Mentally and Environmentally RoR and ASP.NET are similar. I don’t mean technically though. Some approaches and thoughts are the same, and there are many many differences. These are a few of my experiences on starting to learn RoR and remembering my learning of ASP.NET as well.

Background

I had a personal project I came up with to help me learn and remember Japanese. It is something that I haven’t seen before so would have been a fun project I could easily knock out in a weekend on ASP.NET, is fairly basic idea. However, someone challenged me to try to do it in Ruby on Rails, so I figured what the heck why not.

A little background on me is I like ASP.NET and it is my preferred framework, but I am open to doing things in other projects which is why I am decent with php as well. Ruby on Rails is something I have wanted to take a look at, but just haven’t taken the leap until now.

Digging Into My Experience

First, thing I did was try to get some legs on doing RoR. I know that I am a very visual learner when it comes to trying new things so I went to lynda.com and got the Ruby on Rails essentials videos and watched through the first couple of hours of the videos.

I have to say that it was a great introduction. While they were using an older out of date version of rails it was enough to get me started so I set out to start working on my app.

SQLite3

First hurdle was figuring out sqlite. I have never done anything with sqlite at all so I had to quickly get up to speed on this and fortunately it was easy. I find doing this a big nicer default over SQL Express, but nice to see a portable way to do db stuff. Also of note a more flat file type system is coming to .NET world so more mobility in development is going to be available.

Code Generation

If you talk to a few developers I know there is one thing I don’t like and that is code generation, I prefer to lean on a well written framework. I just plain don’t like generated code so I was happy to see that the script/generate stuff mostly just generated files and methods, no real code.

Built-in Server

One thing I love about ASP.NET development is I don’t need to run IIS locally and have some big app running in the background to view my sites I can just used the built-in web server cassini, and sometime soon IIS express. Happily RoR uses a “built-in” server, I prefer mongrel over webrick.

Good Language

Ruby took a little getting used to, but I tend to like it. I much prefer it over PHP and can say if I have any future projects where ASP.NET doesn’t fit I will move to RoR first over PHP. Ruby just looks so much better as a dynamic language than PHP so it makes coding easier and more consistent. A good well organized language is another reason I like C#/ASP.NET.

Hang-Ups

Much like learning anything else learning new things can be a bit tricky at first until you get used to it. I feel pretty confident with my ASP.NET skills, but it took a lot to get there. RoR is the same thing.

RAD is Fairly Useless

Much like ASP.NET RoR’s RAD is great for examples and trying to show the “power” of a framework. However, once you dig into it flaws tend to show up when you start relying on all the RAD code generated. I quickly hit this wall when I wanted to do a few specific things and couldn’t, this might also be my lack of knowledge on a few conventions.

ASP.NET is similar with its controls. There is a bit of use for them, but anything past the basics it is time to hang them up and get to some real work and good code architecture that is why I prefer ASP.NET MVC it is easier to work with.

Too Many Conventions

The “power” that is offered by convention over configuration is enormous and can offer some real speedups when it comes to developing in rails, I can see that. However, good documentation of these conventions are very sparse and confusing leaving me constantly confused by things that should seem fairly simple.

A specific example is path helpers and routing. I have, yet, to find anything that goes into more details than what scaffolding shows about setting up a route mapping so I can do edit_object_path(@object) in a link_to method in one of my views. While it “works” like it should there are conventions behind all of it I can’t seem to figure out, yet, making things not work right, so it leaves me using uglier solutions that are brittle.

Barrier to Entry

This is the key area that RoR is similar to ASP.NET and I could be totally wrong about it only using RoR for 1 week. Both seem to be easy at first, but things quickly get more complicated until you figure out more about what is going on in the framework, and the proper way to do things.

In this case RoR has one thing going for it, for me. I am not trying to learn a new language, a framework, plus a web framework all at once. I have good experience with MVC using ASP.NET MVC and CodeIgniter on PHP.

Much like ASP.NET/.NET world documentation is too advanced, most of the time, when it even exists in RoR world. There isn’t enough stupid people examples of how to do things. The benefit of PHP world is its the first thing a lot of new developers learn so there is an abundance of beginner, beginnermediate, and intermediate examples of things allowing people to grow a little more easily.

