.NET
Roslyn analyzers
I’ve finally decided to get in on that sweet, sweet Roslyn action and write myself an analyzer (please forgive the American spelling–since I’m programming against a series of types defined in American I’ve decided to use their spelling).
You’ll probably know I’m a big fan of functional programming and I’m trying to write my C# in a more functional style; I’ve found that you can get many of the benefits of functional programming even though you’re not writing in a functional language.
As it turns out, sometimes removing certain features from your programming language (or, at least, disallowing certain actions) can actually improve your code. An easy example of this is the goto statement; despite the fact that the C# language supports goto nobody uses it because it’s widely regarded as a harmful thing to do.
The dangers of primitive obsession
Primitive obsession is, like many facets of modern programming, something that has been written about many times before (e.g. http://sourcemaking.com/refactoring/primitive-obsession, http://blog.thecodewhisperer.com/2013/03/04/primitive-obsession-obsession/), yet still we see its ensnaring of unwary programmers.
Classic mashup: An FSharp coding dojo
Yesterday I attended the FSharp Dojo: Picasquez and Velasso at Skills Matter in London.
This dojo is all about manipulating images and creating mashups, like this:
Be careful with attribute routes in projects with both MVC and WebApi
This is a pretty easy trap to fall into! I have been tearing my hair out recently trying to figure out why, in my pet project website, one of the controllers was not having any routes generated. I was able to inspect the generated routes during debugging by setting a breakpoint after the line
routes.MapMvcAttributeRoutes();
and inspecting the routes object. Sure enough routes for the HomeController and ChatController were there, but nothing for the BlogController. What could it be? Everything appeared to be set up correctly:
[<RoutePrefix "blog">]
type BlogController
(
_filterBlogPostsQuery: FilterBlogPostsQuery,
_getBlogPostQuery: GetBlogPostQuery,
_getAllBlogPostsQuery: GetAllBlogPostsQuery) =
inherit MySiteController()
[<Route "">]
member this.Index() =
task {
let! posts = _getAllBlogPostsQuery()
return this.View posts
}
Eventually I figured it out after stumbling across this StackOverflow post: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25727305/asp-mvc-5-attribute-routing-not-registering-routes/. It turns out that, when you have a project with both WebApi and MVC installed, you have two RoutePrefixAttribute classes and two RouteAttribute classes available; one in System.Web.Http and one in System.Web.Mvc. Make sure you’re referencing the right one!
This was also, perhaps, a consequence of using F#, and the fact that the Visual Studio tooling is not as feature-complete as the other languages; I didn’t get a warning from the compiler that there was a naming clash between these two Attributes, despite the fact that I had both the System.Web.Http and System.Web.Mvc namespaces opened at the top of the file. In the end, removing the System.Web.Http namespace was all that was needed to fix the problem.
Lesson learned. Still, it highlights a fragmentation issue between the Mvc and WebApi teams; one which I hope will be fixed in ASP.NET vNext (I assume this will be the case because MVC and WebApi will now share the same base controller).
Richiban 