Red Shirt Tour NYC

A few weeks ago, Microsoft VP Scott Guthrie stopped in NYC as part of his promotional tour for Azure’s cloud services. Normally, I don’t really care for these long informercials, but I decided to go in this case for two reasons. One, it took place in Cooper Union’s Great Hall, which was something historic I had always wanted to check out. Two, even though I’ve played with Azure’s offerings on occasion, I was curious what Guthrie would highlight in his presentation, especially after friends and colleagues had talked up Azure in the last couple of years. So, I went, and I was surprisingly glad that I did.

A few years ago, when I learned of some of Microsoft’s ambitions in the cloud space, I bought some MSFT shares and thought that they might catch up with Amazon in the cloud space. Impatiently, after a year, I began to have my doubts, and I sold off the shares. If you look at its latest price, that was clearly a mistake. I should have held onto them, and while listening to Guthrie’s presentation, it became painfully obvious as to why. Of course, he talked about the inherent power of Azure, with its various data centers around the world. (Which were all shown in a dramatic video seemingly directed by Michael Bay, with an intensely dramatic score blaring in the background.) However, it was the maturity of the platform, with its various tools and considerations for the user that was impressive.

Even though I’ve only dabbled with cloud platforms, I especially appreciate their raw power and penchant for structure. Even when you create apps that are meant to be deployed for the cloud, it heavily reinforces structure in their templates for developers. For example, if you build a web app within Visual Studio destined for Azure, it refers to queues in the project template by default (which are automatically available in Azure). You might question its need to reinforce such a feature through templates, thinking that the usage of queues in a web app as obvious. “What vital web service that receives a POST wouldn’t automatically queue that request, since the resources to fulfill the request might be temporary unavailable? Who wouldn’t do that?” Oh, you’d be surprised. Let’s just say that such bug-ridden deployments are not unheard of.

First, Guthrie talked about the typical use cases of cloud offerings, like creating and deploying a serverless app with ease or creating a container and deploying it with Kubernetes. Even when he talked about deploying apps to specific data centers, those features were interesting but expected. (I still have mixed feelings about the Azure Portal dashboard, but since that’s an argument about interfaces, that’s an entirely different subject.)

However, I was more impressed when he started talking about the other free tools offered by the platform that were supplemental. For one, its inherent monitoring system was akin to Splunk, and it could be used to monitor and query your entire setup (apps, databases, hosted servers, etc.), and you could customize your system instances with networking rules (like lock port 54545 every morning). Next, the number of devops options seemed more diverse than I remembered (with build options including Maven). There was even a tool which would suggest how you could reduce your expenses, like by consolidating servers and minimizing resources (storage, # of dedicated CPUs, etc.). After watching some examples of machine learning and image recognition, my only regret was that I had no reason to use them in my own projects.

After several years of concentrated effort, they had created an impressive, mature cloud platform that definitely could give Amazon a run for its money. I only had two points of contention. One, this promotional tour was somewhat eponymously named The Red Shirt Tour, since I was told by staff that Guthrie has a certain love for them. Aside from a terrible name for the tour, I would say ditch the symbolic shirt, since that will forever more belong to Jobs. Pick a hat, and in order to reinforce Azure, go for a blue beret instead.

Two, they served Subway for lunch. To which the answer is always no.

Yes, it was free. However, just like if you were offered torture for free, you shouldn’t accept it.

Aside from that, though, I walked away impressed. Nicely done, Guthrie and MS!

