The Difficult Bit | Some software development issues

Using XML to pass lists as parameters in SQL Server: the C# Side

The blog post “Using XML to pass lists as parameters in SQL Server” by the wonderfully-named Phil Factor outlines a useful technique to pass lists into stored procedures and functions. Here is a simple function to create the appropriate XML in C# code (assumes it is a list of integers):

Unwanted Requests from Browser Link in Visual Studio 2013

I debugged a web application from Visual Studio 2013 (having recently upgraded from Visual Studio 2012) and then inspected the network traffic in search of a performance issue. I was rather surprised to find that the page was making calls back to a different port on my localhost server with a long URL containing “arterySignalR/poll?transport=longPolling“. […]

DevExpress Rich Edit Document Server: Photos not shown in PDFs

DevExpress has a Rich Edit Document Server class that can be used, among other things, to convert HTML documents to PDF using the ExportToPdf function. This can be used in an ASP.Net web site and will work under normal Medium Trust. However in the modified Medium Trust used by some hosts (for example, Rackspace) the […]

Dev Express Rich Edit Document Server: Fonts in PDF

DevExpress has a Rich Edit Document Server class that can be used, among other things, to convert HTML documents to PDF using the ExportToPdf function. This can be used in an ASP.Net web site and will work under normal Medium Trust. However under Medium Trust some fonts do not display well, either not being spaced correctly or […]

Visual Studio 2012 Tweaks

I am not at all keen on the look of Visual Studio 2012 but experience suggests you get used to anything after a while. Some tweaks I found useful: Disable the Mouse Wheel zoom by installing this extension. I use the mouse wheel and the control key quite a lot and sometimes trigger the zoom […]

“The following module was built either with optimizations enabled or without debug information”

I got the following dialog box from Visual Studio on debugging a Web Application: Microsoft Visual Studio The following module was built either with optimizations enabled or without debug information: C:UsersMyUserAppDataLocalTempTemporary ASP.NET Files1b3abf23b2c10ebaassemblydl3ba72d55bc2ecd6a3_6a4bce01MyDomain.MyProject.dll To debug this module, change its project build configuration to Debug mode. To suppress this message, disable the ‘Warn if no user […]

Assembly Binding Log Viewer and IIS Express

After making significant changes to a C# Web Application I got the following message displayed on starting the web site from Visual Studio using IIS Express: Parser Error Message: Could not load file or assembly ‘MyDomain.UI.UserSite’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. … Assembly Load Trace: The following information […]

StyleCop and the MSBuild Extension Pack

I use StyleCop to check my C# code, running it both manually on particular projects or files from within Visual Studio as well as automatically for all code files as part of the build. The MSBuild Extension Pack provides a Task to run StyleCop from MSBuild. The build file imports the MSBuild Extension Pack tasks […]

Visual Studio 2010 Code Metrics Viewer

This is a useful extension for Visual Studio 2010 which will calculate code metrics for your solution and display the results. It can be downloaded here though you will first need to install the Code Metrics PowerTool 10.0 which it uses to generate the statistics. To perform the analysis: Open the Code Metrics Viewer window […]

Capturing SQL Statements Generated by LINQ to SQL

LINQ to SQL generates SQL statements to send to SQL Server. In the case of problems with these, for example unexpected results or poor performance, it is useful to be able to capture this SQL. This can then be run and investigated separately. It is also sometimes useful to get a feel for the number […]