I’ve got many questions from young developers who want to learn programming and be professionals, I thought of writing this article to give them a glance about how I learn software stuff. I want to tell you I’m still learning and I’ll always pursuit knowledge and being professional software craftsman, and you should consider the same, believe me if you stop learning, you’ll become outdated in this field, and you’ll suck, I met developers with big fat years of experience but they are outdated since 5 years and they can’t go with new technologies anymore, ask any doctor or lawyer and he’ll tell you this craft is about leaning and learning and gaining knowledge.

Learning development is separated into two parts:

1. Dealing with human.
2. Dealing with computer.

Dealing with human

Dealing with human like dealing with client, don’t tell me I just want to code dude, no sometime if not all of the time you have to deal with the clients, think of it as you have your own company you’re entrepreneur now, Do you want to write code only? or you want to create success product by gathering the right requirements from clients and work on them, and then deliver this product, How will you do this if you want to write code only?

Dealing with human is dealing with team, crap again dude I want to put my headphones listen to music, go to the zone, and write code, nah good developers are good team player, to help your team-mate in the project, raise flag when you have a problem, or peer programming, you must have dealing with humans skill.

You’ll learn these skills during your work, I don’t have a screen cast, video training, or book…oh wait wait actually I know some books taking about this:

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (Second Edition)

Team Geek: A Software Developer’s Guide to Working Well with Others

Dealing with computer:

Dealing with computer is programming, In my opinion programming learning is in two stages, first learn how to code, and second leaning  how to write code right or how to produce clean code. You’ll learn well if you learn from your mistakes,  personally I learnt from my mistakes, every time I made a mistake I was very sad and in the beginning I made a lot of silly mistakes, please be passionate, never give up, keep going, and learn from it, I know it’s so hard in the beginning but you’ll love what you’re doing.

Craftsmanship:

Software craftsmanship is an approach to software development that emphasizes the coding skills of the software developers themselves. It is a response by software developers to the perceived ills of the mainstream software industry, including the prioritization of financial concerns over developer accountability.

wikipedia

In Clean Code book Martin Bob aka Uncle Bob wrote craftsmanship is separated into two parts Knowledge and Experience. Knowledge is the learn how to, and Experience is using knowledge to build something, so learn and practice by doing something, if you can’t build something with what you just learn you can build something as side project, this slides encourage me to do some side projects

Learning Material:

This list of materials where you can learn something some are free and some are paid, so feel free to add yours in comments and give me your feedback about them.

Video Training website:

• Pluralsight
• PeepCode
• TekPub
• Udemy
• CodeSchool
• campusMVP

Interactive Course:

• Code Academy
• RubyMonk
• Code Hurricane Electric

Books:

Books for developers are like water for fish, you need to read, read, and read. Technology focused books like ASP.NET books there are many of them in market but make sure you pick nice ones first, personally I search for a book using Amazon read reviews and boom I pick on and read it. There are books I recommended but it’s not technology focused it focus in making you better developer:

Recommended Books:

The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series)

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

Code Complete

Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code

The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development (Pragmatic Life)

Username, Password, or Pin codes these are precious information, and if hacker or even internal employee stole the database he can do whatever he wants with your users information. So How to keep these information safe? The answer is hashing it.

Why I was not doing that? I was lazy and every time I googled/binged/searched about this, I found many complex How-To articles, but last week I finally found something simple and it’s the reason I’m writing this article.

What is hashing?

Hashing is encoding string "message” to hash value and you can’t reproduce the original string “message” from hash value, so it’s one way cryptographic algorithm, it’s different than encryption that it’s  two way cryptographic algorithm.

How to Hash password?

As I mentioned above I found many articles about how-to hash password but most of them are very complex and I believe in work smart not hard, I found System.Web.Helpers Namespace that has Crypto Class that has many hashing helpers. I play with it and try to learn how to hash a password.

Flow:

Now let’s understand the flow and then check how to implement it in code. First to save password in database you must hash it using one of hashing algorithm and store the hashes password into database.

Second to check the user password in login, you should hash the password user input and compare the two hashed passwords (user input & stored in database).

