Darren Kopp

I just released two new nuget packages: libsassnet and libsassnet.Web.

A while ago I blogged about the state of Sass support in ASP.NET. Since then, a lot has changed: Sass hit version 3.3, libsass has become extremely popular, and Visual Studio 2013 now has support for Sass built in.

Unfortunately in the case of NSass, it hasn’t been updated in over a year. For that reason, I’ve been porting most of the functionality over to libsass-net, and the nuget packages and ASP.NET integration has been a glaring whole in that project for a while.

Pre-requisites

Since libsass is a C++ project, you’ll need to make sure you have the Visual C++ Redistributable installed. I’m not a C++ expert, so I’m not sure if the latest version works or if you need the 2012 version.

Integrating with System.Web.Optimization

Integrating with the System.Web.Optimization project is very simple with libsass. Below is an example configuration:

var sass = new SassBundle("~/content/css", basePath: "~/sass")
    .Include("~/sass/app.scss")
    .Include("~/sass/fonts.scss");

bundle.Add(sass);

We just started using NewRelic at work and I’ve really been digging it. We also use SignalR which (by design) can use long-polling connections. Unfortunately, those tend connections to skew the metrics in NewRelic. Fortunately, NewRelic provides an API to ignore certain transactions, so I thought I’d be able to tell it to just ignore signalr.

At first, I tried this answer on StackOverflow, but it ended up ignoring all requests, not just the ones for SignalR. In the end I had to use an Owin module to get the job done.

Here is the code I ended up with

using System;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Data;
using System.Diagnostics;
using AppFunc = Func<IDictionary<string,object>, Task>;

public class NewRelicIgnoreTransactionOwinModule
{
	private AppFunc _nextAppFunc;
	public NewRelicIgnoreTransactionOwinModule(AppFunc nextAppFunc)
	{
		_nextAppFunc = nextAppFunc;
	}

	public Task Invoke(IDictionary<string, object> environment)
	{
		object request = null;
		if (environment.TryGetValue("owin.RequestPath", out request)) {
			if (((string)request).IndexOf("signalr", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) > -1) {
				NewRelic.Api.Agent.NewRelic.IgnoreTransaction();
			}
		}

		return _nextAppFunc(environment);
	}
}

To use this in your owin startup code call the following

app.Use(typeof(NewRelicIgnoreTransactionOwinModule));

Just like a muscle technical skills can and will diminish over time if you don't take the time to regularly practice them.

About 8 years ago I took a C++ course at Weber State University and everything was great. I had just finished my C course, so C++ was fairly straightforward and I didn’t have any problems with the language. I was even able to teach myself C# using what I learned from C and C++ and have been using C# ever since.

Since that time, I have not written any C/C++ code. Zilch. That is, until just recently when I needed to write some C++ code for libsass-net that would add support for generating sourcemap files. I didn’t even need to really write any code, just hook into the existing code. Needless to say, it wasn’t that simple.

Problem after problem

Before I was even able to get started coding, I had already hit a problem after pulling the latest changes from libsass. The compiler kept complaining about a method named UNICODE, but I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. The only hint I had was that Visual Studio was highlighting this method differently than all the other methods.

After a while I finally figured out that a configuration setting in my project file was telling Visual C++ that I wanted to use Unicode strings, so there was a #define UNICODE being emitted by the compiler. I believe I may have found the solution quicker if I had been more familiar with the toolset.

Throughout the process of trying to figure out why things weren’t working I found myself having a hard time understanding what most of the code was actually doing. C++ is a very powerful and very terse language; I found myself struggling to keep track of all the symbols that were in front of me. I was lost in a world of template methods, void * pointers, and lots of other features I vaguely remember.

Keeping up to date

For me, I have decided that I should spend a little time to maintain at least a reading level of the various languages that I have learned over the years. I know that I won’t be able to easily maintain a fluency level in all the languages I have learned because I won’t be writing in them daily, but I can at least retain some of my skill set by reading other people’s code.

In fact, I think by maintaining the libsass-net project, I am in an ideal situation: I am required to write a minimal amount of C++ and need to have at least a minimal reading comprehension of the language. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep my skills somewhat up-to-date without having to go overboard and force myself to make my own project to practice.

Regardless of how you approach the problem, be aware of the skills that you are letting atrophy and take the time to practice them if those skills are important to you. If you do not, you may find yourself in a similar situation to my own, and it’s not the most pleasant place to be.

I had the pleasure of presenting a session on SASS for Utah Code Camp. It was a great event and I’m glad that I was able to participate! Below is the slide deck for my session “Supercharge CSS with SASS”

I learned the most amazing shortcut today that likely would have saved me years of time in the past. Full credit goes to my co-worker Brent Keller for this.

While doing some pair-programming with my co-worker Brent today I noticed something peculiar happen on his screen. It looked like he executed the query, but the results did not match what the query was doing at all. On the contrary, it was a large amount of meta-data about a table.

How is this possible? All you need to do is highlight an object in the query editor and press Alt + F1, then you will see a lot of useful meta-data in the query results window. No need to go traverse the tree in object explorer anymore!

• When you execute this on a table, you’ll get very useful information such as information about the columns, indexes, constraints, and who references the table.
• When you execute this on a table function you get the output columns and the parameters.
• When you run this on a view you get the output columns.
• When you execute it on stored procedures and scalar functions you get the input parameters.
• When you execute it on types (I assume this works on user-defined types as well) you get information about the type.
• I’m sure there are many other object types that this shortcut will work on

Hopefully this information will make you as happy it made me.