vs, wcf comments edit

I’ve run into this issue a couple of times now and I always forget what the answer is, so… blog time.

We have some WCF service references in our projects and we were in the process of updating the generated code (right click on the reference, “Update Service Reference”) when we got an assembly reference error:

Could not load file or assembly AssemblyNameHere, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=1234567890123456 or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference.

Normally you can fix this sort of thing by adding a binding redirect to your app.config or web.config and calling it a day. But we had the binding redirect in place for the assembly already. What the… ?!

As it turns out, svcutil.exe and the service reference code generation process don’t use binding redirects from configuration. It didn’t matter where we put the redirect, we still got the error.

The fix is to reduce the set of assemblies with types that get reused. Right-click the service reference and select “Configure Service Reference.” Switch the setting to reuse types in referenced assemblies to be very specific. If you aren’t actually reusing types from a particular assembly (especially third-party assemblies you aren’t building), don’t include it in the list.

We were really only reusing types in one assembly, not the whole giant set of assemblies referenced. Cleaning that up removed the need for the binding redirect and everything started working again as normal.

Note: If you really want to use binding redirects, you can add them to devenv.exe.config so Visual Studio itself uses them. Not awesome, and I wouldn’t recommend it, but… technically possible.

testing comments edit

I’ve noticed that some of our unit tests are running a little long and I’m trying to figure out which ones are taking the longest. While TeamCity has some nice NUnit timing info, it’s a pain to build the whole thing on the build server when I can just try things out locally.

If you have NUnit writing XML output in your command line build (using the /xml: switch) then you can use Log Parser to query the XML file and write a little CSV report with the timings in it:

LogParser.exe "SELECT name, time FROM Results.xml#//test-case ORDER BY time DESC" -i:xml -fMode:Tree -o:csv

A little fancier: take all of the tests across several reports and write the output to a file rather than the console:

LogParser.exe "SELECT name, time INTO timings.csv FROM *.xml#//test-case ORDER BY time DESC" -i:xml -fMode:Tree -o:csv

And fancier still: Take all of the reports across multiple test runs and get the average times for the tests (by name) so you can see which tests over time run the longest:

LogParser.exe "SELECT name, AVG(time) as averagetime INTO timings.csv FROM *.xml#//test-case GROUP BY name ORDER BY averagetime DESC" -i:xml -fMode:Tree -o:csv

blog, sublime, gists comments edit

Now that I’ve moved to GitHub Pages for my blog I find that I sometimes forget what all the YAML front matter should be for a blog entry so I end up copy/pasting.

To make the job easier, I’ve created a little snippet/template for Sublime Text for blog entries. Take this XML block and save it in your User package as Empty GitHub Blog Post.sublime-snippet and it’ll be available when you switch syntax to Markdown:

<snippet>
  <content><![CDATA[
---
layout: post
title: "$1"
date: ${2:2014}-${3:01}-${4:01} -0800
comments: true
tags: [$5]
---
$6
]]></content>
  <scope>text.html.markdown</scope>
</snippet>

I’ve added placeholders so you can tab your way through each of the front matter fields and finally end up at the body of your post.

blog, github comments edit

Well, I finally did it.

For quite some time I’ve been looking at migrating my blog away from Subtext. At first I wanted to go to WordPress, but then… evaluating all the options, the blog engines, etc., I started thinking “less is more.” I originally started out using Subtext because I thought I’d want to extend the blog to do a lot of cool things. It was a great .NET blog platform and I’m a .NET guy, it was perfect.

The problem was… I didn’t do any of that.

I contributed as I could to the project, and there was a lot of great planning for the ever-impending “3.0” release, but… it just never came together. People got busy, stuff happened. Eventually, Subtext development pretty much stopped.

Part of my challenge with Subtext was the complexity of it. So many moving pieces. Database, assemblies, tons of pages and settings, skins, totally no documentation. (Well, there was some documentation that I had been writing but an unfortunate server crash lost it all.) I started looking at hosted solutions like WordPress that would be easy to use and pretty common. But, then, the challenge with any of those systems is getting your data in/out, etc. Plus, hosting costs.

So I started leaning toward a code generation sort of system. Fewer moving pieces, simpler data storage. Also, cheap. Because I’m cheap.

I decided on GitHub Pages because it’s simple, free, reliable… plus, it’s pretty well documented, Jekyll usage is simple, and Markdown is pretty sweet.

