personal, movies, humor comments edit

I was watching Cutthroat Island this weekend with my daughter, who loves pirate movies, when I started thinking about these giant treasure chests full of gold you see in such films.

The stereotypical treasure chest

While I get that it’s a movie, it was fun to think about how practical carting around that treasure chest of doubloons might be.

Assumptions:

Now, let’s say the treasure chest is like 90cm x 60cm x 60cm on the inside. A little large-ish, but not unheard of in a pirate movie.

  • The chest has 324,000cc interior capacity.
  • Multiplied by the 35% packing efficiency, you’d have 113,400cc of gold.
  • 113,400cc x 19.3g per cc = 2,188,620g = 2188.62kg (4825.1lb).

There is no way pirates are carrying around 5000lb gold chests.

Let’s figure a couple guys - one on each end of the chest - need to cart the chest through the jungle or something. They’re strong, but not they’re not Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson. You’re looking at something like 115kg (253.5lb) or so lest it gets unwieldy.

Working backwards, 115kg is 5958.55cc of gold. With the packing ratio, that’s a chest with 17024.43cc total capacity. To make the math easy, let’s say it’s a cube-shaped chest. That’d yield a chest with internal dimensions of about roughly 25.73cm (10.13 inches) on a side.

That’s a pretty tiny treasure chest.

At least, tiny in comparison to what you usually see on a pirate movie.

Now, I could be generous with my packing efficiency. Maybe it’s far less than 35%, or it could be that the chest isn’t packed to the top with gold, or both.

If you had that 90cm x 60cm x 60cm chest and limited yourself to the 115kg weight, that’d put the packing efficiency of doubloons at closer to 5%; or it’d mean the chest is not quite a quarter of the way full.

Just for fun, we can also calculate the value of such treasure. The price of gold today (as I write this) is $39,175.66 USD per kg.

  • 115kg of gold = $4,505,200.90 USD
  • 2188.62kg of gold = $85,740,632.99 USD

If the chest was full of doubloons (which, again, are actually 22k gold, not 24k), we know that doubloons weigh 6.867g so you’d have…

  • 115kg of doubloons = 16,746 doubloons
  • 2188.62kg of doubloons = 318,715 doubloons

Doubloons seem to be baesd on weight rather than physical size (or, at least, I didn’t see any average size listed anywhere in my two minutes of searching) so I’m not sure how big a chest with that number of doubloons might need to be. I can’t imagine it’s too far off from my original calculation.

Anyway, it was kind of fun to think about. It makes for a better movie to have the giant chest of treasure, so it’s all good.

net, aspnet, azure comments edit

I got the opportunity to hit the Microsoft Build conference this year. Last time I was able to make it was 2012, so it was good to be able to get back in and see what’s new in person.

I’m going to review this from my perspective as a web / web service / REST API sort of developer. As a different person or developer, you may have picked up something different you thought was super cool that I totally missed or tuned out. So.

Usually there are some “key themes” that get pushed at Build. Back in 2012, it was all Windows 8 applications. This year it was:

  • Internet of Things
  • Office and Cortana Integration
  • Cross-platform Applications
  • Microservices and Bots

Keeping in mind my status as a web developer, the microservice/bot stuff was the most interesting thing to me. I don’t work with hardware, so IoT is neat but not valuable. I don’t really need to integrate with Office, and Cortana isn’t web-based. I can maybe see doing some cross-platform stuff for mobile apps that talk to my REST APIs, but this was largely outside the scope of what I do, too.

I was reasonably disappointed by the keynotes. They usually have some big reveal in the keynotes. Day one left me wanting. Something about 22 new machine learning APIs being released that I won’t use. Day two the big reveal for me was free Xamarin for everyone. Again, cross-platform dev isn’t my thing, but still that’s pretty cool.

The sessions were impossible to get into. In 2012 they hosted the conference in Redmond on the Microsoft campus. I got into every session I was interested in. Since then they’ve hosted it in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. I can’t speak for other years, but this year you just couldn’t get into the sessions. If you weren’t lined up half an hour early to get in, forget it - there weren’t enough seats. In total I only got to see three different sessions. In three days, I saw three sessions. I don’t feel like I should have to catch up on the conference I paid to attend by watching videos of the sessions I wanted to see.