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And While I’m Asking For Things

Speaking of requests, I have another quick one. My department has used the Oracle.ManagedDataAccess.dll for quite a while now in our C# (i.e., .NET) deployments, and even though we’ve had some performance issues at times, we’ve created some workarounds and eventually achieved harmony with this miscreant spawn of Oracle (who has been known to be developer-unfriendly). However, we came across a new one the other day:

Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: byteArray
Server stack trace:
at System.BitConverter.ToString(Byte[] value, Int32 startIndex, Int32 length)
at OracleInternal.TTC.TTCLob.GetLobIdString(Byte[] lobLocator)
at OracleInternal.ServiceObjects.OracleDataReaderImpl.CollectTempLOBsToBeFreed(Int32 rowNumber)
at Oracle.ManagedDataAccess.Client.OracleDataReader.ProcessAnyTempLOBs(Int32 rowNumber)
at Oracle.ManagedDataAccess.Client.OracleDataReader.Read()

Basically, if you have a null value in the CLOB column of an Oracle table, you might get this error when you attempt to access that row in the result set. After trying the most recent version of the library (as recommended by Oracle), it became obvious that they still haven’t fixed it. Strangely, the error seems to occur randomly, since it won’t always happen when running the executable against the same data. After spending some time in an effort to diagnose the error, I eventually capitulated, accepted Oracle’s foibles, and simply set all CLOB columns to EMPTY_CLOB(). Problem solved.

But for posterity and all those after me, I implore you, Oracle: can you address this simple problem in your library? I’d ask you to open-source that library, but we all know that’s not gonna happen. So, please go ahead and fix the bug for us. It’d probably take you a whole 15 minutes, the same amount of time that Ellison needs to check the rigging on one of his catamarans. We’d all appreciate it!

A Simple Feature Request for the Spring Community

Not long ago, I was asked by some colleagues to help troubleshoot an issue; they were having some difficulty with the production deployment of a monolith web service using Wildfly and Spring. How could I resist, considering how much I love event-driven, IOC frameworks and their ridiculously verbose log files? (You can cut the sarcasm with a knife.) In any case, it seems that the server was failing during initialization. After wading through the gazillions of lines written due to an exception from the JedisConnectionFactory, I finally found an Null exception from our code that was a clue. It seemed to indicate that a variable was missing from from our active profile. So, I looked inside the standalone.xml file to see if we were pointing to the right profile:

<server xmlns="urn:jboss:domain:1.4">

<extensions>
<!-- list of extension -->
</extensions>

<system-properties>
<property name="spring.profiles.active" value="production"/>
</system-properties>

That was the right profile name, all right…So I copied the deployed .WAR file and opened it up. Alas, the profile wasn’t inside the “/resources” directory! It seems that they weren’t deploying the right version. Problem solved.

So, that leads me to my point. Can the Spring community do me a big favor? If the target profile does not exist, then maybe the log file (among its gazillions of other lines) should say that THE TARGET PROFILE DOES NOT EXIST!

That would be a big timesaver and most appreciated.

When It Rains, It Pours

Well, on top of Microsoft’s XML/JSON deserialization issues within its own libraries, there appears to be related issues within certain third-party libraries.

As if I wasn’t paranoid enough!

.NET and XML: Mortal Enemies

In the past, I’ve had my issues when dealing with the compatibility between C# and XML, so much so that I’ve been inspired to write prose. At this point, I feel that it’s my duty for posterity to document the various instances where Microsoft drops the proverbial XML ball:

1. As stated before, DTD validation of XML files (with the C# XmlReader) is broken. And when I say broken, I mean that it performs as well as a thirty-year-old VCR pulled from the ocean and then placed in a vat of hydrochloric acid. Now plug that VCR in. You’re going to get the same results.
2. If you’re hoping to create a XSD from available XML or classes with the Visual Studio Tool (i.e., XSDT), good luck. For one, it doesn’t allow you to specify any complex rules. Also, if you’re generating a XSD schema from classes, you should know that it doesn’t work with Nullable types or any Dictionary properties, since they couldn’t budget it into their schedule.
3. “Hey, I have a container that’s set to null. So I’ll tell C# not to mention that tag at all upon serialization, since it’s just wasted space and since I might not want that tag visible in certain cases.” It is possible…but under specific circumstances. If you plan on serializing your class as is and if you plan on not using any C# attributes on your properties, maybe. Otherwise? Nope. C# says “No soup for you!”
4. If you want to serialize an array of strings, you get a free bonus upon serialization: all of the tags will be prefixed with a namespace (i.e., the namespace for array serialization). If you don’t want that ugly prefix, just create a wrapper container for a string array. Now do this for every literal type you can think of.
5. Let’s say that you have a XML doc with a string that is a HTTP link. You now want to parse that XML and read that value. Of course, if that link contains a query string, all of those ampersands are already converted into instances of “&amp;“, in order to be compatible with XML standards. “But I want my data to be read incorrectly!” Well, you’re just in luck, friend! Because when you use XmlDocument.Load() to deserialize that XML, that query string will contain “amp;” and not “&amp;“, essentially turning the link into garbage. Huzzah!

