How to include DevExpress references in ASP.NET projects using NuGet?

Introduction:

DevExpress introduced NuGet packages for some subscriptions and it been a long time that I have not yet tried rather installing full package of DevExpress controls. Now it is much easy to include references through NuGet Package Manager.

Using DevExpress NuGet packages for DevExpress Controls

The brief information about the DevExpress NuGet Packages is described on Mehual Harry’s blog post - DevExpress NuGet Packages - Now Available

An excellent step-by-step guide to setup Visual Studio for DevExpress NuGet packages available in below QA thread:
DevExpress NuGet Packages: T466415

Setup DevExpress NuGet Feed to Visual Studio

1. In Visual Studio, select Tools | Options. Under NuGet Package Manager, locate the Package Sources item.
2. Add new package source using a string in the following format: “https://nuget.devexpress.com/{feed-authorization-key}/api”. This feed-authorization-key is available in your DevExpress account's Download Manager and just replace the copied authorization key in the source url.
   
   

Using NuGet Packages in Projects

Right-click a solution and select Manage NuGet Packages for Solution and then Select the newly added package source:

Select the package you want to add to your project and all linked references will be added automatically.

Now time to test the project after updating references.

Note: If you face problem with editor controls then follow the documentation of ASP.NET MVC Extensions for Integration into an ASP.NET MVC Project and we are doing Manual Integration into an Existing Project.

Conclusion:

We have added DevExpress references to the projects from Using DevExpress NuGet packages and after that you will be able to configure your project to run the ASP.NET controls.

What is Microsoft SQL Operations Studio?

Introduction

SQL Operations Studio is a free, light-weight data management tool that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, for managing SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL Data Warehouse;

Download and Install instruction for SQL Operations Studio Public Preview available here: Download SQL Operations Studio

Below is the feature list of SQL Operations Studio:

• Cross-Platform DB management for Windows, macOS and Linux with simple XCopy deployment
• SQL Server Connection Management with Connection Dialog, Server Groups, and Registered Servers
  
  
  
• Object Explorer supporting schema browsing and contextual command execution
  
  
• T-SQL Query Editor with advanced coding features such as autosuggestions, error diagnostics, tooltips, formatting and peek definition.
  
  
• Query Results Viewer with advanced data grid supporting large result sets, export to JSON\CSV\Excel, query plan and charting
  
  
• Management Dashboard supporting customizable widgets with drill-through actionable insights
• Visual Data Editor that enables direct row insertion, update and deletion into tables
• Backup and Restore dialogs that enables advanced customization and remote file system browsing, configured tasks can be executed or scripted
• Task History window to view current task execution status, completion results with error messages and task T-SQL scripting
• Scripting support to generate CREATE, SELECT and DROP statements for database objects
• Workspaces with full Git integration and Find In Files support to managing T-SQL script libraries
• Modern light-weight shell with theming, user settings, full screen support, integrated terminal and numerous other features

T-SQL code snippets

It also provides T-SQL code snippets which generate the proper T-SQL syntax to create databases, tables, views, stored procedures, users, logins, roles, etc., and to update existing database objects. To learn more, see Create and use code snippets.

(T-SQL) IntelliSense

SQL Operations Studio offers a modern, keyboard-focused T-SQL coding experience like SQL Server Management Studio that makes your everyday tasks easier with built-in features, such as multiple tab windows, a rich T-SQL editor, IntelliSense, keyword completion, code snippets, code navigation, and source control integration (Git).

Connection management (server groups)

Server groups provide a way to organize and share connection information for the servers and databases you work with. For details, see Server groups.

Integrated Terminal

Use your favorite command-line tools (for example, Bash, PowerShell, sqlcmd, bcp, and ssh) in the Integrated Terminal window right within the SQL Operations Studio (preview) user interface. To learn about the integrated terminal, see Integrated terminal.

