You have probably seen the discussion of the “Keep Calm and Rape On” T-Shirts that were made available, for a time, by an Amazon reseller.  These shirts were one of several thousand computer-generated designs offered for sale on Amazon, to be printed and shipped if anyone cared to buy one.  At first blush, and as some have pointed-out, it seems like a simple error. A verb list that contained the word “rape” was not properly vetted and therefore the offensive shirt promoting violent crime was offered for sale by mistake. No offense was intended, so, as long as the company takes the proper action of apologizing and removing the offending item, all is well.  This sentiment seems to be summed-up by the well-read post by Pete Ashton on the subject:

Because these algorithms generally mimic decisions that used to be made directly by people we have a tendency to humanise the results and can easily be horrified by what we see. But some basic understanding of how these systems work can go a long way to alleviating this dissonance.

However, I believe it is not nearly this simple.  For one thing, I wonder about how this offensive shirt was “discovered”.  Did somebody really stumble across it in the Amazon store, or, was its existence “leaked” to generate publicity.  I don’t know the answer to this question, but if it were the case that someone at the company knew it was there, and either did nothing or worse, used it for marketing purposes, that would invalidate the “…it was computer generated” defense.  However, in my mind, that defense doesn’t hold water for another reason.  That is, we know this can happen and have the responsibility to make sure it doesn’t.

The companies that use our software are responsible for the output of our programs.  If we are using a sequence of characters that could potentially form a word, those companies are responsible for the message that word conveys.  If our programs output a sequence of words that could potentially form a sentence, they are responsible for that message as well.  If the reasonable possibility exists that a message generated by these algorithms would be offensive, and visible to the public, failure to properly vet the message makes that company responsible for it.

This fact is made even more critical when our customers are enterprise scale clients and we are building software for use by the general public. As an example, lets look at one of the common systems for creating airline reservations which has been in operation for decades.  This system presents to the consumer a six-character alphanumeric code known as the Record Locator Number. This identifier is used for the reservation by both automated and manual systems. What do you think would happen if you were making an airline reservation, and the response, either verbally, or in text, came back with the Record Locator “FATASS”?  How about “FUKOFF” or “UBITCH”?  If the programmers who created this system had just coded a random (or incrementing) set of any 6 characters, these letter combinations would have come up, probably multiple times by now because of the sheer volume of use.  However, the system creators knew this could happen and did what needed to be done to prevent sequences with meaning from being used.  As language changes and different letter combinations have different meanings, these policies need to be reviewed and amended to include additional letter combinations. Problems like this are not new and have been solved many times before, when the clients wanted them to be solved.

Knowing that random combinations of words can result in meaningful, and potentially offensive sentences, we are responsible for the failure when they actually do, whether they happened “intentionally” or not.

or, How I found my Passion for Windows 8 Store App Development

Update: My first Windows Store app was published on March 27, 2013 and can be found here.

I don't have any apps in the Windows 8 Store yet. For that matter, I don't have any apps in the Windows Phone store, or the Apple or Android stores either. I have many ideas for apps, and a number of them in the works for both Windows 8 and Windows Phone, but I have nothing real to show for it yet. Nothing to show for several years of attending sessions at conferences, user groups, and code camps on building these apps; for many hours of hacking on front-end interfaces and business logic. Don’t get me wrong, I've wanted to build these apps, but I didn't have that burning desire that I usually get when I am solving problems with software. You know that desire, the one that compels you to sit in front of a computer for hours at a time until you've completed a solution. I didn't have it.

This recently changed for me -- let me explain.

I have spent most of the last 20 years building enterprise web applications that do most of the work on the server side. My user interfaces have been built in HTML, with some JavaScript for validation and Ajax for dynamic post-backs, but all business rules were housed entirely on the server in either C#, VB or something similar. Even before .NET, in the classic ASP days, my logic executed on the server with VBScript calling components created in Visual Basic. Before that, it was Pascal programs spitting out pure HTML to the console which was then redirected to the browser stream by the web server. As a result, I am very comfortable with using HTML for layout, and multi-purpose languages like C# and VB.Net for the business logic and data access.

In the app world however, this combination of technologies has seemed out-of-reach. In Windows Phone development, I could use C#, but needed to use XAML for layout and style, a technology that I have not yet been able to get comfortable with. For Windows 8 store apps there are more options, including HTML5/JavaScript apps, but I have never been comfortable writing code in JavaScript. The advent of TypeScript has brought us even closer to a solution in my comfort zone where I can get almost a C# style experience with HTML5 as my layout mechanism, but I am still missing key features like LINQ and generics.

