Azure Frequently Ask Questions: How to create a storage account with new portal

After presenting About Azure Storage Services at Global Windows Azure boot camp at Ahmedabad. I got lot of feedback and questions. One of the frequently asked question was how we can create a storage account with new Azure portal Preview. So I thought it would be a great idea to write a walk through post for it.

As you know, Before few months Microsoft has launched a new Azure portal in preview mode. It’s amazing there are lots of features available. You can find azure portal at portal.azure.com. You can do lots of stuff and monitoring that were not possible with current portal. I've tried and really like it. Please do try it and tell community about your feedback.

How to create a storage account with new azure portal:

So what we are waiting for let’s start our walk through of creating a storage account with new portal. So once you put url in browser it will be ask for login with your azure live account.

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Structure and Operator overloading in C#

Recently I have been playing with structure and It’s fun. In this blog post we are going to learn how we can use operator overloading with structure in C#.  You can find my blog post that I have already written about structure  at following location.

Structure in C#
Structure with constructor in C#
Structure with Interface in C#

So as usual I've created a console application to demonstrate operator overloading in C#. Here I have created a structure with equals operator overloading and following is a code for that.

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Structure with Interface in C#

Recently I have been playing with Structure and it is fun. I have written couple of blog post about structure. Following are links for that.

Structure in C#
Structure with constructor in C#

In this blog post we are going to learn how we can use structure with interface. So like earlier example I’ve created a console application. Now it’s time to write interface which we can implement with structure. Following is a code for that.

using System;

namespace StructureWithMethodAndInterface
{
    interface IPrintable
    {
        void Print();
    }
}

Here you can see that I have simple interface IPrintable which has simple print method. Now let’s create a structure which implement this interface. Following is a code for that.

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Structure with constructor in C#

Before some time , I have written basic introduction post about Structure in C#. In this blog post we are going to see how we can have constructor with Structure. As we all know structure is a value type so it stored on stack. So let’s create a structure like follow with constructor.

public struct Customer
{
    #region Fields

    public int CustomerId;
    public string FirstName;
    public string LastName;

    #endregion 

    #region Constructor

    public Customer(int customerId, string firstName, string lastName)
    {
        CustomerId = customerId;
        FirstName = firstName;
        LastName = lastName;
    }

    #endregion
}

Here you can see I have created Stucture with parameter. As we all know structure is a value type so when initialize the it at that time we need to give values to its elements so that’s why default constructor without parameter is not supported in C#.

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Structure in c#

In this blog post we are going to learn about Structure Data structure in C#. In C# Structure is value type which stores on Stack. It is a composite value type that contain other types. You can also create object of structure like class. In C# structure can  contains fields, properties, constants, constructors, properties, Indexers, operators and even other structure types.

So enough theory. Let’s create a sample console application to learn about structure.

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Entity Framework Code First and MySql on Azure

We have used Entity framework with SQL Servers mostly. In this blog post we are going to see how we can use Entity framework with MySql on Azure.

How to create MySql database on Azure:

On azure MySql is not maintained by Microsoft itself. It is provided their partner cleardb. So You need to search at Azure Market Place and then add it like below.

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Best coding standards checklist for C# and ASP.NET

Before some time I have written a blog post about coding standard Why coding standards are important?. It was appreciated by lots of people and few people asked me whether do you have coding standard checklist or not? So Today, In this blog post I’m going to shared few link for coding standard checklist which I follow.

Aviva C# coding guidelines:

An awesome guideline for the C# 3.0,4.0 and 5.0. It’s very good and open sources. You can find that following link on code plex.

https://csharpguidelines.codeplex.com/

Do Factory do and don’ts for C#:

A great list of do and don’ts of C# coding standards that all we should follow.

http://www.dofactory.com/reference/csharp-coding-standards

Encodo C# Handbook:

It’s having so many coding standard and most of relevant to naming conventions and formatting. You can download that via following link.

