May 13th is .NET Day at manning.com. My book (AOP in .NET) is featured as part of this Deal of the Day.

The offer also applies to:

• C# in Depth, Third Edition by Jon Skeet
• Fast ASP.NET Websites by Dean Alan Hume
• Windows Store App Development by Pete Brown
• HTML5 for .NET Developers by Jim Jackson and Ian Gilman
• Metaprogramming in .NET by Kevin Hazzard and Jason Bock
• Dependency Injection in .NET by Mark Seemann
• ASP.NET 4.0 in Practice by Daniele Bochicchio, Stefano Mostarda, and Marco De Sanctis
• F# Deep Dives by Tomas Petricek and Phillip Trelford
• And C++ Concurrency in Action by Anthony Williams

The deal will stay active for about 48 hours. (They let it run a little longer than a day to account for time zones). So get yourself some books!

Use promo code dotd051314au.

Based on a Twitter conversation with Seth Petry-Johnson about mocking/faking SqlException objects in .NET, I decided to go ahead and put what I had written into an open-source project on GitHub. I didn't spend much time on the name: I thought about Sharp Stick and Pointy Stick, but those repo names have already been taken! So, I thought about "stick" some more and remembered the famous line from Lady Macbeth: "screw your courage to the sticking place". Well, I guess I don't have much of a future in professional naming.

Since I was creating a repo anyway, I thought I'd throw a couple of other helpers in there. I put in some of my favorite ASP.NET / ASP.NET MVC helpers and an obscure little string helper. I'm not trying to remake PGK Extensions or anything--just putting some stuff out there that might help someone.

I should also note that the SqlExceptionHelper stuff isn't entirely original: I borrowed some code from a 2006 blog post by Rido, and just updated the reflection code since the private constructor has changed since then (and could possibly change again, since it's a private constructor in a sealed class).

Anyway, go check out Sticking Place on GitHub and let me know what you think.

Welcome to another "Weekly Concerns". This is a post-a-week series of interesting links, relevant to programming and programmers. You can check out previous Weekly Concerns posts in the archive.

• Commit to Github or other public git repos without sharing your private information (like API keys and passwords and such)
• ReSharper and Roslyn would seem to go together like a lime and a coconut, but it seems that's not in JetBrains's immediate plans.
• However, DevExpress claims to be all-in with CodeRush and Roslyn. I don't know if these points of differentiation makes any difference right now, but could be interesting in, say, 6 months to a year from now.
• I was able to see Gary Bernhardt's session "The Birth & Death of JavaScript" at CodeMash this year, which is now available as a video on Destroy All Software. It might seem like a satire at first, but it's actually a really deep, layered, and meaningful talk that should be of interest to everyone, not just JavaScript or web developers.

If you have an interesting link that you'd like to see in Weekly Concerns, leave a comment or contact me.

In a project that I'm working on, I'm using Dapper for data access and I'm using StructureMap as my IoC containter. It's an ASP.NET MVC project.

I was recently demoing the project to my partner on the staging site (Azure), and I ran into a troubling error having to do with data connections (that I had not experienced running it locally on IIS yet). I immediately thought that it must be an issue with the SQL connections (SqlDbConnection objects that implement the IDbConnection interface, per Dapper) not being closed and/or disposed of correctly.

I remember encountering the same issue when I was developing this very site that you are reading, and the solution is to use the HttpContext scope within StructureMap when configuring it for the IDbConnection interface.

Here's what I started with:

And here's what I refactored it to:

I just added HttpContextScoped (the default is PerRequest scope, see StructureMap docs on Scoping and Lifecycle Management). I also added the ReleaseAndDisposeAllHttpScopedObjects to Global.asax.cs, so that StructureMap would...release and dispose those objects at the end of each request.

However, when I did that, I was still getting problems. I would get exceptions saying that the SqlConnection ConnectionString was the empty string. Something wasn't right. I did some searching around about the issue in the docs, and couldn't really find what I was looking for. I did come across someone with a similar issue on StackOverflow, also trying to understand HttpContextScoped. The top answer from PHeiberg (not the accepted answer) pointed me the right direction.

I used a lambda expression instead of just passing the SqlConnection directly. So now my SqlDbConnections are scoped to the HttpContext, and will be cleaned up after every request. That should squash the issue I was seeing on the staging stie.

Hello, again! "Weekly Concerns" is a post-a-week series of interesting links, relevant to programming and programmers. You can check out previous Weekly Concerns posts in the archive.

• Pete Shearer from the Pete on Software podcast kindly invited me to be on his show so I could shamelessly plug AOP in .NET:
  • Episode 5 of the Pete on Software podcast
  • AOP with Matthew Groves blog post, from Pete's blog.
  • Pete also did an Intro to AOP with PostSharp blog post.
• "Pete, Pete, Pete, enough about Pete already!" Okay, okay.
• I was reminded again recently how bad I am with regular expressions and how much I don't like them. Well, I came across a "fluent" interface for regular expressions called VerbalExpressions. I haven't used it yet, but it's something to keep an eye on.
• These sorts of questions aren't common on Stack Overflow anymore, but check out the answers for Strangest Language Feature. There are some answers that I found very cool and some that were real head-scratchers. Not a lot of C# answers in there; I guess C# isn't a very strange language :)
• Another tool to help remote pair programming: go-pty-screen