Code:

I’ll show you how to hash user’s password and check the password he’ll enter when login to your system. Like I said above I’ll user System.Web.Helpers.Crypto Class, this class has 2 methods HashPassword and VerifyHashedPassword we’ll use them. we’ll write the code in Unit Tests so no need for Console Application and wait for Command Prompt to run, you’ll just write your code test it and you’ll get results in test results quickly, so let’s get our hand dirty:

Hash:

What you need to do is to pass the user input password to HashPassword() Method and you’ll get the hashed password.

   1:   plainPassword = "P@12345566";

   2:   hashedPassword = Crypto.HashPassword(plainPassword);

Compare:

We can verify the password by passing the hashed password and the plain password and VerifyHashedPassword() Method will return true if it’s verified or false if it’s not.

   1:  Assert.AreEqual(true, Crypto.VerifyHashedPassword(hashedPassword,plainPassword));

Complete Code:

   1:  [Test]

   2:  public void test_hashing_password()

   3:  {

   4:      string plainPassword;

   5:      string hashedPassword;

   6:             

   7:      plainPassword = "P@12345566";

   8:      hashedPassword = Crypto.HashPassword(plainPassword);

   9:   

  10:      Assert.AreEqual(true, Crypto.VerifyHashedPassword(hashedPassword,plainPassword));

  11:   

  12:  }

Note: I’m using NUnit as my Unit Test Framework and Resharper as my Test Runner.

Yet better Hashing:

Even after hashing passwords you aren’t safe from hacking and hackers, hackers can use rainbow table to attack your system. The good news is you can increase the security of your hashing by adding salt, let’s see how we can do this:

Flow

Save the password looks like the same flow but this time we’ll use GenerateSalt Method in System.Web.Helpers Class to generate random salt that will be added to the password and store it to database with the hashed password.

Retrieving and comparing user input password and the one stored in database is as before but you need to retrieve both the hashed password and salt from database, add salt to plain password, hash the produced string, then compare it with the hashed password that retrieved from database.

Code:

Hash:

   1:  plainPassword = "P@12345566";

   2:  salt = Crypto.GenerateSalt();

   3:  passwordSaltCombination = plainPassword + salt;

   4:  hashedPassword = Crypto.HashPassword(passwordSaltCombination);

Compare:

   1:  Assert.AreEqual(true, Crypto.VerifyHashedPassword(hashedPassword, passwordSaltCombination));

Complete Code:

   1:  [Test]

   2:  public void test_hasing_password_with_salt()

   3:  {

   4:      string plainPassword;

   5:      string hashedPassword;

   6:      string salt;

   7:      string passwordSaltCombination;

   8:   

   9:      plainPassword = "P@12345566";

  10:      salt = Crypto.GenerateSalt();

  11:      passwordSaltCombination = plainPassword + salt;

  12:      hashedPassword = Crypto.HashPassword(passwordSaltCombination);

  13:   

  14:      Assert.AreEqual(true, Crypto.VerifyHashedPassword(hashedPassword, passwordSaltCombination));

  15:   

  16:  }

As you can see it’s simple procedure so please use it and stop saving plain password in your database.

I encourage you to read Jeff Atwood’s article You’re Probably Storing Passwords Incorrectly.

Note: You must be associated to MBS (Microsoft Business Solutions) partner in order to access these links.

Links:

Happy watching.

Do you want to be Microsoft Dynamics AX Developer? I assume you are. Learn how to develop on Microsoft Dynamics AX is not as easy as it seems, it is not as easy as learning to developer using other platforms like Microsoft SharePoint. The material provided from Microsoft is not that one will give you the full picture about the platform, it will give you only the guidelines and you have to go and search and search and search and search. It took me 2 full years to know what I knew now, it is not much but I can do many things not included in the documentations.

So I decided to write this article to make it short on new developers whom want to learn about developing with Microsoft Dynamics AX and even help whom already Microsoft Dynamics AX developers.

The Platform:

Programming Language:

Microsoft Dynamics AX is built with its programming language called X++, it is like C++, C#, or Java, it is Object Oriented, if you know one of these languages you will be familiar with X++.

IDE (Integrated Development Environment) :

Microsoft Dynamics AX has its own IDE called MorphX, you will use it during all your development tasks, it is very easy and support drag and drop to make developer life easier but from my opinion the only cons is it is not supporting multi-monitor, you need to work in one window in one monitor, it is not like Visual Studio you can drag the Toolbox bar and drop it to other monitor.

