Niranjan Singh's coding blog

Microsoft’s has started new way of development in Open Source world with the  paradigm “Compiler as a service”. Now Microsoft has lots of open source projects including the .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”).NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”). The .NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn") provides open-source C# and Visual Basic compilers with rich code analysis APIs. You can build code analysis tools with the same APIs that Microsoft is using to implement Visual Studio!. According to these dramatic changes in the development on the Microsoft platform lots of tools are adopting ways to move along these. After a while again I got chance to install CodeRush in Visual Studio IDE and I there are two different flavours of CodeRush. This makes me little confuse that which one should i install to work with.

After checking through documentation and ready some blog posts related to my question I got that When to use this newer version of CodeRush for Roslyn or CodeRush Classic. Actually CodeRush Classic work with the prior version of .NET Framework 4.6. With this newer version of .NET framework which is shipped with the Microsoft’s open source projects which based on the Rosyln compiler platform. Below are points which help you to decide that which version suits to your development environment:

1. If you are using Visual Studio  2015 and .NET framework 4.6 (above) then CodeRush classic does work for you. In this case you should install CodeRush for Roslyn. This does not has all the feature of the CodeRush Classic but newer version will defiantly improve this open source stack.
2. If you are working with older version of .NET Framework then you’ll need CodeRush Classic. If you need both, you can install both versions simultaneously and defiantly i try this too.
3. CodeRush Classic supports C# 5.0, VB10, ASP.NET, HTML, JavaScript, XML, and XAML. In this case, for the newer version of language CodeRush for Roslyn is the only option and may be in near future Classic version of CodeRush go obsolete.

Learning and source of information:
CodeRush
.NET Developer Tooling: The Roslyn Revolution
CodeRush on Roslyn

Peoples who are habitual of using intellisense in Visual Studio and suddenly it is found missing then they really get mad during the work. Today I am trying to create some html pages with bootstrap for learning. I was feeling little hard to do code with bootstrap, because I am not able remember all of the class names of the bootstrap.

There are lots of glyphicon classes which is hard to remember. Visual Studio has this nice feature by adding JavaScript library path to the “_references.js” file and after that everything available in autosuggest mode.

What happened with me, I am not able to find the correct gylphicon class name without intellisense. Regarding this I have googled and found that this feature is not currently available in VS Code right now. However, it has been added as a feature request for upcoming updates.

Do not disappoint, There is also hope to do work with intellisense in VSCode. You can use extension"HTML CSS Class Completion".

Open Command Palette by press ctrl+ship+p Then run  “ext install HTML CSS Class Completion” to install this extension. Check the results in below image to see after enabling this extension.

Happy coding!

Scenario:

I had a requirement for preventing user to edit the “Composite Shape” elements (e.g. Text Primitives, Ports etc.). This restriction is required during the development for most of the cases because programs are using these shapes for some special purpose representation and these should not be altered by the use at run time to keep them consistent.

If user change these shapes then it will be hard to know that it has been modified this diagram is saved as XML string in some data store. If shape elements are used to identify the shape elements by name then it will break the program for being consistent for these shapes. See the below image, If the edited port name is used in program to  identity the center port then it will be distinguish the center  port in all of these ports.

Finally, it is required to remove some commands from the context menu of the shape in the diagram view for the user so that user will not able to modify the shape elements.

Solution:

At first place, you need to use the “Protection” on the shape to prevent some operation. You can restrict few operation on the shape for the user.

These can be set programmatically, these are just for making restrictions on the shape not for the context menu operations. See below code example:

NAbilities shapeAbilities = new NAbilities();
shapeAbilities.All = false;
shapeAbilities.InplaceEdit = true;
shapeAbilities.ResizeX = true;
shapeAbilities.ResizeY = true;
shapeAbilities.Export = false;
NShape shape = (NShape)nDrawingDocument1.ActiveLayer.Children(null)[0];
shape.Protection = shapeAbilities;

Real Solution
The simplest solution is that create a custom context menu builder for creating context menu for the current diagram view.  This will create/add the required command that you want to provide to the user while working in the diagram.

