Weekly Web Nuggets #77

Posted on September 20, 2009 by John

Pick of the week: Programming – AKA: Paint By Number

General

Two Strikes, and You Are Out: Ayenda Rahien explains how seeing repeated bugs often indicates a fragile design, which is a pretty dire situation to be in.
MonoTouch 1.0 Goes Live: Miguel de Icaza announces the 1.0 release of MonoTouch, a commercial product that allows you to write iPhone & iPod Touch applications using C#.
AOP Can Save You Tons of Repetitive Code: Thomas Weller demonstrates how using Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) can significantly reduce the amount of repetitive code you’ll need to write.
S#arp Architecture has Moved to GitHub (This Ain’t Yo Momma’s SCM): Billy McCafferty writes about S#arp’s transition from SVN to GitHub and provides some good resources for others looking to make the same transition.
Getting to Know .NET Build Tools: Garren pits NAnt against Rake + IronRuby for .NET build supremacy.

Web Development

Shrinkr – URL Shrinking Service Developed With Entity Framework 4.0, Unity, ASP.NET MVC, and jQuery (Part 3): Kazi Manzur Rashid continues his series on building a URL shortening service using the next generation tools. In this installment he shows how to use compiled Entity Framework queries in a repository.
Let’s Make the Web Faster: A list of tool recommendations from Google to help with the overall speed of your site.
Announcing the Microsoft AJAX CDN: Scott Guthrie announces the availability of a public CDN for jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX. Michael Schwarz responds with a few very valid points of criticism that potential users should be aware of.
Integrating OpenID in an ASP.NET MVC Application Using DotNetOpenAuth: Rick Strahl demonstrates how to integrate OpenID authentication in an ASP.NET MVC application.
Ultimate IE6 Cheatsheet – How To Fix 25+ Internet Explorer 6 Bugs: Benjamin of Virtuosi Media has put together a great reference of how to work around hair-pulling bugs and issues in the browser we all love to hate so, so much.

Weekly Web Nuggets #76

Posted on September 13, 2009 by John

Pick of the week: How to Contribute to Open Source Without Writing a Single Line of Code

General

Microsoft Creates the CodePlex Foundation: Scott Hanselman announces the CodePlex Foundation, a non-profit organization created to help commercial software developers use Open Source software.
What the CodePlex Foundation Means to the .NET OSS Developer: Phil Haack shares his thoughts on how the CodePlex Foundation will be able to benefit .NET open source developers. He continues his thoughts in a follow-up post.
First Step In Troubleshooting Complex Issues – Define and Scope Your Issue Properly: Tess Ferrandez explains why the very first thing you should do when troubleshooting is to define exactly what the problem is. She also has good suggestions on how to zoom in on the issue.
SharpDevelop Now Creates Projects as 32-bit By Default: Daniel of the SharpDevelop team announces a seemingly backtracking change in SharpDevelop and has a good explanation of why it’s actually a good idea.
A Fix We Really Need In MEF for .NET 4.0: Nothing is more frustrating than encountering an issue in the core .NET framework that you are unable to fix, extend, or workaround. Kathleen Dollard needs our help to get one of those fixes into .NET 4.0 before it gets locked down.
Your Unit Test May Smell If.: Derik Whittaker highlights one particular indication that your tests might be getting smelly.

Web Development

Looking to the Future with Cassandra: Ian of Digg.com writes about their experience pushing a NOSQL solution – Cassandra – into production. Want even more details? His co-worker Arin Sarkissian has a follow-up post with more in-depth details about Cassandra.
Building Scalable Databases – Denormalization, the NoSQL Movement and Digg: Dare Obasanjo responds to the Digg’s post about using Cassandra by explaining at a high level what the NoSQL stuff is all about.
Shrinkr – URL Shrinking Service Developed with Entity Framework 4.0, Unity, ASP.NET MVC, and jQuery: Kazi Manzure Rashid is using the very latest tools to build a URL shortening service. Based on this first installment it looks like it’ll be a great reference! Also check out part 2 of the project.
RSSCloud vs. PubSubHubbub – Why the Fat Pings Win: Josh Fraser explains the differences between the two technologies behind the emerging real-time web movement. Even though he is a contributor to PubSubHubbub, his arguments are pretty unbiased.
Get and Set Querystring Values in JavaScript: It’s one of those things that really should be native but isn’t. Rick Strahl shows us how to do it.
Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Refcard: Keyvan Nayyeri announces the availability of a nice little reference document for ASP.NET MVC written by himself and Simone Chiaretta.
ASP.NET MVC – Using RESTful Architecture: Srinu Tamada explains what RESTful architectures are and how you can build them using ASP.NET MVC.
The Technology Behind Tornado, FriendFeed’s Web Server: Bret Taylor writes about the background of Tornado, FriendFeed’s recently open sourced web server.