These are only a few instances, but there’s more. (Don’t even get me started on deserializing payloads from a ASP.NET web service.) If anyone out there has their own experiences to add, I’d love to hear them.

Ahead of My Time

As I take more responsibility over the web services within our department, I’m trying to be more standard in its development and maintenance, including its documentation. While learning how to correctly implement Swagger pages for our services (and, yes, I know, I’m late to the party), I stumbled upon this particular wonderful little feature: interactive documentation!

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece how documentation should be more interactive, since that would ultimately result in a more effective tool to teach people about anything (an API, a programming method, etc.). Now, since it was actually introduced years before I wrote that piece, you can say that I’m actually behind my time. I’ll accept either. Even though it’s a more basic version of the idea presented in my post, it’s still cool that there’s some work being done in that direction. Much-belated kudos to the Swagger team!

Initial Impressions of MatterMost

Having low expectations due to being old and jaded, I downloaded the Slack-alternative package known as MatterMost and then proceeded to install it onto Red Hat with their instructions. (Slack would seem like an obvious choice, but it’s a less viable candidate for enterprise due to a number of possible reasons: contracts with competing vendors, auditing, corporate secrets, etc.). First and foremost, I appreciated the readability of their straightforward description regarding the prerequisite steps, even before installing the actual product. (Since my teenage days of being a part-time administrator are long gone, I need somebody to hold my hand.) The installation of the product itself was also fairly easy, and I was able to get it working quickly thereafter. If I hadn’t been busy with a few other things at the time, it might have taken me only a few minutes to prepare everything. So, kudos to Mattermost for that! Plus, just like Slack, I was able to communicate with the server through a number of available clients.

But I wasn’t here for just an inhouse chat server, though that’s pretty cool. Instead, as I mentioned in my last post, I was here to investigate the possibility of deploying useful bots for my team. In the same way that Atomist’s bots help software companies manage their projects, I’d like to create my own bots that can help monitor and control the custom distributed architecture that exists inside our walls. For the more interactive bots, they have two types of web hooks: incoming and outgoing. Since I wanted to keep it simple, I went with the Slash commands. Now, you have to pay close attention here, since they have explicit instructions on how to implement the callback correctly. (Do not stray from the instructions, or you will face certain doom.) However, if you follow them exactly, the Slash command will work without fail. I created a simple bot that returned markup text for a table, which displayed the status of several daemons running on our servers. Again, I was impressed!

So, now, what’s next? Well, long ago, I wrote an InfoQ article about creating web apps that were driven by a MDD architecture. In this case, I don’t see why the same couldn’t be employed with a set of bots. With a little bit of planning, I can envision simple yet effective tools available through such a network. Constructed within a MDD framework, their functionality could be adjusted with just a few modifications to metadata. So, much like a Silicon Valley project manager can get the status of a software build while texting on his phone with a colleague, it’s now possible for me to chat and run a few commands against my distributed architecture. (Finally, I won’t have to whip out the laptop and dial into the VPN every time something happens.) And all while still fitting into corporate compliance! Well, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but it’s now looking much more feasible now than a few weeks ago. And I still have to sell it to the brass…but I got my fingers crossed.