Conclusion / Next

This is meant as a chronicle of my experience doing RoR development so I am obviously going to misunderstand and do things wrong, but for now RoR feels like a big hill to climb like ASP.NET used to be. The key thing is I need to learn how things are done in the ruby/ruby on rails world to make life a bit easier. I am used to the .NET world so time to get used the Ruby world too.

I had planned to post on how I got my environment setup for doing RoR development using 2.3.8, but seeing as how RoR 3.0 should be coming out soonjust released I will hold off and start over from scratch on it and get a bit more technical in future posts.

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Working with most data storage technologies requires us to connect to some other source be it a database, or in the last few years, some sort of cloud based storage. As I was working through my latest project I decided to give Azure storage a shot for all of my images, and it was a quite a fun experience. However, most concerning was having to have a magic string inside my code somewhere. Here is how I solved the problem, but using the web.config connection string, it is super simple.

We are going to be using blob storage example for this case, but I am sure it will work for tables and queues. I will have to say that I haven’t worked with tables or queues yet so I am not sure how their connection string looks.

First, we need to set a connection string in the web.config file. It is just like a connection string for anything else and since it is all based on strings, in the web.config, it is simple for Azure connection information too.

<add name="AzureBlob" connectionString="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=http;AccountName=someAccountName;AccountKey=accountKeyGoesHere" />

Lets look at the BLOB connection string here is an example.

DefaultEndpointsProtocol=http;AccountName=someName;AccountKey=accountKeyHere

Notice there are 3 parts

• DefaultEndpointsProtocol – this is the protocol to use http or https to make the connection
• AccountName – you set this for your specific account you wish to access that you created
• AccountKey – this is a really long key that is generated for you that acts like a password

Here is a piece of code that I use to get my container from my BLOB storage account.

private CloudBlobContainer GetContainer()
{
    return CloudStorageAccount
        .Parse(this.connString)
        .CreateCloudBlobClient()
        .GetContainerReference(containter);
}

The key to this piece of code is the Parse() method. Using that method you can pass in a connection string and use that to connect if you connecting to azure outside of a webrole or a workerrole. If you are using a webrole or workerrole you will probably be running it inside an Azure project which comes with its own configuration information. If you are using the Azure configuration you can use the FromConfigurationSetting() method instead of Parse(), which is much more convenient.

I set out to figure this particular thing out because all I could seem to find were examples using the FromConfigurationSetting() method, but I wasn’t using an Azure project so I need a way to go outside of Azure. Most example code I saw was like this:

var storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString");

I actually setup a custom class since the images are only a small part of my project, so here is a little bit of it as an example

public class AzureHelper
{
    private string connString;
    private string containter;

    public AzureHelper(string connectionString, string con)
    {
        this.connString = connectionString;
        this.containter = con;
    }

    private CloudBlobContainer GetContainer()
    {
        return CloudStorageAccount
            .Parse(this.connString)
            .CreateCloudBlobClient()
            .GetContainerReference(containter);
    }
}

If you know of any other good ways to do this please let me know.

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This isn’t going to be your normal wordpress plugin tutorial series. We are actually going to build a useful wordpress plugin most bloggers probably would need. Especially bloggers who program.

Some of the most common reasons people build plugins are:

• WordPress functionality Doesn’t exist
• Plugin doesn’t exist
• Don’t like how existing plugin works
• Unable to find the plugin you need
• Want to create it yourself for experience

For this plugin it falls into, probably, most of those above.

What is the Plugin

By now you probably want to know what the plug-in is going to be. I’ll quote the concept so its better to understand it.

This is a plugin to allow you to manage your list of posts in the series you are writing. Instead of managing the list at the top of all your posts you can add a simple line to your page to manage it in the admin section of your site in one spot. So it is a table of contents for series.

The great thing about this plugin is it is simple enough to do a series on, but touches a lot of what other plugins do so you get a good feeling of how to do many different parts writing a plugin. Now we have what the plugin is for and will do, lets look at the steps. I like to do this by stepping through workflow of how you would work with this plugin, so we only get what we need.

Workflow of Using the Plugin

This is the workflow I would probably use if I had this plug-in.

