Mehran Nikoo's Notes

Spanish (United States) Locale

Last week, I had a enquiry from a customer about the Spanish locale for the United States. As he mentioned, it does make sense to have this locale, especially for the users based in the southern regions of the US. If you are running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, there is no such locale supported by the operating system so if you try to access this locale in a managed application by writing this line of code:

System.Globalization.CultureInfo cultureInfo = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("es-US");

you will get an ArgumentException, which says: "Culture name 'es-US' is not supported". As a workaround, you can use the "es-MX" locale or create your own locale.

But the good news is that the support for the "es-US" locale was added in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 so if you are running one of these operating systems, you can now use the es-US locale (LCID = 21514) and the same line of code we used above will work fine.

This page has a complete list of the locale IDs assigned by Microsoft so if you thinking of creating your own locale, check this list first to make sure there is no conflict with the existing locales.

VSTS 2010 Beta 1 Available for Download

As planned, VSTS 2010 Team Suite Beta 1, .NET Framework 4 Beta 1, TFS 2010 Beta 1 and VSTS 2010 Test Load Agent and Controller Beta 1 are now available for download from MSDN Subscribers area.

We now have 32-bit and 64-bit support for TFS and the TFS client OM. All of the client tools such as Visual Studio will continue to run in 32-bit environment though. For more information on the supported environments for TFS and the improvements in setup, administration and operations refer to Brian Harry's post.

VSTS Web Test Recorder Bar Missing in Windows Vista/7 64-bit

Primarily for my own reference in the future but you may find this useful too. If you are running Windows Vista/7 64-bit and want to use the VSTS 2008 Web Test Recorder plug-in, the web test recorder bar may be unavailable due to the way Windows caches the list of available explorer bars. In order to resolve this, you can apply some tweaks to the registry. Michael Taute has a useful post which explains the problem and solution in more detail and covers some other issues too.

Project and File References Revisited

Most .NET developers and architects are familiar with various approaches to Visual Studio solution design:

"What? Haven't heard of "Multiple Partitioned Solutions" before. Did you just make it up?"

Yes, you might be using it already but you didn't know what it's called. That's fine as I have come up with that name and haven't written about it before :) So please read on!

Most of the development projects contain more than one Visual Studio project. As soon as a second project is added to the solution, as a developer/architect, you start thinking about how the dependencies should look like.

Meet "Camp P"
Members of camp P believe file references are evil as they cause all sorts of versioning and build issues when the dependencies go out-of-date. The members of this camp try to put everything in the same solution and life is great as long as you can count the number of projects with your fingers. There has been a debate out there as to whether Visual Studio should become quicker when it comes to handling large solutions. This issue was partly addressed by release of Visual Studio 2005 SP1 where we introduced some performance improvements in the IDE. These improvements are also rolled forward to Visual Studio 2008. However, you need to take into account all the work the IDE and the compiler need to do while you are typing in the IDE to provide you with Intellisense and compiler warnings/errors. So at some point, you will hit a practical limit on the number of projects you can have open in Visual Studio.

Meet "Camp F"
This is where the members of "Camp F" are coming from. They want to avoid the project references in order to speed up the IDE but they usually end up spending the time they saved on resolving the versioning issues.

Now Meet Both!
None of these solutions are perfect but as long as the development team is consistent in following one of these approaches, then the team can live with it. This becomes a major problem when you have members from both camps in the same development team. This has been the case in most of the development teams I have worked with and I bet most of you have had similar experiences. So what is a typical day on such project? Somebody from "Camp F" is not happy with performance of the IDE while he is working on the "Order Processing" feature of the application. As a result, he decides to replace all of the references to the "UI Framework" projects with file references. But guess that? The dependency type is defined in the project file, so this change results in modification of the project file and the changes are checked back into the source control at some point. Few hours later, somebody from "Camp P" who is working on one of those "UI Framework" projects is trying to perform an integration test to validate a change she made to the UI Framework and finds out that the dependencies are out of date. She checks the source control as it was working fine until that morning and notices the change. She then reverts all of those changes as file references will make her job harder. And the team will soon end up in changing the references types back and forth between project and file references and and this changes cause further problems in the build process. Add to this all of the discussions/arguments as to which approach is better and you will see how much time is wasted as developers and build engineers keep changing the dependencies to suit their needs.

What is the solution then? I am going to start with re-iterating what you probably know already but bear with me - I'll try to keep it short!

The Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server guide does a pretty good job at providing high level guidelines for choosing the right approach. It provides three options for managing the solutions: Single Solution, Partitioned Solution and Multiple Solutions. I am going to skip over the Single Solution. If you can manage everything in the same solution, then you are not worried much about the solution design, right?

Partitioned Solution
If you work on a large system, consider using multiple solutions, each representing a sub-system in your application. These solutions can be used by developers in order to work on smaller parts of the system without having to load all code across all projects. Design your solution structure so any projects that have dependencies are grouped together. This enables you to use project references rather than file references. Also consider creating a master solution file that contains all of the projects. You can use this to build your entire application.

