Quality

Lines of code, cyclomatic complexity, coupling, cohesion, code coverage. You’ve probably heard about these metrics before. But do you actively track them? Should you? Visual Studio computes some of these metrics out of the box. But if you want to define a custom metric, you’re out of luck. Yet, there are a bunch of code metrics that you might find useful for your code base. More so, a composite metric might be more helpful than the sum of its parts. For example, the C.R.A.P. Metric detects complex code that is not covered by unit tests. How can you track such a metric in Visual Studio? In this article we’ll see how to visualize code metrics, add custom metrics and how to monitor trends with NDepend.

Code Metrics

NDepend computes many metrics out of the box. You can use the intellisense support to discover the standard metrics for a given code element:

Computer Code Metrics

But it would be hard to extract information from these metrics if all we got was a bunch of numbers. We need other techniques to help us break down the complexity of the data. Visualization techniques complement metrics, by making it easier to synthesize and digest this information.

Continue Reading

Quality

Your code base has a lot to tell you. The question is: How can you listen to it? You can identify code smells when you’re reading code or extending it, but this doesn’t give you an overview. After you have been working for a while in a project, you can name some of its strengths and weaknesses. But this approach takes a long time, relies on experience and is subjective. It would be nice if you could query a code base in a structured way. Basic search functionality from an IDE like Visual Studio isn’t powerful enough. NDepend allows you to query .Net code using LINQ syntax through CQLinq – Code Query LINQ. In this blog post we’ll discuss how to query your code base using CQLinq.

An Example

Since I like to learn from examples, let’s first see a simple, yet very powerful query. The following code detects classes that are candidates to be turned into structures. This is one of the default CQLinq rules.

from t in JustMyCode.Types where
  t.IsClass &&
 !t.IsGeneratedByCompiler &&
 !t.IsStatic &&
  t.SizeOfInst > 0 &&

  // Structure instance must not be too big,
  // else it degrades performance.
  t.SizeOfInst <= 16 &&
  // Must not have children
  t.NbChildren == 0 &&

  // Must not implement interfaces to avoid boxing mismatch
  // when structures implements interfaces.
  t.InterfacesImplemented.Count() == 0 &&

  // Must derive directly from System.Object
  t.DepthOfDeriveFrom("System.Object".AllowNoMatch()) == 1 &&

  // Structures should be immutable type.
  t.IsImmutable
select new { t, t.SizeOfInst, t.InstanceFields }

As you can see, the query is quite readable. Even if you don’t know the CQLinq syntax, you understand what it does. And since it’s based on Linq, it already seems familiar.

Continue Reading

Clean Code, Quality

How do you manage dependencies in your project? Since an image speaks a thousand words, I’ve always been a fan of visual management. Unfortunately, Visual Studio Professional doesn’t provide a way to do this. In the Premium and Enterprise editions you can visualize code dependencies on dependency graphs. But I don’t think this is enough. An architectural diagram with every assembly or namespace in my solution doesn’t tell me that much. It contains too much information.

Fortunately, there is a tool that can help you manage dependencies in the .Net world: NDepend (there is also a Java port – JArchitect). NDepend is a static analysis tool that, among other things, allows you to visualize dependencies. After I first ran NDepend on a project, I was overwhelmed with information. Then I took some time to play around and discover what can it tell me about my solution. NDepend integrates into Visual Studio quite nicely and points you in the right direction through tool tips and links. This is useful for people who prefer learning by doing. Aside from giving you information, it also tells you what to do with that information.

NDepend has two main views for managing dependencies: the Dependency Graph and the Dependency Structure Matrix. Apart from these, there is also an Abstractness vs Instability report that can be helpful. In this blog post, we’ll discuss some of the things that these views can tell you about your solution.

Continue Reading

MSMQ, NServiceBus

In the previous blog post we went over some of the MSMQ bascis. In this blog post we’ll touch on how to monitor, troubleshoot and backup MSMQ.

I’ve been using NServiceBus with the MSMQ transport for a while now and have faced some issues. Unfortunately, information about MSMQ is pretty scarce and sometimes outdated. This blog post contains links to resources that I’ve found useful for understanding some of the best practices around MSMQ administration.

Monitoring

Events

MSMQ logs informational, warning and error events under the Application Log. When accessing an object fails or succeeds, it also adds an audit entry in the Security Log. All message queuing events contain the “MSMQ” text in the Source column.

If you have enabled End-to-End tracing, you can find the trace events in Application and Services Logs/Microsoft/Windows/MSMQ/End2End.

Dead-Letter Queues

When a message expires, the queue manager puts it in one of the dead letter queues. This ensures that messages are not lost. A message expires when one of its timers (Time-To-Reach-Queue or Time-To-Be-Received) expire. There are two dead-letter queues, one for non-transactional messages and one for transactional messages. In order to keep track of expired messages, you should monitor the dead-letter queues.

External Transactions

MSMQ can take part in external transactions. You can monitor these transactions by using the Distributed Transaction Coordinator Transaction Statistics and Transaction List views. Since internal transactions don’t go through MSDTC, these can’t be monitored using this approach.

Performance Counters

MSMQ provides performance counters that are helpful for monitoring its performance.

The MSMQ Service performance object contains global information about the Message Queuing Service:

  • Total bytes in all queues – This is very important, since you don’t want to run out of disk space
  • Total messages in all queues
  • MSMQ Incoming Messages
  • MSMQ Outgoing Messages
  • Incoming Messages/sec
  • Outgoing Messages/sec
  • Sessions – The total count of open network sessions

The MSMQ Queue performance object contains counters for each individual queue. If you want to monitor the Dead-Letter queues, you should select Computer Queues:

  • Bytes in Queue
  • Messages in Queue
  • Bytes in Journal Queue
  • Messages in Journal Queue

Since MSMQ is disk intensive, it is recommended to spread out MSMQ’s storage files over multiple disks.