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/encodocsharphandbook/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=3352

Microsoft All one code framework:

I have been using this for a while. It’s an awesome library which display best practices how we can write code.

http://1code.codeplex.com/

There are lots others are also available but I think it’s if you follow and practice above mentioned resources your code will be perfect.

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Entity Framework Internals: Connection Resiliency

When you use cloud services to deploy your application and database it might be possible that transient connection will be a problem between database server and web servers. When you use on premise servers that uses the database server and web server on same data centre. When you use cloud there will be huge infrastructures and you never know where it is deployed even if it deployed on same data centre there will more connection like network load balancers etc. When you use cloud services that will be shared by lots of users which means its responsiveness can be affected by them. And your access to the database might be subject to throttling. Throttling means the database service throws exceptions when you try to access it more frequently than is allowed in your Service Level Agreement (SLA).

So in cloud service there will be transient problems which will be resolved in short period of time. So when you got such kind of errors then you can wait for some time and then you have retry. For that kind of operation Entity Framework provides connection resiliency feature.

The connection resiliency features must be configured for proper database services. It has to know which exceptions are likely to be transient problem and which exceptions are caused by our code. It has to wait for an appropriate amount of time between retries of failed operation. Also it has to try number of times before giving up.

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Quick Tip–How to get time difference in C#

Recently, One of the reader of this asked me about, how we can get time difference between two dates or two times? So I thought it will be a good idea to write a blog post about that. So that other use can also get benefit from that.

For that I have created sample console application like below.

using System;

namespace TimeDifferenceCSharp
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            DateTime firstDate = DateTime.Parse("12:50");
            DateTime secondDate = DateTime.Parse("10:40");

            TimeSpan difference = TimeSpan.Parse(firstDate.Subtract(secondDate).ToString());

            Console.WriteLine(difference.Hours);
            Console.WriteLine(difference.Minutes);
        }
    }
}

In above example, If you see it carefully I have taken two dates with different time. Then I have used subtract method DateTime class to find different of both and then I parse it to TimeSpan class. After that I have printed hours and minutes for  via Console.Writeline method.

Now let’s run this application. You will see output as following.



That’s it.Hope you like it.

You can find complete source code of this blog post at github on- https://github.com/dotnetjalps/TimeDifferenceInCSharp

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Quick tip- How to change menu bar letter style in visual studio 2013 and 2015

When Microsoft has introduced, Visual Studio 2012 with Upper case menu, There were so many reactions from the developers. So with Visual Studio 2013 Microsoft has provided that settings to Turn of capital letters for menu. I have just came to know that accidentally. You can find that settings in Tools->Options-General settings.



Once you check it. Upper case will turn off like below.



That’s it. Hope you like it. Stay tuned for more!.

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Entity Framework Internals: Private setters and private constructors

I have been heavily learning Domain Driven Design recently and In that there is a concept called “Anemic Domain Model” which we used to use in our project. In simple terms Anemic Domain Models are those classes that do not have any behaviour with them and most of created with properties. You can use them as container for your data from database. While Domain driven design is all about behaviours. So we need to make our models incorporate behaviours also which is called  “Rich Domain models”.

One of step to convert your Anemic Domain Models to Rich Domain Models is to create parameterised constructors. For example an Employee must have FirstName and LastName. So instead of doing validation at the insertion time on UI we should not allow Employee to be created without FirstName and Lastname. The only way to do this to make this properties setters private and assign value of those properties via parameters constructors like below.

public class Employee
{
        public Employee(string firstName, string lastName)
        {
            FirstName = firstName;
            LastName = lastName;
        }
            
        public int EmployeeId { get; set; }
        public string FirstName { get; private set; }
        public string LastName { get; private set; }
        public string Designation { get; set; }
}

Now, If you want to do DDD with any Object Relational Mappers there will be a problem as most of Object Relational Mappers create properties with public setters. Entity Framework is such a Object Relational mapper and I love to work with Entity Framework.

