Thursday, June 26, 2008

Handling time zones in .Net is really easy

I have a project right now where we are going to implement a feature that allows an admin to specify the time zone that each user is in. When they view reports on things like system activity or similar that have a time component to them, they will see the times in their own time zone. When they request a report and specify a time, it will parse that time in whatever their own time zone is.

Time is a fairly difficult problem to handle since many different areas have different time zones with different rules. Does it have Daylight Savings time? When does that start/stop? What if the dates it starts or stops on change? What about the 25 hour day you get when you change and the 23 hour day you get when you change back? There are a lot of edge cases and a lot of time zones (for example, Arizona is on Pacific Time but it does not have Daylight Savings Time) that you have to account for. Fortunately, .Net has this nifty thing called the TimeZoneInfo class that makes this a trivial problem.

Some useful methods

There are a number of static methods on this class that are useful to the feature that I'm trying to implement. The first story that I want to implement is "As an Admin, I want to see all available time zones so that I can select the appropriate one for a user." Not a problem. I want to load them all and store them in a listbox. Here's the code:


ListBox list = new ListBox();
IList systemtimes = TimeZoneInfo.GetSystemTimeZones();
foreach(TimeZoneInfo t in systemtimes)
{
list.Items.Add(t);
list.DisplayMember = "DisplayName";
}
This will give me a list box that tells me all the time zones that are currently installed in the registries. I have a property on my TimeZoneInfo class called "Id" that gives me the id of the particular time zone, so if I want to save the time zone that a user is on, I can persist the id of that class somewhere and then use this to retrieve it:

int tzID = MyTimeZoneRepository.GetTimeZoneIDForUser(someUser);
TimeZoneInfo tz = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById(tzID);
Alternately, I can serialize and deserialize my TimeZoneInfo class in order to be able to persist it and reconstitute it in situations where I may not want or have available the system time objects. The code for that would be this:

TimeZoneInfo tz = TimeZOneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById(1);
//tz now has some time zone value

string serialized = tz.ToSerializedString();
//serialized is some really long string that has all the time zone info in it

TimeZoneInfo tzNew = TimeZoneInfo.FromSerializedString(serialized);

Assert.AreEqual(tz, tzNew); //should return true


This also means that I can create my own custom timezone if I want to by defining a set of rules and then instantiating a TimeZoneInfo class from my rules (I'm not going to give an example here but there's plenty of them out there).

Now, to actually use these things, I use the TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTime() method. So, if I want to fulfil my second user story, which is "As a user, I want to have all my reports reflect my local time zone so that I can see when things happened in relation to where I am" then I have a means to do so.

In order to do this, I need a UserTimeZoneRepository that gets the correct time zone for a user by their ID. First, some helpful interfaces. Let's assume that these all have implementations that do what they look like they should do:

public interface IUser{
public int ID {get;set}
}

public interface ITimeZoneRepository {
TimeZoneInfo GetTimeZoneForUser(IUser u);
}



Now, here's some code to handle the time zone problem. Let's assume that ALL times in my database are converted to UTC when they are stored there:

public class TimeZoneConverter{

private IUser u;
private ITimeZoneRepository r;

public TimeZoneConverter(ITimeZoneRepository r, IUser u){
_repository = r;
_user = u;
}

DateTime ConvertTimeToUTC(DateTime t){
return TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeToUTC(t, r.GetTimeZoneForUser(u));
}

DateTime ConvertTimeFromUTC(DateTime t){
return TimeZoneInfo.ConvertTimeFromUTC(t, r.GetTimeZoneForUser(u));
}
}


So why all of this? Well, first, this gives me a centralized place to handle all time zone conversion issues (Don't Repeat Yourself). Next, it decouples the user and the user's time zone from the actual functionality of converting the times (Single Responsibility Principle) so that I can test it in isolation but I also don't have to concern myself with where that time zone is coming from. Finally, this gives me a convenient place to hook date formatting into my application when I need to. Remember, I can't just user DateTime.Parse because I don't know if 04/05/2008 means April 5th or May 4th without having some sort of cultural info associated with this. If I store the user's culture somewhere and have a similar repository, I can then combine this object with the DateTime parsing and formatting commands and create one unified DateTimeService for my application where a Date string goes in and a DateTime comes out (works the other way also). It just so happens that I have another story that reads "As a user, I want to read dates and enter dates in a way that I am familiar with so that I can interperate the meaning correctly" so this is definitely going to come in handy in the future. Some other useful things that the TimeZoneInfo class has:

TimeZoneInfo.SupportsDaylightSavingTime - this property returns a bool that is true if there is a daylight savings time on that instance of TimeZoneInfo. For Pacific Time, this would return true, for Arizona time it would return false.

TimeZoneInfo.DaylightName - this property returns the name of the Daylight Savings Time Zone, so for Pacific time it would return "Pacific Daylight Time"

TimeZoneInfo.Local - this static property returns a TimeZoneInfo class that reflects whatever the computer you're running it on is set to.