Enter Windows Runtime Components. I say “enter”, as if they were new -- they're not, I just apparently allowed myself to forget about them. RT Components can be written in C# (and other languages), but can be called from JavaScript or any Windows 8 Store code, just as if they were written in that same language. RT components can also call into any .NET code that can be executed in a Windows Store App. As a result, I have the power of C# and the .NET Framework at my disposal while writing a JavaScript app. All I have to do is wrap my .NET Windows Store compatible libraries in an RT component, and use JavaScript to bind it to my HTML layout. Since I have been using Portable Libraries for most of my business logic for some time now, and those libraries that aren't yet portable, are generally easily translated, most of my .NET business logic is already available for me to wrap in an RT Component.

With the primary business functionality done in C#, it becomes a relatively trivial exercise in JavaScript to bind my RT model to the HTML components in my UI. This experience is completely comfortable to me, and in using this process, I have found the passion I was missing for building these apps. I will have several apps in the Windows 8 store in the next few weeks with more to follow after that. I will also be writing about my methods in building these apps, from the perspective of an enterprise developer. Hopefully, this will allow others to find the passion for creating these apps as I have. In the meantime, here are a few tips you can start using now to ease the transition into building apps:

1. Use portable libraries wherever possible, especially for business logic.
2. Use dependency injection to make non-portable dependencies available to portable libraries. This will allow your business logic access to platform-specific functionality (such as network access) without sacrificing portability.
3. Do as much of the work as possible in the underlying .NET libraries and keep the RT Component as thin a translation layer as possible. I will be exploring techniques for this in the near future. Possibilities here include making this layer either a View-Model or a Repository implementation.
4. The only logic in the JavaScript code should be that which is required to bind the RT Component to your controls. If you are doing more than setting event handlers and other control properties in your JavaScript, you might want to think about moving that functionality into a lower layer. This has the added benefit of making that logic potentially reusable across applications.

I’m interested to hear if there are other enterprise developers with similar stories, whose comfort zones of HTML and C# or VB have kept them from building apps as they’d like. Please contact me on Twitter at @bsstahl.

Here is an update on where and when I’ll be delivering presentations about software development in .NET over the next few months.  I still have some availability left for the H1 2013 and H2 is effectively wide open. You can request me as a speaker through INETA.

Sothern Most User Group in Key West FL on February 7th - “Code Portability in .NET”

South Florida Code Camp in Ft. Lauderdale FL on February 9th - “Building a DSL Using an OData Source”

Desert Code Camp on April 20th in Gilbert AZ – “Building a DSL Using an OData Source”

Twin Cities Code Camp in Minneapolis MN on April 27th – “Code Portability in .NET”

SELA Dev Conference in Tel-Aviv Israel on May 5-9 – a full day seminar version of “.NET TDD Kickstart” as well as “Code Portability in .NET”

CodeStock in Knoxville TN on July 12-13 “Code Portability in .NET” (assuming the attendees vote for my session) 

I hope to see you at one or more of these events.

I previously expressed my annoyance here and here (starting at 01:02:06) about the lack of the Create Unit Tests feature in Visual Studio 2012, similar to the one in Visual Studio 2010.  It is interesting that none of the Microsoft people I’ve spoken to on the issue were able to provide me with a reasonable work-around, but apparently, intrueder, a commenter at Stack Overflow, has.  It turns out that the functionality was not removed from the Visual Studio product, just from the context menu. Therefore, we can give ourselves access to the command again by assigning a keyboard shortcut to it.  The steps to do so are as follows:

1. In Visual Studio 2012, select Options from the Tools menu on the top menu bar.
2. In the Environment section of the dialog, select Keyboard.  This will show you a list of commands and their keyboard shortcuts if they have one.
3. In the Show commands containing box, type CreateUnitTests.  You should see the command window filter down to the EditorContextmenus.CodeWindow.CreateUnitTests command, which will be highlighted.
4. If there is anything shown in the Shortcuts for selected command drop-down, you are already done.  You can use whatever key sequence is listed to access the command as described below.
5. If there is nothing shown, you’ll need to assign a keyboard shortcut.  Press the key sequence you’d like to use while in the Press shortcut keys text box.  If that shortcut is already assigned, the Shortcut currently used by drop-down will change to show how the key sequence is currently used.  You may have to try several key combinations before you find one that you are comfortable using, especially if you use a product like Resharper which maps a bunch of additional shortcuts on top of the Visual Studio default key mappings.
6. Once you decide on a key sequence and those keys (or key) appear in the Press shortcut keys text box, press the Assign button to map the sequence to the command.  You can now use that key sequence to access the CreateUnitTests command as described below.

Now that a shortcut is setup, all you have to do is place the cursor within the scope that you want to create unit tests for (a namespace, class or method) and invoke the key sequence.  The command should be activated as it was in Visual Studio 2010.  I have been using this for a little while and it is working quite well for me, but I don’t make use of nearly all of the features of this command.  I’ll be interested to hear if you have any troubles using this tool in this way.  You can contact me on twitter at @bsstahl if you have any comments.