The schedule wasn’t public very early. I normally like to check out the web site and figure out which sessions I want to see when I get there. They didn’t release the speaker schedule (to my knowledge) until the day before the conference. I may well have canceled my reservation had I known the list of topics ahead of time. Maybe that’s why they didn’t release it.

There were great code labs. Something they didn’t have as much in previous years were interactive labs so you could learn new tech. They did a really good job of this, with several physical labs with hardware all set up so you could try stuff out. This was super valuable and the majority of my conference takeaways came from these labs. In particular I finally got a good feel for Docker by doing this lab.

There was no hardware giveaway this year which makes me wonder why the price was so high. I get that there are big parties and so on, but I would rather the price go down or there be some hardware than just keep the price cranked up. That said, I did come out with a Raspberry Pi 2 Azure IoT starter kit, so I can at least experiment with some of the IoT things they announced. Who knows? Maybe I’ll turn into an IoT aficionado.

There was a pitifully small amount of information about .NET Core. .NET Core and ASP.NET Core are on the top of my mind lately. Most of my current projects, including Autofac, are working through the challenges of RC1 and getting to RC2. There were something like three sessions total on .NET Core, most of which was just intro information. Any target dates on RC2? What’s the status on dotnet CLI? Honestly, I was hoping the big keynote announcement would be the .NET Core RC2 release. No such luck.

Access to the actual product teams was awesome. This almost (but not quite) makes up for the sessions being full. The ability to talk directly to various product team members for things like Visual Studio Online, ASP.NET Core, NuGet, Visual Studio, and Azure offerings was fantastic. It can be so hard sometimes to get questions answered or get the straight scoop on what’s going on with a project - cutting through the red tape and just talking to people is the perfect answer to that.

There was a big to-do around HoloLens. There seemed to be a lot around HoloLens - from conceptual demos to a full demo of walking on Mars. The lines for this were ridiculous. I didn’t get a chance to try it myself; a couple of colleagues tried it and said it wasn’t as mind-blowing as it was promoted to be.

Nutshell:

  • Logistics: Not good. If you sell out in five minutes and don’t have enough seats for sessions, that’s not cool.
  • Topics: Not good. I get there’s a focus on a certain subset of topics, but I can usually find something cool I’m excited about. Not this time.
  • Educational Value: OK. I didn’t get much from sessions but the labs and the on-hand staff were great.
  • Networking Value: Good. I don’t normally “network” with people in the whole “sales” context, but being able to meet up with people from different vendors and product teams and speak face to face was a valuable thing.

net comments edit

I’ve been working a bit with Serilog and ASP.NET Core lately. In both cases, there are constructs that use CallContext to store data across an asynchronous flow. For Serilog, it’s the LogContext class; for ASP.NET Core it’s the HttpContextAccessor.

Running tests, I’ve noticed some inconsistent behavior depending on how I set up the test fakes. For example, when testing some middleware that modifies the Serilog LogContext, I might set it up like this:

var mw = new SomeMiddleware(ctx => Task.FromResult(0));

Note the next RequestDelegate I set up is just a Task.FromResult call because I don’t really care what’s going on in there - the point is to see if the LogContext is changed after the middleware executes.

Unfortunately, what I’ve found is that the static Task methods, like Task.FromResult and Task.Delay, don’t behave consistently with respect to using CallContext to store data across async calls.

To illustrate the point, I’ve put together a small set of unit tests here:

public class CallContextTest
{
  [Fact]
  public void SimpleCallWithoutAsync()
  {
    var value = new object();
    SetCallContextData(value);
    Assert.Same(value, GetCallContextData());
  }

  [Fact]
  public async void AsyncMethodCallsTaskMethod()
  {
    var value = new object();
    await NoOpTaskMethod(value);
    Assert.Same(value, GetCallContextData());
  }

  [Fact]
  public async void AsyncMethodCallsAsyncFromResultMethod()
  {
    var value = new object();
    await NoOpAsyncMethodFromResult(value);