1. Make a post
2. Make second post
3. Get links to both posts
4. Open the plugin admin panel in the admin section of wordpress
5. Create new ID for the series ex: 1, 2, 3
6. Make an easy to remember title for the series
7. Add Links to the posts in a text field
8. Save it
9. Add string to top of the two posts with the id of the Table of Contents ex: [toc=2]
10. Update the posts
11. View the post to confirm it is there
12. Make another post and add the string to the top
13. Go back to admin panel for plugin
14. Choose the title we created earlier for that series
15. Add link to the existing ones
16. Save updates
17. Confirm it all worked by opening up the post

That is probably the longest way to use this plugin, but probably the best way to figure out what is needed by figuring out the robust usage. These steps make sure you walk through your the usage instead of just thinking you know what is needed. Now lets figure out what needs to be coded up.

What to code

• Add Link to the Admin Panel in Settings section of admin panel
• Create page for editing settings and adding new table of contents
  • have a list of existing TOC listed by title with an edit button and id number
  • have text field for “title”, “ID”, and “all the links”
  • have save button for new entries and updates
• Every time the post is displayed it reads the code with the ID, and injects the links in
• On display options where it only shows summaries the TOC doesn’t show up

Those are essentially all the elements we have to code up. Though, doing it might be a bit more complicated than listed. As mentioned before this series will cover a lot of topics; below are some of the topics we are going to cover in this series.

Topics

There are several of topics with doing a wordpress plugin here is a list of the bigger ones we will discuss

• The Loop
• Creating Admin Section
• Getting Plugin to Show-up in Plugin section
• WordPress Database Access
• Plugin Hooks
• Plus more…

Conclusion

This hopefully is a good overview of what we are going to be doing in this series. Obviously once the plugin is done it is going to have an immediate benefit of using it on this series.

This is a good starting place for this plugin. In the course of writing this I have thought of many additional features which can be added to make life a whole lot easier and this plugin better. However, it would tack on a lot of extra posts, and would detract with the concept of this series; which is to hit many of the topics other plugins use without writing HUGE complex plugins.

I hope you enjoy this and any feedback is welcome and encouraged.

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Over the past month I have been importing posts little by little into wordpress. At first it was mostly for archival purposes with no real intention to really hit blogging again on here for a few more months, around summer. I have wanted to concentrate on my Japanese blog Dumb Otaku where I talk about Japan, Japanese Language, and Media. However, reading through my old blog posts, and removing the twitter like posts, I realized how much I like to program and want to get back to it.

Unfortunately, at my current job I don’t get do any programming I only get to make sure the programmers servers stay on, so not a lot of opportunity. I also realized I don’t have a portfolio either. I know, that I know how to program, but no one else does. Therefore, I am going to do a few different series of posts where I teach how to do different things to create a final product, website wise. I really need to have something to show my experience programming. While I have been programming for about 7 years now, on my own time, I don’t have anything I can show other people.

So long story short I am coming back to this blog. I plan to post about once a week so I don’t burn out again, and to kick it all off I am going to start the first series tomorrow with a post on wordpress plugin development. I have been helping a lot of people with wordpress lately and on my own. So while I will cover .NET a lot as time comes I will also be covering PHP and wordpress quite a bit too.

Hopefully you can join me, and offer advise or point out where I am wrong, if I am.

Thank You.

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Some people may not realize, but I like photography and will spend a lot of time looking at photography on the internet.  My dad actually was an amateur photographer for a while and took several classes to get better and has passed on a little of that knowledge to me.  The biggest problem is I have never had a quality camera that could take a quality picture.  Today I did a little bit of research on ultra compact cameras for around $200, and found an amazing one for the price that a lot of professionals said for the price is an amazing point and shoot camera.  So I got it.

This camera is to be a multi-function camera for me. I will try to carry it with me always so that I have the opportunity to take some pictures I have always wished i had a camera for. Also it is a camera that takes good high quality pictures (8 megapixels) so if I do get that good shot it will be a good picture quality wise. It will also get me started down the path of being a better photographer as it will allow me to take a LOT more pictures anytime I want so that I can get better.

As a test I took some pictures of our dog playing fetch in our living room and here is the results. Note that I know nothing about any settings on the camera at all. This is just me pointing and clicking after throwing the ball. So if they suck its not me. If they are good then I have amazing raw talent LOL

If you are into photography and have any tips please let me know what you think.  If you are in the market for a good inexpensive camera that takes good pictures I think this one is it.