Information from MSOS documentation: Microsoft SQL Operations Studio

Conclusion

It is a nice lightweight cross platform tool for SQL Developers and DBAs. I found it very intuitive and easy to use for managing database. Nice step by Microsoft toward OSS and cross platform development using such good Electron based tool rather SQL Server 2017 is also cross platform.

Introduction to Angular 4 and TypeScript- Setting Up the Development Environment

In this article, you are going to learn that how setup the development environment for Angular and TypeScript.
TABLE OF CONTENT

• Introduction
  • What is Angular?
  • Why do we need Angular?
  • Architecture and Building Blocks of Angular Apps
• => Setting Up the Development Environment
• Your First Angular App
• Structure of Angular Projects
• Webpack
• TypeScript Fundamentals
  • What is TypeScript?
  • Creating First TypeScript Program
  • Declaring Variables
  • Types
  • Type Assertions
  • Arrow Functions
  • Interfaces
  • Classes
  • Objects
  • Constructors
  • Access Modifiers
  • Access Modifiers in Constructor Parameters
  • Properties
  • Modules
• Angular Fundamentals
  • Creating Components
  • Generating Components Using Angular CLI
  • Templates
  • Directives
  • Services
  • Dependency Injection
  • Generating Services Using Angular CLI
• Exercise

Introduction

Before we start code with Angular, there are some prerequisites to install first. In this article we set up everything what we need to start work with Angular 4. Before we more further to learn Angular we need to make some decisions related to selection of programming language, Editor and setup our tools to get everything ready.

What Language to select for Angular?

There several languages we could use to build an Angular application. Either we can use JavaScript or TrypeScript.

JavaScript

The JavaScript language specification standard is officially called ECMAScript or ES. Most browsers don't yet support higher version ES 6 named ES 6. So, ES 6 code must first be translated to ES 5. Code developed with ES 6 must be compiled by a tool that converts that ES 5 syntax to comparable ES 5 syntax before the browser executes it. That way we as developers get the benefits of the new ES 6 productivity features and the browsers still get code they understand. Since Angular is a JavaScript library we could use any of the many compile to JavaScript languages to build our Angular application. But the most common language choices for Angular include the ES 5 version of JavaScript. ES 5 code runs in the browser today without translation so no compile step is required. If we want to take advantage of some of the new ES 6 features to improve productivity such as classes, the let statement and arrow syntax, we can write our Angular code using ES 6. We then translate our code to ES 5 before running it.

TypeScript

Another language is TypeScript. TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript and must be translated. One of the key benefits of TypeScript is its strong typing, meaning that everything has a data type. Because of this strong typing, TypeScript has great tooling including inline documentation, syntax checking, code navigation, and advanced refactoring’s so TypeScript helps us better reason about our code. The Angular team itself takes advantage of these benefits and uses TypeScript to build Angular 2. Most of the demo code in the Angular documentation at present also uses TypeScript. For these reasons, TypeScript is the language of choice for many Angular developers and we will also use this throughout entire tutorial.
TypeScript is an open source language that is a superset of JavaScript and compiles to plain JavaScript through translation. It is strongly typed so every variable, every function, and every function parameter can have a data type.
How does TypeScript determine the appropriate types when using JavaScript libraries that are not strongly typed? By using TypeScript type definition files. These files contain the definition of each type in a library. These files are named with the library name .d.ts. TypeScript implements the ES 6 class-based object orientation plus more. It implements classes, interfaces, and inheritance so if you have experience with an object-oriented programming language such as C#, C++, or Java, using TypeScript may feel very natural to you. We will learn TypeScript in detail later in this tutorial.

Dart is another option. It is a non-JavaScript-based language for building Angular applications.
We've selected TypeScript as our Angular language.

Editor or IDE for Angular
Once we've picked a language, we select an editor or IDE that fully supports development in that language. Then we set up the development environment to get started with Angular. In these there are lots of editors and IDEs offer support for TypeScript and we can check the documentation of TypeScript Editor Support, but we only get the clever Intellisense as we type if we use a supported IDE. Initially, this was only Microsoft's Visual Studio.