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Fluent Nhibernate : Create Table from Code(Class- CodeFirst)

Now days,  Convention over configured is more preferred and that’s why Fluent Nhibernate got more popularity Because with Fluent Nhibernate we don’t have to write and maintain mapping in xml. You can write classes to map your domain objects to your database tables. If you want to learn how we can do this with existing database and Fluent Nhibernate, I have also written a blog post about CRUD operation with Fluent Nhibernate and ASP.NET MVC . After writing this blog post I was getting a lots of emails about how we can create database from the Fluent Nhibernate as we can do same with Entity Framework Code First. So I thought it’s a good idea to write a blog post about it instead of writing individual emails.

How to create tables from class via Fluent Nhibernate:

To Demonstrate how we can create tables based mapping classes create we’re going to create a console application via adding new project like below.

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Entity Framework Internals: Enum Support

In .NET world, We all are using Enums in our code. It’s makes our code more readable then using hardcoded numbers of strings. Entity Framework 5.0 or higher version has support for Enums. In this blog post we are going to see how we can use Enums with entity framework.

We are going to create a console application to see how it’s works. I’m going to create a console application for the same.



After creating a application I’ve added Entity framework via Nuget package.

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Entity Framework internals :IEnumerable and IQueryable

Now days, Entity framework is one the most used ORM in .NET world. Still I can see lots of people confused with IQueryable and IEnumerable. If they dont' know what is difference between them then they are going to make mistakes .When you first look at it both looks same. But there are quite differences and If you don’t understands internals of it then it will impact your query performance also.

IEnumerable vs IQueryable:

Here is the basic difference between IEnumerable and IQueryable. When you write queries with IEnumerable it executes queries on Server and load data in memory and then filter data on client side. This will be a problem when you are fetching large amount of data. While IQueryable executes queries on server side with all filters and then load all data into memory.

Example:

Sound complex!. Let’s write a simple example to understand it better. I am going to create a simple table in database called student table.

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NSubstitute Introduction and Why I like it

Recently I am heavily learning Test Driven Development and Domain Driven design. As you know With TDD you need to have a mocking libraries. So after doing on research on internet they are three libraries available in Microsoft.NET development world which are quite mature.

1. Rhino Mocks
2. NSubstitute
3. Moq

I have gone through all of above three and then After doing research and I choose NSubstitute.

Why I Choose NSubstitute:

Following are the reasons why I have chosen NSubstitute.

1. It is super easy to use. I don’t have to write very complex lamda expressions to mock objects.
2. It works really fine with all framework of Test Driven Development
3. As it is super easy to use you need to write very less code to mock objects.
4. With other Visual Studio plugins like Resharper, Telerik Justcode its works perfectly and they are able to generate code for the same.
5. It’s got fluent syntax and very easy to understand.
6. It’s perfect for some one who is not mature enough for Test Driven Development.

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Shared project in Visual Studio 2015

Shared project is new feature that was added in Visual Studio 2013 update 2 but in visual studio 2015 it is coming by default. In this post we are going to learn about Shared Project and how it is different from class library.

Shared project in Visual Studio 2015:

Shared project is a new feature that is introduced with Visual Studio 2013 update 2 and it’s comes by default with Visual Studio 2015. So with shared project you can share your common code with any number of applications. You can use that in another project via adding project reference. So let’s see how we can use Shared project in multiple application.

To understand how Shared project works, I have create a blank solution like following.

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Why coding standards are important?

Yesterday, I had a discussion with friend about coding standard are important and why you need it?  So I thought it will be a good idea to write a blog post about it. Followings are some reasons why coding standard are so important.

• Readability:  coding standard will increase overall code readability means if you follow you coding standard defined other people also know that what you have written. They don’t need to debug the code to know what function this code will perform.
• Code Style: Every programmer have different style of writing code. So if we don’t have coding standard then Programmer ‘A’ can write variable in camel casing while other  will prefer to use Pascal case. So different modules have different coding styles.Which makes code hard to understand.
• Code Reviews: Code review is an important part of any software development. If you don’t have a coding standard defined then it will take more time to do code review.
• Error handling/Exception handling : The another benefits of coding standard is standardized way of handling errors. If you don’t have coding standard defined then each programmer will handle errors in unique way that could create a problem of identification of a bug  in software development .
• Maintenance: Large enterprise software's will have  long life span. So if there is any enhancement or maintenance work is required with the help of coding standard any people can understand code easily and easily do the some changes.