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I want to thank all those that came to my talk. I have added the files for you to download. Just a note you will need to edit web.config file for connecting to the DB.

OOP_TechFest_2008_Presentation.zip (737.83 kb)

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I try to visit Pirate 4×4 when I can to read about jeeps.  The biggest problem is that the color scheme hurst my eyes after a while.  So I found out about Greasemonkey for FireFox and you can write custom scripts to edit "stuff" on a website.  So I found a quick piece of javascript code on a site for editing css and modified it for Pirate 4×4.  So to install and use it here are the instructions

1) Install Greasemonkey for firefox.
2) Visit the script home for "New Pirate 4×4 Colors" and click install this script on the right.
3) Visit Pirate 4×4 forums and seee it change the colors.

Note:

So that you know when you load up the page it will load up the normal colors then once the page is done it will execute the Greasemonky script and change the colors.

Hope you find it useful.

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So the other day I acquired a Tablet PC, been wanting one FOREVER. The great thing about having the tablet is now I can do my math on the computer and no more paper.  I also am taking a Japanese class at college to better help my cultural influeances in the world, heh not really I just want to understand anime I watch better.  Anyway one thing about taking the class is I am learning to write kana.

Well it is easier to learn kana when you can write it so I got the wild idea to do it on my tablet. I spent a while online looking for programs to let me write kana and recognize it. Then a friend showed me a link to someone using Vista and writing Kanji. That got me thinking why can't I write in Vista using the default settings. So i set out to figure out how and spent another hour looking online for a how-to. Unfortunately, I didn't find one, but I got very annoyed and just decided to figure it out myself and figured out how easy it was to actually do it. Just add Japanese keyboard to Vista. Its just that easy.

Here are the steps.

1) Open Control Panel.

2) Go to the “Clock, Language, and Region” section and click on “Change keyboards or other input methods”

3) With the new dialog box click on “Change Keyboards…”

4) Click on “Add…” to add the Japanese keyboard to the list.

5) Find “Japanese (Japan)” and select Japanese checkbox. Then OK.

6) Now you should see English and Japanese in the installed services area as an available keyboard to use.

7) Next is to make sure you can write.  Click on the flyout, if available, for the tablet pc writing area on the left side of the screen.  And you should see English and Japanese from the langauge selection.

7) Select Japanese and you should be good to go to start writing Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji.

That is it. That is the process for getting support to write in the Japanese language. I also note stroke order does tend to matter. I found that out trying to write ki in Katakana. I kept getting really really weird results when I got the stroke order wrong.

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Was looking at the lazycoder blog and saw a post on Herding Code podcast, sounding cool, I saw he posted on a “Back to the Basics” episode. I just want to be clear as I start this. I am a beginnermediate (not quite a beginner, but definitely not an intermediate developer) developer. I look and listen in my world at that level and base my conclusions on my skill level. The purpose of this post is to show a bit of the discrepancy between what an advanced developer would consider basics and what a beginner would consider basics. I do agree these are all basics, but I believe there are levels to them that should be clarified.

Below, I have categorized things the podcast hit on as basics.  I tried my best to put it in a linear fashion as what you should learn first to last.  I have also included a short opinion on each of these.

Beginner

Memory Management

This is defintely something a beginner _needs_ to know.  Not necessarily every part, but have a good idea of what is going on.

References (pointers)

This I agree is another thing to learn so you get a better idea of what is going with Memory Management.

Requirements

Here is the gold of what a beginner needs to learn.  If you don't know the requirements or can't translate those requirements to code then you will most likely fail as a developer.

Beginnermediate

Floating Point Math

This is one thing that should be learned and is important, but not quite as important as not knowing the above. This tends to be an extensive thing to figure out and to really grok so I put it in the beginnermediate area once you know the beginner level and the general basics of developing like: if, then, for, variables and the like.

OOP

This is one thing that is a basic to learn. However, it is HARD to learn for the real world. I learned OOP in a college class in one semester no problem. It has taken me well over a year to translate, effectively, that knowledge into real world applications, that aren’t games. This is a big must, but can be put on hold to learn whats above first.

Source Control

To me this is kind of a debateable topic as when to learn.  I think before you move to intermediate level programming level you should learn the basics of source control because it is at this point that you are going to be writing more sophisticated programs that are going to need Source Control.