Good Stuff About GitHub Pages

  • It’s simple. Push a new post in Markdown format to your blog repo and magic happens.
  • It’s portable. All the posts are in simple text, right in the repo, so if you need to move somewhere else, it’s all right there. No database export, no huge format conversion craziness.
  • It’s free. Doesn’t get cheaper than that.
  • It’s reliable. I’m not saying 100% uptime, but putting your blog in GitHub Pages means you have the whole GitHub team watching to see if the server is down.
  • Browser editor. Create a new post right in the GitHub web interface. Nice and easy.

Less Awesome Stuff About GitHub Pages

  • There’s no server-side processing even if you need it. Ideally I’d want a 404 handler that can issue a 302 from the server-side to help people get to broken permalinks. But the 404 is just HTML generated with Jekyll, so you have to rely on JS to do the redirect. Not so awesome for search engines. I have some [really old] blog entries that were on a PHP system where the permalink is querystring-based, so I can’t even use jekyll-redirect-from to fix it.
  • The Jekyll plugins are limited. GitHub Pages has very few plugins for Jekyll that it supports. On something like OctoPress you hook up the page generation yourself so you can have whatever plugins you want… but you can’t add plugins to GitHub Pages, so the things you can do are kind of limited. (I totally understand why this is the case, doesn’t make it awesome.)
  • No post templates, painful preview. With Windows Live Writer or whatever, you didn’t have to deal with YAML front matter or any of that. The GitHub web editor interface doesn’t have an “add new post” template, so that’s a bit rough. Also, to preview your post, you have to commit the post the first time, then you have the “preview” tab you can use to see “changes” in your post. It renders Markdown nicely, but it’s sort of convoluted.
  • Drafts are weird. I may be doing this wrong, but it looks like you have to put “posts in progress” into a _drafts folder in your blog until it’s ready to go, at which point you move it to _posts.
  • Comments don’t exist. It’s not a blog host, really, so you need to use a system like Disqus for your comments. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it means you have some extra setup.

My Migration Process

A lot of folks who move their blog to GitHub Pages sort of “yadda yadda” away the details. “I exported my content, converted it, and imported it into GitHub Pages.” That… doesn’t help much. So I’ll give you as much detail as I can.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Credit where credit is due:

Phil Haack posted a great article about how he migrated from Subtext to GitHub Pages that was super helpful. He even created a Subtext exporter that was the starting point for my data export. I, uh, liberated, a lot of code from his blog around the skin, RSS feed, and so on to get this thing going.

David Ebbo also moved to GitHub Pages and borrowed from Mr. Haack but had some enhancements I liked, like using GitHub user pages for the repository and using “tags” instead of “categories.” So I also borrowed some ideas and code from Mr. Ebbo.

If you don’t follow these blogs, go subscribe. These are some smart guys.

You Need to Know Jekyll and Liquid

You don’t have to be an expert, but it is very, very helpful to know Jekyll (the HTML content generator) and Liquid (the template engine) at least on a high-level basis. As you work through issues and fix styles or config items, this helps a lot to track things down.

Initialize the Repository

I’m using GitHub user pages for my blog, so I created a repository called tillig.github.io to host my blog. For your blog, it’d be yourusername.github.io. The article on user pages is pretty good to get you going.

Get the Infrastructure Right

Clone that repo to your local machine so you can do local dev/test to get things going. Note that if you check things in and push to the repo as you develop, you may get some emails about build failures, so local dev is good.

The GitHub page on using Jekyll tells you about how to get your local dev environment set up to run Jekyll locally.

There’s a lot to set up here, from folder structure to configuration, so the easiest way to start is to copy from someone else’s blog. This is basically what I did - I grabbed Haack’s blog, put that into my local repo, and got it running. Then I started changing the values in _config.yml to match my blog settings and fixed up the various template pieces in the _includes and _layouts folders. You can start with my blog if you like.

GOTCHA: GitHub uses pygments.rb for code syntax highlighting. If you’re developing on Windows, there’s something about pygments.rb that Windows hates. Or vice versa. Point being, for local dev on Windows, you will need to turn off syntax highlighting during local Windows dev by setting highlighter: null in your _config.yml.

I didn’t see any GitHub Pages blogs that had search on them, so I had to figure that one out myself. Luckily, Google Custom Search makes it pretty easy to get this going. Create a new “custom search engine” and set it up to search just your site. You can configure the look and feel of the search box and results page right there and it’ll give you the script to include in your site. Boom. Done.

Fix Up RSS

The Octopress-based RSS feed uses a custom plugin expand_urls to convert relative URLs like /about.html into absolute URLs like http://yoursite.com/about.html That no worky in GitHub Pages, so you have to use a manual replace filter on URLs in the RSS feed. (If you look at my atom.xml file you can see this in action.)