That’s it. Hope you like it. Stay tune for more!

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What is MongoDB and Why MongoDB?

Recently I have playing a lot with MongoDB and it’s  one of the favourite document database. In this blog post we are going to learn about MongoDB in details.

What is MongoDB?

Those who don’t know MongoDB here is what documentation on MongoDB says about it.

MongoDB is a document database that provides high performance, high availability, and easy scalability. Document Database. Documents (objects) map nicely to programming language data types. Embedded documents and arrays reduce need for joins.

A MongoDB is one of popular database. A standard deployment can hold many databases. A database holds a set of collections. It's like similar to tables in relational databases. A collection holds a set of documents just like rows in relational database tables. A document is a set of Key value pair. It’s stores data in such a way that there is no relation is required. It was created by company called 10gen.

MongoDB supports almost all the languages and there are lits of drivers are available for MongoDB and it open sourced at Github at following location.

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Grid view row span in ASP.NET

I know for some one it will sound like a very basic code for the row span of grid view but still there are lots of people that does not about that. So I thought it will be a good idea to write a blog post about it. So in this blog post we are going to learn How we can use row span in ASP.NET Grid Views.

So what we are waiting for Let’s take a small example of sample ASP.NET Web forms application. So Let’s start by creating an empty ASP.NET Webforms application like below.



After that I have added a page web page like below.

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Project.json file in ASP.NET 5(vNext)

Recently Microsoft has released the preview version of ASP.NET 5(vNext) as a Part of Visual Studio 2015 CTP. As this whole .NET framework is rewritten from the scratch so there are lots of change there. One of most exciting changes in ASP.NET 5(vNext) is moving all changes in Project.json file instead of solution. This Project.json file will have lots information related to dependencies, configuration and lots of other stuff.

Project.json file in ASP.NET 5(vNext)

Let’s create a ASP.NET 5(vNext) application from File –> New  Project



Once you create ASP.NET 5 application, It will create a sample project with Project.json like this.

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Install Go Language and Lite IDE on Ubuntu

Note: I’m not moving to Another world. Still C# and ASP.NET is my bread and butter.

Recently I have installed Ubuntu as Virtual OS in Oracle Virtual Box. This was one of first exposure I got Linux base operating system.  Earlier I have used Linux when I was doing my masters as part of their curriculum.  So far I am having fun Ubuntu and other Linux base operating system has come far.

After installing Linux, I thought why should I try some other language which is completely different then which I am working right now. This make me Polyglot  programmer and I could learn something from trying a new language and so I gone through various language and choose Go language.

Why Go Language?

Here are the reasons why I have choose to learn GO programming language.

• It’s backed by Google so will not go away near future.
• High performance :  Makers of Go language claims that it will perform as fast C and C++ language.
• Fairly easy language to run.
• Statically typed just like C#.
• It has Garbase collection so I don’t have to worry about memory management like C and C++
• Concurrency is in built

To know more about go language you can visit following site. It has got ton of resources.
http://golang.org/

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Setting up development environment for ASP.NET 5(vNext) on Ubuntu

I am really enjoying working on Ubuntu. In previous post, We have learn how to install Sublime Text and in this blog post we are going to learn how we can setup development environment for ASP.NET 5(vNext). So what we are waiting for let’s go.

Note: First thing you need to make sure that Python 3.0 or higher version is installed. I have installed latest version of Ubuntu which already has Python preinstalled.