Troubleshooting

The good news is that, usually, MSMQ just works. Most of the problems that you encounter are caused by either DTC or not having enough disk space.

For investigating DTC issues, you should use DTCPing. Here is a blog post documenting how to troubleshoot DTC issues.

Disk space depends on the throughput of messages that flow through your system, their size, and the amount of time it takes to recover from a failure (and start processing messages again). You don’t want to start losing messages because you can’t store them on disk. You should monitor disk space using performance counters. If there is not enough disk space, you can either increase the MSMQ computer quota and maybe change the MSMQ storage location.

If you want to find out more about MSMQ troubleshooting, check out these links:

Backup and Restore

MSMQ comes with a command line utility – mqbkup – for backup and restore. Using this tool you can backup storage files, log files, transaction files, and Registry settings. I’ve also heard that QueueExplorer is a good tool for managing MSMQ, although I haven’t tried it yet.

Conclusion

In my limited experience with MSMQ, I have ran into a couple of issues. Most of them were caused by the fact that I didn’t monitor it well enough or I didn’t understand how it works under the hood. In this blog post I’ve summarized some of the best practices around MSMQ monitoring and troubleshooting. I’ll probably update this post whenever I learn something new about MSMQ.

MSMQ

Microsoft Message Queue Server (MSMQ) is a Message Oriented Middleware that allows applications to communicate among them using queues. In this blog post we’ll go over some of the MSMQ basics: Queues, Messages, and Transactions.

Queues

The queue is one of the basic concepts of MSMQ. It is just a container that stores messages, decoupling the sender from the receiver. MSMQ Queues are not necessarily FIFO (First In, First Out), because messages can be prioritized.

Queues can be transactional or nontransactional. Transactional Queues can only receive  messages sent within a transactional context. Nontransactional queues can only receive messages sent outside of a transactional context. Messages sent in a transactional context are processed in the order in which they were sent.

There are two categories of queues: Application Queues and System Queues.

Continue Reading

Books

When I started programming, people were talking about Domain-Driven Design. Being a junior, I gave more attention to the tactical patterns. I kind of got the idea behind repositories, entities, value objects, etc.. Six years later and I still see people paying more attention to the tactical patterns. Even Eric Evans says that he has overemphasized the building blocks. So, in order to get a better understanding about what is Domain-Driven Design, I decided to read the book that introduced it. The main purpose was to gain more knowledge about the strategic patterns of DDD.

DDD Book Cover

Continue Reading

Books

User Stories are at the heart of agile delivery, yet creating user stories is a hard skill to master. I think everyone working in an agile project has battled with stories either too big or too small, too technical or without business value. Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories by Gojko Adzic and David Evans provides solutions to many of these issues. This book helps readers to be more agile, instead of doing agile. It challenges ideas like using numbers for estimations and using velocity for capacity planning or for measuring value.

Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories

Continue Reading

NServiceBus

Recently, I stumbled upon an interesting problem related to NServiceBus Saga concurrency and coarse-grained locks when using NHibernate Persistence.

With NServiceBus, concurrent access to an existing saga instance works out of the box. This is because it relies on the underlying database system. With NHibernate, it relies on optimistic concurrency, by adding a Version column to your Saga Data. But there is a catch: NHibernate doesn’t support Coarse-Grained Locks. Let’s first explore this general problem and then we’ll get back to the NServiceBus Saga.

Coarse-Grained Locks

With a coarse-grained lock you basically lock a group of entities together. If you’re familiar with DDD, then you know that an aggregate should be a consistency boundary. When I save an aggregate, I want to save the entire aggregate, to ensure it’s consistent. Why would you need this? Here’s an example:

Let’s take the already familiar example of an Order with OrderLines, Order being the aggregate root. We’re using optimistic concurrency control for each of our aggregate parts. In our domain there is an invariant that dictates that the total number of items  in an order can’t be more than 10. Two commands that would increase the quantity could be processed in parallel and break the invariant. This is because in each transaction, the invariant would hold and each transaction would commit, since they update different lines. Now you’re in an inconsistent state.

If we could lock the entire aggregate (order and order lines), then the second transaction would fail and rollback, maintaining a consistent state. One way to achieve this when using optimistic concurrency is to update the root’s version whenever an aggregate part is updated.

Continue Reading

Books

Like many other people, I spend some of my time doing brainless activities like walking, running, commuting. To make this time more enjoyable, I decided to give audible a try. While browsing the available audio books, I found Soft Skills by John Sonmez, which is great  since I’ve had this book on my to read list for a while. Since I usually prefer more technical books, I never got around to read it.

This book is about software development, without being about software development. It covers many aspects of a software developer’s life, from career and marketing to finance and fitness.

soft skills cover

Continue Reading

NServiceBus

Framework designers usually make sure there is a way to decouple infrastructure code from business code. Usually this comes in the form of hooks that you can use you to inject custom code. The benefit is twofold: you don’t have duplicated code and you don’t break the Single Responsibility Principle. If you’re using ASP.NET Core/MVC/WebApi, then you have ActionFilters. NServiceBus has its own mechanisms that you can use. In this blog post we’ll discuss two ways of hooking into the message processing pipeline that are useful for managing units of work in NServiceBus : IManageUnitsOfWork and the NServiceBus pipeline. There are many use cases where these prove useful. Here are some examples:

  • Manage the unit of work (i.e. the session in NHibernate and RavenDB)
  • Logging & Monitoring
  • Error Handling
  • Authorization

You definitely don’t want to add these concerns to your handlers. Here are two approaches that can help you to keep the handlers clean of infrastructural concerns.

Continue Reading