Oh the embarrassment!

I havent played a Windows game for years literally -- finally installed Prince of Persia 3D (itself not exactly new). Its been so long I couldnt even figure out how to get out of the first room. Thats got to be bad :-)

Gnustep

One of pleasing things of last few months was getting Gnustep to run under Windows XP -- why you might ask, the answer being it might be a nice way of playing with Objective-C. It seems nice enough, I havent dived in deep so far, but it is a definitely more pleasant than AndLunux for instance, there is the same slightly uncanny feeling of running something Not Windows but so far it hasnt been confusing.

Excellent. TDD xUnit in Ruby

Somebody else usually gets there first (fortunately) :
http://rubyeyeforthejavaguy.blogspot.com/2008/09/xunit-in-ruby.html

simply VB Unit

My sucessful conversion to the xUnit section of "TDD By Example" as mentioned in last post, made me think that the boot-strapping technique might be fun to try out with Ruby, Smalltalk and my old nemesis VB6. Looked at VBUnit site while thinking of SimplyVBUnit and realised from the steps that I never used SimplyVBUnit properly, hence my total lack of progress. This could be getting interesting. Will report more, but for me the problem was not having "Break on Unhandled errors" not checked. Cant think why not. (Didnt think is more like:-)

Zowee - into Unit testing at last!

I have languished at chapter 2 of"Test Driven Development by Example"
the classic by Kent Beck, but unfortunately after 3 years or so, I still find it nearly as unreadable as Craig Larman's majestic but insomnia-curing
"Applying UML and Patterns" -- so today I jumped to the half way point, like a bad murder mystery reader, and discovered part 2 which is a joy where he boot-straps a unit testing framework from scratch in Python.
It is completely enchanting and transcends the whole yawny 'you-should but why bother' reaction brought on by the first section. Almost entirely my fault of course, but the combination of starting from scratch and the test and run cylcle with an interpreted language just brings the whole business to life -- finally I think I am getting it

Great solution - whats the problem again?

On first glance this seems great but when you dig deeper it starts to seem to make less sense -- HTML to native? Isnt that the opposite of the way we are all going?
http://www.appcelerator.com/
Except almost definitely in the mobile space where pathetic describes the on-board resources and a bit of native would be a god-send.
Having said that the most attractive short cut would be writing apps for the iPhone without having to learn Objective-C (yuk twice, its always made me feel uncomfortable). But not on anything except a Mac with the iPhone SDK though -- why would you bother? Unless of course you wanted to build a Hackintosh first :-)

http://lifehacker.com/5351485/how-to-build-a-hackintosh-with-snow-leopard-start-to-finish

Another tech that wont die

'Classic' ASP is still out there, unloved and almost forgotten, but not by the programming community!
People have been working on MVC and ASP.Net-friendly frameworks for it ...
ASP to ASP.Net:
http://code.google.com/p/claspdev/
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/asp/ClassicAspFW02.aspx

ASP MVC:
http://robrohan.com/2006/09/19/simple-mvc-asp-framework/
(use 7zip on the zip file, windows doesnt recognise it as a file)

http://zend.lojcomm.com.br/goodies/asp-xtreme-evolution/

Nice article on web based apps

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/09/05/desktop-aps-versus-web-apps/
Some nice links as usual on SEO and suchlike (goes right over my head but however:-)
Also mention of Ruby on Rails, I must track back through his previous posts

playing with Django

the framework, not the guitarist :-)
Finding it very like Ruby on Rails so far, not a surprise. The pleasure with the two (RoR and Django) is that they pretty much Just Work and get out of your way, unlike certain other frameworks which pretend to be MVC. I've never been particularly a fan of MVC but there is a logic and rhythm to them when you work through an exemple with Rails or Django. Incidentally, on the language level I still dont warm entirely to either Ruby or Python, they seem like re-threads of Smalltalk -- but the web frameworks definitely know how to win friends and influence people

The joys of Project Euler

Many years ago (well, about twenty two years ago actually, but thats more than half a life-time, my life-time so far) I used to be able to do quadratic equations in my head. I only discovered this remarkable fact when I did a college maths exam and completely forgot that I had a calculator with me (at the time calculators were still banned in state exams so I had been used to not using one)
I had never been a math wiz, in fact I had barely scraped by and had been uncomfortable with most aspects of the subject. I only took it as a university subject because there were compulsory subject mixes and I didnt think I had a choice. Suddenly around age 20, when most real mathematicians are ascending to the height of their powers, I suddenly got it, became deeply interested and actually enjoyed quadratic equations, differentials and other arcane stuff. However, the opportunity to use them never really came up, and only over the last couple of years I was getting nostalgic and looking around for something a bit out of the way to stimulate my brain, and even borrowed an advanced post-graduate college text from a friend. But it has just been sitting there.
Then, about two weeks ago I stumbled across Project Euler. I'm pretty sure I had come across it before but it never appealed, but for some reason this time I was intruiged enough to join up. So far it has been great fun. Some of the problems are gimmicky, parlour game stuff and sub-Sudoku numerology tricks,
but some are serious maths and a lot of them are very hand for exercising your brute force programming skill. The forums are great as well, I felt that much more intelligent just reading some of the ingenious solutions other people had come up with. Interestingly, I have found myself using different programming languages, from the stage when the numbers got beyond the integer range of most of the older programming languages. It is a good test of the casual use of a language and interesting to see how flexible some of the languages are. I have been particularly impressed by Python and Ruby, although so far I have only got around to using Python. Less impressed with Ocaml, which doest quite do it out of the box, its legendary efficiency seems to get in the way of the casual user. Will probably also try out a modern implementation of Fortran such as G95 and Common Lisp and maybe some obscure Basic dialects for a laugh.