Setting up package manager control:

The first thing you need to is to install/setup package manager control. To Install package control, We need to go from View- > Show console menu. It will load package control. You need to run following command from the console. It will install the package manager control.

import urllib.request,os,hashlib;
h = '2deb499853c4371624f5a07e27c334aa' + 'bf8c4e67d14fb0525ba4f89698a6d7e1';
pf = 'Package Control.sublime-package'; 
ipp = sublime.installed_packages_path();
urllib.request.install_opener( urllib.request.build_opener( urllib.request.ProxyHandler()) );
by = urllib.request.urlopen( 'http://packagecontrol.io/' + pf.replace(' ', '%20')).read(); dh = hashlib.sha256(by).hexdigest(); print('Error validating download (got %s instead of %s),
please try manual install' % (dh, h)) if dh != h else open(os.path.join( ipp, pf), 'wb' ).write(by)

You can also copy this command from the this url- https://packagecontrol.io/installation

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How to install Sublime Text 3 in Ubuntu

I am quite having fun with Ubuntu on Oracle virtual box.In last blog post, I have already shown you how you can run ASP.NET 5 (vNext) app in Ubuntu. Now we are going to setup development environment for ASP.NET 5(vNext) and my preferred choice of editor is sublime text. If you have not heard about Sublime Text you should visit following link.

http://www.sublimetext.com/3

As we all know Sublime Text is a popular editor and  now Sublime Text3 is available with beta version for both registered users and general public. The Webupd8 team created a Personal Package repository containing the installer for Ubuntu and Linux. So we can install it very easily on Ubuntu.

So first thing we need to do is add PPA repository to Ubuntu via running following command.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-3

It will load PPA repository into Ubuntu like below.

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ASP.NET 5(vNext) on Ubuntu 14.4(Linux)

As we all know Microsoft has recently launched ASP.NET 5 and Microsoft has made announcement that it will work on any version of Linux and OSx. So in this post we are going to learn how we can use ASP.NET 5 on Ubuntu.

Installing Ubuntu on Oracle Virtual Box:

As I don’t have spare computer where I can install Ubuntu so that I’m going to install it on Oracle Virtual Box. If you don’t know about Virtual Box then it it a powerful x86 and AMD/Intel 64  virtualization product for enterprise or home box. It is freely available as GNU Licence.

You can find more about  Oracle Virtual Box here- https://www.virtualbox.org/

There are few things you to consider before going this route.

• You need to first make sure that your computer supports virtualization or not. There are some utilities available for that like Intel processor identification utility – You can download from the here- https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=7838. It will tell you whether your processor supports Virtualization or not.

• After checking whether your processor supports virtualization, you need to enable virtualization from Bios. That is different as per your Processor and you can learn how you can enable virtualization on your pc via searching on internet.
• Make sure you have at least 4 GB ram to run this virtual OS smoothly. If you less RAM then it will work but thing will be slow.

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Recent updates to C# 6.0 syntax with new version of Visual Studio 2015 CTP

This blog post is part of C# 6.0 Features Series.

Recently, Microsoft has announced new version of Visual Studio 2015 and I have downloaded it. At the same time I was checking what’s new in Visual Studio 2015 CTP newer version and and I have found that suddenly my c# 6.0 new features solutions  stopped working.

The first problem it got is with static class using features. Following was my code.

using System.Console;

namespace StaticClassUsing
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            WriteLine("With using statement");
        }
    }
}

Now when you run this it was giving error like following.

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Intellisense for Bower and NPM in Visual Studio 2015

CodeProject
Microsoft has recently launched the Visual Studio 2015 Preview with ASP.NET 5(vNext) and it’s got ton of features. In this blog post we are going to learn about Intellisense feature for Bower and NPM.

What is Bower and NPM:

 

Bower: Bower is a package manager for JavaScript libraries that allow you to define, version and retrieve your dependencies. It works on top of NPM. You can find more about that at following link.

http://bower.io/
https://egghead.io/lessons/bower-introduction-and-setup

NPM: NPM stands for Node Package Manager- It’s a kind of package manager for the installing node.js packages just like NuGet packages.  You can find more information about following location.

https://docs.nodejitsu.com/articles/getting-started/npm/what-is-npm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_(software)

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