Emailing Pictures in new OSX Photos app

After updating to the new Photos app I tried to share a picture via email and was disappointed to see this option missing from the Share menu.

After some searching I discovered that it was because I wasn't using the Mail app as my default mail reader. After setting it back to Mail.app in the Mail Preferences window 

the option to share via Mail appeared in the Photos Share menu. 

Clicking More in that menu opens the Extensions Preferences window where you can select with extensions you want to use and so I'm hoping this is just a result of the third party email reader application needing an update to configure itself as a Mac sharing extension.  

More TFS woes

Disclaimer: TFS is not my VCS of choice. I use it because that is what the client site where I'm working uses.

I'd heard about it before but only just ran into it myself today. I'm referring to the TFS character limit which I've come to learn is actually a Windows character limit that is a holdover from older APIs. NTFS actually supports filenames in excess of 32000 characters yet windows APIs, and thus any tool built on top of those APIs, still has a limit of 260 characters. Apparently Microsoft doesn't intend to fix it (or didn't in 2011). If that's not technical debt then I don't know what is.

They have started addressing it to some degree in TFS 2012 with support for up to 400 character paths but on the server only.

Auditing DB actions using MVC 4 and Entity Framework

This is a post from sometime last year that for some reason I never published.

This post describes an approach for an ASP.Net MVC application with a database-first EF Model.  I was using MVC 4 and EF 4.3.  The project this was for had some requirements and standards that have to be met about the degree of auditing on at the DB level. Simply overriding the EF SaveChanges() method to catch all actions will not suffice as the DB would likely be accessed by other means outside of the MVC/EF application. So table based triggers was the way to go but how to pass the username through to the DB?

The approach described below builds of off concepts outlined in the following articles:

1. http://lgsong.blogspot.ca/2012/01/contextinfo-and-entity-framework.html This article gives the general idea of what I'm doing here.  
2. http://jmdority.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/using-entity-framework-4-1-dbcontext-change-tracking-for-audit-logging/ See this article if you're using a Code-First approach (this was not an option for us).
3. http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2008/01/27/adding-simple-trigger-based-auditing-to-your-sql-server-database.aspx The code in this article was full of syntax errors and was missing spaces and required a little clean up in order to work with it but the ideas are good.  I adapted his approach of dynamically adding triggers to all the tables to work with the Audit table schema we were using.

The high level description of the approach is as follows:

1. Create Audit_Log and Audit_Comment tables in your DB
2. Add a stored procedure that takes a username and a comment string and inserts them into the comment table saving the generated comment_id and username in the database CONTEXT_INFO.
3. Add insert, update and delete triggers to each table that will first extract the comment_id and username from the ContextInfo() and then use those when inserting the audit details into the Audit_Log table.

Other Suggestions

Use an XML column to reduce the number of inserts.
Instead of storing before and after values in each audit entry row, the before values can be retrieved from the previous entry (inserts are also audited) although this makes queries on the audit data slightly complicated. Could also store only the columns that changed in the XML....

Threading Woes

Until recently I've gotten away with only looking at or making minor tweaks to VB.Net code. I've now been tasked with modifying a web service that involved reviving some cached values in a background thread so the user wasn't left waiting for the task to finish. If the values were cached the service responded well but once the cache expired there was a long wait (minutes) for any request that came in while the cache was rebuilt. The solution, until a replacement service is completed, was to preemptively rebuild the cache in a thread prior to expiry. The solution involved locks to ensure only one thread is rebuilding the cache at once and thus prevent cycles spent needlessly rebuilding the cache multiple times. Locks in VB are created using SyncLock which is like lock in C#. The challenging bit for me (and I now know way more about VB than I ever intended to) was that the Static keyword in VB does not work the way you would expect coming from a C# perspective (or any other perspective I've encountered for that matter) and can only be applied to local variables and properties. It turns out what I really wanted was a Private Shared ReadOnly object although it took me some time and plenty of tinkering to come to that conclusion.

Also, despite the great thread debugging tools available in Visual Studio, print statements proved invaluable in actually seeing what order things were happening in and seeing when the locks were actually working or not. Sometimes the simplest approach is the most effective.

jQuery UI Tabs issue in MVC 4

I was trying to set up the jQuery UI Tabs sample in an ASP.Net MVC 4 application and got the following error in the console:

Uncaught TypeError: Object #<Object> has no method 'tabs'

It turned out that jQuery was not yet loaded at the time the .tabs() method was being called.  Scripts must be loaded in the correct order or the code they're referencing may not be available.  I had the bit in the document ready block but was still having a problem. The problem in the MVC case seemed to be the mix of using both MVC bundles and script tags. There is likely a proper way to do it if I were to read more about bundles and when they're loaded, etc. 

I decided to put all the script resources into bundles and loaded them that way and I left the bit of code calling $('#tabs').tabs() in a script tag. Still no luck. So I deleted that script tag, loaded my page, made sure all scripts were available and then in the chrome javascript console I entered $('#tabs').tabs() and BAM, the tabs appeared.  This proved that the script fragments were not being run in the order I had expected so I put the code in a separate js file and loaded it in a bundle as well and everything worked.

So if you're using Bundles, it appears your best bet is to use them across the board and not mix and match with inline script tags.