S#arp Architecture - Architectural review

Overview

For the past 6 months or so I have been using and following closely the S#arp Architecture framework’s evolution from beta to release. During this time I have found the project, community and reference documentation excellent! Billy McCafferty and the team of contributors have done a professional job assembling this framework into a key source of guidance on how to assemble an enterprise architecture that embraces (from its Project main page on Google code) :

• Loose coupling leveraging Microsoft’s ASP.Net MVC
• Persistence ignorance with NHibernate
• Domain Driven Design
• Pre-configured infrastructure

S#arp Architecture includes S#arp Scaffolding that greatly speeds up the process of adding CRUD functionality for your entities through the use of T4 templates implemented with the T4 Template toolkit. The “out-of-the box” templates can be extended adding support for using the Ext-JS JavaScript library. It also includes a Visual Studio project template to build out your Solution tree. Billy has a good post on the topic of extending the T4 template to embrace the EXT-JS library.He frequently responds to questions that come into the Google group discussion forum linked at the bottom of this post. Kyle Baley has done several Dimecast videos on getting started and extending the architecture. Others of note who contribute with insightful comments and blog entries that have helped my understanding are Luis Abreu.

What follows will be a series of blog posts documenting the ability to override the default generated templates and code to produce the desired result of managing the roles for various users accessing an MVC website in the context of varying controller actions.

The posts will be as follows:

Introducing the model and overriding Fluent NHibernate’s auto mapping strategy within S#arp Architecture

Links

S#arp Architecture trunk

Origins of architecture

Billy McCafferty on VAN

Discussion group

VAN: Lessons learned building NH Profiler with Ayende Rahien, Christopher Bennage and Rob Eisenberg Oct 21 and Oct 28, 2009

Topic

A three way conversation with the main collaborators who created NH Profiler. This tool enables developers to gain a deeper insight into profiling their applications communication from NHibernate(.Net) and Hibernate(Java) through to the database.

Who they are

Ayende Rahien contributed efforts on the back-end development.

Chris Bennage and Rob Eisenberg contributed their efforts to the front-end.

Time and location of the meetings

Times below are Central Daylight Time
Start Time: Oct 21 and 28, Each week 8:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours
End Time: Oct 21 and 28, Each week 10:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours
Attendee URL: Attend the meeting (Live Meeting)

VAN: An evening with Scott Bellware discussing the myth of developer productivity August 18, 2009

Topic

The myth of developer productivity.

Scott’s Bio

Scott Bellware is a software product designer, developer, manager, and agile coach living in Austin, TX. He speaks at software industry conferences and teaches agile development practices and software production methodologies in workshops in the US, Canada, and Europe. He is the founder of the Lean Software Austin and the AgileATX communities of software practitioners. He is the organizer of the upcoming MonoSpace, ALT.NET Open Space, and Continuous Improvement conferences in Austin, and has served as the content chairman for the agile development track at the DevTeach conferences, as well as the chairman of the INETA Speaker Committee. He is the recipient of Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional award.

Meeting Details

Times below are expressed in Central Daylight Time

Start Time: Wed, August 19, 2009 8:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours

End Time: Wed, August 19, 2009 10:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours

Attendee URL: http://snipr.com/virtualaltnet (Live Meeting)

VAN: An evening of Questions and Sharing of group opinions regarding DDD pragmatic concepts facilitated by David Laribee July 29, 2009

Topic

In the spirit of Open Spaces we will be bringing in David Laribee to facilitate a discussion of opinions on Domain Driven Design.

Who is Dave?

He is a coach for the product development team at VersionOne. He has 12 years experience designing and developing enterprise applications and coaching Agile teams. David has worked on internal IT, product development, consulting, and rapid prototyping teams across a wide variety of industries. David is a frequent speaker at local and national developer events. He was awarded a Microsoft Architecture MVP for 2007 and 2008 and writes about Agile and Lean methods, coaching, and software design on the CodeBetter blog network.

Meeting Details

Times below are Central Daylight Time
Start Time: Wed, July 29, 2009 8:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours
End Time: Wed, July 29, 2009 10:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours
Attendee URL: Attend the meeting (Live Meeting)

del.icio.us Tags: DDD,Open Spaces,VirtualAltNet

Technorati Tags: DDD,Open Spaces,VirtualAltNet

Enabling Kerberos delegation with Application Service Architectures and SQL Server Analysis Services 2005

Introduction

This document describes how to setup Kerberos delegation to authenticate an application windows service HTTP requests to SQL Server Analysis Services 2005. Additionally the steps for configuration that will follow become required when the application host machines are separated but exist within the same domain. More information can be obtained on this here.

Active Directory Setup

When making changes in Active Directory there is a requirement for you to have a System Administrator with permissions to invoke any of the changes needed below.

● The server which hosts your application windows services must be set to 'Trust this computer for Delegation (Kerberos
only)'.
● All your AD user-accounts that will utilize your application windows service should have the setting "Sensitive: not allowed
to be delegated" disabled. This means that all these accounts should be allowed to be delegated.
● Register the Service Principal Names (SPN) described in this document in your Active Directory.

Service Principal Name Registration

If you do not have the Service Principal Name tool or SPN tool is part of the Windows Server 2003 and 2008 Support tools and can be found on your product CD. Alternatively you can download it from here.

Machine hosting your application windows service.