TimeZoneInfo.Utc - static property that returns a TimeZoneInfo class that is set to UTC time

TimeZoneInfo.IsDaylightSavingsTime(DateTime) - instance method that tells you if a particular datetime occurs within daylight savings time for that time zone

Anyway, this is my first exposure to having to deal with this stuff and it's convenient that .Net provides some good functionality for dealing with it easily. If you want more info, there's a number of MSDN articles on the TimeZoneInfo class and how to deal with Dates and Times in general that you can read but this post has enough info to get you started.

Alt .Net meeting- why do only developers attend?

At every Alt .Net event I've been to (all three of them but I'm still kinda new to this) as well as every conference, it seems like the vast majority of the attendees are developers. While we're there, we have sessions on things like "how to convince project managers to use Agile" and "how to talk to business people" and stuff like that. Then we return to our jobs and try to convince these people that we're right or that code quality is important or that unit tests help improve your product or other things that are obvious to us (especially after two hours of discussion). So here's my question:

WHY DON'T THE BUSINESS PEOPLE ATTEND OUR CONFERENCES?????

whoa, I just had an epiphany:

WHY DON'T WE SOFTWARE PEOPLE ATTEND THE BUSINESS CONFERENCES????

It seems like we're trying to figure out how to communicate with the "other side" that is the business. We are saying that we value communication, engagement, and people over process, however all we're doing is creating a process for trying to communicate with them. Isn't this a violation of our own principles? Certainly seems like it to me.

It works both ways, people

Instead of just talking to each other about how we communicate with the business people (and I assume the MBA conference probably has similar ideas about talking to software people), why don't we practice what we preach and bring some of these business people to our conferences and directly engage them in this whole communication thing? We can tell them how we communicate and what our needs are and what is important to us and most importantly, why these things are important. In turn, they can tell us the same thing from their perspective. I think that this would be infinitely superior to what we do now.

If you build it, they will come (and they've built it and we're sitting around)

On the flip side of this, how many of us developers actually attend any business-oriented conferences? Have any of us? What about presenting a session at them? Anyone do that? I certainly haven't and I have only myself to blame for this. I think it's time for us as a community to take action and not only bring the business folks and managers into our movement, but actively reach out to them and approach them in their community as well and let them bring us into their world for a change. Anyone out there agree with me? Anyone have any ideas on how we can do this?

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

New Job!

I'm excited to announce that I have a new job working at Microsoft! I will be on the networking team of the Core Operating Systems Division and I will be working on System.Net in the .Net framework. I'm really excited about this position as it will give me a chance to learn a lot of new things and to grow as a developer. I'd just like to thank everyone at Microsoft that I've worked with so far, especially my recruiter who has been very helpful and infinitely patient with my constant stream of questions. I'd also like to thank JP Boodhoo for his blog post which helped me to make this decision. He is absolutely right about setting goals and making sure that you're constantly raising the bar so that you are continuously improving yourself. If you don't have any goals for your life, career, family, and anything else that is important to you, then drop what you're doing and set some. There are some things that you can't change, however you can always change yourself and your situation if you make enough effort.

Monday, June 16, 2008

How I made it faster- the yearly windows reinstall

Every year my computer starts behaving very strangely. Programs get really slow, the start menu takes forever to load, the OS crashes randomly, and other strange things happen. This year's strangest thing was that for reasons unknown, Visual Studio decided that Notepad++ was my default web browser every time I launched a web application. I have no idea how this happened and it has defied my efforts to fix it. As a result, I find it easier to just reinstall windows and everything else from scratch. This usually takes me two days to get everything the way I like it, which is much less time than it usually takes me to go through and fix everything (if I even can fix everything, and yes, I have timed this). This time around, I decided to change things a bit and I've noticed that some things are much faster.

Visual Studio
I develop web applications in C#. That's really all I do at work (besides read blogs and drink coffee). Therefore, when Visual Studio prompted me to do the "common" install, I hit "custom" for the first time ever. I then got rid of everything that wasn't C# and web application related. No C++, no C++ diagnostic tools, no VB, no installation packager or whatever it is, just C# and web stuff. I also got rid of things that I never use like the icons and other crap packages. I also gave up any plugins that I don't directly use. I just started using my fresh Visual Studio install, and this thing flies now. It loads really, really fast. It still takes forever to load my solution (it has 14 projects in it, but I promised that I wouldn't complain about my project setup in this post, and no, I wasn't the one who added those projects) but everything else is fast. I also have several plugins turned on, including ReSharper, CodeIt.Right (like FxCop but useful), and the TeamCity personal build thing. Also, unlike my previous computer, I only have one version of Visual Studio installed (2008) as opposed to four versions (I used to need all four of them too).

Sql Server
Again, the only thing I care about in Sql Server is the database and the client tools. I don't use Reporting Services, Business Intelligence, the legacy DTS stuff, or any of that extra crap. I don't need it at this time. So I hit "custom installation" again and chose only those components that I actually use. I also found that I no longer need Oracle to be installed locally so I don't have that installed either, although I doubt this is speeding things up any because I had it turned off unless I was actively using it.