Don’t Get Mad, Get Better

Posted on September 11, 2009 by John

I had seen this flash by yesterday, but today the story has hit mainstream. Apparently at yesterday’s Microsoft company meeting Steve Ballmer tormented an employee who was brandishing an iPhone. Should that employee have been a little more discreet in Ballmer’s presence? Maybe. Did Ballmer overreact? Probably. Should employees feel pressured to use only their company’s products? Absolutely not. Their company should make products that their employees want to use!

Don’t get caught with your pants down

Full disclosure: I am a BlackBerry user on Verizon. I live in Montana, where AT&T just doesn’t exist. Maybe they think there’s nothing here but cows?

In 2007 Apple turned the mobile industry upside-down when it introduced the iPhone. Never before had any phone offered so many easy to use features to consumers, and we ate it up. Before the iPhone smart phones were pretty much exclusively for business people and choices were limited, Windows Mobile or BlackBerry. Within months we were seeing phones being touted as iPhone ‘killers’, but that was far, far, far from reality.

More than two years have passed and there still isn’t anything even close. Many have tried and fallen short. Some of those have actually been really good phones, but still no iPhone. Why not? I’m certain that there are lots of incredibly smart people working at Nokia, LG, HTC, etc. We have Windows Mobile and Android operating systems that can run on many devices. How is it that the iPhone has gone so long unchallenged? Surely those in the mobile industry had known that something was coming from Apple, even if they didn’t know what. Yet that sat idly by churning out one generic phone after another. They had become complacent. A newcomer to the industry couldn’t possibly offer any significant competition, right?

Wrong. Apple has claimed about 13% of the smart phone market in just over two years, while Microsoft’s is sliding down past 9%.

You can’t really blame Ballmer for disliking the iPhone so much. Apple’s success has come at the expense of Microsoft and others, who were now scrambling to get something to market as quickly as possible. This marked the beginning of the cycles where just as soon as anyone gets remotely close to a comparable device Apple would release a new iPhone.

It didn’t take long to see that the iPhone was going to start running away with the market. At its launch it was the most expensive mobile device you could buy, but that didn’t stop thousands of people from camping out to get one. The day Steve Jobs announced the iPhone the Windows Mobile team should have put everything on hold to start planning its return strike. Each and every one of them should have been in those lines to get an iPhone so that they could really understand what made it so great. Only then could they really design a device worthy to be called a competitor. But they didn’t, and now they are playing catch-up.

Never stop getting better

This story applies to a broad range of industries, with software development absolutely being one of them. It’s relatively easy and inexpensive to take an idea and turn it into reality.it’s one of the reasons I enjoy what I do so much. But in an industry that can move so quickly you simply can not afford to let your guard down. To stay in the lead you’ve got to innovate in your product, or someone else will. If you become complacent you will get overtaken. And in the event that you do get your ass handed to you, don’t even think about getting mad.just get better.

Weekly Web Nuggets #75

Posted on September 6, 2009 by John

Pick of the week: Scott Hanselman’s 2009 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows

General

Finding the Needle in the Haystack: Digg’s Sammy Yu talks about how Apache Solr powers the Digg search. (source: Digg blog)
8 Techniques to Find Problems in Your Unit Tests Within 30 Seconds: Roy Osherove points out some simple sanity checks for your unit tests.
Don’t Delete – Just Don’t: Udi Dahan argues that maybe we shouldn’t be deleting data in our applications.
Booting from a VHD: Charlie Calvert walks us through one of the cooler features in Windows 7 – booting from a VHD!
New Features in CTP2 of ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 Explained: Nuno Filipe explains in more detail the new features in CTP2 of the next version of ADO.NET Data Services.
CodeRush vs. ReSharper: Jason Irwin is doing a very in-depth comparison of the two most popular coding add-ins for Visual Studio. After 2-3 weeks of testing the results are pretty surprising.