Multiple Solutions
If you work on a very large solution requiring many dozens of projects, you may encounter solution scalability limits. In this scenario, break your application into multiple solutions but do not create a master solution for the entire application because all references inside each solution are project references. References to projects outside of each solution (for example to third-party libraries or projects in another sub-solution) are file references. This means that there can be no “master” solution.

Instead, you must use a script that understands the order in which the solutions need to be built. One of the maintenance tasks associated with a multiple-solution structure is ensuring that developers do not inadvertently create circular references between solutions. This structure requires complex build scripts and explicit mapping of dependency relationships. In this structure it is not possible to build the application in its entirety within Visual Studio. Instead, you can use TFS Team Build or MSBuild directly.

The Partitioned Solution approach doesn't scale well for very large solutions since it will make the IDE very slow and this sends you down the Multiple Solutions approach. So you group related projects and create a solution for each group. You use project references for dependencies inside the solution and file references for those dependencies that cross the solution boundaries. This is where the problems start:

1- You cannot create a master solution that contains all of the projects. This is because you have created file references for cross-solution dependencies, which will cause problems when you try to build the master solution.

2- Depending on which area of the system you are working on, you may want to have a different slice of the system in your solution. For example, if you are a member of a team working on a specific feature such as Order Processing, you want to have a vertical slice that goes across application layers (presentation, business and data). But if you are working on the UI Framework for the application, you want to have a horizontal slice that includes the presentation layer from all functional areas as well as the UI Framework.

So even if all of the team members agree on the concept of Multiple Solutions, there are decision to be made on how the projects are going to be grouped into multiple solutions and as you can see in the above diagram, these categorisations don't necessarily play well with each other.

You always need to consider various factors such as the solution size and simplicity of the build process and choose one of these approaches (none of which are perfect):

• Single Solution
• Partitioned Solution
• Multiple Solutions 

Multiple Partitioned Solutions 
Some of you may know about this already but there is another approach too. One can argue that it is the same as Partitioned Solution but in order to avoid confusion(!), I usually call it "Multiple Partitioned Solutions" or "MPS" (as you know we love TLAs). So what is it and how does it work?

MSBuild is a great build engine. One of its features is the ability to follow and find the project references in a project even if those referenced projects are not inside the solution you are trying to build. This means you no longer need to have all of the project references inside the solution. Believe it or not, but you can successfully build the solution and the projects inside it even if the referenced projects are not in the solution. This will work both from the IDE and the command line as they both rely on the underlying MSBuild functionality. The only condition here is that the referenced projects need to have been built already. MSBuild is able to follow and find those referenced projects but it won't build them for you. Is this a major problem? Probably not because when you get the latest version from the source control, you usually do a full build and then start working on your specific area.

Let's see how the system will be structured then. The dependencies between the projects are created as project references wherever possible. Depending on your requirements, you can create a solution that contains only a subset of projects you need to work on. Because the dependencies are project references, you can now have cross-cutting solutions that go across functional areas and architectural layers. You can also have a master solution because the dependencies are project references. Clearly, you don't want to open the master solution in the IDE often as it will take a long time to load, it will be slow and you don't usually work on all projects at the same time. The master solution will primarily be used for build purposes.

Note 2: I am not saying that you should never use file references. There are cases where you don't want the dependencies to be built in the same build step so you can use file references if needed. The advantage of the Multiple Partitioned Solutions is that it gives you maximum flexibility.

Why do I call it "Multiple Partitioned Solutions"? Because the master solution is partitioned multiple times based on various perspectives. For example, the master solution can be partitioned into three solutions, one for each logical layer (such as presentation, business and data). At the same time, it can also be partitioned into another three solutions, one for each functional area (such as Order Processing, User Management and Call Centre).

Like the other approaches, The MPS approach is not perfect and it has its own challenges. I personally prefer this approach though. It addresses the concerns around solution size and versioning and is very flexible as you can have cross-cutting solutions. But from a tooling perspective, we can provide you with better support so this is an area for improvement. As an example, if you try to remove a project from a solution in Visual Studio, it removes all of the dependencies on that project too. If you are following the MPS approach, this is not necessarily what we want. This is not as bad as it looks as in most projects I have seen, the solutions are created and maintained by dev leads, architects and/or build engineers so as long as they know what they are doing, it will be fine but it would be nice to have a proper solution here.

I have found a workaround for this, which is to unload the projects that depend on the project we are trying to remove before removing the project. This will prevent the dependencies from being dropped automatically. Another approach is to manually edit the solution file and remove the project(s).

As I said, these are workarounds not solutions. When we remove a project, we ideally want to be able to specify whether we want the project to be removed from the dependencies or we are just trying to exclude that project from the solution. So maybe we could add an "Exclude" option to the project context menu in the Solution Explorer? 

So... have you used the MPS approach in your development projects? If yes, can you share your experiences? What are the challenges you have faced and how have you addressed them? What kind of support do you expect from the IDE in this area?

Windows 7 Beta is Here

Windows 7 Beta is now available for download from the MSDN Subscriber area. It will then become widely available for download on Friday (9 Jan) via http://microsoft.com/windows7.