Make Last Minute Fixes to Existing Content

I found that it was easier to do any last-minute fixes in my existing blog content rather than doing it post-export. For example, I was hosting my images in ImageShack for a long time, but the reliability of ImageShack (even with a paid account) is total crap. I lost so many images… argh. So I went through a process of moving all of my images to OneDrive and it was easier to do that in my original blog so I could make sure the links were properly updated.

If you have anything like that, do it before export.

Export Your Content and Comments

This was the trickiest part, at least for me.

Haack was running on his own server and had direct database access to his content so a little SQL and he was done. I was on a shared server without any real SQL Management Console access or remote access to run SQL against my database, so I had to adjust my export mechanism to be more of a two-phase thing: Get the data out of my database using an .aspx page that executed in the context of the blog, then take the exported content and transform that into blog posts.

There also wasn’t anything in Haack’s setup to handle the comment export for use in Disqus, so I had to do that, too.

Oh, and Haack was on some newer/custom version of Subtext where the database schema was different from mine, so I had to fix that to work with Subtext 2.5.2.0.

Here’s my forked version of Haack’s subtext-jekyll-exporter that you can use for exporting your content and comments. You can also fork it as a starter for your own export process.

  • Drop the JekyllExport.aspx and DisqusCommentExport.aspx files into your Subtext blog.
  • Save the output of each as an XML file.
  • Make your URLs relative. I have a little section on this just below, but it’s way easier to deal with local blog development if your URLs don’t have the protocol or host info in them for internal links. It’s easier to do this in the exported content before running the exporter to process into Markdown.
  • Run the SubtextJekyllExporter.exe on the XML from JekyllExport.aspx to convert it into Markdown. These will be the Markdown pages that go in the _posts/archived folder and they’ll have Disqus identifiers ready to go to tie existing comments to the articles.
  • In Disqus, import a “general” WXR file and use the XML from DisqusCommentExport.aspx as the WXR file. It may take a while to import, so give it some time.

You can test this out locally when it’s done. Using Jekyll to host your site locally, check out your comment section on one of the posts in your site with comments. They should show up.

Make URLs Relative

It is way easier to test your blog locally if the links work. That means if you have absolute links like http://yoursite.com/link/target.html they’re going to only work if the link is truly live. If, however, you have /link/target.html then it’ll work on your local test machine, it’ll work from yourusername.github.io, and it’ll work from your final blog site.

I did a crude replacement on my blog entries that seemed to work pretty well.

Replace ="http://www.mysite.com/" with ="/" and that seemed to be enough (using my domain name in there, of course). YMMV on that one.

Push It

Once everything looks good locally, push it to your public repo. (If you’re on Windows, don’t forget to comment out that highlighter: null in _config.yml.) Give it a few minutes and you should be able to see your blog at http://yourusername.github.io - navigate around and do any further fix-up.

Configure DNS

This was a finicky thing for me. I don’t mess with DNS much so it took me a bit to get this just right.

My blog is at www.paraesthesia.com (I like the www part, some folks don’t). GitHub has some good info about setting up your custom domain but it was still a little bit confusing and “spread out” for me.

For the www case, like mine:

What got me/wasn’t clear was that for the www special case, you have to do both the A and CNAME records.

Once you do that, yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com will both make it to your blog. (If you don’t like the www part, make your CNAME file in your repo only contain yourdomain.com instead of www.yourdomain.com.)

Remaining Items

I still have a few things to fix up, but for the most part I’m moved over.

There are still some quirky CSS things I need to fix that I’m not happy with. Looking at the headers in this entry, for example, they have some crazy overlapping with the first line under them.

I have some in-page JS demos that were sort of challenging to set up in Subtext but should be easier in the new setup. I need to move those over; right now they’re broken.

I also have the “Command Prompt Here Generator” app that was running on my blog site but is now inaccessible because I have to get it going on a site with dynamic abilities. I’ll probably use my old blog host site as an “app host” now where I just put little dynamic apps. It’ll be easier to do that stuff without Subtext right in the root of the site.

I’ll get there, but for now… I’m feeling pretty good.

net comments edit

One of the most frequent StackOverflow questions we see for Autofac involves some confusion over how to deal with components in applications like MVC and Web API that support per-request dependencies.

To help folks out, I wrote up a fairly comprehensive document on the Autofac doc site addressing the various questions around per-request dependencies.

We’re still working on porting over the wiki content into the doc site. While that is going on, things are a little “split” between the two sites. If the content is on the doc site, go for that over the wiki. The doc site has content that’s a little more robust and detailed than the wiki had (which is part of the desire to move to the doc site).