    // THIS FAILS - the call context data
    // will come back as null.
    Assert.Same(value, GetCallContextData());
  }

  private static object GetCallContextData()
  {
    return CallContext.LogicalGetData("testdata");
  }

  private static void SetCallContextData(object value)
  {
    CallContext.LogicalSetData("testdata", value);
  }

  /*
   * Note the difference between these two methods:
   * One _awaits_ the Task.FromResult, one returns it directly.
   * This could also be Task.Delay.
   */

  private async Task NoOpAsyncMethodFromResult(object value)
  {
    // Using this one will cause the CallContext
    // data to be lost.
    SetCallContextData(value);
    await Task.FromResult(0);
  }

  private Task NoOpTaskMethod(object value)
  {
    SetCallContextData(value);
    return Task.FromResult(0);
  }
}

As you can see, changing from return Task.FromResult(0) in a non async/await method to await Task.FromResult(0) in async/await suddenly breaks things. No amount of configuration I could find fixes it.

StackOverflow has related questions and there are forum posts on similar topics, but this is the first time this has really bitten me.

I gather this is why AsyncLocal<T> exists, which means maybe I should look into that a bit deeper.

personal, culture comments edit

There has been a lot of push lately for people to learn to code. From Hour of Code to the President of the United States pushing for more coders, the movement towards everyone coding is on.

What gets lost in the hype, drowned out by the fervor of people everywhere jamming keys on keyboards, is that simply being able to code is not software development.

OK, sure, technically speaking when you write code that executes a task you have just developed a piece of software. Also, technically speaking, when you fumble out Chopsticks on the keyboard while walking through Costco you just played the piano. That doesn’t make you a pianist any more than taking an hour to learn to code makes you a software developer.

Here’s where my unpopular opinion comes out. Here’s where I call out the elephant in the room and the politically-correct majority gasp at how I can be so unencouraging to these folks learning to code.

Software development is an art, not a science.

Not everyone can be a software developer in the same way not everyone can be a pianist, a painter, or a sculptor. Anyone can learn to play the piano well; anyone can learn to paint or sculpt reasonably. That doesn’t mean just anyone can make a living doing these things.

It’s been said that if you spend 10,000 hours practicing a task you can become great at anything. 10,000 hours is basically five years of a full-time job. So, ostensibly, if you spent five years full-time coding, you’d be a developer.

However, we’ve all heard that argument about experience: Have you had 20 years of experience? Or one year of experience 20 times? Does spending 10,000 hours coding make you a developer? Or does it just mean you spent a lot of time coding?

Regardless of your time in any field you have probably run across both of these people - the ones who really have 20 years’ experience and the ones who have been working for 20 years and you wonder how they’ve advanced so far in their careers.

I say that to be a good developer - or a good artist - you need three things: skills, aptitude, and passion.

Skills are the rote abilities you learn when you start with that Hour of Code or first take a class on coding. Pretty much anyone can learn a certain level of skill in nearly any field. It’s learned ability that takes a brainpower and dedication.

Aptitude is a fuzzier quality meaning your natural ability to do something. This is where the “art” part of development starts coming in. You may have learned the skills to code, but do you have any sort of natural ability to perform those skills?

Passion is your enthusiasm - in this case, the strong desire to execute the skills you have and continue to improve on them. This is also part of the “art” of development. You might be really good at jamming out code, but if you don’t like doing it you probably won’t come up with the best solutions to the problems with which you’re faced.

Without all three, you may be able to code but you won’t really be a developer.

A personal anecdote to help make this a bit more concrete: When I went to college, I told my advisors that I really wanted to be a 3D graphics animator/modeler. My dream job was (and still kind of is) working for Industrial Light and Magic on special effects. As a college kid, I didn’t know any better, so when the advisors said I should get a Computer Science degree, I did. Only later did I find out that wouldn’t get me into ILM or Pixar. Why? In their opinion (at the time, in my rejection letters), “you can teach computer science to an artist but you can’t teach art to a computer scientist.”

The first interesting thing I find there is that, at least at the time, the thought there was that art “isn’t teachable.” For the most part, I agree - without the skills, aptitude, and passion for art, you’re not going to be a really great artist.

The more interesting thing I find is the lack of recognition that solving computer science problems, in itself, is an art.

If you’ve dived into code, you’re sure to have seen this, though maybe you didn’t realize it.

