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Debugging with Fiddler on Windows 7
Gill Cleeren     .net | ADO.net     July 16, 2009    

Fiddler is a great http debugging tool, allowing you to see all traffic going in and out. It’s very useful when for example working with ADO.NET Data Services to see which request is being sent to the service.

It so happened that since I had been using Windows 7, I hadn’t used or installed it yet. I was just creating a Silverlight application that works with ADO.NET Data Services and there was a specific query I wanted to see. So I installed Fiddler 2 on this Windows 7 machine.

Normally, when using Fiddler for local debugging, you add a “.” after the localhost: http://localhost.:1234/whatever.aspx. This should show the requests in Fiddler. However, it didn’t seem to work on my machine.

Luckily, I knew there was another way to see the local requests: using the ipv4 notation: http://ipv4.fiddler:1234/whatever.aspx. This seems to work.

I’m not sure if this has something to do with Windows 7 though. In any case, this second approach seems to work, so it might come in handy if the first one doesn’t work on your PC either :).

Fiddler can be downloaded on www.fiddler2.com (thanks Dominiek)

  Posted on: Thursday, July 16, 2009 10:58:37 PM (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)   |   Comments [3]
         
My talk on ASP.NET 3.5 SP1
Gill Cleeren     .net 3.5 | ADO.net | ASP.net | ppt | Visug     October 22, 2008    

Yesterday, I gave a talk for Visug on ASP.NET 3.5 SP1. It was a long evening, with over 2 1/2 hours of content. The talk covered Dynamic Data, Ajax History, Data Services and Entity Framework (talk given by Kurt Claeys).

Below, you can find the presentation. If anyone is interested in the demo's, leave a comment and I'll upload those as well.

Slide deck

I hope you all enjoyed the talk! Remember to register early for our next events!

  Posted on: Wednesday, October 22, 2008 10:42:03 AM (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)   |   Comments [0]
         
Debugging ADO.NET Data Services
Gill Cleeren     ADO.net     October 12, 2008    

Next week, I'll be doing a presentation on ADO.NET Data Services for Visug. While creating some demo's, I found myself in a bit of problems when debugging.

By default, Data Services don't return information on what's wrong when you try to execute some code, for example an update, against it. This is understandable: if you open up a data service on the web, you shouldn't be returning all important information about entities in the underlying model.

However, when developing a Data Service, it might be handy to get a little more information than just "An error occurred while processing this request". Here's how to achieve this...

You can start by setting the UseVerboseErrors on the ServiceConfiguration to true, like so:

public static void InitializeService(IDataServiceConfiguration config)

{

config.UseVerboseErrors = true;

config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.All);

}

This will get you the error returned by the model/database. For example, you'll see that you are inserting duplicate keys in your tables.

Now, this is OK if you are able to run your service. But what if it doesn't even start? You'll get the generic error: "The server encountered an error processing the request". Trying to get more info with the above method won't help you, since the service didn't even execute anything.

In that case, you can use the following attribute on your service class:

[System.ServiceModel.ServiceBehavior(IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults = true)]

public class Service : DataService<NorthwindEntities>

{

...

These 2 options should provide you with enough information about what's going wrong with your services. Do remember to remove them when you go live with the application!
  Posted on: Sunday, October 12, 2008 1:04:56 PM (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)   |   Comments [3]
         
ADO.net Entity Framework on to Beta 3
Gill Cleeren     .net 3.5 | LINQ | ADO.net     December 9, 2007    

Microsoft released a new preview of the ADO.net Entity Framework, this time Beta 3. The ADO.NET Entity Framework is the latest Microsoft technology to support the RTM versions of .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. Beta 3 is the followup to Beta 2, which was released last August.

ADO.NET 2.0 data providers that have committed to support the ADO.NET Entity Framework include Core Lab, DataDirect Technologies, IBM, MySQL, and Sybase. Oracle is not ready yet, but will be added in the near future.

Together with the announcement, MS also announced the agreement with 3rd party database vendors for supporting the new framework.

New in this version are mainly some new features, bug fixes and major performance enhancements. "We've got faster view generation, some simpler generated SQL, we've taken a lot of feedback from customers in some of these areas," said Elisa Flasko, program manager for the Data Programmability team at Microsoft.

"The changes have mostly been around the mapping and in the Entity Data Model of the Entity Framework itself," Flasko said. "As far the LINQ to Entities implementation, it has mostly been fit and finish." Users can, however, now do compiled LINQ query for better performance.

If you already used the Beta 2, it's advised to go through the breaking changes list here.

Want to get started? Go here for the plugins.

  Posted on: Sunday, December 09, 2007 2:53:37 PM (Romance Standard Time, UTC+01:00)   |   Comments [0]
         
9/2/2010   9:28:11 PM