Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Unable to Add Entity Model to Silverlight 4 Business Application

I decided to try out the Silverlight 4 Business Application template in VS2010. I just wanted to see what the template produced out of the box. When I created the “BusinessApplication1” project it created both the Silverlight and host web projects for me which I expected.

Next, I wanted to add an entity model to the web project to support a new domain service. However, when I went to add the new item to the project, I received the following error: “"The project's target framework does not contain Entity Framework runtime assemblies..". That’s interesting since out of the box the template targeted the .NET 4 framework.

I found that that only way to clear up this error was to do the following:

  1. Change the target framework for the web project to .NET 3.5 and rebuild. The compile fails because the new code requires features from .NET 4.0.
  2. Change the target framework back to .NET 4.0 and rebuild. The compile now succeeds.
  3. Now I can add the entity model to the project.

Looks like there’s a small problem in the business application template in terms of the web application project file.

Monday, January 17, 2011

CAB Event Publishers and Subscribers

CAB Event publishers and subscribers allow your application to be designed in a very modular and decoupled way. That’s a good thing, but it can bite you if you’re unprepared. In this post, I want to describe a situation that recently snagged me while working on a CAB-based application project.

One of the advantages of using CAB, or other composite application frameworks for that matter, is the fact that your code becomes much more loosely coupled. It helps to isolate your classes allowing you to better unit test. It makes it possible to organize the development of your application functionality into discreet units. In order to support this modularization, CAB brings a number of important features to the table that allows your loosely coupled code to share information.

While this modularization and loose coupling is a big benefit in the big scheme of things, it also puts a burden on you to design your application modules with certain things in mind. In particular, each module will not have direct knowledge of other modules loaded at runtime. In our case, modules are organized into their own projects and do not have any references to one another. At most, they will share some references to common projects that provide some base functionality. If your modules are interested in sending or receiving information from each other, there are a number of possible ways to approach this. The most common way and the way that leverages the publish/subscribe pattern is the use of CAB events.

Using CAB events is very straightforward. In your publisher, simply declare the event that your class will raise. You add the CAB EventPublicationAttribute to the event. The constructor for this attribute takes two parameters: a topic string and an enum for the publication scope.

   1: [EventPublication(ConstantsEvent.CurrentLeadSummaryChanged, PublicationScope.Global)]



   2: public event EventHandler<LeadSummaryEventArgs> CurrentLeadSummaryChanged;




We define a set of string constants for our event topics. In the case above, the publication scope is defined as Global so that CAB notifies everyone that the selection of a lead has changed.



The subscribers to the event simply declare their event handler and apply the EventSubscriptionAttribute. This attribute has a couple of different constructors. One simply takes the string topic ID and the other takes the topic ID and a ThreadOption enum, which allows you to control marshaling of the event data. This is useful when your publisher raises their events from a different thread and you need to marshal it to the UI thread for instance.





   1: [EventSubscription(ConstantsEvent.CurrentLeadSummaryChanged)]



   2: public void CurrentLeadChanged(object sender, LeadSummaryEventArgs e)




At development time, you must take the initiative to make sure that the signatures of the two (publisher and subscriber) match. Your code will happily compile, even if the two have differing EventArg types. If you fail to make them match, you will be presented with an ArgumentException at runtime indicating that one cannot be converted to the other.



Admittedly, the fix for the situation that I just ran into is pretty straightforward, but I think it bears pointing out that your development methodology should take this into consideration. If you miss one, probably the easiest way to locate all of the places where the event is used is to simply search the solution by the topic ID. This will allow you to verify that the signatures match.



Long term, add tests to your integration tests to validate that both publisher and subscribers work together. This will help prevent future mismatches and validate that the communication between the two is working well.



Hope this helps if you find yourself in this situation…

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Troubleshooting “Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation”

You’ve probably run across this Exception in a number of different situations. In my case, I ran into it most recently while doing some plumbing changes on our application, which is a composite application built using CAB (Composite UI Application Block). One of the most common failures we run into when wiring up new views or controllers is when an Exception occurs within the initialization logic of one or both of these.

CAB utilizes ObjectBuilder2  for dependencies. You will most often get the above exception when construction of your object occurs because ObjectBuilder2 is going through Activator to instantiate the object you asked for.

