Author: Jimmy

SharpSVN: A Gentle Introduction

SharpSVN is a really useful library which encapsulates the functionality of the Subversion client so we can leverage it programmatically from .NET applications. I can think of many uses for this. In the past, in some of the automation frameworks I’ve worked with, updating the source code from SVN has been a manual task ran weekly. Using SharpSVN, we could write a simple console application to accomplish this. It could also be useful to automate repetitive SVN tasks in a development environment.

In this post, I’m going to outline the basics of using SharpSVN, and in the process create a simple C# console application to check-out some source code.

For starters, we’ll need to download the SharpSVN package from here. Next, create a C# console application in Visual Studio. You’ll need to target .NET 2.0.

Unzip the SharpSVN package, and add ‘SharpSVN.dll’ as a reference to your console application. Next, add the following code. We’ll pass the location we want to check-out from as an argument to the application:


string Repository = string.Empty;

if (args.Length != 1)
{
Console.WriteLine("Usage: SharpSVN ");
}
else
{
Repository = args[0];
}

I’m assuming here that you’re already authenticated with your SVN server. Now the code to actually perform the check-out, which is really simple:


using (SvnClient client = new SvnClient())
{
try
{
SvnUriTarget target = new SvnUriTarget(Repository);

if (client.CheckOut(target, @"C:\Working"))
{
Console.WriteLine("Successfully checked out '" + Repository + @"' to 'C:\Working'");
}

}
catch(Exception e)
{
Console.WriteLine("Error occurred during check out: " + e.ToString());
}

That’s it. The above code will check-out the source code from the SVN repository you passed as an argument to ‘C:\Working’.

The only downside I’ve seen with SharpSVN, is that it only seems to work when I target .NET 2.0. Maybe I could download the source and try to compile it under .NET 4.0, but I haven’t tried that.

I see huge usage for this library in future projects, and it’s certainly better that a previous solution I had implemented using the command line interface to the TortoiseSVN client.

Happy Coding…

C# – Logging to the Windows Event Viewer

In the past for any applications I’ve written in C#, I’ve always logged any information I needed to in a .txt file in the Windows %temp% directory. This was really quite a messy approach when I consider it now.

Logging from your applications can be useful for a couple of reasons:

  • Auditing: Depending on your level of logging, you can get a step by step view of what’s happening with your application. I find this useful for testing as I write code.
  • Diagnostics: This is the more obvious use of logging from your application – capturing a stack trace or other useful information in the event of any issues.

Using the Windows Event Viewer to capture auditing or diagnostic logging is a much better approach, as you can specify when you log what type of event this is, i.e. ‘Information’ (for auditing), or ‘Warning’ and ‘Error’ (for diagnostic logging). This makes it a lot easier to find errors, and makes any logging you do highly readable.

I’ve created this class which wraps the logging to the Event Viewer functionality:


using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Diagnostics;

namespace EventLoggingExample
{
public class LoggingHelper
{
private string Application;
private string EventLogName;

///

/// Constructor
///

/// The application doing the logging /// The log to write to in the Event Viewer public LoggingHelper(string app, string log)
{
Application = app;
EventLogName = log;

// Create the event log if it doesn't exist
if (!EventLog.SourceExists(Application))
{
EventLog.CreateEventSource(Application, EventLogName);
}

}

///

/// Write to the event log
///

/// The message to write public void WriteToEventLog(string message, string type)
{
switch (type.ToUpper())
{
case "INFO":
EventLog.WriteEntry(Application, message, EventLogEntryType.Information);
break;
case "ERROR":
EventLog.WriteEntry(Application, message, EventLogEntryType.Error);
break;
case "WARN":
EventLog.WriteEntry(Application, message, EventLogEntryType.Warning);
break;
default:
EventLog.WriteEntry(Application, message, EventLogEntryType.Information);
break;
}
}
}
}

To use it, just create an instance and log at will:


LoggingHelper log = new LoggingHelper("MyApplication", "MyAppLog");
log.WriteToEventLog("Some application information", "info");
log.WriteToEventLog("This is your first warning!", "warn");
log.WriteToEventLog("An error has occurred...", "error");

This is definetely something I’ll be adding to my utilities library.

Windows Phone 7 – Check if first run

Many of the applications I’ve been looking at developing during my Windows Phone 7 endeavours have a common requirement – the ability to check if this is the first run of the application. For example, if you are designing an application that will access a service like Twitter or Facebook, you’ll need to gather the users login details in order for your application to function.

