DDD Melbourne 2015

Last Saturday I attended the DDD Melbourne conference. I’d decided earlier in the year that I’d like to go along, so it was an extra bonus to learn that I had a session submission accepted too.

I flew over on the Friday, and stayed at the Pathfinder Motel in Kew (nothing fancy, but it did the job, though the traffic can be a bit noisy). I’d originally looked at the map and figured it was pretty close to the conference venue at Swinburne University’s Hawthorn campus. After I’d settled in to my motel room, I decided to do a bit of reconnaissance of the area and walk down to the campus just to check how long it would take me to get there the next morning.

Turns out I probably miss-read the scale on the map, as the round trip turned out to be just short of 8kms. Needless to say I caught the tram on Saturday 😀.

On the plus side, there are lots of cafes, restaurants and a cinema on Glenferrie Rd, so plenty of eating options.

Registration officially opened around 8.20am on Saturday, but there were quite a few people there even before that. Lots of helpful volunteers were on hand to help with this as well as general venue management, directing pedestrian traffic and helping with morning/afternoon teas and lunch.

This year they had 398 attendees, and the tickets all sold out in just 33 minutes. Wow!

The keynote speaker was Darrel Miller, who spoke about REST, the journey around making it work and separating the concept of REST from a particular implementation.

He likes food, so almost all of his slides used food metaphors.

Lucky the organisers laid out some morning tea next before the first session began!

First off, I saw Sarah Tabrizi speak about “Agile and Azure”. She had some great Azure demonstrations. I actually liked that the demos were pre-recorded as it meant they all worked properly (no surprises or problems with dodgy network connections) and could be talked over the top of as required.

Next up I caught Philip Beadle discussing tips on automation. Definitely some Lean influences coming through there.

Some of the key points Philip made were:

• Active documentation (eg. using MarkDown with Cucumber to do BDD-style Given/When/Then tests that are business-readable)
• Fully automated applications
• Signals for hypothesis – provide ways to measure business outcomes of software

Next Daniel Chambers spoke about making your C# and JavaScript more functional. No surprises that last year Daniel presented on F#!

He suggested that functional languages were the next evolution after object-oriented languages. I asked him what came next, but he wasn’t sure.

Some interesting demos on incorporating functional concepts into C# (via Linq and Reactive Extensions) and JavaScript (via lodash). His talk materials are here.

I’m also embarrassed to admit that I was confused by Daniel’s Twitter picture. He doesn’t look anything like Jack Nicholson.

Time for some lunch. Hotdogs with cheese and onions, and drinks/muffins etc.

Next up, James Newton-King on designing good APIs. James knows a thing or two about this, being the developer behind JSON.NET – one of the most depended upon 3rd-party libraries available for .NET.

Some very interesting reflections from him on things to consider (and watch out for) when designing your own APIs.

And then, it was my turn!

As you can see, the room was packed. As a speaker, there isn’t much more of a complement than that (especially as everyone stayed to the end!). My talk seemed to go quite well, though I need to practise my chocolate throwing technique.

(Second photo courtesy of Martin Doms)

The final speaker for the day was Paul Stovell, founder of Octopus Deploy.

I’ve bumped into Paul a few times over the years (he’s originally from SA, though now based in Brisbane), so it was great to hear his story of how he created the Octopus Deploy software application and then build a successful company around that product.

Then after a final thankyou from Lars (one of the organisers), it was off to the pub around the corner for free drinks (make mine a dry ginger, thanks)

It was a great conference. Really good speakers, content and organisation.

I made a particular point of talking to a number of the speakers to see if we could get them to present to the Adelaide .NET User Group in the future. I also spent a bit of time talking to Lars about how they’d organised the event, to get ideas about maybe doing a DDD Adelaide again in the future. It was great how helpful and encouraging he and others I spoke to were.