The problem with this Exception is that it masks the actual problem that is occurring. In my most recent case, it was caused by a null reference that wasn’t being checked. Unit testing and checking for a null reference would have solved this problem prior to doing the wiring (obviously); however, lacking those in the code base I’m working in currently, the best option was to break on the Exception in the debugger and see what was up.

It’s somewhat annoying that the InnerException is null in this case. The stack trace did however yield some insight into the problem and helped to solve the problem.

In my case, starting at the top of the chain with the constructor of the new object helped to ferret out the problem. From there, I was able to go back and properly check my state and handle the null situation without it being a problem.

Hope this helps…

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Just Read “Making Too Much of TDD”

As I read Michael Feather’s points in this blog post, I found myself agreeing so many times that I felt I had to link to this.

http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341d798c53ef0147e1235b4c970b

I work in a company where the “scientist” in me is constantly challenged and where most in the developer group fall into the engineer group. I think it’s an excellent example of a polarity that exists (strongly) in our company. The business puts extraordinary pressure on the developers to deliver a working solution in the shortest time possible. The natural response is to forego practices that many in the Agile community consider “best practice” in order to just keep up with the pace of change and new features.

I personally get the same sense of satisfaction when patterns just emerge from the iterative process I follow, which is not strictly TDD, but is more or less a hybrid of it. It bothers me that refactoring is not given much attention in our daily development activities, but I am finding myself now questioning many of the beliefs which I held to be incontrovertible (am I being dogmatic?).

I think my most important takeaway from Michael’s post is the unmistakable position that we MUST question our approaches regularly to improve and to seek new approaches that make us better. Out with the old, in with the new. Constantly focus on pragmatism. If doing something doesn’t improve your product or your time to market, drop it.

I also want to better understand his concept “language granularity”. I believe it has an important impact on how we do development here. It touches on a very important business pattern here. Namely, the constant churn our teams find themselves in and the costs associated with the changes that are required in order to satisfy the latest/greatest requirements.

Great read Michael …

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

When Team Velocity is King

Our team met yesterday to do a walk-through on a project that was developed by a group of contractors for a high-priority project. A significant portion of the project architecture relied on patterns like dependency injection, factories, and the like to gain a high degree of loose coupling. This was motivated by the ever changing requirements for the product owner and the demands that the system be easily extensible.

At various points during the review, some of the team members that had the longest time on the team made comments that the design was too abstract, that “we’d never do a system this way.” When we came across a set of tests that had been commented out, the response was, “Good, we didn’t want to maintain tests anyway.”

Being the new guy on the team, I wanted to understand why they felt that way. The general opinion of the team was that abstraction and unit tests were simply too time consuming to implement and yielded too little value to consider for their applications. This position intrigued me – considering how much adoption and support Agile practices for software engineering have across the industry.

I believe this opinion is rooted in the business’s belief that “better is the enemy of ‘good enough’”. They are more interested in getting applications out quickly, with as few bugs as possible, but when bugs do occur, they are VERY tolerant of them. The cost associated with fixing the bugs, even if they are found in the field by end users, is not seen as a significant reason for being more strict in the development methodologies to prevent them.

Instead, they rely heavily on business analysts acting as QA and end users to ferret out the defects that are most critical and fix them then and there. More esoteric bugs that don’t dramatically affect the usability of the applications are glossed over and may be fixed in the future when time allows (or may not).

All of this is motivated by the belief that “going fast is the single most important requirement for our development teams.”

Velocity is King here – and it’s good to be the King.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Manually Deploying a WCF Service to IIS

I recently downloaded the WCF and WF samples to begin looking at the Federation sample. The topic of federated security in WCF is an interesting one and I will write about my experience with it in a future post; however, I wanted to address a more basic situation that I ran into while working with the sample project.

I opened the solution in Visual Studio 2010 and compiled it. After successfully compiling, I attempted to run the client project, which is configured as the startup project. The app started, but the browse books capability failed because I had not deployed the web service that the application required in order to get data. * In the interest of disclosure, I did not follow the recommendation of using the setup.bat to create and deploy the web site and related applications to host the STS and app services because I wanted control over where/how they were created.

The information in this post is admittedly pretty basic, but in my experience these simple steps are sometimes missed making it impossible to test your service. Therefore, in this post I will list the simple steps needed to publish/deploy a WCF service to IIS.

