Category: Code

Software Development

Use P4Merge as the Merge Tool for Mercurial Windows

Whenever I do a Mercurial merge on Windows I get a little Visual Studio Dialog popup saying File -nosplash not found. Which is annoying. Especially as I have Perforce's excellent p4merge installed.

You can set the merge tool used by Mercurial like so:
[shell]Edit %userprofile%\Mercurial.ini[/shell]
where Edit is your favourite text editor, and %userprofile% is usually C:\Users\username\.
Then add this section to your Mercurial.ini file:
[code][merge-tools]
p4.priority = 100
p4.premerge = True
p4.executable = C:\Program Files\Perforce\p4merge.exe
p4.gui = True
p4.args = $base $local $other $output[/code]
You can change "p4" to anything, so long as you change all occurrences of p4 left of the = signs.
If p4merge.exe is in your path and if you use p4merge as your identifier, then you don't need the executable line:
[code][merge-tools]
p4merge.priority = 100
p4merge.premerge = True
p4merge.gui = True
p4merge.args = $base $local $other $output[/code]

MVC Html.ActionLink() fails weirdly with routeValues parameter in Asp.Net

It seems simple. In an MVC view page you have an @Html.ActionLink with parameters for action, controller & route values:
[html]@Html.ActionLink("Some text","Action","Controller", new {id=1})[/html]
but instead of rendering the text with a link to the action, it renders a link with some weird URL that isn't what you want at all.

If you use intellisense to look at the overloads for ActionLink, you'll see that the overload you've got is interpreting new {id=1} as html attributes not as route values. You need the overload with one more parameter, which can be null:
[html]@Html.ActionLink("Some text","Action","Controller", new {id=1}, null)[/html]
And then it works.

.Net Assembly Binding Redirect doesn’t work – because you have an Uppercase/lowercase error in config

Thanks to Eran Stiller for spotting the fact that assembly binding redirect fails—with no appropriate error message or clue as to the reason for failure—if you used PascalCasing instead of camelCasing casing in your config.
This fails:
[xml]<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
<runtime>
<assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
<dependentAssembly>
<assemblyIdentity name="Moq" Culture="neutral" PublicKeyToken="69f491c39445e920" />
<bindingRedirect oldVersion="4.0.10827.0" newVersion="4.1.1309.1617" />
</dependentAssembly>
</assemblyBinding>
</runtime>
</configuration>[/xml]
because of incorrect case in the attributes Culture and PublicKeyToken. Make them camelCase like so:
[xml]<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
<runtime>
<assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
<dependentAssembly>
<assemblyIdentity name="Moq" culture="neutral" publicKeyToken="69f491c39445e920" />
<bindingRedirect oldVersion="4.0.10827.0" newVersion="4.1.1309.1617" />
</dependentAssembly>
</assemblyBinding>
</runtime>
</configuration>[/xml]
and now it works.