Resharper 4 Bug with 'Use Format String'

I'd like to say first that I really, really like Resharper 4.0 and have made it my mission to persuade my boss to buy it for all of the Dev's where I work. I got my copy free at a NxtGenUG Southampton meeting and it continues to make my life as a developer easier.

But...

I've come across a small bug in Resharper 4.0 today, so I thought that I'd share so that others become aware.

Real code has been changed to protect the innocent (and because it belongs to my employer).

Start off with a StringBuilder.Append statement that uses the '+' operator to concatenate a string with an object. Why an object, well because that's what the code I'm working with has, not ideal, but that's working with legacy code for you sometimes.

Of course, using the Append statement with string concatenation isn't ideal practice either and what I'd like is to change it to an AppendFormat call. Now Resharper makes this very, very (seductively) simple.

Here's my example code before I let Resharper do its' thing:

Here's Resharper offering to do its' thing:


Here's the code that results:

The important line to note is that we now have:

stringBuilder.AppendFormat("{0} likes Resharper.", (object[])canBeCastToString);

Note the unnecessary cast to an object array. Because of this we now get the error:

System.InvalidCastException: Unable to cast object of type 'System.String' to type 'System.Object[]'.

The solution is just to get rid of the superfluous cast to Object[].

I still really, really like Resharper 4.0.

NxtGenUG Fest '08

Just got back from an excellent day attending the NxtGenUG Fest '08 at Microsoft's campus at Reading.

Like all NxtGen related events everything was smooth and incredibly well put together. I enjoyed all of the talks and some of them have definitely inspired me to go and hit the computer for a play.

Mike Taulty's talk on ADO.NET Data Services was an excellent and engaging introduction to this feature that will be properly released with the forthcoming .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1. The technology seems very seductive, and I will try and find some time before long to have a play with it but it seems very data driven to me and the implications of this if the technology was to be deployed much beyond a simple demo app concerns me a little. Still, until I look into it properly that's just a gut reaction and may well be wrong.

Daniel Moth gave a short talk on Parallel Linq which looked very interesting and this is something that I will definitely be looking into before long.

Dave Morrow gave a really interesting talk on providing BI using SQL Analysis Services, Proclarity, MS Performance Point and SharePoint (WSS 3). The world of BI (business information) is not one that I know particularly, but this talk has really gotten me wanting to have a play with these tools. It'll stretch the limits of my hardware (even with VMs) to get the necessary environments setup to play around sensibly with this stuff but I think that I'll enjoy it and it'll be worth it. One thing that I wondered watching this demo was whether I could bring SPSS (a statistical analysis package I used during my MSc) to the party and get some even more interesting information out of this mix. No doubt I'll blog about this when I've looked into it, and had a good play, some.

The talk that most interested me however was Oliver Strum's talk on F#. I can't overstate how interesting and well delivered this presentation was in my opinion. I'd been wanting to look into F# for a few months now without ever getting around to it. Oliver's talk has made this (along with my continued playing with Spec#) the new big priority for my personal R&D time. I'd heard/read that F# would be a good tool for writing business rules engines, but had been leaning toward doing this with a Boo based DSL. This introduction to F# is making me think that I really need to look into this before I make that decision. I suspect also that, as an added benefit, a play in this space will do wonders for my use of Lambda expressions in C# too.

Of course the day was not just about the great speakers (they were all great, not just the ones that I've highlighted), but like any NxtGen event it was also about the pizza, the swag. I got, amongst other things, a free copy of the full DevExpress software (no that's not why I'm so full of praise for Olivers' fantastic talk), and some Microsoft 'Heroes' chocolates. Beyond all of that though the chance to meet and chat with former colleagues (great to see such a large number from Immediacy) and other NxtGeners (great to see so many from the Southampton branch) really made the day. Congratulations and thanks to Dave, Rich and John for another brilliantly hosted and put together event.

Now I just can't wait for DDD 7 (which, incidentally, I have just submitted a proposal for a Grok talk on Design by Contract and Spec# for).

Insufficient Permissions on web.config when delegating administration of a web site to remote users in IIS 7

****** Note: This post has been revisited with new, and better, advice here! ******

Preparing a talk I'm giving at NxtGenUG Southampton tomorrow evening on IIS 7s ability to allow the administration of aspects of web sites and web applications to be delegated to non-admins I started to get a really frustrating error.

"Error: Cannot write configuration file due to insufficient permissions"

I looked into this for a little while, without finding anything of use, before I spotted that the WMSvc (Web Management Service I presume) had explicit read permissions on the applicationHost.config file. Now this user/principal/whatever was no where to be found when I tried to give it permissions to my web app's so I tried giving Service permissions instead, and bingo! It worked. My remote client could now set the permissions I was trying to set.

Now I'm only a Dev, and I'm sure that this is probably not the best (or even a good) solution, so I'm open to any better ideas. What it does strike me though is that this might be a not too bad example of why Admin's don't want to give Dev's like me access to their servers, let alone administrator privileges on them, and so why this facility, which is new in IIS 7, is so great.