• Visual Studio
• Visual Studio Code
• WebStorm
• Sublime Text
• Vim
• Atom
• Notepad++

Some of the support TypeScript out of the box and by including a plugin. Select any one of these supported Editors or whichever suits you best, but keep in mind that working with TypeScript will be much pleasant if you select an editor that understands TypeScript.
We are going to use either Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code throughout the tutorial. It support it much better than other IDEs or Editors because Visual Studio 2017 now has ability to debug the TypeScript code as like C# code.

Setting up Development Environment
Setting up development environment for Angular require to Install npm or Node Package Manager

Install npm or Node Package Manager
First thing you need is the latest version of the Node. Visit the Node.js website and download the latest version of the Node.


It is runtime environment for executing JavaScript code outside the browser. Node provides some tools to build Angular projects.

npm or Node Package Manager is a command line utility that interacts with a repository of open source projects. Now Node Package Manager has become the package manager for JavaScript. Using npm, we can install libraries, packages, and applications along with their dependencies.

We'll need npm to install all the libraries for Angular. Then we help us to execute scripts to compile our code and launch our Angular application.
After installing Node, we can verify it by running command “node –version” on command prompt that it has been install successfully or not.


With npm installed we are ready to set up our Angular application and create our first Angular application.

Conclusion
We have learnt how to setup the environment for Angular development. If we have installed tools required for development then we good go for creating our first Angular application.

Previous: Introduction

Next: Your First Angular App

How to fix error TFS connection error "You are not authorized to access …"

In this article we will know that how to fix the error when connecting a project collection in Visual Studio with Source Control Explorer open (TF30063: You are not authorized to access… project)

Scenario:
Recently, I must change my Active Directory account password due to password policy which force the user to change the password after few days. In my development environment TFS require AD credentials to connect with TFS services.

Solution:
Peoples from developer community suggested various ways to solve this issue. Few of them explained as below:

1. One probable solution is clearing the Internet explorer 9 and above cache completely. The Team Foundation Server login apparently uses Internet Explorer which can be launched from Visual Studio though and It may conflict or try to match with cached credentials. After the cache clearing, Visual Studio ask to the correct login details screen or authenticate automatically.
   
   
   
   Now logout from portal and login again with updated credentials
   
   
2. In my case removing the entry from credential manager which cached the previous password for the TFS connection.
   
   
   
   Find and remove entry from web or Windows credentials where you find for your TFS service. I need to remove it from Windows Credentials
   
   
   
   Restart Visual Studio and Then it worked again.
3. Sometimes this problem gets resolved by clearing TFS cache from below location "C:\Users\%UserName%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Team Foundation\7.0\Cache". Just press Win+R on keyboard and paste this path. Remove the cache and reconnect TFS with valid credentials again. It works if you are using multiple logins to connect the TFS Services.

Conclusion:

We have discovered ways to solve the TFS issue. It may work one of them to someone’s problem.

NDepend enabled all features for .NET Core 2.0 Visual Studio projects..

Introduction

NDepend is a static code analyser for .NET projects. NDepend performs a range of analyses across a solution to make the projects better with code. Now day .NET Core stack is the hot stuff in the Microsoft development technologies due to cross platform development. Recently I found that NDepend also start analysing .NET Core 2.0, ASP.NET Core 2.0 and .NET Standard 2.0 Visual Studio projects from latest Version v2017.3.1.

What’s New

All NDepend favorite features now work seamlessly with any .NET Core 2.0, ASP.NET Core 2.0 and .NET Standard 2.0 Visual Studio projects.

Here is the web report for the .NET Core web application and it also includes all the previously support features for a .NET Framework project.

There are few another improvement in newer version of NDepend.

• Guide Tooltip for Beginners and these guide tooltips now explain the basics of NDepend UI panels as you can see in below image:
  
  
• There are more than 50 improvements on the default rule-set to avoid matching false positives in various situations to make results Less False Positives and it also include ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core and WPF projects.
• UI responsiveness has been improved in Visual Studio when running NDepend analysis or loading an analysis result.
• More than 30 bugs fixed and dozen improvements done in this release.