Das Bomb

I cant understand it -- I was doing a blogging software evaluation, got Wordpress and Textpattern to install no bother -- just followed the steps for Joomla! and all went well, had it down to about fifteen minutes by the time I got to Textpattern and both of them look fine, but I decided to go one further and try out Das Blog, being a Dot Net sort of guy.
Sadly, this did not go at all well -- tried the simple copy option and failed dismally, so then decided to try the Web Platform Installer route -- this was a disaster -- it may have been down to my virus checker, but first I had to install WPI 1 before WPI 2 would install and had to restart my browser several times. Finally, all went well, but it really didnt inspire confidence -- I wont be recommending Das Blog to anyone, either from a technical or usability stand point -- found it very bare compared to the competion

Sample Apps and Best Practices

I kind of like the .Net Pet Shop, and the lesser known French rival PetshopDNG -- a lot of their stuff is in, uh French, cos they are French, but some of if has a translated version www.dotnetguru.org/articles/us/PetShop20/PetShop_20.pdf -- because they come with lots of explanations about design decisions and so on, which a lot of sample and best practices examples dont. It would be great if there were maybe two teams on a lot of these projects, one to write the code and a second to document the thing behind in great details

Finally used to Vista

I'm finally at home with Vista, even the whole UAC annoyance thing -- I actually turned it back on :-)
And I'm moving towards Virtual PC as a platform anyway, so when there is something unbearable or unsupported I break out the XP or Win2003 Server image -- its not perfect but it beats having half a dozen PCs.
Ironic then that the Windows 7 hype is passing me by -- it installed very obediently, about 75 minutes, practically no stupid questions and runs smoothly. But am I bovvered? Not likely.
It er, looks a lot like Vista, and there have just been too many operating systems for me to get excited. I installed AndLinux the other week, which seems very nice, but again, bought the tatty t-shirt

Useful MSDN Article on Azure Blob Storage

The Cloudy in Seattle blog is always good, and this article is a good back up to the hands on labs on storage
http://blogs.msdn.com/jnak/archive/2008/10/29/walkthrough-simple-blob-storage-sample.aspx

he refers to the following MSDN article which saved my bacon
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd203057.aspx

I might have missed it in the Labs, but the on line one is very good, especially the note and table referred to:
"Note: The Endpoints listed on the summary screen are not the URLs that you will use to access the storage services if you are using the StorageAccountInfo type in the StorageClient library in the Windows Azure SDK samples. Please see the table below."

I dont know myself

After yesterday's experience - only posted today -- of the helpful Asp.Net message, today I find myself reluctantly praising Azure Web Services. A lot of rough edges, and I mean a lot, but as I do more of the hands on labs I get more ideas about how this could be A Good Thing. If the Good People at Redmond can restrain themselves and come up with a reasonable pricing structure, they could give Salesforce a run for its money. I need to have another go at Google App Engine, I was definitely taken with the Pythonic way of doing things, and all respect to Jon Udell, using Python on Azure Web Services as it exists at the moment seems well, a bit masochistic. Ta but no thanks.

Love at last?

I think I'm finally beginning to like ASP.Net -- it actually helped with my debugging -- I was so used to it being useless that I only noticed the very specific message when I had given up for the day and was shutting everything down, including the - as I thought - gratuitous aspx error page. Who would have thought. But after grinding away at it for five months, it could be the Stockholm Syndrome (where you end up liking your torturer :-)

Missing Something with Vista UAC

When you run an ASP Web site project in certain circumstances, it will refuse to load up properly if you dont sign into Visual Studio as Administrator. This seems bizarre in the extreme to me, only certain aspects such as changing the public directory structure of the website, copying the web site and changes to the database seem to be Admin activities to me, everything is should be runnable as a sand-boxed user, otherwise, what is the point of having security settings at all?

Language madness

Over the last couple of days I installed and got working both Iron Python and its big brother F# (Microsoft's reimplemenation of the OCaml language, itself a reimplementation of ML which is sort of a Python-esque compilable language for mathematicians which I have always been fascinated by but never managed to write anything useful with ... something to do with being able prove a theorem in fifty lines and taking ten lines just to open a file same as in C++)
At a loss how to try them out though, maybe I will follow Jon Udell and try writing Azure Services with them!

