Never a Do'h! Moment For .Net Architects

The architect wanted to adopt a unit testing methodology using Microsoft's new MVC (Model View Controller) framework for ASP.Net, which is very cool and all but first things first. He needed to get the product to work inside Visual Studio. Before he started integrating these frameworks, the architect decided to demonstrate to his team the significance of the MVC model.

When a developer asked him why he couldn't get the MVC code to work in his Visual Studio Team System 2008 edition, everyone in his team scrambled for suggestions. The code worked in Visual Studio 2008 but not in the Team System edition. He was quick to blame VSTS and MVC's code. He thought that either the MVC developer group needed to fix its installation process or that VSTS broke dependencies, whenever users migrated code between VS and VSTS.

The architect tried registering DLLs, checked for missing dependencies, combed through the XML in Project files to see if he missed any links, but ultimately he missed the obvious -- installing the MSI file the way Microsoft asks users to do. Scott was kind enough to guide him through his mistakes. Lo and behold, the installation worked in seconds

Apparently, the architect made a simple but crucial mistake -- he followed the same installation procedures that he used with third-party, open source frameworks to install the MVC code. At run time, the MVC DLLs can be placed anywhere on a machine but at design time Visual Studio needs to know what they are. Visual Studio uses GUID (globally unique identifier) to identify project types. Since the MVC project was not registering in VSTS, he could have easily migrated the code to an empty Web project.

id
unit-1659132512259
type
Sponsored post

Though it was simple to solve, the installation problem is representative of a larger issue affecting .Net architects -- with so many frameworks popping up on the Web, how can they use them effectively in a combined way? Test Center will be exploring this new phenomenon. Stay tuned.