If you need more information on WCF, just check out the Beginner’s Guide to Windows Communication Foundation. There you can find a lot of useful information on writing WCF services and exploring the various hosting options available to you.

Create a New Web Site

After writing your service or compiling the sample you’re working with, you need a web site to host it. Assuming you have a working service implementation…

1.) Click Start\Run and type ‘inetmgr’ (assuming you already have IIS installed)

2) Right click sites, and add a new site. In my case, I created the BookStore site. I created the physical path C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Bookstore

3) I then created a subdirectory for web services. C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Bookstore\Services and a bin folder to put the binaries in that you just compiled. You should end up with a directory structure like this: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\<yoursite>\Services\bin.

Copy the Content to the New Site

4) Copy the DLLs from your services bin\debug or bin\release folder to the …\<yoursite>\Services\bin folder.

5) Copy the web service’s .svc and web.config files into the …\<yoursite>\Services folder. If your service has any additional files that it needs to function, copy them to that folder as well. The Book Store example needed a .txt file for its data.

Create a New Application to Host the Service

6) In the IIS Manager, create a new application for your services folder. Do this by right-clicking the Services folder and select, “Convert to Application”. Select your newly created Services folder for the physical folder and click OK. Make note of the application pool that you selected.

7) Change the application pool’s advanced settings to select the .NET Framework 4.0 (assuming you’re using 4.0 – if not be sure the right version of .NET for you is selected).

Set the ACL on Your Physical File Folders

8) Grant access to the application pool identity to your file folder. The identity that you select will be IIS AppPool\<AppPoolName>.In my case it was IIS AppPool\BookStore. Be sure to grant it Read & execute, List folder contents, and Read.

If you happen to miss this step, IIS cannot load your service assemblies.


 

9) That’s it! To test your service, you should be able to select the .svc file in the IIS Manager and click Browse and get a screen that describes your service.

Good luck!

/imapcgeek

Friday, September 3, 2010

What is TDD and BDD and How Do They Relate to One Another?

In this post I will attempt to define TDD and BDD and show how they are similar. I’ll also describe the way that each apply to software development and where I’ve seen shortcomings with how TDD is often applied.

TDD - Test Driven Development/Design

It depends on the age of the information you’re looking at which of the two terms you’ll see used – Development vs. Design. Newer literature will refer to it as Design more often than not. The reason for the change is to emphasize the important software engineering practice that is primarily benefited from its practice.

Can you describe TDD in a sentence?

TDD is the practice of using automated unit tests to drive the creation of classes and methods that satisfy a set of requirements for a software application.

On a team, who does TDD?

TDD is performed by the software developers that are responsible for the delivery of the code that satisfies the requirements of the application. It is not performed by QA or others responsible for quality control of an application.

Why are developers writing these tests? Shouldn’t testers write tests?

Because the primary purpose for TDD isn’t testing per se. It’s strange that it’s called Test Driven Design when its primary purpose isn’t testing. Perhaps it’s a matter of semantics, but in my opinion, the simple unit tests that are created as a part of this process are a byproduct of the effort. The real output from this process is a design that embodies two very important traits: cohesiveness and loose coupling. For information on SOLID design principles, please see: http://www.butunclebob.com/ArticleS.UncleBob.PrinciplesOfOod. This book has an excellent coverage of these principles.

Cohesiveness refers to the degree to which a class’s interface is well organized into single set of related responsibilities. This refers to the ‘S’ and the ‘I’ in the SOLID principles that are widely accepted as good Object-Oriented design principles.

Loosely coupled refers to the degree to which classes that work together to solve a problem are concretely knowledgeable of each other. In other words, how abstract are the relationships. More loosely coupled is desirable. This refers to the ‘L’ and ‘D’ and a bit of ‘O’ of the SOLID principles.

How does TDD fit into a SDLC?

In my opinion, before writing the first TDD test and subsequently any code, developers come together and through a general understanding of the high-level functional and non-functional requirements make a determination of the high-level architecture. They should be able to do this based on past experience with applications that are similar in nature. This decision process includes deciding what technologies will be used (WinForms vs. WPF vs. Mobile; SQL Server; etc.) and what high-level layers exist in the application (UI, Business Logic, Data Access). They should also generally have some ideas about how these layers will interact. For instance, you might determine that because you must support desktop clients, web clients, and automated processing that you wish to separate business logic into a separate layer and make it accessible via a web service. The latter might be skipped to begin with, but I think it’s helpful to form these mental maps early on.