First create a Custom ContextMenuBuilder by inheriting “NDiagramContextMenuBuilder” class and override “BuildContextMenu” method. There you need to create the context menu and add the required commands to the created context menu.

internal class CustomContextMenuBuilder : NDiagramContextMenuBuilder
{
    public override NContextMenu BuildContextMenu(object obj)
    {
        NContextMenu contextMenu = new NContextMenu();
        contextMenu.Commands.Add(CreateCommand((int)DiagramCommand.Delete, false));

        return contextMenu;
    }
}

After that create an instance of this custom context menu builder and assign it to the ContextMenuBuilder property of your diagram command bars manager:

nDiagramCommandBarsManager1.ContextMenuBuilder = new CustomContextMenuBuilder();

npm -v

npm install -g live-server

live-server

It is also possible to see the live preview in VSCode split windows. You have follow below steps to do this:

1. Create a live-view.md file with this in it (Place it wherever you want. I put it at the base folder of all my projects since I can use it for whatever I'm currently working on):
   

   <div style="border:1px solid #777;
   position:absolute;left:10px;top:10px;bottom:10px;right:10px;"> 
     <iframe src="http://localhost:8080/"; width="100%" height="100%" frameborder="0" /> 
   </div>
   

2. Open live-view.md in the second/split pane in VS Code and click the "Open preview" button (top right of file).

To start writing your first program without using the Visual Studio or other tools, you just need to open “Command Prompt”. Just type command on the search in Start menu either you are using Windows 7 or any higher.

Visual Studio installs few command line tools to do some operation using command tools and these can be invoked using the “Developer Command Prompt for VS2015”(For Visual Studio 2015). If someone has not installed Visual Studio then just install .NET Framework on the computer.

After this we are ready to create and compile our “Hello World!” program using the .NET Framework compilers.

Now create a file “hello.cs” using the “notepad”. We are going to write our code to print “Hello World!” on the screen for this example. “.cs” is the common extension for the C# file and “.vb” for Visual Basic. So now we going to create a C# program now so this file will contain C# code.

After running this command a prompt will appear with message “Do you want to create a new file?”. Click on “Yes” to create a new file.

In this we are going to create a class with a static method “Main”. In a Console application that would run on command prompt, CLR look for class named “Program” with a “Main” method to run the program.

Now save this file and come back to the command prompt.

Now one of the tool “csc.exe” exists in the “Windows” directory in the .NET framework installation paths. It can be located at the path “C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\{.NET Framework}”. Under the Framework folder you will find installation of .NET Framework multiple version. Below is the path of the latest one on my system. It is the “Visual C# Command Line Compiler” which compiles the C# code.

Now we are going to compile the C# code then execute the program. After compiling the program C# compiler produce a executable file(.exe).

To compile the created C# code file, use the below command line on command prompt. Just pass the created “hello.cs” as parameter.

1. csc hello.cs

On windows we can run exe. Now run the hello.exe to view the result of our example program.

That’s all done. We have created an example program run on the command prompt using the C# command line compiler.

Actually it transforms C# code into Microsoft Intermediate Language. This can either an exe or dynamic link library. We specify the assembly format to the csc.exe using the /target:library option. See below image for various target options:

  Happy Coding!

After using Windows Live Writer, now I have start using Open Live Writer to do remote blogging. Right now WLW is not able to connect with few blogging platforms like blogger.com and also Microsoft has stopped putting efforts on the amazing tool for the bloggers.

OLW is an open source tool which is developed by the contribution of the developer community. Lots of features of this tool is under development. It has the main advantage that there are many tools available as compare to the HTML editor on the remote blog. You can work offline, which might be good if you’re in a situation where you don’t have a decent internet connection or not able to connect to internet for days. It will let you write blog posts and save them to draft for later publishing.

In this article, you will go through the steps to configure Open Live Writer for the Orchard CMS. This provide support for remote bloging through XmlRcp. Both WLW and OLW are able to connect with the Orchard CMS blog using this feature.

Orchard provides this XML-RPC feature out of the box and You have to enable it in the Modules section inside your Orchard CMS Orchard admin panel.

Prerequisites:

1. You have setup Orchard CMS on your web hosting or local IIS and created a blog on website.
2. Installed OLW on your computer.

If you have done pre work then go to the Administration Dashboard of Orchard and click the Modules. There you will find Remote Blog Publishing feature under the Content Publishing section. It is dependent on XmlRpc so if you enable it then XmlRpc feature will automatically enabled.

To enable Remote Blog Publishing click the Enable link. After clicking the enable link you will see both of them enabled at once since they are dependent features. After you click Enable, if everything is Ok then you will see following message:

After enabling these modules you are ready to configure Orchard blog in Open Live Writer. Now, launch Live Writer from your Start menu in Windows.

In Blog Accounts section, click on 'Add blog account'

When you choose “Add blog account” then you will see below prompt to select the blog service. Choose “Other blog service” from the available options and click Next.

Type the URL to your Orchard blog, along with the admin user name and password that you defined when you set-up Orchard for the first time.

Click Next. Open Live Writer will connect to your blog in order to read the XML-RPC capabilities that Orchard supports and download the current Theme (for previewing posts before publishing). If you are prompted to create a temporary post during this step, select "Yes" in the dialog.

