Scott Hanselman

We try to go to Africa every year if we can. We went there to get married and negotiate lobola. We took our first son there to meet his Grandmother, and now we head back to introduce Son #2 to Gogo.

We're all packed and the house is safe in the hands of the house-sitter. We've got about 25 hours of travel ahead of us with a 1 year old and a 3 year old in tow.

If I'm connected at all on this trip, it'll be to blog about our travels, so temporarily, this blog will turn into an Africa Travel Blog, as it has every year (or every other year) in December, so be warned. If you're not interested (as Jeff is not) in such gripping topics as Black Hair, "Waiting for Death's Sweet Release" or Finding a Fundi, then I'll see you in January. If I get a chance, we'll podcast from the other side of the world as well.

One other thing, I'll be stopping by two User Groups while ekhaya, first on the 8th at 6:30pm in Gauteng in Johannesburg, South Africa:

When: 8th December 2008 18:30 - 20:30
Venue: Microsoft Auditorium 2, Bryanston (directions)
Topic: Probably MVC and very open Q&A - Vote here.
RSVP: Please RSVP including your full name as Microsoft security now requires this upfront.

Then in Cape Town on the 17th at 1:00pm in Mowbray:

When: 17th December 2008 13:00 (sharp) (yes, that's 1pm)
Venue: Microsoft Cape Town -  Golf Park 3, Engen House, Raapenberg Road, Mowbray
Topic: "Building a Real Website with ASP.NET MVC: Suffering and Pain and Joy" and (very) open Q&A
RSVP: Please RSVP including your full name as Microsoft security now requires this upfront, at hilton at giesenow.com or at http://dotnet.org.za/sadevelopercapetownevents/

Please feel free to spread the word if you're in RSA, but remember that RSVP'ing is needed. See you there!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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My one-hundred-and-fortieth podcast is up. Neither I nor Rob Conery are experts in DDD (Domain Driven Design.) We hear a lot about DDD, but we hear very "Zen-like" and "soft" terms. As concrete (or fairly so) thinkers, Rob and Scott try to get our tiny minds around DDD. Is it a fad? A religion? Some kind of software design cult? Rob Conery has decided to learn for himself, and I join him for the trip in this episode. We likely accomplished nothing, but we've taken the first step.

The premise of domain-driven design is two-fold:

• For most software projects, the primary focus should be on the domain and domain logic; and
• Complex domain designs should be based on a model.

Also, check out Eric Evans on .NET Rocks!

Subscribe: 

• Download: MP3 Full Show #140
• Play in your browser.

Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

Telerik is our sponsor for this show!

Building quality software is never easy. It requires skills and imagination. We cannot promise to improve your skills, but when it comes to User Interface, we can provide the building blocks to take your application a step closer to your imagination. Explore the leading UI suites for ASP.NET and Windows Forms. Enjoy the versatility of our new-generation Reporting Tool. Dive into our online community. Visit www.telerik.com.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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My one-hundred-and-thirty-ninth podcast is up. Scott chats with with Miguel de Icaza and Joseph Hill, the folks behind Moonlight. It's Silverlight on Linux with Mono and it's Open Source!

Subscribe:

• Download: MP3 Full Show #139
• Play in your browser.

Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

Telerik is our sponsor for this show!

Building quality software is never easy. It requires skills and imagination. We cannot promise to improve your skills, but when it comes to User Interface, we can provide the building blocks to take your application a step closer to your imagination. Explore the leading UI suites for ASP.NET and Windows Forms. Enjoy the versatility of our new-generation Reporting Tool. Dive into our online community. Visit www.telerik.com.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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I found a bug in an application I'm working on. I couldn't decide if it's a bug in the ASP.NET MVC Framework or a feature. I knew this, however. Both their code and my code runs exactly as it was written. ;)

First, the behavior I'm seeing, then a pile of unnecessary technical context because I like to hear myself talk, then my conclusion. Regardless, it's great fun!

UPDATE: I've been promptly teased/beaten by the MVC team, as they pointed out, pointedly, is the same behavior pointed out by Ayende like 15 years ago. It was prompted fixed/changed, and the new behavior changes the order (listed below) to 3, 1, 2 as I understand it. I hang my head in shame. ;) It's been totally fixed in the Release Candidate, so this post acts only as my own CSI:ASPNETMVC.

The Behavior

My application does CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) on Dinners. When you are entering a new Dinner object, you fill out a form and POST your HTML form.

We take in the Dinner and save it (I've removed goo for clarity):

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]
[Authorize]
public ActionResult New([Bind(Prefix = "")]Dinner item)
{
    if (ModelState.IsValid)
    {
        item.UserName = User.Identity.Name;
        _dinnerRepository.Add(item);
        _dinnerRepository.Save();
        TempData["Message"] = item.Title + " Created";
        return RedirectToAction("List");
    }
}

The behavior I'm seeing is that ModelState.IsValid is ALWAYS false.