For example, on the first run of the application, we’ll want to display a login dialog, gather the users information and store it. We can use the isolated storage facility on Windows Phone 7 devices to store this information. If you’re unfamiliar with isolated storage, check out my previous post here.

Step 1 – Store a value to track if this is the first run

I added this code to the ‘Application_Launching’ function. This function is called each time your application is launched.


// Code to execute when the application is launching (eg, from Start)
// This code will not execute when the application is reactivated
private void Application_Launching(object sender, LaunchingEventArgs e)
{
// Set if this is the first run of the application or not
if (!settings.Contains("firstRun"))
{
settings.Add("firstRun", (bool)true);
}
else
{
settings["firstRun"] = (bool)false;
}
}

Step 2 – Intercept navigation to your main page, redirect if necessery

Next, we need to create an event handler to intercept any navigation the your main page, and redirect to your ‘first run’ page (login or whatever) if necessery.

First we check if we’re navigating to our main page, if we’re not the function just returns and navigation proceeds as normal. If we are, we’ll ensure that if it’s the first run of the application, the user will be redirected to a login page etc.


///

/// Event handler to intercept MainPage navigation
///

/// the frame /// navigation args void RootFrame_Navigating(object sender, NavigatingCancelEventArgs e)
{
// Only care about MainPage
if (e.Uri.ToString().Contains("/MainPage.xaml") != true)
{
return;
}

// Check if this is the first run of the application
if ((bool)settings["firstRun"])
{
e.Cancel = true;
RootFrame.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(delegate
{
RootFrame.Navigate(new Uri("/FirstRun.xaml", UriKind.Relative));
settings["firstRun"] = (bool)false;
});
}
else
{
RootFrame.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(delegate
{
RootFrame.Navigate(new Uri("/MainPage.xaml", UriKind.Relative));
});
}
}

Step 3 – Ensure the event handler is called when navigation occurs

Finally, we need ensure that the event handler we created in step 2 above is actually called when any navigation occurs. To accomplish this, all we need to do is add the following code in the constructor of the ‘App.xaml.cs’ file:

// Add this code to the constructor in App.xaml.cs

// Route the user to the login screen if it's the first run of the application
RootFrame.Navigating += new NavigatingCancelEventHandler(RootFrame_Navigating);

That’s pretty much it, I’ve successfully used the above mechanism in two different applications, hope this saves you some time!

ASP.NET MVC – Creating a DropDownList

I’ve been looking at the ASP.NET MVC framework for the past two weeks, and it has occurred to me that some of the simple things we may want to do when creating a web application may seem confusing to someone new to ASP.NET MVC – for example the task of creating a DropDownList control on a form. ASP.NET MVC provides a number of ‘HTML Helpers’ which we can easily use to construct the form items. ‘DropDownList’ is one of these HTML helpers we can use.

Let’s create a simple example form using some of these HTML helpers. To begin a form, we can use a helper, we just need to add this code to our View:


<% using (Html.BeginForm()){ %>

// Form data will go here

<% } %>

This creates the basic form code for us – no need to explicitly write any HTML code. Before adding the DropDownList control, we need to decide where we want to get the data which will bind to the list. We can either hard code the items, or use LINQ to SQL to grab them from a database at runtime.

Method 1 – Hardcoding the form items

With this approach, we just add the items to a list, and pass this list to ViewData, so we can access it from the View:


List items = new List();
items.Add(new SelectListItem
{
Text = "Apple",
Value = "1"
});
items.Add(new SelectListItem
{
Text = "Banana",
Value = "2",
Selected = true
});
items.Add(new SelectListItem
{
Text = "Orange",
Value = "3"
});

ViewData["DDLItems"] = items;
return ViewData;

Then, to actually display the DropDownList, we’d just need to add a single line to our View code, utilizing the DropDownList HTML helper:


<%= Html.DropDownList("DDLItems") %>

Method 2 – Using LINQ to SQL to get the data at runtime

We could also retrieve the list data from a database table at runtime using LINQ to SQL. In order for this approach to work, you will need to have generated LINQ to SQL classes for your database using the wizard in Visual Studio. Then we can easily write the code to retrieve the data:


// Get the list of supported languages (for example) from the DB
var db = new TransDBDataContext();
IEnumerable languages = db.trans_SupportedLanguages
.Select(c => new SelectListItem
{
Value = Convert.ToString(c.ID),
Text = c.Name.ToString()
});

ViewData["SupportedLanguages"] = languages;
return View();

Again, to display the DropDownList, we’d just need to add a single line of code to the View:


<%= Html.DropDownList("SupportedLanguages") %>

From the above, you can see how easy it is to render form items using the HTML helpers provided by ASP.NET MVC.