  • Have you ever seen a really tough problem solved in an amazingly elegant way that you’d never have thought of yourself? What about the converse - a really tough problem solved in such a brute force manner that you can’t imagine why that’s good?
  • Have you ever picked up someone else’s code and found that it’s entirely unreadable? If you hand someone else your code, can they make heads or tails of it? What about code that was so clearly written you didn’t even need any comments to understand how it worked?
  • Have you ever seen code that’s so deep and unnecessarily complicated that if anything went wrong with it you could never fix it? What about code that’s so clear you could easily fix anything with it if a problem was discovered?

We’ve all seen this stuff. We’ve all written this stuff. I know I have… and still do. Sometimes we even laugh about it.

The important part is that those three factors - skill, aptitude, and passion - work together to improve us as developers.

I don’t laugh at a beginner’s code because their skills aren’t there yet. However, their aptitude and passion may help to motivate them to raise their skill level, which will make them overall better at what they do.

The art of software development isn’t about the quantity of code churned out, it’s about quality. It’s about constant improvement. It’s about change. These are the unquantifiable things that separate the coders from the developers.

Every artist constantly improves. I’m constantly improving, and I hope you are, too. It’s the artistic aspect of software development that drives us to do so, to solve the problems we’re faced with. Don’t just be a software developer, be a software artist. And be the best artist you can be.

net, aspnet comments edit

Here’s the situation:

  • I have a .NET Core / ASP.NET Core (DNX) web app. (Currently it’s an RC1 app.)
  • When I start it in Visual Studio, I get IIS Express listening for requests and handing off to DNX.
  • When I start the app from a command line, I want the same experience as VS - IIS Express listening and handing off to DNX.

Now, I know I can just dnx web and get Kestrel to work from a simple self-host perspective. I really want IIS Express here. Searching around, I’m not the only one who does, though everyone’s reasons are different.

Since the change to the IIS hosting model you can’t really do the thing that the ASP.NET Music Store was doing where you copy the AspNet.Loader.dll to your bin folder and have magic happen when you start IIS Express.

When Visual Studio starts up your application, it actually creates an all-new applicationhost.config file with some special entries that allow things to work. I’m going to tell you how to update your per-user IIS Express applicationhost.config file so things can work outside VS just like they do inside.

There are two pieces to this:

  1. Update your applicationhost.config (one time) to add the httpPlatformHandler module so IIS Express can “proxy” to DNX.
  2. Use appcmd.exe to point applications to IIS Express.
  3. Set environment variables and start IIS Express using the application names you configured using appcmd.exe

Let’s walk through each step.

applicationhost.config Updates

Before you can host DNX apps in IIS Express, you need to update your default IIS Express applicationhost.config to know about the httpPlatformHandler module that DNX uses to start up its child process.

You only have to do this one time. Once you have it in place, you’re good to go and can just configure your apps as needed.

To update the applicationhost.config file I used the XML transform mechanism you see in web.config transforms - those web.Debug.config and web.Release.config deals. However, I didn’t want to go through MSBuild for it so I did it in PowerShell.

First, save this file as applicationhost.dnx.xml - this is the set of transforms for applicationhost.config that the PowerShell script will use.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration xmlns:xdt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/XML-Document-Transform">
    <configSections>
        <sectionGroup name="system.webServer"
                      xdt:Locator="Match(name)">
            <section name="httpPlatform"
                     overrideModeDefault="Allow"
                     xdt:Locator="Match(name)"
                     xdt:Transform="InsertIfMissing" />
        </sectionGroup>
    </configSections>
    <location path=""
              xdt:Locator="Match(path)">
        <system.webServer>
            <modules>
                <add name="httpPlatformHandler"
                     xdt:Locator="Match(name)"
                     xdt:Transform="InsertIfMissing" />
            </modules>
        </system.webServer>
    </location>
    <system.webServer>
        <globalModules>
            <add name="httpPlatformHandler"
                 image="C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Web Tools\HttpPlatformHandler\HttpPlatformHandler.dll"
                 xdt:Locator="Match(name)"
                 xdt:Transform="InsertIfMissing" />
        </globalModules>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

I have it structured so you can run it over and over without corrupting the configuration - so if you forget and accidentally run the transform twice, don’t worry, it’s cool.