Intermediate

Data Structures

Data Structures being an intermediate skill to learn is kind of misnomer. I think you should learn 2 to 3 basic data structures like an array or in .net generic List<>. Just something to get you by then later once you understand more and more go back and really learn other data structures. I believe this really would work out well because then you have probably coded quite a bit and will learn the data structures quicker and really know when and where to use them.

Design Patterns

This is most definitely an intermediate skill to learn. Design patterns are important to writing smooth pretty and effective software, but until you learn OOP really well or a few other things you are stuck in the land of “please just work”. Understanding and using design patterns from what I have seen just takes time and writing quite a bit of code before they make sense. I saw this because I have yet to be able to use them effectively and really understand when and where.

Dependency Injection

I put this in intermediate because I still don’t know what it is and everytime I ask I just get confused which means it is something beyond my skill level so I am defaulting it to the top of the list. Because of the not understanding problem I personally don’t think this is a basic, but I will listen to those more experienced than me and consider it a basic.

Concolusion

I guess I mostly wanted to do this post to kind of come up with a way to organize what and when to learn the basics. From reading and research ALL of the above basics are things that are used daily and very important to know, but not all of it is easy and can be learned quickly so it is good to break it down. I really loved this podcast episode because it is honestly not often I get to hear pro’s talk about the basics. The basics are something I strive to help people understand because it isn’t taught a lot online usually and _most_ of the time not well.

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I have been wanting to watch my videos that I have on my hard drive on my TV for a looooong time, but never seemed to have the right equipment that actually worked. Well yesterday a friend finally hooked me up with the right equipment and I have been playing with Vista Media Center since then.

First off, Vista Media Center rocks. I am loving it. I used to have to get up every so often and switch videos on my computer to watch from my chair or bed, not to mention mess with rotating the flat panel monitor. Well, now with media center and the IR Remote that is hooked up to the computer I basically have a TiVo like system going, minus recording tv.

Now along the way I ran into a problem, was user error. If you hit the power button on the IR remote it would send the computer to sleep mode. Not to big of a problem except the setting for windows was to prompt the user for a password upon resume. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem for I couldn’t seem to login or even get anything to display on the TV or my computer once I hit the power button on the remote again. So, I did the one last thing I could think of. Hard turn off of the computer.

That is when the problems started. Once I got it back up apparently some db got corrupted that no longer let me view the videos. So after reading for a few hours on the internets I came across the solution, and with a bit of guessing, to just delete the db’s. Only problem is I didn’t know where they were located as no where explicitly said where. After some searching I found out 2 things that are kind of important.

1. Media Center information and stuffs are stored in “Microsoft\ehome” folder
2. The media library database is stored in the “Microsoft\Media Player” folder

You can find the main stuff for Media Center at “C:\Windows\ehome”. That is where the executable and other things are located. Other stuffs are in “C:\Users\Buddy\AppData\Local\Microsoft\ehome” that will be important for other things besides this problem. Just letting you know file locations.

What is the most interesting though is that the media center library is stored at “C:\Users\Buddy\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player”. I was amazed because I figured they would store that info in the ehome folder.

Anyway, the problem specifically that I had was when I would go to the videos area of the menu in Media Center it would try to display all the folders, but wouldn’t. I could actually get it to do anything. Once I decided to delete the database information it reset everything back and I could finally add files through the monitoring folders of settings. Well once I did that it still didn’t work properly as the videos would only display in the “Date Captured” view.

So what was my solution?

1. Delete the database files at “C:\Users\Buddy\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player”
2. Unmonitor all video locations
3. Install 3rd party MCE application called Video Browser

That is it. Now I just use video browser app that I installed into Media Center as it works a lot better, but a bit different.

Install and Use Video Browser

Installing Video Browser is super simple. Just visit the site “http://code.google.com/p/videobrowser/” download the installer and install it. After that go to the Pictures+Video section of your Media Center menu and you should see a tab to the left called Video Browser.

Now the most important part to not is. VB only monitors your “C:\Users\\Videos” folder. So to add videos from other locations just simply create a shortcut to that folder or file and it will work. This works out great for me as I have a lot of things I need to watch so I only put shortcuts to my “To Watch” videos.

I suggest giving the Media Center stuff a try in vista it is a lot of fun. So much fun in fact if I am not careful I might make an app for it.

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