The Journey:

I started by reading the Microsoft Student Training Document you need to have access to Microsoft Partner Source or Customer Source, then start to develop and found out these documents is not enough and I need to learn something more, I started to Googling or Binging and land on small parts that are helping but you need to add yours to make it full solution, for example I need to create a Sales Order and Sales Line from the code, I found sample code to create one using job (Job in AX is small runnable code) not how to use it inside a form whether to implement it in Class, Form, or Table, and if you will implement it in Form in which level DataSource or Design, I was confused and none on web can help me in setting things together till I found this great free book called MorhpX IT it was written for AX 4.0 but it still have useful information works with AX 2012 R2 I encourage you to read it after reading Student Training Documents, I really got the full picture of the platform and now I feel like I’m understand what I’m doing.

Materials:

Books:

Inside Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Development Cookbook

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Services

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Security How-To

Inside Microsoft Dynamics® AX 2009

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Programming: Getting Started

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Development Cookbook

MorphX IT

Blogs:

Dilip’s blog on DYNAMICS AX

Dynamics AX tools and tutorials

Investigating DAX

Dynamics Ax workshop

Amir’s Microsoft Dynamics AX space

Dynamics Ax Musings

Community:

Microsoft Dynamics AX community

AX User Group

Dynamics User Group

Stack Overflow tags: dynamics-ax-2009 dynamics-ax-2012 x++ dynamics-ax Axapta

The End

At the end I hope this article helps you and start the journey of learning developing on Dynamics AX.

If you’re ASP.NET developer, you’re concern about the User Interface/Design of your application and you notice Metro/Modern UI is neat and great UI, but How I can make my ASP.NET application look like Windows 8 application? Can I do that? The answer is Yes you can, there’re bunch of (free/paid) tools that will help in make your ASP.NET application looks like Windows 8 application.

Before listing the tools, let’s see Why Metro/Modern UI is neat? and Why Microsoft choose it to be its UI cross all its platforms? Microsoft Modern/Metro UI inspired by public transportation signs and it’s a typography design which focus on the content by implement typography more than graphics.

My Experience

Personally I didn’t use Windows 8 yet, I’ve tired it but I didn’t use it as my daily OS. Last week I bought Nokia Lumia 920 and What made my mind to buy it and go for Windows Phone after using Android for 2 years? It’s the UI and UX, yes Microsoft made it this time. Me and my wife were shopping, we went to try this phone and she said wow this UI and UX are great (she’s an Apple fan) and I agree with he. I’m using the phone for a week only and I love it.

Modern UI or Metro UI

If you noticed I’m using Metro/Modern UI not Metro only, because Microsoft forced to change the name of its new UI to Modern because of some legal issues and copyrights, it’s rumor but the true is Microsoft stop calling it Metro and mention it as “Microsoft design language” and some folks on the internet call it Modern UI.

The List (Tools)

Your ASP.NET will have a great UI if you add Metro UI to it, so let’s list the tools:

• CSS/JavaScript:
  • Metro UI CSS (free): It’s CSS framework helps you create most of the things in Metro/Modern UI components like live tiles, toggles, textboxes, buttons, and much much more, it has its grid system and it’s not based Twitter Bootstrap.
  • Bootmetro (free): It’s based on Twitter Bootstrap so you still have features of bootstrap and has some of Metro UI components like hub/tile. action buttons, notifications, list view. etc..
  • Metro-bootstrap (free): It’s also based on Twitter Bootstrap but it’s lack of many Metro/Modern UI components.
• Icons:
  • Syncfusion Metro Studio (free): It’s free  desktop application that have more than 1700 icons you’ll need when building Metro/Modern application, the great thing about this tool is you can arrange icons in projects, export icons to many extension or ever CSS sprites, and resize icons.
  • MetroUIIcons.com (free): It’s a website contains more than 800 handcrafted Metro UI icons, the create thing about this website that you can contribute because it’s open source and hosted on GitHub plus you can make a request for an Icon.
• ASP.NET Control:
  • Telerik ASP.NET Ajax RadControls (paid): Telerik is the one of the best companies that provide .NET tools/controls to .NET developers, it has RadControls for ASP.NET WebForms, one of the best feature of RadControls is the style, Telerik provides wide rang of styles with RadControls so developers can use them out of the box. Two of RadControls styles are Metro which looks like Metro/Modern UI and Metro Touch which is a touch enabled version of Metro/Modern UI.