Arrrggh Part 2

I noticed that this week there is a new Microsoft Azure Services Training Kit released in the last few days, and dutifully re-installed the January Toolkit -- I see now there is a March CTP, but just for now I wont go there :-)
Thing is, I started back on the infamous WCF hosting example and to my great surprise, got it to work. Eventually. With some restarting and other tinkering, but nothing I didnt do back in January. So I havent actually learned anything, and to me WCF has yet to attain Just Works status. Not has Azure Services, but despite my self I am starting to like it. Fingers crossed so far.

Anders Hjelsberg

Interesting interview with the always interesting Anders here:

http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/04/an-interview-with-anders-hejls-1.html

If I understand it correctly he says that dynamic languages are a fashion because Java is too complicated but that they, like their ancestor Smalltalk, are great for small to medium projects.
That would be fine, but how many people actually do Really Enormous Projects from scratch anymore? In something like Grails, which sits on top of Hibernate and Spring, the scripting language is leveraging the non-dynamic Java platform under it, turning a Large project into a small one Anders is probably right (I am a compiled language fan myself) but for many, perhaps most non Java/.Net Framework size projects, it doesnt really matter. And the predicted scripting language disaster have yet to happen. As I said previously, despite the 'back to the future' feeling, I am won over by Python and Ruby and the other 'new' languages

I hate it when this happens

I finally got Groovy working on Windows XP. I did nothing different from what I did the last time, so totally baffled. It is only the second time I got it to work, and I never got much use out of it last time, so going to dive right in and see what all the fuss is about

Some successes

Installed and working with ASP.NET MVC -- very impressed so far.
Installed and working with DotNetNuke -- again, very impressive -- not completely painless, but quite smooth and there seem to be ways around any problems

Some fails

Continue to have problems installing Ruby on Rails on any Windows PC -- well it installs but never quite works properly. Mysterious. Also Turbo Gears. Also Groovy and Grails -- never got them to work at all on Windows

Online PHP book

I have high hopes for this online book, finding it a good read so far:
http://www.tuxradar.com/practicalphp

PHP - where's the code?

I had an amusing exchange with another programmer recently, he is looking into Drupal at the same time I was looking at Joomla! It wasnt a religious flame war, more a mutual moan.
"Dont know quite what to make of PHP" I said. "Yeah" he said. "Its great of course, but its not really like a programming language"
"Cant find structure" I said. "Must be there but dont see it yet"
"And where's the code?" he said.

And so it goes on. I dont know why I have such a problem, I even get Rails to some extent, and PHP is very reminicent of ASP and JSP -- I suppose its so long since a single line of script to run a GIF of a little man running around a box was a big deal that very short snippet of mark-up no longer does it for me as a persuasive argument. Still, lots of big site run PHP so I'm going to stick with it a while longer in search of enlightenment

WCF - a link to a link!

A link to WCF screen-casts by Michele Bustamente
http://www.simonrhart.com/2007/12/wcf-tutorials-and-resources.html
You have to register and they only run on IE 6 and above but might be worth a look if you prefer screencasts to just reading

A day of Ruby

Yesterday was a Day of Ruby. I'm impressed again -- previously my reaction to Ruby and Python has been ugh, more Smalltalk clones, back to the future again! But having warmed up this time, I get it a bit more -- some of the features, such as mix-ins, seem so natural that it's hard to believe they are not in more conventional languages, and never mind the excellent technical reasons why they are not.

Joomla

Wednesday I successfully installed Joomla! on top of the XAMPP stack on Windows XP, following the video tutorial
http://www.veoh.com/collection/screencasts/watch/v1802750A7Mnpe7z
Impressed. By both the tutorial and Joomla itself -- pretty painless compared to (cough, cough) Sharepoint - which needs win 2003 server in the first place

Oh Yeah! Unit Testing for WCF

Seek and you shall find...eventually. I cannot even remember what search term I used on Google to these, but for your delectation and information:


http://richardsbraindump.blogspot.com/2008/10/unit-testing-wcf-services.html

http://www.typemock.com/wcfpage.php

http://blogs.conchango.com/howardvanrooijen/archive/2007/03/14/Configuring-WCF-Services-for-Unit-Testing.aspx

WCF

As a result of the enthusiasm of the excellent Jon Udell blog, http://blog.jonudell.net/
I decided to give Azure Web Services, Microsoft's latest toy, a whirl. So far so good in that it seemed to be a GUI-fied version of Google App Engine...up to the point where I had to create a WCF service in one of the Hands On Labs -- then it all fell apart, and I spent a big chunk of the last four working days trying to get a (any) WCF service running in Visual Studio 2008, despite all the wizards and much searching of news groups and help files. Now, I may have mentioned before that I'm not your natural programmer, so maybe it's down to poor reading skills. Finally I found
http://www.thatindigogirl.com/ (the blog of the lady who is the WCF team leader) and downloaded followed the pdf of Chapter One of her book very carefully indeed, right down to cutting and pasting the configuration file text. As you would expect, she is very thorough and goes into so much detail that even if you miss something, as I still managed to do, there is suficient detail to cross-reference. If you are having trouble with WCF, I highly recommend her book, far over the other WCF books I have come across.
And so finally I have a working WCF service and all that remains is to get the WCF service in the Azure example working and then its off to the races. I hope. In four days I could probably have learned Ruby on Rails, is what I'm thinking :-)