Other Software
So before I started randomly installing all the stuff from Hanselman's tool list, I made a list of all the software installed on my old computer. I then started crossing out things that I can't remember using in the last six months. I installed what was left, including Launchy, Nant, NUnit (sorry MbUnit, but some people at my work don't like you so I can't use you anymore. . . at work), DisplayFusion, ReSharper, Firefox, Subversion, and Notepad++. So far, I have yet to find something that I miss. Please also note that I didn't install Tortoise SVN this time around, which brings us to the next most useful thing that I installed:

Cygwin!!!!!!11!11!1!1!!one!11!!
I love this thing. It basically gives me a Bash shell on windows. It has all the unix commands that I'm used to using. It has alias and ln. It has hundreds of packages, including subversion. It's find totally pwns windows find. It has grep so I can do something like alias devenv=`find / -name devenve.exe | grep devenv.exe` and I get to type "devenv" and it launches Visual Studio without me having to fuck around with my Path or other environment variables. I also have vi and nano, which rule (I use nano when I need to change one stupid line of a config file because I find it simpler to use for that purpose than vi, but vi is for anything more complex). I have only begun to figure out the coolness that is Cygwin. I also get Python and Perl and probably Ruby, although I haven't actually looked for a Ruby package yet. Be warned, however: If you are not familiar with Unix, including commands, the file system, and concepts like fork(), it probably is not for you. Also, when you want to launch a program and not have the shell sit there and wait for the program to terminate, the correct thing is to add a '&' to the end of the line, i.e. /devenv.exe &
will launch Visual Studio and kick it into the background so I can do other stuff with the shell.

The results

My computer loads faster. A lot faster. This is probably due to a combination of factors, but I would say the biggest difference between this computer and the last is Sql Server only has two services running now instead of like 1000 or something (I'm exaggerating but you get the idea). I also don't have Tortoise slowing explorer down, although I may reinstall it if I find that I'm not more productive using svn from the command line. Visual studio starts faster. I also don't have to worry about which version of Visual Studio launchy decides to launch for me either. It also stops faster when I close it.

The moral of the story:

The moral here is really stupidly obvious: Don't install crap that you don't use or need. This really shouldn't need to be said, but I find that a lot of people just hit "default install" when they shouldn't be. They also install crap that they don't use and don't need. That being said, may I present:

Jeff's guide to the obvious: Volume 1
  1. Always use custom install when installing software. Pick only what you need. This applies to everything.
  2. You can always run setup again if you need to add something.
  3. Don't just install something because it "looks like you might use it"
  4. Any software that you don't use in more than six months, get rid of it.
  5. Any software that you don't immediately start to love and use frequently, get rid of it
  6. Don't just install everything off of Hanselman's tools list (uh, not that I ever did or anything. . . . )
Follow these simple instructions and I guarantee your computer will run faster and have less random behavior, although having Notepad++ be your default browser is useful sometimes.

Seattle Alt.Net open spaces

There was an open spaces event for the Seattle Alt .Net community on May 24th (I know, this post has been sitting around for a while just be glad I have insomnia tonight). I think I learn more in these open spaces events than anything else I've been to so my first advice is to find (or start) a local group and have these things.

Everyone has something to contribute

I think it was Dave Laribee (please correct me if I'm wrong) who said that "everyone here is a leader" at the last open spaces I went to. This is absolutely true. I find that everyone, no matter who they are, what their experience is, or what they work on, has something meaningful to say on something. That's one of the things I really like about these events.

The event

So this open spaces was at the offices of Lexis Nexis so I would like to publicly thank them for generously donating their space and providing lunch. Employer support of Alt .Net and these types of events is critical in ensuring that they happen and that the are accessible to all. I hope that everyone's company will follow Lexis Nexis' lead in supporting these types of events as they directly contribute to the education of their developers, and a company with good developers is more likely to be successful and deliver a better product.

We discussed a number of things at the event, most of which we were able to video, so I'm not going to spend a bunch of time recapping, however I will come back and edit this post with the links to the videos once they're are available.

The biggest thing that we got out of this event was a good foundation for a Seattle Alt .Net community. It turns out that there are a lot of us devs out there, definitely more than I had suspected, that are interested in this whole Alt .Net thing. In fact, it's looking like our open spaces is going to be a monthly thing (last I heard we're going for the fourth Saturday of the month) so I'm excited about seeing where this is going to go. If you are interested (you should be) you should subscribe to our google group and start coming to these things. Remember, everyone is welcome and everyone has something to contribute. Seriously, you should come to our next event. Even if you disagree with everything Alt .Net is, come out anyway and see what we're all about (and if you do disagree with everything, by all means share your opinions because maybe you've thought of something that none of us have).

The next event will be on June 28th at:

Mantis Technology Group, Inc.
12413 Willows Road NE
Suite 300
Kirkland, WA 98034

I'll see you there!