What I’m using

Personally I’m using Metro UI CSS, Syncfusion Metro Studio, and Telerik ASP.NET Ajax RadContorls, it’s working fine together not perfect because there’re some CSS conflicts between Metro UI CSS and Telerik ASP.NET Ajax RadContorls, but in the other hand it’s working, nowadays I’m working on an ASP.NER WebForms application with those 3 tools to make it looks like Windows 8 application.

So dude How can I solve this issue?

From my opinion it’s better to solve this by using JavaScript function than using RegularExpressionValidator, so let’s write the JavaScript function and call it in onKeyPress TextBox client event.

As you can see in line number 2 I pass TextBox and MaxLength, this will make the max number of characters user can input in the MultiLine TextBox is 15.

Nowadays I’m playing with Twitter Bootstrap CSS framework and I find myself create very neat and awesome looking ASP.NET applications by just using the already defined CSS classes in the framework, it’s so easy and the documentation is easy to understand and readable, you can find the documentation right here.

So let’s get into the business, the most commonly used ASP.NET Control GridView is very ugly if you don’t apply a style to it, it’ll look like an awful HTML table with bunch of rows and columns, sure you can use the ready made styles “Auto Format” created by Microsoft team, but also you can apply much better style to it, let’s find how.

I’ll show you how to apply 2 styles to GridView:

1. Twitter Bootstrap.
2. ASP.NET Dynamic Data.

Twitter Bootstrap:

I mentioned above nowadays I’m playing with Twitter Bootstrap and I love its Table style, it’s very simple and neat and have many style can be used separately or make a combination of them. I love to use the full combination of them and it can be applied to the GridView by assign the CssClass property to Twitter Bootstrap CSS classes like this:

Here is the result:

You can use style you like you can check the Table styles and make your combination or use only one CSS class.

You can install Twitter Bootstrap to your solution from NuGet. Go to Tools –> Library Package Manager –> Manage NuGet Packages for solutions… NuGet package manager window will open, search for Twitter Bootstrap and Install it.

ASP.NET Dynamic Data:

One day I was checking ASP.NET Dynamic Data, I built and started the project, and then I saw a very beautiful GridView. I start to dig in the aspx file on how ASP.NET team made this GridView beautiful like that, finally I found they are using a CSS specially made for Dynamic Data, I grab it and applied it to another demo project has a GridView and took care of the Image file used in header’s background.

Here is the GridView control, take a look on CssClass, RowStyle-CssClass, and HeaderStyle-CssClass properties:

Here is the result:

I’ve created a Demo project, you can download it from GitHub.

Happy Developing Folks

In this post we’ll learn How to create one POCO and perform CRUD on it, I’ll use the famous Northwind database and create POCO for Customers table, let’s see how we can do it.

Get PetaPoco:

We need to get PetaPoco in our project and there are 2 ways:

1. Install it from NuGet:
   • Use NuGet package manger and if you don’t have NuGet you can download it from here.
   • In NuGet package manager console, write Install-Package PetaPoco.
   • If you see message “Successfully installed ‘PetaPoco 4.0.3′.” then you’re ready to go.
2. Download the whole project from GitHub because PetaPoco is open source project you can download it and you can even add your code if you want, after downloading the project add PetaPoco.cs file to your project.

Create POCO:

Now we’ll create POCO for Customers table in Northwind database, so let’s do it. It’s so simple just create new class and for each column in the table create a property for.

Connect To Database:

In order for PetaPoco to your POCOs, you need to have database Connection String in configuration file or construct one in code, so we’ll add App.config file to the project and add a <connectionString> that refer to Northwind database.

Now we are ready to make PetaPoco connect to Northwind database, and the connection can be done by Instantiate Database Object and pass the Name of the Connection String to the Contractor.

Perform CRUD:

Read:

Read can be done by call Database Query Method and pass the POCO we want to query against.

We can add parameters to the query.

Create:

Create can be done by create new object from Customer POCO and assign its data, call Database Insert Method, and then pass Table name, Primary Key, and the POCO object.

We can only pass the POCO object of we decorate our POCO Class with two PetaPoco special Attributes.