I am loving many of the improvements made in Visual Studio 2012.  The performance and overall user experience of the test runner has improved tremendously from Visual Studio 2010 and the IDE is generally a joy to use.  Unfortunately, I can’t use it. It is missing one of the key features I use in my development workflow, that is, the “Create Unit Test” option.  This function, in VS2010, generates the stub of unit tests based on the interfaces of the selected methods.  It is hard for me to imagine why this feature was left out of Visual Studio 2012, but it needs to be put back in immediately. 

Please let Microsoft know how you feel about the absence of this feature in VS2012 by voting the feature request up on UserVoice.

The complete, working application for my .NET TDD Kickstart sessions can be found here.

Unzip the files into a solution folder and open the Demo.sln solution in a version of Visual Studio 2010 that has Unit Testing capability (Professional, Premium or Ultimate).  Immediately, you should be able to compile the whole solution, and successfully execute the tests in the Bss.QueueMonitor.Test and Bss.Timing.Test libraries.

To get the tests in the other two test libraries (Bss.QueueMonitor.Data.EF.Test & Bss.QueueMonitor.IntegrationTest) to pass, you will need to create the database used to store the monitored data in the data-tier and integration tests, and enable MSMQ on your system so that a queue to be monitored can be created for the Integration test.

The solution is configured to use a SQLExpress database called TDDDemo.  You can use any name or SQL implementation you like, you’ll just need to update the configuration of all of the test libraries to use the new connection.  The script to execute in the new database to create the table needed to run the tests can be found in the Bss.QueueMonitor.Data.EF library and is called QueueDepthModel.edmx.sql.

You can install Message Queuing on computers running Windows 7 by using Programs and Features in the Control Panel.  You do not need to create any specific queue because the integration test creates a queue for each test individually, then deletes the queue when the test is complete.

If you have any questions or comments about this sample, please start a conversation on Twitter or Contact Me.

The camera-phone shot below was taken at John Wayne-Orange County Airport (SNA).

You'll notice a column of arrows along the right side. These clearly indicate the direction the reader has to go to get to that gate. It's the little things that make all the difference.

I head out to Fullerton tomorrow for the start of my .NET TDD Kickstart world tour

In this session, the speaker and the audience will "pair up" for a coding session which will serve as an introduction to Test Driven Development in an Agile environment. We will use C#, Visual Studio and Rhino Mocks to unit test code to be built both with and without dependencies. We will also highlight some of the common issues encountered during TDD and discuss strategies for overcoming them.

I will be presenting this session at numerous venues around the country this year, including, so far:

• Southern California Code Camp – Fullerton in January
• South Florida Code Camp – Ft. Lauderdale in February
• New Mexico .NET User’s Group – Albuquerque in March
• Twin Cities Code Camp – Minneapolis in April

If you are interested in having me present this or another session at your event, please contact me.

There is much more than an hour’s worth of material to be presented, so instead of trying to rush through everything I want to talk about during this time, I’ve instead taken some questions from this presentation and posted them below.  Please contact me if you have any additional questions, need clarification, or if you have an suggestions or additions to these lists.

Update: I have moved the FAQ list here to allow it to be maintained separately from this post.

I noticed something interesting with Rhino Mocks today while testing some demo code:

behaves as I anticipated; it expects the call to MyMethod to be repeated 5 times and returns the value of result all 5 times. Meanwhile:

also has the expectation of 5 executions, but it returns the value of result only once. The other 4 executions return 0.

When I think about it now, it makes sense, but it wasn't the behavior I originally expected.

It's AZGiveCamp time again! Our third event is coming up in under 2 weeks, Oct 21st-23rd 2011 at the Park Central Mall (Central Ave. between Thomas and Osborn) in midtown Phoenix. Please sign-up to volunteer as a developer, designer, or analyst at http://azgivecamp.org/Volunteer.aspx.

Special appeal: we need graphic designers! If you’re a pro or amateur, it doesn’t matter. Designers are always the most popular people at any GiveCamp!

Those who participated in the last 2 events already know that AZGiveCamp is the local component of a national event where the software development community comes together to support local charities and non-profits by developing or improving their web sites and applications. It's fun, it's agile, it's geeky, and it's good for the community.

We had a fantastic time at the last 2 events and, in Arizona alone, have helped more than 20 non-profits with their development needs. As someone who has now participated in GiveCamps as both a participant and as an organizer, I can honestly say the experience is very, very, worthwhile.

You can find out more about AZGiveCamp at http://azgivecamp.org and about the national organization at http://givecamp.org.

I am very excited about this event and look forward to working with all of you at AZGiveCamp III.