revisions) and came up with the following:

Local Data

Level 1 (Important Documents, E-Books, Portable Apps)

• "Real-time" backup/sync using SugarSync
• When at home: "Real-time" backup to NAS (Synology ds211j with 2TB Raid1)

Level 2 (Documents, Pictures, Videos, Drivers)

• "Real-time" backup to NAS

Level 3 (Virtual Machines, Software, Games)

• Weekly, manual update on external HDD

Server Data (Databases, Files)

• Daily, automated backup to NAS (over FTP)

I feel a lot better now and really hope I do so rightly. 

Today I tried to install the ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update. The Installation always failed with a fatal error(0x80070643). The log file sent me to the ASP.NET Webpages.msi logfile which had the wonderful error message

There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program run as part of the setup did not finish as expected. Contact your support personnel or package vendor

The Eventlog had even some additional but equally useless information:

Application: WebConfigCA.exe
Framework Version: v4.0.30319
Description: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception.
Exception Info: System.ArgumentException
Stack:
   at System.Web.Configuration.VirtualDirectoryMapping..ctor(System.Web.VirtualPath, System.String, Boolean, System.String)
   at System.Web.Configuration.VirtualDirectoryMapping..ctor(System.String, Boolean)

After some digging I found a KB Article describing the same error during the installation of MVC 3 or WebPages and the first suggested workaround helped:

Remove the trailing backslash from the following registry keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ASP.NET\4.0.30319.0\Path
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\ASP.NET\4.0.30319.0\Path

I guess someone at Microsoft missed the Path.Combine method ;)

Since the jQuery disabled hotlinking, the default implementation of the Theme Switcher Widget doesn't work anymore. To get it running on your webspace, you need to download the js and images and change alle the links. That seemed to cumbersome for lazy dev, so I asked google for another solution. Surpringsingly, I did not found much, but there was one blog entry which picked up the idea. Although it hat some errors and was still hotlinking the css files, I could reuse it with some changes.

The attached zip file contains the js file and all necessary images. You can set the baseUrl, path to the images and the CDN which should be used in the settings, e.g.

cssPrefix : "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.10/themes/", 
imgPrefix : baseUrl + "Images/Themeroller/theme_90_", 
imageLocation : baseUrl + "Images/Themeroller/",

themeswitcher.zip (163.96 kb)

Before starting the development I want to determine the involved frameworks, components and practices.

Web Framework

I will just go with the obvious choice: ASP.NET MVC3 with the Razor view engine. This might not be the most exciting choice, but I haven't used razor before and want to try it.

Specification-/Testframework

I'm really looking forward to using Specflow. On the one hand I want to have automated regression tests to get rid of (or at least reduce) the manual testing. On the other hand I want to have a showcase for the testing team on my current project, because they're always looking for ways to reduce manual testing. I'm not quite sure whether to include the UI, but I'll probably ignore it for starters.

Although I'm fine with MSTest or any other test framework, I'll use NUnit just to try it.

Code Contracts

I've recently introduced code contracts in some components of my current project. I like the idea of code contracts and was excited to see them included in .NET 4.0, but it's a lot of additional work to get them right throughout a project. What is even worse is the tooling. The tools didn't make it into VS2010 so you have to install them separately. That would be ok for me, if the performance wasn't as horrible as it is. Even in a relatively small solutions the static checker completely uses a single core for several minutes and uses up to 1.5GB of ram.

Therefor I'll skip code contracts for now. Hopefully they'll get the tooling right till the next release of VS.

Xml Comments

MediaCommMVC is currently completely document with xml comments and when working in teams I always insist on xml comments. Nevertheless I believe that clean code does not need comments (at least not that verbose), its just much harder (sometimes even impossible) to get people writing clean code than it is to get them writing comments. As I'm working on this alone, I'll try to keep the code clean and not use xml comments.

Solution/Project Structure

In the past I sometimes thougth quite a lot about how to organize projects and split them into assemblies. MVC and DI made me think about physical layers (assemblies) and logical layers separately and after reading an article by Patrick Smacchia I realized that I've no reason to split the project into many assemblies. I'll start with 3 projects in the solution (UI, Core, Test) and try to keep it simple.

[EDIT: VS and Resharper support is significantly better when controller and views are in the same project so I'm down to 2 projects (Web & Tests)]

3rd Parties Libraries

Simple Choice: Nuget. I had some trouble with more complex solutions but this small project it should work just fine.