Once the developers have this high-level roadmap, it becomes easier to proceed with work in specific areas, but the next part can be somewhat tricky. It is at this point that the team needs to figure out where to start working. Most TDD examples are very simplistic and in my opinion don’t help much in making this decision. Often, a developer will decide, “I know how I want the database to look so I’ll do the data model and procs and then code up my data access objects.” If that’s where they wish to start, they would create a test fixture for the DAO and then create tests that would drive the new methods that the DAO must provide to satisfy the test. As each test is written, the DAO has logic added to it to satisfy the new test. These tests are often very, very small and simple (that’s a good thing). The developer may try to “guess” all the corner cases that a consumer would hit against the DAO and would create a lot of tests to validate those and subsequently put code into the DAO to handle the cases. As you can imagine, the number of these small unit tests will be many. That’s OK since unit tests are supposed to be fast, atomic, and repeatable. It’s not painful to rerun them many, many times. The end result is that you have a DAO that has a well-defined public API for getting your data and you have a unit test fixture that exercises that logic based on “rules” that the developer established that the DAO was supposed to adhere to.

The above pattern would then repeat itself at the web service layer, the business logic layer, and potentially up into the UI layer. All during this time, you make numerous “assumptions” about how the code will be used by a consumer. As you move higher and higher through the layers of your application, you may be required to tweak classes in lower layers, but that’s OK. You have the benefit of unit tests to help you if your assumptions are wrong and you have to go back and refactor. Each change is supported by a compilation and execution of tests to ensure you didn’t break something along the way. This entire process should be iterative, fast, and focused on small sets of functionality.

However, the above scenario is where I’ve seen TDD fail. Why? Because the view is that the reiteration of changes as you move up the layers is seen to be expensive. It can be costly to go back and touch several layers lower down in the design. You often have to: 1) Identify a missing or incorrect assumption; 2) Identify where to make the change; 3) Change the test(s); 4) Change the code; 5) Recompile; 6) Rerun the tests. If your requirements are constantly in flux or you make lots of assumptions that are wrong, this cycle can be expensive.

Enter BDD…

BDD

Behavior Driven Development/Design

Similar to TDD, the emphasis in this practice is on Design not development. In contrast to TDD, where you often see examples or real-world projects that begin at the bottom of the logical application stack, BDD focuses on “Behavior” aka what the user experiences and sees from the application at the logical “top” of the stack. That’s why I refer to it as a top-down approach while I refer to TDD as a bottom-up approach.

Not surprisingly, it shares a TDD principles: 1) use tests to drive design; 2) use small, fast iterations to identify a requirement, codify that in a test, implement code to make the test pass, repeat. Why is it similar? Because BDD evolved from TDD. I believe many practitioners of TDD realized that the most important aspect of the apps we write is what the user experiences. As a result, the emphasis shifted from the bottom of the stack to the top and BDD was born.

So rather than starting with writing tests for a DAO, you would start with writing tests for a UI-related class that defines the behavior the user wishes to have. Depending on some of the prevalent design patterns for the UI technology you chose, you may have in mind various design patterns that are popular to use with that technology. For instance, Model-View-Controller (MVC) is very popular with web technologies, Model-View-View-Model (MVVM) is popular with WPF, and Model-View-Presenter is often applied for WinForms. Strictly speaking, when you first begin writing your UI tests and supporting code, it’s too early to choose one design pattern over another, but I believe it’s useful to have them in mind as you
code to see where the design is leading you. But most importantly, let the tests and the resulting behavior drive which pattern is the winner.

So why is BDD better than TDD?

Well, I believe that they are very closely related and in reality BDD is nothing more than a refinement in how to approach TDD. In my opinion, BDD is superior because it focuses on the most important aspects of the system you’re building – the thing the user experiences. Secondly, while I don’t have empirical evidence at hand to prove this, I believe it reduces the churn that is often experienced when you build systems from the bottom up. As long as you design and code in small chunks and focus on YAGNI (you ain’t gonna need it) and let the top-level classes drive the requirements for the lower-level classes then the amount of churn is less. Most importantly, you don’t need to make ASSUMPTIONS about what is needed. Your top-level classes as consumers TELL the lower-level classes what is needed and you code that and nothing else. YAGNI wins.