Web Development

Silverlight 3 File Transfer Application: Giovanni Montrone shows how you can build a little chat application with file transfers.
Simplify Iteration in Your MVC Views: Steve Sanderson takes a stab at simplifying the markup needed to iterate through a collection in ASP.NET MVC.
Reducing ViewState Size: Davy Brion investigates compressing ViewState by extending ASP.NET WebForms.

Weekly Web Nuggets #74

Posted on September 3, 2009 by John

Pick of the week: WebForms – FrontPage for Programmers

General

Writing Great Unit Tests – Best And Worst Practices: Steve Sanderson has a great must-read post about good unit testing practices. This should be of particular interest to those who are struggling to find that ‘aha’ moment when it all makes sense.
Identify Code Structure Patterns At A Glance: Patrick Smacchia shows how you can use Design Structure Matrices to quickly identify some common code structures.
Multi-Tenant Data Architecture: Microsoft explains the various details and tradeoffs with multi-tenant architectures.
Fun With Method Missing and C# 4: Curious about the new dynamic keyword in C# 4 but still not wrapping your head around how or when to use it? Phil Haack has a great example. After reading the post, be sure to check out the entirely different post just about the feedback!
Fluent NHibernate 1.0: Like what NHibernate has to offer, but the thought of writing fragile XML makes you shiver? Then you’ll want to check on the freshly released 1.0 of Fluent NHibernate.
My Enemy, My Self: Rob Conery writes an entertaining post about progress on a new project and how his own worse enemy ended being himself.
The Weekly Source Code 45 – Kicking Butt on Windows 7 *and* Windows XP: Scott Hanselman takes a look at how to take advantage of the cool new features in Windows 7.

Web Development

Silverlight And Localizing String Data: Tim Heuer demonstrates how to localize strings in you Silverlight application.
jQTouch: The first beta has shipped of this neat jQuery plugin for the iPhone, Pre, & Android devices.
Code Optimized Web Development Profile: As part of his VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series, Scott Guthrie has made this web developer smile from ear to ear – in VS2010 you can disable the designer view for HTML!
Windows Cache Extensions 1.0 for PHP – Beta: PHP on ~~IIS7~~ IIS just gets better and better.Ruslan Yakushev announces the beta release of a drop-in PHP accelerator for Windows. Be sure to check out his post about increasing the number of PHP instances, too.
Odd/Even Looping in ASP.NET MVC: Rick Strahl shows two options for odd/even parsing in ASP.NET MVC.

Weekly Web Nuggets #73

Posted on August 23, 2009 by John

Pick of the week: Code Ownership Also Means Code Responsibility

General

Should I Use MEF For My General IoC Needs: Glenn Block addresses one of the first/biggest questions developers have about MEF – can/should I use it for IoC?
Try SQL Azure Database CTP Today: The SQL Azure team announces the first public CTP of the reborn SQL Azure platform.
A Few Lessons Learned: Nate Kohari shares a few of the lessons he’s learned from running his own business.
Be A Good Jedi – Build Your Own Blog: Rob Conery makes some compelling arguments as to why developers/geeks should build their own blogs. As someone who’s been struggling with the same issues, I think Rob’s on the right track.
Disclosing How C#-SQLite Was Ported To .NET: Abel Avram sits down with Noah Hart to talk about the details of porting SQLite to C#.

Web Development

Moonlight 2.0 Goes Beta: Miguel de Icaza announces the beta of Moonlight 2.0, which is feature complete against Silverlight 2.0.
Rest For ASP.NET MVC SDK and Sample: Phil Haack introduces the Rest for ASP.NET MVC toolkit, which allows you to easily build restful services in your ASP.NET MVC application.
Adding Syntactic Sugar To The Spark View Engine: Karl Seguin demonstrates how easy it is to add functionality to the Spark View Engine.

Setting Up Google Analytics For Your Bitbucket Repositories

Posted on August 23, 2009 by John

One cool feature of Bitbucket is the ability to track traffic to your repositories using Google Analytics. Setting it up is simple, but there are a few subtle tricks. Here’s how to do it.