Conclusion

NDepend has made good improvement in .NET Core projects analyses. In Visual Studio 2017, Dashboard and other reports are responsive. It is nice tool to Static Analyses for .NET and its successors .NET Core also.

How to temporary fix Open Live Writer blog template adaption issue?

Introduction

Current version of Open Live Writer has issue with some blog services e.g. BlogEngine. When we configure blog then it does adapt the blog template.

It is related to issue on OpenLiveWriter adaption issue on github. Similarly, I faced this issue when first time I configure my blog in this tool. Below is the actual theme for my blog which has white background in the blog post.

When I select this newly added blog account in the Open Live Writer, I looks like this:

It has some blackish background and font color is also different than the actual blog view.

Solution

Currently, this has not fixed yet but we can revert the blog template to view the default view of the writer to write out blog post and view them property. Below are the steps to correct the problem until Open Live Writer is not able to adapt the blog templates correctly:

Press Windows + R key to open the Run dialog and open the Open Live Writer blog templates folder at location “%AppData%\OpenLiveWriter\blogtemplates”

Then Identity the folder for your blog if you have multiple blogs configured in Open Live Writer. In my case it has multiple folders for storing blog template.

Now just delete the blog template folder and when you either reload or switch back to your blog then it will show blog in default view from Open Live Writer which much better than the previous one.

Conclusion

We learn that how to switch to the default view of Open Live writer, so that we can even write post on blog easily.

Introduction to Angular 4 and TypeScript- Your First Angular App

In this article, you are going to learn that how to create and run an Angular application using Angular CLI.
TABLE OF CONTENT

• Introduction
  • What is Angular?
  • Why do we need Angular?
  • Architecture and Building Blocks of Angular Apps
• Setting Up the Development Environment
• =>Your First Angular App
• Structure of Angular Projects
• Webpack
• TypeScript Fundamentals
  • What is TypeScript?
  • Creating First TypeScript Program
  • Declaring Variables
  • Types
  • Type Assertions
  • Arrow Functions
  • Interfaces
  • Classes
  • Objects
  • Constructors
  • Access Modifiers
  • Access Modifiers in Constructor Parameters
  • Properties
  • Modules
• Angular Fundamentals
  • Creating Components
  • Generating Components Using Angular CLI
  • Templates
  • Directives
  • Services
  • Dependency Injection
  • Generating Services Using Angular CLI
• Exercise

Introduction
Angular CLI is the new approach to work with Angular. It helps to create new projects as well as deployment of the packages through command line interface(CLI). In this article we install Angular CLI using node package manager and then create a new Angular 4 project.

Creating a new Angular Project
To create a new Angular project, first you must setup your development environment and the Angular
CLI which can be configured using below command.

npm install -g @angular/cli

Now open the command prompt and go to the directory where you want to create your first Angular application. Now run below command on the command prompt.

ng new Angular4App

After ng new xxxxxx, this xxxxxx is the application name which all depend on you that what you want to name your application.

Now open current project folder in Visual Studio Code by running below command:

code .

Finally, it is the time to check if your newly created application is running or not. To run your first application switch back to command prompt and run “ng server” command within project directory. Below is the command to run the Angular server which package and load the current application on the server so that you can run it in the browser.

ng server

After running this command, you will see in the output window where you will find that Angular live development server is listening on “localhost:4200” So go to the browser and type “localhost:4200” and you will find that your application is running as seen in above image.

Along this you will see a message in last that webpack: compiled successfully. In the next article We will discuss about webpack and project structure.

Conclusion
In this article you have learned to create and run an Angular project using Angular CLI.

Previous: Setting Up the Development Environment

Next: Structure of Angular Projects

Introduction to Angular 4 and TypeScript

This tutorial led you to learn the fundamentals of Angular and TypeScript.

