Bug Hunting with NDepend

Here's another post about NDepend (one of my favorite tools of the trade)! I've recently installed the new NDepend v4 and here's how I've used it for the first time.
I was going through the logs of the asp.net application I'm developing and found reasons to believe that somewhere in the application an object was being written on the viewstate that wouldn't serialize as supposed and throw an exception.
Now, how do we find and fix this bug easily? Surely we could attempt to find in the solution for all uses of the Viewstate and reading that code, but that would be too much code to read, so I've decided to use NDepend to aid me.
So here's what I've though:
- most of the times we use the viewstate in this application is through a property on a page or user control;
- if it's a serialization error, we can ignore properties whose type is a primitive type as we're likely dealing with a class defined in our application;

Here's how I've done it:

From here I only had 3 source code locations to investigate! Much easier than going through the entire application, isn't it?

The ability to query your code (and now in a syntax much alike the linq queries I write day after day) is something very powerful, and every once in a while we might find a new way of use this power!

NCrunch

I think I can say that I know most of the relevant development tools related with the .NET world, so it's obviously not every day that I stumble upon a new tool worth of notice. But today (or rather tonight) was one of those days (or nights). Even more relevant is the fact that this one is free (at least for know, while its considered a beta version).
I'm talking about NCrunch (http://www.ncrunch.net/). It's a tool targeted for developers using Visual Studio and doing TDD. It aims to decrease the amount of time we loose compiling and runing our unit tests, by not requiring us to do it at all! That is, it compiles and runs our tests in background automatically. Even before we save the file with the unit tests source code!
I'm not going to write a full review, but I dare you to use a handful of minutes looking at the video presented in the NCrunch homepage to see the awesome features available.

Happy coding and testing!

Testing emails with neptune

Most of us have already developed some feature that sends emails, and when we finish the development phase we need to test it, but how? Surely we can force the application to send a mail to ourselves, but sometimes we don’t even have an available smtp server to use, or it requires further development steps to enable it with some authentication mechanism.
An alternative is to use a lightweight local smtp server focused on this development needs. So today I’ll show you how to use Neptune (There is another product with similar features, which I’ve never used, so feel free to explore it as an alternative to Neptune. It’s called SMTP4Dev and you can find it at smtp4dev.codeplex.com).
The latest Neptune version (downloadable at http://donovanbrown.com/post/Neptune-with-POP3.aspx) even supplies a POP port so that you can easily check the emails you sent, instead of only acknowledging that an email was successfully sent.
Neptune runs in the windows tray. With a right click on it’s icon you access a context menu which allows you to stop the smtp server and access a window showing further details as the smtp/pop ports and the number of email messages processed.

As mentioned earlier, you can easily set up an email account on your outlook (or another email client) to use the pop server supplied by neptune to take a look at the emails sent from your application. Most of the account details (as the username, password and email address) are dummy and make no difference for the pop server. You just have to specify that the mail server is 127.0.0.1.

If you’re interested in unit testing your emails, Neptune also supplies some extensibility mechanisms for that purpose.

RIP .NET Reflector (as a free version)

If you still haven't heard about it, here's a bad news: Redgate is about to put an end on the .NET reflector's free version as soon as they release the new version (which will be .NET Reflector 7). This new version seems to be scheduled for late february/early march. Knowing that the free version will only work until May 30, you'll soon have to make a decision: either buy it or stop using it. Well, I guess you could maintain a virtual machine with a freezed date and no internet conectivity at all to avoid connections with redgate servers, but where's the praticality in that?


I've made my decision, it's an easy decision, 35$ is not that much for one of the most important tools I use on a daily basis! Otherwise, I would have to make ildasm my new best friend!
As a developer I understand the importance of getting payed for what you develop and that the comporate side demands return on investment upon the new features being developed. Don't get me wrong, I do like the idea of open source, I just don't think we can apply it everywhere. The fact that the .NET community isn't taking this decision very well isn't much of a surprise for me. We all had the expectation that we'ld never have to pay for it, you may even state that we Redgate led us to believe that, that's what's the fuss is all about!
At the end of the day, what really matters is that we're talking about a fanstastic product that deserves the investment. Also, Redgate states that "Version 7 will be sold as a perpetual license, with no time bomb or forced updates", so that's definitely worth the value. I may even consider buying the pro edition...

What worries me is knowing that there a few companies that will not buy it for their developers! Let's just hope my company buys the necessary licenses asap, so I'm not forced to use my personal license at work!