From your main Google Analytics screen, click “Add Website Profile” at the bottom of the screen.
If this is the first repository you’ve setup, select the option to add a profile for a new domain. Once you’ve done this for one of your repositories you can use the existing domain option.
In the URL field, enter “http://bitbucket.org”.it won’t let you enter the full URL of your repository here.
Click “Finish”, which should take you back to the main Google Analytics screen.
Find your analytics key for Bitbucket (i.e. UA-123456-7) and copy it.
Go to the “Admin” page of your repository and paste the analytics key in the appropriate field.
Head back to Google Analytics and click “Edit” on your newly created profile to bring up its settings.
Under the “Main Website Profile” click “Edit” and paste the full URL of the repository in the “Website URL” field.
It might take a few minutes, but the status of the tracking code should change from “Tracking Unknown” to “Waiting for Data”, and eventually to “Receiving Data”.

Now you are able to have some valuable insight into traffic reaching your repositories!

Windows PowerShell at the Billings .NET User Group

Posted on August 20, 2009 by John

As promised, here is my presentation from the other night on Windows PowerShell. Thank you to everyone who attended!

Just a reminder that we are having a guest speaker next month – Tim Huckaby – so be sure to mark Tuesday, September 8th, on your calendar!

Windows PowerShell – Billings .NET User Group – August 2009

View more presentations from johnclayton.

WordPress Gotcha: Upload Path After Migration

Posted on July 31, 2009 by John

I recently moved a few web sites running WordPress from an Ubuntu host to a Windows Server 2008 host and have spent the last few hours trying to figure out why I couldn’t upload pictures through Windows Live Writer. Once I got past a recent upgrade bug everything seemed to be working except the files weren’t being written to disk.

Out of sheer desperation I came across the following options screen.

See the issue?

Turns out that at some point WordPress wrote the full *nix path to that option and didn’t error when it couldn’t find the path!

Weekly Web Nuggets #72

Posted on July 27, 2009 by John

Pick of the week: All Programming is Web Programming

General

Windows 7 – The Best Vista Service Pack Ever: Jeff Atwood shares his thoughts on the recently RTM’d Windows 7 and how it is significant in an ecosystem where stubborn/uninformed businesses continue to run a 9 year old OS.
Windows API Code Pack V1 Released: Hot on the heels of the Windows 7 RTM is the Windows API Code Pack, which lets managed code easily take advantage of the new features of Vista & Windows 7.
Open Source Is Not A Zero-Sum Game: Nate Kohari responds to criticism over his releasing an open source project.
Top 10 Tips Working Developers Should Know About Windows 7: Scott Hanselman has a great list of tips & tricks for developing on Windows 7.
My Ideal IDE: Jimmy Bogard blogs about his ideal IDE where the emphasis is on the code editor and not much else.
MEF – Making Extensibility Fun: Martin Rue has an entertaining user story for MEF.
xUnit Browser Attribute – Run Cross-Browser WatiN Tests Effortlessly: Ben Hall demonstrates how easy it is to extend xUnit and in the process creates a way to easily run web UI tests across multiple browsers.
Linq To Mocks Is Finally Born: Daniel Cazzulino has added a neat feature to the next beta of Moq – the ability to use Linq queries to build a mock!
Scalability Best Practices: A good list of scalability best practices – some ~~pretty~~ hopefully obvious, others not so much.

Web Development

Spark Output Caching: Louis DeJardin writes about the latest feature of the Spark view engine – the ability to do granular output caching.
ASP.NET MVC V2 Preview 1 Released: Didn’t ASP.NET MVC just RTM? Yes! And there’s already v2 bits? Yes! Scott Guthrie has the details of the first drop of ASP.NET MVC v2.
Single Project Area With ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 1: Phil Haack is already showing off the extensibility of latest ASP.NET MVC v2 bits.
Building Silverlight 2 and 3 Applications with Visual Studio 2008: Tim Heuer demonstrates how you can work with both v2 and v3 Silverlight projects using Visual Studio 2008.
The Definitive Guide to GET vs. POST: Fahed Bizzari has put together a very nice guide to choosing between GET and POST requests.
Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC: Telerik is offering a set of UI extensions for ASP.NET MVC for free!
Firefox and IE Deal With No-Cache Differently: Sriram Krishnan shares his findings after digging into a weird HTTP caching problem.