Database/DAL

It's currently nHibernate with SQL Server. I might look into migrating to Raven DB, but I'm not sure. May be an option for v 0.5 ;)

I came across an interesting bug when working with a dictionary. I had a class using a dictionary as internal storage which should always ignore the casing of key when access the dictionary, Similar to the following code:

[Serializable]
public class TestContainer
{
    private readonly string id;
    private readonly Dictionary<string, string> dictionary;

    public TestContainer(string id)
    {
        this.id = id;
        this.dictionary = 
            new Dictionary<string, string>(StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase);
    }

    public string GetValue(string key)
    {
        return this.dictionary[key];
    }
        
    public void AddValue(string key, string value)
    {
        this.dictionary.Add(key, value);
    }
}

There were unit tests checking all possible scenarios to make sure the values were always retrieved correctly (at least I thought so). The container was serialized and saved to a database by one application and deserialized by another application. The following sample has the same effect:

DataContractSerializer serializer = 
    new DataContractSerializer(typeof(TestContainer));
using (MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream())
{
    serializer.WriteObject(memoryStream, testcontainer);
    memoryStream.Position = 0;

    deserializedTestContainer = 
        (TestContainer)serializer.ReadObject(memoryStream);
}

Everything seemed to work just fine, until I encountered a bug where a value in the dictionary couldn't be found. I looked at the serialized xml (which was quite a pain being several MB big) and debugged to find the missing value. When I found the value in the dictionary I was really surprised and couldn't explain it. Then I realized the casing of the key wasn't consistent and began to wonder whether I had missed a scenario in my unit tests. But everything seemed to be covered and all tests passed. While inspecting the dictionary object I discovered that the dictionary's comparer was a GenericEqualityComparer. That means the (de-)serialization ignores the comparer of a dictionary and resets it to the default. To fix the issue, the [OnDeserialized] attribute can be used:

[OnDeserialized]
private void OnDeserialized(StreamingContext context)
{
    this.dictionary = new Dictionary<string, string>(
        this.dictionary, StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase);
}

Because I'm not very good at designing I decided to base the style of the new version of MediaCommMVC completely on jQuery UI themes.

I started with the menu and was quite sure I would find a ready to use menu which offers a second level flyout and supports jQuery themes. But none of the hundreds of menu example I found supported jQuery UI themes (maybe I just missed it?). There is a menu() function in jQuery UI 1.8 which belongs to the autocomplete widget. But it's style doesn't really fit in the overall color schemes of the themes. There is also

Not really being interested in creating a menu widget from the scratch I looked at the jQuery UI samples to find components I could reuse. Putting aside the flyout behavior, the buttonset seemed like a good choice regarding the theme support. The first level menu can be created with just a few radiobuttons and a single jQuery call:

<script type="text/javascript">
	$(function () {
		$("#mainNav").buttonset();
	});
</script>
<nav id="mainNav">
	<input type="radio" id="radio1" name="menu" />
       <label for="radio1">Menu Item 1</label>        
	<input type="radio" id="radio2" name="menu" />
        <label for="radio2">Menu Item 2</label>  
	<input type="radio" id="radio3" name="menu" />
        <label for="radio3">Menu Item 3</label>
</nav>

To add a level 2 flyout menu, I wrapped a menu item in a div and included nested radio buttons:

<div class="menu-item">
    <input type="radio" id="radio2" name="menu" />
    <label for="radio2">Menu Item 2</label>
    <div class="hover-menu">
        <div class="menu-item">
            <input type="radio" id="radio2Sub1" name="subMenu2" />
            <label for="radio2Sub1">sub menu item 1</label>
        </div>
        <div class="menu-item">
            <input type="radio" id="radio2Sub2" name="subMenu2" />
            <label for="radio2Sub2">sub menu item 2</label>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

The following css code makes the submenu visible on hover:

#mainNav .menu-item { display: inline; }

#mainNav .menu-item .hover-menu { display: none; }

#mainNav .menu-item:hover .hover-menu
{
    display: block;
    position: absolute;
    left: 0;
    top: 28px;
}

#mainNav .menu-item:hover { position: relative; }

The result may look like this:

You can see the demo here (including the jQuery UI themeroller) or download the attached sample.

jQueryUIThemesMenu.zip (1.31 kb)

I released version 0.3 of MediaCommMVC some days ago. Technically it's still alpha, but I've got an small instance running for some time without major problems. I was looking forward to get 0.3 done. Not really because of it's features (I just added html5 videos and some smaller features) but because I get to start rewriting everything for 0.4.

The reason for starting the blog is to force myself to reflect on what and how I'm rewriting it and to document it. Maybe I should start with reflecting on the why:

• Because I can and its fun ;)
• Switch to mvc 3 and razor
• The architecture got a bit ugly. In the beginning it was simple and clean but now there's to much logic leaking into the controllers and repositories. I hope a service layer and view models can help to get it clean again.
• The design was built around Multiflex which is a real pain as it overrides the styling all possible html elements. I'm really bad as a designer so I'll try to come up with a very simple layout and jQuery UI themes

Not that much after all, but enough for me.