For a full list of the helpers, check out the MSDN documentation here.

Windows Phone 7 – Storing & Retrieving Information

I’m planning on doing a series of posts called ‘2 Minute Tutorials’. I always get frustrated when searching for information on the Internet. Sometimes, I just want a simple explanation, and a code example that I can utilize immediately. This is what I hope to provide in this series of posts, which will be mostly related to Windows Phone 7, C#, and C++.

In this particular installment, I’m going to take you through the process of storing and retrieving information on the Windows Phone 7 platform – a certain requirment should you intend developing a WP7 application. You can store information on the phones local file system quite easily. This may be required for saving such things as user information like usernames and passwords to services such as Twitter, or application specific preferences such as a preferred language or orientation.

This functionality is provided by the IsolatedStorageSettings class contained in the System.IO.IsolatedStorage namespace. It’s ‘isolated’, because it can only be accessed by your application, not by any others. If you need to share information between applications, you’ll need to store it on the web somewhere – this offers local, isolated storage only.

IsolatedStorageSettings allows you to store name/value pairs in a dictionary. This data will always be there, even after powering off the phone. It will remain in the file system until you either remove it, or you uninstall the application to which it belongs.

Here’s an example of storing an item called ‘username’:

using System.IO.IsolatedStorage;
...
IsolatedStorageSettings settings = IsolatedStorageSettings.ApplicationSettings;
settings.Add("username", "jimmy");

Simple. It’s just as easy to retrieve the data again:

string username = (string) settings['username'];

Some important things to remember:

  • Your application will throw an exception if you try to retrieve a value that is not present so you should always handle this case.
  • You can save anything, even Objects.
  • You have to explicitly cast your data when you retrieve it.

That’s it. It’s that simple to store and retrieve information on the local file system of a device running Windows Phone 7.

See here for the MSDN documention on IsolatedStorageSettings.

Windows Phone 7 Development – First Impressions

Since my Christmas leave from work has begun, I’ve had some time to really look at Windows Phone 7 development over the last 2 days, and have gotten really excited about it all. I’ve been meaning to do this for ages (since WP7 was released actually), but have always either been too busy or suffered procrastination (thanks Zen Habits!).

Some positives:

  • Development Environment – I think Microsoft has done an excellent job on Visual Studio 2010, and the WP7 development tools plug in seamlessly. If you don’t already have Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft is offering a special Express Editon for Windows Phone.
  • Developer Resources – There are a huge amount of resources available on Microsoft’s App Hub (often called ‘MarketPlace’ – the equivalent of Apple’s ‘App Store’), ranging from tutorials, walkthroughs of some key concepts and full application code examples.
  • The Windows Phone Emulator – This is installed as part of the developer tools, and it really is state of the art. I haven’t purchased an actual device running WP7, but have been using the emulator to test my inital application effort. There are some obvious things that won’t work on the emulator, for example anything to do with the accellerometers (the emulator assumes it is lying on a flat surface), but it’s perfect for testing your inital Windows Phone 7 applications.
  • Familiarity – If you’ve ever developed using C# on the Windows platform, you already have a huge start in WP7 development.
  • Developer Subscription – The cost of a yearly developers subscription, a mere 99 Euro, can easily be covered with very little downloads of your applications (should you even be bothered about it).

The only ‘negative’ I’ve found so far is that I’ve had to purchase a (long overdue) brand new Dell running Windows 7 in order to create my development environment. My previous machine, running Windows XP, is not supported by the Windows Phone 7 development tools, which seems strange to me, since XP is not scheduled to be EOL’d until 2014. It seems to be another move by Microsoft to push people to move to Windows 7 or (shudder) Windows Vista.

Windows Phone 7 development is one of the three areas I want to become proficient with in the first half of 2011. I had initially focused on the iOS platform, but when I thought about it, it didn’t make much sense, since I’m already familiar with C# and didn’t feel I’d gain any real advantage by learning Objective C. Also, rumours began to circulate this week regarding Microsoft getting into bed with Nokia, so WP7 will surely gain more momentum in the first half of 2011.

My first application, (well under way!), will be a simple Twitter client. The reason I chose this is that it will encompass many of the key concepts I’ll need to learn, such as designing user interfaces for WP7, storing information locally on a WP7 device, and accessing external information via API’s. I plan to complete this over Christmas – screenshots to follow once it is.

Aside: If you’re interested in getting into developing on the Windows Phone 7 platform, check out Jeff Blankenburg’s 31 Days of Windows Phone, it’s the best introductory article series I’ve found so far.