Check the registered SPN’s before you continue with the registration by issuing the following text from the command line:
setspn –l <domainName]\[serverHostName]

This command will list (-l) out the current SPN’s and the only one’s that should show up are as follows:

HOST/<serverHostName>
HOST/<serverHostName>.domain.com

Protocol registration

setspn –a HTTP/<domainName>\<serverHostName> <serviceAccount>
setspn –a HTTP/<serverHostName>.<domainName>.com <serviceAccount>

Application Service registration

setspn –a <appWindowsServiceName>/<domainName>\<serverHostName> <serviceAccount>
setspn –a <appWindowsServiceName>/<serverHostName>.<domainName>.com <serviceAccount>

Note: The <serviceAccount> token we have used above will be referenced as the <serverHostName> token when the services are running as LocalSystem/NetworkService. Otherwise specify the Domain account that the services are running under.

Machine Hosting SQL Server Analysis Services

Check the registered SPN’s before you continue with the registration by issuing the following text from the command line:
setspn –l <domainName]\[serverHostName]

This command will list (-l) out the registered SPN’s. Typically the one’s that will appear are the same as noted above on your Application windows service machine.

SSAS Service registration

setspn –a MSOLAPSvc.3/<domainName>\<serverHostName> <serviceAccount>
setspn –a MSOLAPSvc.3/<serverHostName>.<domainName>.com <serviceAccount>

The <serviceAccount> token notes above equally apply.

Setup the clients

● The URL used to connect to the Application service web application http://<serverhostname>.<domainname>.com/) should be added to the trusted sites list in Internet Explorer
● To use Windows Integrated Authentication, the option ‘Automatic logon with current username and
password’ must be selected in the Security settings dialog box for the trusted sites zone, (Section:User authentication -Logon)

Team City Addin for NUnit

Recently at our Virtual Alt.Net group I ran through getting a basic project up and running within Team City 4.0. During the demonstration we were lucky to have a couple of key insiders from Jet Brains join us in the discussion. During the presentation I was painfully hitting the proverbial brick wall of "fail", namely around getting my NUnit test results integrated into Team City's build reports. To save all of you from having to watch the video and to concisely put this rather simple issue to rest quickly, I have concluded at the bottom of this post steps requiring action to have your NUnit tests integrated within Team City. I would like to thank Yegor Yarko and Eugene Petrenko and all participating attendees who offered their assistance in getting this to work!

In order to integrate the NUnit Test runner, Team City requires a bit of additional configuration and the documentation is not as forthcoming as I would like. Hopefully this post will assist others who want to integrate their testing statistics into their build server's dashboard reporting.

Jet Brains indicates that they provide support for NUnit via an addin. The addin provides on-the-fly test coverage reporting integrated within Team City.
The screen to the left appears as an additional chart located within the Settings tab indicating Test Count.

The screen shot below is indicative proof that test reports are not configured correctly. The build itself however is successful. Notice that there are four tabs displayed, there should be five with a Tab named Tests.







When the NUnit test runner integration is correct the screen will appear as follows:












Click on the Tests tab and you can filter the tests by ignored, successful, failed, or all. Additionally you can view your tests by classes, suites, namespaces/packages, or all. This filtering capability is directly above the listing of tests in the screenshot below.








Configuration Steps

It is important to note that with the ensuing steps integration of the NUnit test runner is supported only from versions 2.4X and higher of NUnit.

• Locate the nunit.console.exe.config file for the version of NUnit that you will be using. In this case I chose to use NUnit 2.4.8. The path to the file is C:\Program Files\NUnit 2.4.8\bin. Add the following XML to the config file save and close the file.
  

• I defined a property for locating the NUnit console runner for version 2.4.8. This is optional of course I just find this a cleaner approach as I can reference this location with less noise later in the build script. Additionally its also worth noting that the version for NUnit's console runner does not have to match the version of NUnit referenced within your project's test assembly.
  

• Copy the dll and pdb files for the Team City Nunit AddIn to the location defined above for the nunintconsole property and place the files within the newly defined directory of addins that is created within this task. Then the tests are executed by NUnit.

The Team City test runner for NUnit will work only for version's 2.4x and higher for NUnit. If anyone has some alternative configuration that has worked for them I would love to hear them.

Tricks for dealing with Assembly changes in DocProject

I have been working with Steve Bohlen of late in evaluating a couple of API documentation engines that are being considered for inclusion with NHibernate's API.  

One issue that was bothering me was how to best deal with detecting assembly changes in a Project. As many of you know NHibernate has a rather extensive API that undergoes many regular changes and additions. DocProject is one tool that is being evaluated to perform the documentation requirements. During the initial project setup a wizard prompt requests you to select your assembly targets for inclusion. These assemblies then appear as reference dependency inside of your DocProject project. So the question that was bothering me was what happens if you create new assemblies? Having to manually added these new assemblies to DocProject would become a nuisance as it would be easy to forget to do this step. 

Stephen suggested the following which worked quite nice!

Step 1

Remove the reference assemblies from DocProject

After removing the dependencies, you need to specify an external location where they can be located by DocProject.  Below this is done within the DocProject Properties window supply we supply the External sources location for the source of the assemblies and the XML documentation files. 

Step 2

Create a post build event that copies the Assemblies to the projects output directory which in this case we have created a folder output target called Help. This folder content is also automatically cleaned and scrubbed by the projects build script during the compile task. We added the following macro command in the Project Properties | Build Events section defining a post-build event.

 

Checking the noted changes caused a fail to the build. We need to automate the creation of the Help folder.

Hence I added a make directory task to my compile target in the project's build script.

Now any assemblies newly added within my projects namespace will be automatically detected for documentation. The post-build task can be tweaked to limit the project assemblies you would like to document.