After that it will complete downloading supporting files and template for making blog post writing intuitive.

Once it finishes, you will have window where you can specify the name of your blog you have just configured in Open Live Writer, click Finish.

Now you are ready to write blog post for your Orchard CMS blog.

CodeProject

In AngularJS controller can have $scope or $http parameters. These must be $scope or $http rather than s or h. Minification process removes extra spaces and convert JavaScript method parameters to single character so that it tries to convert them in single character parameters.

When we declare a controller using the module then most of us just simply specify the controller method as below:

var app = angular.module("githubViewer", []);
//Controller
var MainController = function($scope, $http) {
};

app.controller("MainController", MainController); //MainController is controller method

During the learning, I get to know that during the minification process these parameters are changes to some single character. If these are renamed then AngularJS will not able to find the $scope and $http parameter. It expect them as 6 character $scope and 5 character $http in the controller method. To avoid this happen you need manually specify the parameters name when you specify the controller name and controller method to the module.

app.controller("MainController", ["$scope", "$http", MainController]);

       Hope this help someone to avoid making this mistake..

Yesterday I have installed update 3 for Visual Studio  2015 Community edition. At that time set failed due to internet disconnection during the installation. Somehow setup completed but when Visual studio was not working correctly. It was showing “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” when try to select any item in visual studio as shown below:

Solution
To resolve this issue I have tried to repair the Visual Studio using Program and Features in Control Panel but still the situation is same. After doing some research I found that it is the issue with the configuration setting and common files for the visual studio located at following locations:

1. C:\Users\{user}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio
2. C:\Users\{user}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VSCommon

Delete the content from these folders. If you do this way then all of your user settings such as Visual Studio layout, linked Microsoft account or start page settings get lost.

If you have installed multiple version of the Visual Studio then it is sufficient do delete folder ComponentModelCache on path
C:\Users\{user}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\{version - 14 or 12}. It will preserve other setting of the Visual Studio. If it does not work then delete all content from the “Visual Studio” folder.

Some times it require to run “devenv /resetuserdata” command to reset the user data of the visual studio. I did it also using the Developer Command Prompt for Visual Studio Console but you can find this command tool at following locations:

1. [x64] C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE
2. [x86] C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE

Hope it will save time for someone rather doing uninstall or install for Visual Studio again.

Microsoft announced the release of Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 two days ago. They have addressed issues from previous update and improved few things. In the list of improvements, I found an interesting thing that you can now quickly include NuGet packages by just using the resolve reference method. You can say it An option to add a reference to a NuGet package as a quick fix.

You can enable this option from Tools > Options > Text Editor > C# > Advanced, under "Using Directives":

Visual Studio is improving in most of the expects for the development of the Universal Application development. There kind of improvements can make you more productive..

Scenario:
I have created a web application using Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6. When I have compiled and uploaded my project files to the hosting server, it showed the exception of related to permission. After checking for a while I found that application is trying to execute the CSC.exe file within the Bin\roslyn\ folder, but IIS user account does not permission to do that.

Solution:
If you are trying to publish Roslyn on shared hosting then you should know that it runs on Full Trust mode. Shared hosting companies does not allow Full Trust applications automatically , they override this globally with Medium Trust due to security restrictions as they are hosting multiple customers website and they don’t want one application affects another by any chance. Some hosting provider provide you the control to run your application on Full trust and provide setting to do that in these days.

Roslyn compilation will only work with Full Trust so on some shared hosting you might face challenges. I would suggest ask your hosting provider if they support Full Trust mode or not.

If shared hosting does not support Full Trust you should not deploy application with Roslyn, this will display you some sort of .exe file missing errors. Even you can’t upload .exe files to FTP on shared server, but you can somehow able to upload these exe files through their control using the zip package and then unzip on the hosting folder.

Below are the steps to deploy without Roslyn:

1. Open NuGet Package Manager from tools menu or Use Manage NuGet Packages for Solution it will give you graphical way to uninstall packages from the solution project in which you are using that package.
   
   
   
2. Now uninstall Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform package using the below command line in Package Manager console:
   
   Uninstall-package Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform <Your Web project name>
   
   
   
3. Now rebuild & republish. This uninstallation also removes CodeDom configuration from web.config file. This will solve your purpose. Basically this will not generate any csc.exe, vbc.exe files inside bin folder of your project.
   
   In your web project publish profile settings, uncheck "Allow precompiled site to be updatable". You can find this under Settings > Precompile during publishing > configure.
   
   

Solution from - Roslyn CSC.exe, Web API 2 on Hosting Server
Hope this help others to solve the issue.
Cheers!