Where do Business Analysts fit into this process?

The emergence of DSL (Domain Specific Language) and tooling to support them have opened a number of possibilities. It allows the Business Analyst (or subject matter expert SME) to define the specifications for how an application should behave in a language they are familiar with. The tooling then “translates” that to executable code and with the help of the developer the required BDD unit tests are born thus driving the development of the app. This is often referred to as “executable specifications”.

One example of a tool like this is SpecFlow. This tool is a .NET tool that supports creating executable specs by integrating with numerous supported unit test frameworks like NUnit, xUnit, etc. The SME can write specifications in English sentences that conform to a predetermined structure that outlines pre- and post-conditions for each “test” and the tool converts those into actual unit tests, which the developer then implements.

@bradwilson of Microsoft did a demo of this tool at #agile2010 and showed how he was able to integrate the resulting test fixtures with a web-automation tool to drive the web UI of a project. The end result was a set of specifications written in English backed by executable tests written in the developers language that drove the creation of the web UI the end user wanted.

I hope this has helped to clarify the differences between TDD, BDD, and how it might apply to your development initiatives.

/imapcgeek

Monday, August 16, 2010

Agile 2010 - Day 1 - Evolutionary Web Development with ASP.NET MVC (Part 1)

Presented by Brad Wilson, Senior Developer Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Team

Part 1 – TDD

The first session for me of the Agile 2010 Conference in Orlando was the “Evolutionary Web Development with ASP.NET MVC” given by Brad Wilson (@bradwilson). The first 90 minutes of the three-hour session was dedicated to Test Driven Development (TDD) basics. Brad and his sidekick Scott not only demonstrated the fundamentals of how testing drives design, but gave a good example of how paired programming works. For me, the jury is still out on the effectiveness of pairing, but then I’ve never been in a team that it was encouraged or embraced so that it could sway me.

Although TDD isn’t practiced at my current company, I do use TDD in my personal programming projects and it was a good reminder for me of the fundamentals. Repetition is what helps to keep our skills fresh

A few key points from the first half that resonated with me were:

1) When developing, think in terms of component development that facilitates isolation making it possible to test your units in isolation

2) Use your tests to drive public API’s – tests should also only exercise publicly visible behavior

3) Your tests should be small, simple, and fast – makes it easier to run them over and over again. If anything, I’d add that the tests should also be repeatable though that wasn’t discussed (maybe it was just that obvious).

4) The basic workflow in TDD is – Green –> Red –> Green. Although, I’ve often seen the workflow start with Red where my tests initially fail until I provide the requisite implementation to make them pass. In fact, re-reading James Newkirk’s book on TDD starts off with the Red->Green->Refactor workflow.

5) Refactor, refactor, refactor – if you aren’t regularly refactoring, your code probably (almost surely) has a lot of smells. The beauty of the unit tests is that it provides the safety net and gives confidence that while refactoring you aren’t breaking the contract that you promised to provide in your implementation.

6) Replace your dependencies with “test doubles” (mock objects) – Brad’s demo touched lightly on Moq (http://code.google.com/p/moq/), which I hadn’t used before. It looks like a good framework and I’ll have to experiment with it myself to see, but having used NMock, and others, it appears to address some of their shortcomings (like mocking classes not just interfaces).

7) TDD is more about design than it is about testing. The conscious act of creating tests that define the specifications for the public API is a radical departure for anyone that has never tried TDD. It can represent quite a leap in style and thought process, but one that can yield excellent results. Most people that aren’t practicing TDD say they believe that the process would slow them down. I believe (though I have no hard evidence to support my argument) that it’s quite the opposite. If nothing else, it certainly yields a cleaner design that makes maintainability higher reducing time over the long haul.

8) A side effect of #7 is that the unit tests aren’t the goal; they’re an artifact of the process. This can be a distraction for some – myself included. Until you realize that the unit tests are a means to an end, you may lose focus on what they are supposed to be doing for you: a.) driving your design and b.) providing a safety net for when you refactor (you want to refactor don’t you?).