Note at this point that I'm not clever enough to go digging into the ModelState object for exactly why. More on my stupidity later. ;)

The Context

The Form POST looks like this (RAW HTTP):

Title=Foo&EventDate=2008-12-10&EventTime=21%3A50&Description=Bar&HostedBy=shanselman&LocationName=SUBWAY&MapString=1050+SW+Baseline+St+Ste+A1%2C+Hillsboro%2C+OR&ContactPhone=%28503%29+601-0307&LocationLatitude=45.519978&LocationLongitude=-123.001934

See how there's a bunch of Name/Value pairs in there? They mostly line up with the names of properties in my class as seen below.

However, note that ID isn't in the Form POST. It's not there because it's an identity, and it'll be created when we save the Dinner to the database.

The New() method takes a Dinner as a parameter. That Dinner is create by the system because using the DefaultModelBinder. That binder looks at the values in the HTTP POST and tries to line them up with the properties on the object. Notice that there's no "ID" in the Form POST. Why is ModelState.IsValid false?

If I look in the ModelState.Values, I can see that the first value says "A value is required." ModelState.Keys tells me that's "ID" and that "" was passed in.

Where did MVC get an ID from and why is it ""? I don't need an ID, I'm in the middle of making a Dinner, not editing one.

Well, it turns out that the DefaultValueProvider, the thing that, ahem, provides values, to the DefaultModelBinder looks in a few places for its values. From the source on CodePlex, note the nice comments:

public virtual ValueProviderResult GetValue(string name) {
    if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(name)) {
        throw new ArgumentException(MvcResources.Common_NullOrEmpty, "name");
    }

    // Try to get a value for the parameter. We use this order of precedence:

    // 1. Values from the RouteData (could be from the typed-in URL or from the route's default values)

    // 2. URI query string

    // 3. Request form submission (should be culture-aware)


    object rawValue = null;
    CultureInfo culture = CultureInfo.InvariantCulture;
    string attemptedValue = null;

    if (ControllerContext.RouteData != null && ControllerContext.RouteData.Values.TryGetValue(name, out rawValue)) {
        attemptedValue = Convert.ToString(rawValue, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
    }
    else {
        HttpRequestBase request = ControllerContext.HttpContext.Request;
        if (request != null) {
            if (request.QueryString != null) {
                rawValue = request.QueryString.GetValues(name);
                attemptedValue = request.QueryString[name];
            }
            if (rawValue == null && request.Form != null) {
                culture = CultureInfo.CurrentCulture;
                rawValue = request.Form.GetValues(name);
                attemptedValue = request.Form[name];
            }
        }
    }

    return (rawValue != null) ? new ValueProviderResult(rawValue, attemptedValue, culture) : null;
}

Seems that while I assumed that the Form POST was the only place that a Model Binder would go looking, in fact, it looks in three places:

1. Values from the RouteData
2. URI query string
3. Request form submission (should be culture-aware)

The emphasis is mine. At this point I know I'm not seeing a bug, but rather an uncomfortable side-effect of my overly generic naming. I created an ID property on Dinner, but is also have the default route in my Global.asax.cs:

routes.MapRoute(
    "Default",                                              // Route name
    "{controller}/{action}/{id}",                           // URL with parameters
    new { controller = "Home", action = "List", id = "" }  // Parameter defaults
);

Note the default value for ID. This can be confirmed in the debugger at the same breakpoint I used before. The RouteData collection shows an ID name/value pair, where the value is "".

The DefaultModelBinder saw that an ID was available, but it was set to "", which is different than complete omission. If it wasn't there at all, it wouldn't have been required. If it was set to "A" as in /controller/action/A then I'd have seen a different error of "The value 'A' is invalid." as "A" isn't an int.

The Conclusion

I'm going to change my model to use Dinner.DinnerID instead of Dinner.ID so that there's no reuse of tokens between the Route/URL and the Model's property names. Fun stuff! It was so nice to just check the ASP.NET MVC source code to solve my problem. Kudos also to the ASP.NET MVC team for making the source easy to read.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Say what you like about Netbooks, or Tiny Notebooks, but I love my Dell Mini 9.

It's tiny. That's the whole point. It weighs like 2 lbs, almost nothing. It is definitely purse-sized (or murse-sized) with a high WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). It's already saved me twice when I've been out and about and needed to log into servers to fix stuff.

Even if you don't get a Mini 9, as long as your expectations are set appropriately for what the machine can do, you'll love your netbook. Omar got a EeePC and loves it. Others like one of these:

• MSI Wind
• Asus Eee PC 1000H (80GB HD, 160GB HD)
• Lenovo IdeaPad S10

From Dell, on the very low end you can get one for US$349 with a 4GB SSD (Solid State Drive), Linux and a half-gig of RAM. Good for surfing, but little else. On the high end, you can get a gig of RAM and a 16GB SSD, which is more usable.