Here’s the PowerShell script you’ll use to run the transform. Save this as Merge.ps1 in the same folder as applicationhost.dnx.xml:

function script:Merge-XmlConfigurationTransform
{
    [CmdletBinding()]
    Param(
        [Parameter(Mandatory=$True)]
        [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]
        [String]
        $SourceFile,

        [Parameter(Mandatory=$True)]
        [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]
        [String]
        $TransformFile,

        [Parameter(Mandatory=$True)]
        [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]
        [String]
        $OutputFile
    )

    Add-Type -Path "${env:ProgramFiles(x86)}\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v14.0\Web\Microsoft.Web.XmlTransform.dll"

    $transformableDocument = New-Object 'Microsoft.Web.XmlTransform.XmlTransformableDocument'
    $xmlTransformation = New-Object 'Microsoft.Web.XmlTransform.XmlTransformation' -ArgumentList "$TransformFile"

    try
    {
        $transformableDocument.PreserveWhitespace = $false
        $transformableDocument.Load($SourceFile) | Out-Null
        $xmlTransformation.Apply($transformableDocument) | Out-Null
        $transformableDocument.Save($OutputFile) | Out-Null
    }
    finally
    {
        $transformableDocument.Dispose();
        $xmlTransformation.Dispose();
    }
}

$script:ApplicationHostConfig = Join-Path -Path ([System.Environment]::GetFolderPath([System.Environment+SpecialFolder]::MyDocuments)) -ChildPath "IISExpress\config\applicationhost.config"
Merge-XmlConfigurationTransform -SourceFile $script:ApplicationHostConfig -TransformFile (Join-Path -Path $PSScriptRoot -ChildPath applicationhost.dnx.xml) -OutputFile "$($script:ApplicationHostConfig).tmp"
Move-Item -Path "$($script:ApplicationHostConfig).tmp" -Destination $script:ApplicationHostConfig -Force

Run that script and transform your applicationhost.config.

Note that the HttpPlatformHandler isn’t actually a DNX-specific thing. It’s an IIS 8+ module that can be used for any sort of proxying/process management situation. However, it doesn’t come set up by default on IIS Express so this adds it in.

Now you’re set for the next step.

Configure Apps with IIS Express

I know you can run IIS Express with a bunch of command line parameters, and if you want to do that, go for it. However, it’s just a bunch easier if you set it up as an app within IIS Express so you can more easily launch it.

Set up applications pointing to the wwwroot folder.

A simple command to set up an application looks like this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS Express\appcmd.exe" add app /site.name:"MyApplication" /path:/ /physicalPath:C:\some\folder\src\MyApplication\wwwroot

Whether you use the command line parameters to launch every time or set up your app like this, make sure the path points to the wwwroot folder.

Set Environment Variables and Start IIS Express

If you look at your web.config file in wwwroot you’ll see something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <handlers>
            <add name="httpPlatformHandler"
                 path="*"
                 verb="*"
                 modules="httpPlatformHandler"
                 resourceType="Unspecified" />
        </handlers>
        <httpPlatform processPath="%DNX_PATH%"
                      arguments="%DNX_ARGS%"
                      stdoutLogEnabled="false"
                      startupTimeLimit="3600" />
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

The important bit there are the two variables DNX_PATH and DNX_ARGS.

  • DNX_PATH points to the dnx.exe executable for the runtime you want for your app.
  • DNX_ARGS are the arguments to dnx.exe, as if you were running it on a command line.

A very simple PowerShell script that will launch an IIS Express application looks like this:

$env:DNX_PATH = "$($env:USERPROFILE)\.dnx\runtimes\dnx-clr-win-x86.1.0.0-rc1-update1\bin\dnx.exe"
$env:DNX_ARGS = "-p `"C:\some\folder\src\MyApplication`" web"
Start-Process "${env:ProgramFiles(x86)}\IIS Express\iisexpress.exe" -ArgumentList "/site:MyApplication"

Obviously you’ll want to set the runtime version and paths accordingly, but this is basically the equivalent of running dnx web and having IIS Express use the site settings you configured above as the listening endpoint.