9) Refactoring should focus on small, incremental changes. In my second session of the day (which I’ll cover in another post), Joshua Kerievsky (pretty sure it was him) spoke up about the importance of refactoring to patterns to improve overall design.

I came away with a few little catchy tidbits as well.

1) xUnit – uses the word “fact” to avoid the stigma that developers have against testing. I began experimenting with xUnit after the conference and find it equally usable to NUnit, but it also emphasizes some best practices that NUnit missed (as James Newkirk’s blog pointed out, xUnit was developed after some experience with “programmer testing”).

2) “Do the simplest thing that can make it work.”

3) TDD drives a very small incremental development style. Add test, watch it fail, add code, watch it pass.

4) In the real world you would write the acceptance tests first – BDD then TDD. The acceptance tests will fail for quite some time.

5) TDD tests are the documentation for other developers. BDD tests are the documentation for the business.

6) @bradwilson, “TDD is like the scientific method.” You form a hypothesis, write a test to represent it, and then see if your assumption is correct.

7) The basic test structure should be similar to this:

// Arrange
Set up the conditions for the test

// Act
DO whatever work is required

// Assert
Validate that the results are what you expected

See (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ArrangeActAssert)

That pretty much sums up the first part of that session. In closing, the important takeaways were using TDD and refactoring to drive your designs and improve code readability and overall health. Though this session talked about using mock objects as a means to loose coupling, a later session with Arlo Belshee discussed other design patterns that can also help to achieve loose coupling, but that don’t necessarily have the same overhead that mocks bring. I’ll cover more on that in a future post.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Troubleshooting a Failed Deployment of WCF Services on IIS7

In this blog post I will describe a problem that I recently experienced while developing a new WCF service and deploying it to a local IIS installation on Windows 7. The details of the service itself are unimportant; rather, the specific problems are related to the deployment of the service and with the setup and installation of IIS.

When attempting to browse to the newly deployed service (which was nothing more than a stub at this point), I experienced two problems. First, there was no handler mapping for the .svc extension. After I rectified that, I received the following error:

HTTP Error 500.21 – Internal Server Error
Handler “svc-Integrated” has a bad module “ManagedPipelineHandler” in its module list

According to the error page that was presented, the most likely causes were:

  1. Managed handler is used; however, ASP.NET is not installed or is not installed completely.
  2. There is a typographical error in the configuration for the handler module list.

How I got here:

  1. I installed the Internet Information Services through the Control Panel \ Windows Features dialog.

  2. I then manually created a new Application Pool to host the new services web site.

  3. From there I created a new Web Site to host the service.

  4. Last, I set my publication settings in Visual Studio to push the service and its implementation to the newly created website. Executing the publish from the IDE all things went well.

 

When I browsed to the service in the IIS Manager, I received the dreaded error above.

The root cause of this is mainly a timing issue. Depending on the order in which you install .NET and IIS, then the WCF and ASP.NET handlers and related modules will not be properly configured. Fortunately, resolving the issue is fairly straightforward.

  1. To resolve the problem with a lack of a .svc handler mapping, run the following:
    “%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.0\Windows Communication Foundation\ServiceModelReg.exe –i”

    or if you are running with .NET 4, then the path is:
    “%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\ServiceModelReg.exe –i”

    * Note that if you’re running on a 64-bit O/S you will need to change the path to use “Framework64” instead of “Framework”
  2. Lastly, to resolve the error above, you need to re-run the ASP.NET registration using this command:
    “%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_regiis.exe –i”

Once you’ve done that, you should be able to then access your WCF service. Hope this helps resolve this for you if you run into a similar situation.

del.icio.us Tags: ,,,

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Expression Blend 4

I’m not sure where I missed it, but Expression Blend 4 is now out. I recently went back to create a SketchFlow project to model some stories I’m working on for a proof of concept application and found that Expression Blend 3 does *not* integrate with Visual Studio 2010. I posted a #fail message on Twitter and low and behold @mfcollins3 and @unnir were nice enough to point out that Blend 4 was not only out but *did* work with Visual Studio 2010.

Thanks for the info. I’m downloading and installing Blend 4 as I write this and will hopefully be back to sketching and designing again very soon.