The final big news was that NDC (who were the main sponsors of the conference) announced that they will be holding a conference in Australia 1-5th August 2016. NDC Sydney is now open for registration, and also has a call for papers open until April 1st. At least they’ve given everyone a year to save up for it.

ASP.NET Web API for .NET Framework 4 in Visual Studio 2015

This is a pretty unique set of constraints I know – sometimes there are limitations outside your control as to which version of .NET you (or those who will be running your software) can use.

Note that the most recent version of Web API that works with .NET Framework 4.0 is 4.0.30506.0 (The 5.x releases all require at least .NET 4.5)

1. Open Visual Studio 2015
2. Create a new project (Make sure you select .NET Framework 4 in the frameworks dropdown list)
3. Open the Package Manger Console
4. Enter Install-Package -Id Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi -Version 4.0.30506 -DependencyVersion HighestMinor
5. Update-Package Newtonsoft.Json
6. (Optional) Install-Package -Id Microsoft.AspNet.WebApi.Tracing -Version 4.0.30506
7. Add an App_Start folder
8. Inside this folder, add new class WebApiConfig
9. Add the following content to the WebApiConfig class:

public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config)
{
    config.Routes.MapHttpRoute(
        name: "DefaultApi",
        routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{id}",
        defaults: new
        {
            id = RouteParameter.Optional
        }
    );

    // Uncomment the following line of code to enable query support for actions with an IQueryable or IQueryable<T> return type.
    // To avoid processing unexpected or malicious queries, use the validation settings on QueryableAttribute to validate incoming queries.
    // For more information, visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=279712.
    //config.EnableQuerySupport();

    // To disable tracing in your application, please comment out or remove the following line of code
    // For more information, refer to: http://www.asp.net/web-api
    config.EnableSystemDiagnosticsTracing();
}

1. In the top-level of the project, add a Global.asax file
2. Open the Global.asax.cs file and add the following method:

protected void Application_Start()
{
    WebApiConfig.Register(GlobalConfiguration.Configuration);
}

1. Add a Controllers folder
2. Inside the Controllers folder, add a new class (eg. ValuesController)
3. Update the ValuesController class to look as follows:

public class ValuesController : ApiController
{
    // GET api/values
    public IEnumerable<string> Get()
    {
        return new string[] { "value1", "value2" };
    }

    // GET api/values/5
    public string Get(int id)
    {
        return "value";
    }

    // POST api/values
    public void Post([FromBody]string value)
    {
    }

    // PUT api/values/5
    public void Put(int id, [FromBody]string value)
    {
    }

    // DELETE api/values/5
    public void Delete(int id)
    {
    }
}

Your project should look similar to this:

You can now build and run the web application and browse to /api/Values and get a response from your controller (JSON or XML depending on your browser)

Solution to error 0x80240020: Upgrade to Windows 10

So the whole “delete the contents of the downloads directory” thing didn’t work for me.

Today I noticed a tweet linking to an article, which in turn referred to a post in the Microsoft forums.

Apparently, the error 0x80240020 is not an indication of any download corruption – just that you’re computer is in a “holding pattern” waiting for the green light from Microsoft, as they’re staging the upgrade process. I think it would have been preferable to have just had this sitting quietly on my computer, rather than littering my Update History with “Update failed” messages.

So if you don’t want to wait, there’s a registry key you can set. (Instructions for setting registry key repeated here from the forum post)

1. Locate the registry key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\OSUpgrade]

2. It should exist, but if not, create it.

3. Create a new DWORD (32-bit) Value with Name = "AllowOSUpgrade” (without the quotes), and set the Value = 0x00000001.

Now go back to the Windows Update in Control Panel, and tada – a new screen appears!

Click on the Get started button and things start happening..

It thinks for a short time, then the Windows Update prompt appears on your desktop:

And back in the Control Panel, you’re also prompted to restart. Clicking Start the upgrade now, or Restart now both do the same thing

Your computer reboots, and the upgrade proceeds.

After a little while, and a few reboots later, you now have Windows 10!

Woohoo!