I've finally got my ADSL connection up and running again! I've been here in Spain for about 2 1/2 years now, and I've had ADSL pretty much from day 1 - however, a while back there were a whole string of ISPs being bought out by others, which meant that my provider kept changing. They actually did quite well for a while at keeping me online, but finally (and predicably!) it all went pear shaped.

After a bit of research, I chose Spantel for my new contract - it's taken a while, since the last provider hadn't released my line, but at last I'm online properly again :) I've been on the phone to Spantel a number of times over the course of this to get progress reports etc, and they've always been pretty quick at picking up and providing useful answers. When the kit arrived this week, it turns out that there was also a problem on my line - again, Spantel tech support have been great, organising the Telefonica engineers to get it sorted.

So "Well Done" to Spantel - let's hope the good service continues.

As I've not doubt you've heard, the January CTP of Visual Studio 2007 was released a couple of weeks back (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1FF0B35D-0C4A-40B4-915A-5331E11C39E6&displaylang=en). Initially, I downloaded and installed the side-by-side installer version - I don't much like developing inside a virtual machine, so being able to install it on my main machine alongside 2005 was great (although it is beta software, so I don't recommend you do this unless you're happy to reinstall your machine should it all go awry!).

The main thing I was interested in using is the new ADO.NET Entities features. This CTP doesn't have the designers built in yet (I understand these will come in the next release, probably sometime in Febuary), but I'm happy editing XML by hand so now. As a start point, I got the ADO samples from October (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=c14c451d-7043-44f0-87d7-845f1c238d64&displaylang=en). These opened and built just fine, but fell over almost straight away when I tried running them, with a MissingMethodException being thrown out of the guts of the entity framework. It was trying to access a property called ProviderFactory on a DbConnection object - a quick glance at MSDN (and confirmed with Reflector) showed that, indeed, this property did not exist.

A scan of the forums suggested that other folk did have the samples running, although they were running wthin the virtual environment. Another huge download later, and I span up the samples within a VPC - sure enough, they worked just fine. A quick investigation found that the standard System.Data.dll assembly (the 2.0 version, found in \Windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v2.0.50727) had been updated but, for whatever reason, the same update had not been performed when running the Installer version.

I copied the dll across to my dev machine and put it into a new directory, then set the DEVPATH environment variable to point there. Finally, I added the following to the app.config of the sample application:

<configuration>
<runtime>
<developmentmode developerinstallation="true">
</runtime>
</configuration>

This instruts the assembly loader to use the locations specified in DEVPATH during the assembly bind process - and it gets processed first, enabling it to override the contents of the GAC (I didn't want to start replacing files in the GAC at random, since although I don't *mind* reinstalling, I'd rather not if I don't have to!).

Bingo! The samples now work on my main machine (running Vista). I don't know if this is an ommission in the current installer, or if some error occurred (silently!) during the installation itself. However, the above seems to resolve it for now.

More stuff on WCF / IIS7 - IIS7 has got some funky new tracing features built in to diagnose failed requests. Again, this is not enabled by default; you need to go into "Turn Windows Features on or off" and select "Interet Information Services\World Wide Web Services\Health and Diagnostics\Tracing". Once done, you'll see a new entry in the IIS admin tool - select your web site and on the Actions pane you can now configure the failed request tracing. Enjoy!

Just been starting to play with WCF again, and was experimenting with the IIS activation. With IIS7 on Vista, I was getting a 404 error on my .svc file. Since I knew the file existed, I guessed this was probably down to the appropriate handlers not being installed, and since it's not one of the few types that get served as static pages, IIS returned a 404.

I quick poke around the new IIS admin screen showed this to be the case - no handlers were setup to serve .svc files. Turns out that in Vista, this is an optional component that is not installed by default. To get .svc files running, you need to go to Control Panel \ Programs, open the "Turn Windows features on or off" applet and drill into the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 node. In there, select the WCF HTTP Activation entry and you should be good to go.

Not much more to report on the Spec# investigations. The overall approach holds a lot of promise, but I would say that currently it's a little early to consider its use for anything more than experimentation. I'm hoping that some of the features quickly migrate over to C#, although I doubt this will be happening in the 3.0 timeframe.

An update on the empty solution problem that I was experiencing with Spec# - if I run up VS2005 and try to create a new Spec# project (any type, console app, windows app or class library) I was getting the project created, but the solution pane within VS was blank.

I'm running Vista (build 5744), and wondered if that had caused an issue somewhere, so I've just tried an install of Spec# on a VM running XP - and it works just fine. So I'm guessing that somewhere during either the VS2005 install or the Spec# install on Vista, something somewhere doesn't register properly. If / when I get (very!) bored, I may try comparing the registry entries etc to see if I can locate the problem.

In a quest to improve code quality, I've been looking at a number of code analysis tools lately. FxCop was the lowest hanging fruit, since it ships with VS2005 - it's pretty good, and I tend to agree with the bulk of the warnings that it issued. I ran it against a fairly big project (~30 seperate assemblies), and it generated a good number of warnings, which took a few days to trawl through and get fixed. Most of them were trivial in nature, but there were a few good ones, including about 4 clear-cut bugs (this being code that has been live for over 2 years!). There's no doubt that the code is cleaner now than before the FxCop runs, so it's now turned on by default.

I'm now having a play with Spec# (SpecSharp), which at first glance looks to be extremely powerful. A few teething problems so far (mainly the VS2005 integration - the Spec# project templates just don't seem to work for me), but nothing too serious. I'm going to spend the next couple of days running it against some subsets of some existing projects and adding in the appropriate annotations to the code - it'll be interesting to see how much effort it entails with existing code, and what value it adds.