If you run the code an exception will be thrown because when you specify the PrimaryKey for the POCO, PetaPoco will deal with it as it’s Identity column and CustomerID isn’t identity column.

We will remove PrimaryKey POCO Attribute and our new customer will be inserted.

Update:

As we did in Insert Method we can do with Update Method, but again Customers table doesn’t have identity column and this method will not work.

PetaPoco have the flexibility to get the update statement that the user can write, and we’ll use this to perform the update.

Delete:

Delete is an helper Method like Insert and Update if you are using Identity column as the Table key, you can also write your Delete statement.

We’ll write our Delete statement by pass the CustomerID we want to delete.

You can get the whole project from GitHub.

Let’s lists all ASP.NET Expression and it’s task:

1. Directive Expression <%@ .. %> 
   • It’s used in Web Forms .ASPX files or User Control .ASCX files to set settings, for example the Page directive where you can declare Title, Master Page, Language, etc….
     <%@ Page Title="Home Page" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Site.Master" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="ASPNETExpressions._Default" %>

2. Data-Binding Expression <%# .. %>
   • Create binding between server control with data source when calling DataBind() method, most of the time you’ll see this expression inside Data Bound Controls like GridView and DetailView.
     <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtFirstName"  Text="<%# Eval("FirstName") %>"/>

3. Expression Builder <%$ .. %>

   • This expression is used to set controls properties that located in configuration files Web.Config such as AppSettings, ConnectionStrings, or Resources
   • It’s syntax is <%$ Expression Prefix: Expression Value %>
     <%$ ConnectionStrings:DefaultConnection %>

4. Server-side Comment Expression <%– .. –%>

   • It’s to comment a block of code so that it’ll not rendered or executed inside the page.
     <%– This is a comment –%>

5. Displaying Expression <%= .. %> 

• It’s the simplest way to display one piece of information such as Integer or String inside the page, it’ll be converted to Response.Write().
  <%= DateTime.UtcNow.ToString("dd/MM/yyyy") %>

Tip:

Every time you’ll see <% look at the next character:

• If it @ then it’s Directive Expression.
• If it = then it’s Displaying Expression.
• If it # then it’s Data-Binding Expression.
• If it — then it’s Comment.
• If it $ then it’s Expression Builder.

Note:

If you make incorrect syntax inside these expression, Exception will be thrown.

Microsoft Support: Introduction to ASP.NET inline expressions in the .NET Framework

ASP.NET Page Lifecycle is very important piece of knowledge every ASP.NET developer must know, and unfortunately some of ASP.NET developer out there don’t know and they think it’s not important to know.

Let’s dig in and let’s examine ASP.NET Lifecycle but in short list and description:

1. PreInit():
   • In this event all Controls created and Initialized with their default values. You can create dynamic Controls here. You can set theme programmatically here
2. OnInit():
   • In this event you can read the Controls properties the were set in Design Mode and can not read values changed by user.
3. LoadViewState():
   • This event fires only if the page is posted back “IsPostback == true;” and here View State data where are stored in hidden form fields get de-serialized and loads all controls View State data.
4. LoadPostBackData():
   • This event only fires when Page is posted back and Controls which implement IPostBackDataHandler interface get loaded with values from HTTP POST data.
5. Page_Load():
   • This event is well known among ASP.NET developers and here Page gets loaded and after it all Load() events of Page Controls fired.
6. Control Event Handlers:
   • These are basically event handlers like Button click event handler “Button1_Click()” which fires after Page_Load() event.
7. PreRender():
   • This event is fired for each page child controls and her you can change controls values.
8. SaveViewState():
   • In this event Controls View State saved in Page hidden fields.
9. Render():
   • Here all Controls get rendered or every Page Controls Render method is called.
10. Unload():
    • Here we can have Page and Controls clean up operations. This event the Page and its Controls are rendered.

Notes:

1. ASP.NET Lifecycle will be called ever time there a request for the page.
2. HTTP POST data has only one value per control, that’s why Control like Textbox can gets value from HTTP Post but Control like DropDownList can not gets data from HTTP Post it can gets data from View State.
3. Init() and Unload() events are fired from outside to inside controls, fro example: user control Init() event will be fired before Page_Init() event

Reference: ASP.NET Page Lifecycle on MSDN