Monthly Archives: June 2016

Sprint 0 for old school .NET devs

.NET, C#, CI, DevOps

When you start work on a code base, either from scratch or as you approach it as a new dev, there are a few things you should ensure are in place before you get going. Like most other things, these are easier and more natural on more mature platforms than it tends to be on .NET where the toy app tends to be king, but it is doable. I will here list some technologies I use and I may mention some competing ones for completeness. I can’t share most of the code because reasons, but if there is interest, I can put together samples showing specific techniques of the ones I have used.

Introduction

The checklist of what you need to put in place if it doesn’t exist is the following:

  • Version control
  • Build server
  • Automated tests run as part of the build process
  • Automated packaging
  • Automated deployment
  • Automated monitoring
  • Automated setup of development environment

I know most of that reads as “a house must have a roof” but there were, and still are,  places where people go “We’re only a couple of guys, we can just leave the source on the NAS, it’s backed up”, so I’m just being clear here.

The last point may seem like overkill, but especially if you use the abomination that is 3rd party components, it is crucial to save time and more easily onboard new guys.

Version control

I’m going to shock you here and not require that you use Git. You might want to, because it’s becoming a skill everybody has, and GitHub is a beautiful place to keep your code, but if your workflow is centralised anyway. you can legitimately stay with Subversion as long as you take care of the basics, as in backing up the repository properly. Recent versions have less horrible diffing, so it is is not that bad anymore. The most crucial aspect is that you do need a version control system that has a good powerful command line interface.

Build server

I’m going to suggest TeamCity here, because I know it well, but it has some real drawbacks. GitHub comes with TravisCI which is a modern CI system. Jenkins has been popular. The point is – make sure your build configuration is the same on the development machine as it is on the build server, and make sure the build configuration is version controlled with the source, ideally that you can run all of it from the command line. This way you can know you are not about to break the build before you push your changes and also you know that you can recreate a previous version of the code without faff because a contemporary build configuration can be found in source control along side the source.

Automated tests run as part of the build process

The obvious bit here are to run your favourite command-line testrunner on your build output to make sure all your tests run on the build server.

You can always write powershell scripts to make simple but high-value integration tests, it doesn’t all have to be Selenium / FitNesse even though those are quite nice once you are over the initial hurdle, but yes, there is a cost.

Automated deployment

Many ways to deploy exist, OctopusDeploy is popular to use with TeamCity, but you should look at chef and puppet as well. They tend to be hostile to Windows, but it is now possible to use them, and they make sense. It is as if they are specifically designed for the purpose of deploying and maintaining software infrastructure.

Years ago I looked very briefly at Puppet, but I have come to work with chef recently and it does what it is supposed to do, but I have no factual reason to rate chef higher than puppet other than that I now know it.

For chef you can look at kitchen to test your deployment scripts in transient VMs. It can use Azure VMs, VMWare WorkStation or Vagrant / VirtualBox and it does shorten the feedback cycle considerably.

Automated monitoring

You can use pingdom, Monitis or Nagios or just run a few curl/wget in a scheduled task and send an email if they don’t return the expected information. Either way, you need to be able to know if things aren’t working. Use the smallest possible thing you can get away with if your budget is constrained, but do use something.

Automated setup of the development environment

This may be sensitive, as developers tend to be particular about where their code lives and how their machine is organised, but having the developers just be able to run a script and end up with all their development tools set up and ready to debug.

Some things are going to be difficult. Installing Redgate SQL Source Control doesn’t seem to be scriptable, but other than that you can:

  • install Visual Studio
  • Install plugins
  • Use chocolatey to install source control management
  • Get the sources locally

In some cases, as your system grows, and you break bits out into separate micro services, you will need this scripting to make sure you can set up the entire system to debugged locally. Ideally you would, as an additional means to verify your deployment method, use chef-zero or corresponding technology from Puppet to use your normal deployment templates as you configure the system on the development machines as well. This is another situation where clever IDE tooling actively makes things difficult for you, but any work you put in to automate here will pay huge dividends.

But what does this all mean in practice?

In short, if you are going to keep working on Windows exclusively, at least learn Powershell. It is not that horrible. The stance among Windows users have long been anti-scripting, and with the state of CMD.exe it has been for good reason. Powershell, though, has a lot of features that make sense even though the syntax can be confusing at first. Learning ruby may be more viable from a cross-platform perspective, but Powershell is evidently more suited for Windows and a lot of useful cmdlets for enabling windows features et cetera are only available in Powershell.

Red mist

.NET, F#, Functional

Sometimes you get so upset about something you need to blog about it, and ranting on Twitter, Facebook and Channel 9 comments just did not quite seem enough.

The insult, and the injury

I watched a Channel 9 talk about the “future of C# and VB” by Jay Schmeltzer from DEVintersection where he went over the future of the .NET stack, and started out by looking over the Stack Overflow statistics of programming languages that I have addressed before. He showed the graph of Most Popular Technologies showing C# placed prominently fourth behind Java, SQL and JavaScript, then Jay showed the category Most Loved languages, where Microsoft  have a runaway hit with F# on third place, and then C# way down on 10th place. Obviously, VB was right on top of the Most Feared, but that you knew already. Jay expressed much pride in having C# all the way up on 10th of most loved languages and then said “and we have Microsoft’s F# up here on 3rd, but that is of course more of a … well,  C# is of course mainstream in a different way”. So in other words, not even a pretence that F# is a first class citizen in .NET.

Contrast with Apple. From almost single handed creating Objective C into something that is in existence and popular despite the crushing superiority in funding and mindshare of C++ – Apple basically told everybody that (the F# clone) Swift is it from now on. They basically did a VB6 -> C# sort of story, telling everybody that they were welcome to use that old stuff but they really should get on board with the modern technologies.

Contrast that with the above statement from top brass at Microsoft.

So basically, in this blog I am trying to collect ways which a dark matter C# developer can just start using F# today thanks to the extremely ambitious efforts of the friendly and hard-working F# community, and show to the extreme extent Microsoft isn’t bothering at all – ignoring the goldmine they are sitting on. I’m trying to find ways which make things easier for existing Microsoft-focused developers, so I will be collating the things you can use to go F# today for the crummy ASP.NET LOB apps that make up the bread and butter of the C# world.

The comeback

My goal is providing ways which you can go F# today, and immediately write less code with fewer bugs that do the things your C# code does today. You will eventually discover cooler things, like package management using Paket (wich support Nuget package streams and maintaining dependencies directly from GitHub or similar) amd the very F# web framework Suave.io and using FAKE as a build system rather than MSBuild, which helps if you have complex builds where you would like to not mess with XML and rather read F# code. You may perhaps find other ways to persist data that are more natural to use in F# and you will have little problem learning them once you get over the hump, but just to make the barrier to entry extremely low, let’s keep things familiar and non-scary. The things that would come for free if Microsoft had devoted more than a fraction of means towards F# in Visual Studio is the templating that makes C# so easy to use when creating websites and web services. To achieve that ease-of-use we have to rely on the community, and they have despite the odds come up with a few competitive options over the years. I have compiled these on my F# for C# people page which I hope to keep updated.