I am very tempted to go ahead and install it as the base OS on my work laptop today but as usual, Microsoft IT have created the customised image to be used internally so I will wait until next week when I have physical access to the corporate network. My home desktop is very excited as its OS is getting an upgrade this evening :)

Windows Installer Custom Actions, Windows Vista and Terminal Server

Using a setup project in Visual Studio is a nice and easy way of creating a deployment solution for your application. In some cases, built-in features such as file copy, GAC registration and registry modification are good enough but there are cases where you need to perform a custom action such as configuring CAS or running a script.

If you have used Visual Studio 2005 to build the setup package (with custom actions) and have tried to run your setup package on Windows Vista with UAC enabled, then you may already know that the setup can fail. This is because Windows Vista is enforcing an architectural intent according to Robert Flaming's blog post. So in order to make sure your custom action runs on Windows Vista without a problem, you need to edit the MSI package and change the custom action type flag to include msidbCustomActionTypeNoImpersonate (see here for the list of options). So for example, if your custom action is defined in a class library, this is how you can calculate the type value for Windows Vista:

msidbCustomActionTypeDll + msidbCustomActionTypeInScript + msidbCustomActionTypeNoImpersonate = 0x00000001 + 0x00000400 + 0x00000800 = 3073

(Note that Visual Studio 2008 sets this value correctly to 3073).

You can then update the type value for this custom action in the Orca tool:

And instead of performing this step manually, you can use a script that does this for you and then run this script as a post-build event of your setup project. Aaron Stebner has a great blog post on this.

So now all is good and we have an automated process for setting the right value for the custom action type. Now what happens if you want to run the same setup package on Terminal Server? If you are performing a per-machine install, the custom action runs with no user impersonation by default and you may need to perform some tasks that rely on the user being the administrator. In order to force the custom action to run with user impersonation, you need to include another flag (msidbCustomActionTypeTSAware), which is ignored if msidbCustomActionTypeNoImpersonate is already present. This makes sense as one is forcing impersonation and the other one is preventing it. But now the challenge is, how can we create a setup package that runs on both platforms?

Windows Vista needs: msidbCustomActionTypeDll + msidbCustomActionTypeInScript + msidbCustomActionTypeNoImpersonate = 0x00000001 + 0x00000400 + 0x00000800 = 3073
Terminal Server needs: msidbCustomActionTypeDll + msidbCustomActionTypeInScript + msidbCustomActionTypeTSAware = 0x00000001 + 0x00000400 + 0x00004000 = 17409

This is where the deployment conditions come to the rescue. First, a bit of background on deployment conditions:

All setup project deployment artifacts such as files, folders, registry entries and custom actions have a Condition property, which will determine whether that item will be installed/run. These properties tell you about the hardware configuration (memory size, CPU type), OS (version, service pack and build number) and other information elements such as user name and computer name. The property reference section on MSDN has a full list of property values you can use. You are not limited to one condition and you can perform logical operations and equality checks too (see Conditional Statement Syntax and Examples of Conditional Statement Syntax).

So let's go back to our scenario. We were looking for a solution that allows a single setup project to be used on Windows Vista and Terminal Server. There is a deployment condition called TerminalServer, which is defined only if we are running on Terminal Server. The deployment condition "TerminalServer" will be true in a Terminal Server environment and the "NOT TerminalServer" will be true in all other environments, including Windows Vista. So we can achieve our objective by creating the following two custom actions:

• One for Terminal Server environments, Condition: TerminalServer, Type: 17409
• One for other environments, Condition: NOT TerminalServer, Type: 3073

This doesn't necessarily mean you need to create two installer classes though. You can add the default output of your class library (which contains the installer class) to the setup project twice and then add two custom actions, each of which uses one of those outputs. You can then use the Orca tool to set the types manually (make sure you set the right type for each action) or use the scripting approach as explained by Aaron Stebner (note that you will need to change the script to satisfy the requirements).

Other links:
Operating System property values for deployment conditions

Application Architecture Guide 2.0 - Final Release

The Application Architecture Guide 2.0 is out and you can now download it from here. As J.D. writes in his post, there are some changes since the Beta 2, including the foreword by Scott Guthrie (which follows the foreword by Soma added in the Beta 2 timeframe) and the incorporated feedback from the long list of internal and external reviewers.

Working on this guide has been a great experience in the past few months, working with the core team and the contributors and reviewers from various product and consulting teams at Microsoft as well as partners and customers. Since this is an architecture guide, it is all about best practices and general guidance and it was amazing to see how we started with varied (and sometimes conflicting) views on different subjects and how we came to an agreement in those areas as we came closer to the release date and we all learnt new ways of looking at various architectural topics.

One of the interesting challenges for us during the development of this guide was to make sure we keep it up-to-date as we announced new products and technologies and made decisions about our development platform roadmap. Clearly, the Microsoft application platform will evolve and we have a long list of products to be released in the next couple of years so the p&p team will be working with various product teams to publish prescriptive guidance and best practices and to revise the existing guides where necessary.

We hope that you enjoy reading this guide and please keep your feedback coming via the CodePlex site.