TABLE OF CONTENT

• =>Introduction
  • What is Angular?
  • Why do we need Angular?
  • Architecture and Building Blocks of Angular Apps
• Setting Up the Development Environment
• Your First Angular App
• Structure of Angular Projects
• Webpack
• TypeScript Fundamentals
  • What is TypeScript?
  • Creating First TypeScript Program
  • Declaring Variables
  • Types
  • Type Assertions
  • Arrow Functions
  • Interfaces
  • Classes
  • Objects
  • Constructors
  • Access Modifiers
  • Access Modifiers in Constructor Parameters
  • Properties
  • Modules
• Angular Fundamentals
  • Creating Components
  • Generating Components Using Angular CLI
  • Templates
  • Directives
  • Services
  • Dependency Injection
  • Generating Services Using Angular CLI
• Exercise

Introduction

What is Angular?
Angular is a JavaScript framework for building client-side applications using HTML, CSS, and a programming language such as JavaScript. It is an open-source front-end web application platform based on TypeScript.

Before start using something new framework; everybody has lots of questions in his mind that What is it and Where does it fit in requirement? At which place it benefits and Why to use if there are lots of JavaScript frameworks out there.

Why do we need Angular? Why to use Angular and not some other JavaScript framework?

Angular makes HTML more expressive. It powers up HTML with language related features such as local variables, for loops, and if conditions.

Angular has powerful data binding. Application can easily display fields from data model, track changes, and process updates from the user so fast. It is built for providing speed. It has faster initial loads, faster change detections, and improved rendering times than other JavaScript frameworks.

Angular encourages modularity in application by design. It led us to create Applications as a set of building blocks, making it easier to create and reuse content. There most of the application build with JavaScript/ jQuery but as far the application gets more complex it is not easy to maintain the JavaScript and jQuery code.

It requires to properly structure the application. There are some JavaScript patterns out there e.g. Revealing Module Pattern, Prototype Pattern but these are must easy to lots beginners for JavaScript.

Angular has built-in support for making communication with a backend service. This makes it easy for web applications to integrate with a back-end service. It is preloaded with set to features to get and post data or execute server-side business logic.

Easily Testable

Picture credit from..

There are most the applications build with JavaScript or jQuery. Over the years various frameworks are build and evolved to make web applications development easier. Angular makes applications with clean structure that easy to understand and easy to maintain loosely coupled code. It makes applications more testable to write automated test to test the various part of the application.

Architecture and Building Blocks of Angular Apps


In modern web application, there are at least two parts a Front-end and Back-end. The Front-end is called client, it is the part of the web browser that user sees and interacts with. It includes user interface or UI for the application. It uses HTML, CSS, JavaScript/ TypeScript, Angular to create the Front-end. Front-end contains the HTML Templates and presentation logic to display the data and responding to the user e.g. navigation, listing data.

The Back-end consist of web servers or cloud which responsible for storing the data and doing any kind of processing. Back-end may one or more databases and APIs to make the data available to the client. For a large enterprise level application, it may also implement the business logic of the application like calculating the tax, shipping on various parameters

The Front-end or Client app talks to the Backend-end to get or save the data. At Back-end we create one or multiple HTTP Services / API to make data available to the client. These HTTP Services/ APIs are endpoint that are accessible via HTTP protocol so we call them to through HTTP request to get or save the data.

If we talk about Angular Building Blocks At the heart of every Angular App, we have one or more components. Application developed with Angular is comprised of a set of components and services which facilitates operations/functionality across those angular components.

Angular component


Angular component is comprised of a template which is the HTML for the user interface fragment defining a view for the application. component encapsulates the Data, HTML mark-up and logic for a view.

Along this, a class for the code associated with the view. The class contains the data or properties for use in the view and methods, which perform actions button for the associated view e.g. responding to a button click.

Metadata

A component also has metadata, which provides additional information about the component to Angular. It is this metadata that identifies the class as an Angular component.

Modules

Every Angular application has at least one Angular module which called the application's root Angular module. As Application grows it can have any number of additional Angular modules including feature modules that consolidate the components for a specific application feature to make code maintainable. It is a container for groups of components.