Specs

Some netbooks have Hard Drives, but the Dell has a silent memory-based SSD. Omar points out that most netbooks have similar specs:

• 10 inch 1024 x 600 screen
• 80 GB SATA hard drive
• Intel Atom 1.6 Ghz processor
• 512MB – 1 GB of RAM
• WebCam
• Bluetooth (Lenovo S10 does not)
• WiFi (Asus has 802.11n while the others are b/g)
• Ethernet 10/100

The Mini 9 also has an SD card slot, 3 USB ports, headphone/mic and VGA out. The SSD seems to get a buffered read speed of about 25Mb/sec, while my T60p does about 50Mb/sec. That benchmark number feels about right when compared to the perception of speed.

The speakers are surprisingly loud. I watch a full episode of Heros last night while on the treadmill and had no trouble hearing it. It's also worth noting that it's completely silent when running. It's so quiet it's hard to tell its on. One last thing that's significant, the screen is exceptionally crisp and bright. I didn't expect so small a laptop to have SUCH a clear screen.

I've heard people say it gets hot, but I just haven't see that at all. Some folks complain there is no F11 or F12, key. However, BIOS A02 (the currently shipping BIOs) uses Fn-Z and Fn-X for F11 and F12, so no problem there now.

Upgrades are Cheap and Easy

However, if you check out sites like http://www.mydellmini.com/, there are aftermarket SSDs in sizes like 32GB. I'm sure 64GB is on its way. One strategy is to by the smallest, cheapest Dell Mini, the get a 2GB memory chip from Crucial for ~US$26. The upgrade is literally a 5 minute affair.

I upgraded my to 2GB and bought it with the 16GB SSD. The SSD is slower than a regular HD in my experience, but in weird ways. For example, the thing boots from off to the Windows 7 desktop in about 15 seconds. However, if you have a LOT of things going on writing to the drive it seems to slow down. That said, it's TOTALLY usable.

This guy added a GPS to his Dell Mini 9. I suspect we'll see more cool hacks like this.

Coding

I'm running Visual Web Developer and SQL Server 2008 Express and doing just fine. I'll be taking it with me to South Africa this month as my only laptop. I'll be speaking at two User Groups and running all my demos on this machine. I think it'll work just fine as a slowish laptop. After installing Windows 7, VS.NET Express (not MSDN), and SQL Express, I've got 4.58 Gigs free on the drive, so I'm not feeling cramped.

When you plug in a large keyboard, mouse and monitor, it almost disappears, especially when you're using it at a reasonable resolution.

Performance

I use it while working out to watch Hulu.com and other 480p videos and the when plugged in, the frame rate is just fine, very smooth. It drops frames if you're compiling in the background or something.

I'm getting between 3 and 4 hours of battery life, depending on the brightness level and how hard it's working. It's definitely better than the 2.5 hours I squeeze out of my Lenovo T60p.

I plugged it into my 1600x1080 monitor and amazingly it worked fine. It kept the same color depth and the windows still had transparent Aero glass with my pre-release version of Windows 7. It did seem that the video card was working pretty hard though. When I turn off transparency and themes it moves faster, so you can tune the visual effects to your taste.

I haven't tested Outlook, but as I understand it, the seek pattern of PST/OST files is NOT something that SSDs like. Since the Dell Mini 9 has a SD slot, you can easily add another "drive" by putting a SD card in there. I added a 4GB SD card and made a new folder called "C:\Program Files (SD)" then linked it to the SD card with this command line:

mklink /d "C:\Program Files (SD)" E:\Program Files (SD)"

Then I installed some programs in there. You can do the same with data files like OSTs, but don't expect stellar Outlook performance for now.

Mini 9 Performance Tweaks

• Some folks have claimed that turn off Prefetching in XP can make SSDs work faster by removing a series of small writes that XP/Vista does in the background. Your mileage my vary (YMMV).
• I have turned off the Indexing Service, Virus Scanning and a few other tweaks to lay off the drive and disabled the pagefile and it feels faster. This isn't something that is easily benchmarked, though.
• You should also disable the Defragmenter Schedule as SSDs don't really need to be defragmented.
• I configured a gig of my SD card for the ReadyBoost Feature.

There are lots of folks trying lots of tweaks. Try them one at a time and see what works for you. It's very early. I would also point out if you're running a pre-release of Windows 7 that from what I hear, the bosses are big fans of these little netbooks, and if you remove some feature, you might be working against some optimizations that they might be building in. This is conjecture on my part - a gut feeling. I'm not on that team.

That said, I REALLY like running Windows 7 on my Mini. Again, not speedy, but not slow. My Windows Experience Score is 2.3, but that's just the video that's holding it back. The other scores are all 3.0, except the memory which is 4.4.

If you need a backup machine for travel, a "surfing while on the couch" machine, a small laptop for a modest (child, teen, non-technical spouse), or a purse-machine desktop-replacement for a spouse, I totally recommend the Dell Mini 9.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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