For an example, in real world scenario If we go to a grocery store then it has few shelf's to maintain their products/items to sell but in a big mall we found lots of I/0 to manage different categories of the products. Similarly, to maintain different type of components we can create multiple modules to organize the components.

If we see in Training web application, there are following modules can be created to manage the application:

Each module will manage their specific group of components, sub components to break the application in smaller and maintainable to facilitate a specific area of the application.

Conclusion:
In this section we have learned about the Angular and what/why Angular. Along this we have also tried to know the basic building blocks of the Angular to develop a web application

Next: Setting Up the Development Environment

Rule "Same architecture installation" failed with Microsoft SQL Server Data Tools for Visual Studio 2013

Scenario:

I was installing Microsoft SQL Server Data Tools - Business Intelligence for Visual Studio 2013 with a 64 bit SQL Server 2014 Express and Visual Studio 2013. The installation will not start because of a failing rule check. "Same architecture installation"

I have selected existing SQL Server instance to add features:

Then selected “SQL server Data Tools – Business Intelligence for Visual Studio 2013.

After that installation start running “Feature Configuration Rules” and I got an error saying that Rule “Same architecture installation” failed.

Solution:

I have searched for the problem and found that only 32-bit version of SQL Server Data Tools for Visual Studio 2013 published by Microsoft.

 

From MSDN forum and blog article:

Make sure you choose the "New Instance" option (strange as that might seem). Otherwise, you'll get an error that says the following:

Rule "Same architecture installation" failed.

On my machine x64 version of SQL Server was installed so it requires to do a new installation rather adding features to existing instance. I thought that It was due to the Operating System architecture difference but these tools require 32 bit instance of SQL Server.

Hope this help others to solve this strange issue.

Out of box “Emmet” code snippets in Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code has a port for Emmet out-of-the-box too, which gives us more HTML features. Emmet is a web-developer’s toolkit that can greatly improve your HTML & CSS workflow or programming.

Basically, most text editors out there allow you to store and re-use commonly used code chunks, called “snippets”. While snippets are a good way to boost your productivity, all implementations have common pitfalls: you have to define the snippet first and you can’t extend them in runtime. Same like full version of visual studio, Emmit is way to implement code snippets in the VS Code editor.

For example  let's say we wanted to just type div and then inside of that div we wanted to have a UL. And then we want that UL to have, let's say, five LIs. We could do LI right there and how do you do five of those, we can do *5. Now if I hit Tab, it's going to automatically generate all that HTML.

Notice it's kind of got a cursor there in the first spot, so let's see what that happens there. I can type I first, hit Tab, and go to second, and then just keep typing like this. Now you can use that and hit Escape to get out and to also create things like table or anything else that's more complex.

if you want to learn more about the Emmet syntax you can check out this link here at docs.emmet.io.

How to run Node.js and Npm with web proxy

Recently I needed to install npm on my workplace computer and it always showing below connection timeout error message every time when I run any command.



I have faced such issue with VS Code when trying to install extensions and updates. After going through documentation, I found that here is the same issue with proxy settings and I got information by running ‘npm help config’ command. It redirected me to the npm config documentation and I found this:



To authenticate my corporate proxy, I set the environment variables HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY but npm did not recognized these environment variables.

After doing search on internet and from my previous experience with vscode issue, I found the following same way to configure the proxy for npm.

npm config set proxy http://proxy.company.com:8080
npm config set https-proxy http://proxy.company.com:8080

If you need to specify credentials, they can be passed in the url using the following syntax.

http://user_name:password@proxy.company.com:8080

You can also set the proxy configuration as a command line argument or environment variable. Configuration parameters can be specified using -- when executing npm. So the proxy could also be specified as follows.

npm --https-proxy=http://niranjansingh:MyPass@172.29.01.01:8080 -g install yo

I have tried command line configuration to make it work and I have done my job.

Hope this help others also... Happy Coding!