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• Running Windows Phone Developers Tools CTP under VMWare Player - Yes you can! - But do you want to?

  - by Liam Westley

  This blog is the result of a quick investigation of running the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP under VMWare Player.  In the release notes for Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP it mentions that it is not supported under VirtualPC or Hyper-V.  Some developers have policies where ‘no non-production code’ can be installed on their development workstation and so the only way they can use a CTP like this is in a virtual machine. The dilemma here is that the emulator for Windows Phone itself is a virtual machine and running a virtual machine within another virtual machine is normally frowned upon.  Even worse, previous Windows Mobile emulators detected they were in a virtual machine and refused to run.  Why VMWare? I selected VMWare as a possible solution as it is possible to run VMWare ESXi under VMWare Workstation by manually setting configuration options in the VMX configuration file so that it does not detect the presence of a virtual environment. I actually found that I could use VMWare Player (the free version, that can now create VM images) and that there was no need for any editing of the configuration file (I tried various switches, none of which made any difference to performance). So you can run the CTP under VMWare Player, that’s the good news. The bad news is that it is incredibly slow, bordering on unusable.  However, if it’s the only way you can use the CTP, at least this is an option. VMWare Player configuration I used the latest VMWare Player, 3.0, running under Windows x64 on my HP 6910p laptop with an Intel T7500 Dual Core CPU running at 2.2GHz, 4Gb of memory and using a separate drive for the virtual machines. I created a machine in VMWare Player with a single CPU, 1536 Mb memory and installed Windows 7 x64 from an ISO image.  I then performed a Windows Update, installed VMWare Tools, and finally the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP After a few warnings about performance, I configured Windows 7 to run with Windows 7 Basic theme rather than use Aero (which is available under VMWare Player as it has a WDDM driver). Timings As a test I first launched Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, and created a default Windows Phone Application project.  I then clicked the run button, which starts the emulator and then loads the default application onto the emulator. For the second test I left the emulator running, stopped the default application, added a single button to change the page title and redeployed to the already running emulator by clicking the run button.   Test 1 (1st run) Test 2 (emulator already running)   VMWare Player 10 minutes  1 minute   Windows x64 native 1 minute  < 10 seconds   Conclusion You can run the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP under VMWare Player, but it’s really, really slow and you would have to have very good reasons to try this approach. If you need to keep a development system free of non production code, and the two systems aren’t required to run simultaneously, then I’d consider a boot from VHD option.  Then you can completely isolate the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP and development environment into a single VHD separate from your main development system.

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• My New BDD Style

  - by Liam McLennan

  I have made a change to my code-based BDD style. I start with a scenario such as: Pre-Editing * Given I am a book editor * And some chapters are locked and some are not * When I view the list of chapters for editing * Then I should see some chapters are editable and are not locked * And I should see some chapters are not editable and are locked and I implement it using a modified SpecUnit base class as: [Concern("Chapter Editing")] public class when_pre_editing_a_chapter : BaseSpec { private User i; // other context variables protected override void Given() { i_am_a_book_editor(); some_chapters_are_locked_and_some_are_not(); } protected override void Do() { i_view_the_list_of_chapters_for_editing(); } private void i_am_a_book_editor() { i = new UserBuilder().WithUsername("me").WithRole(UserRole.BookEditor).Build(); } private void some_chapters_are_locked_and_some_are_not() { } private void i_view_the_list_of_chapters_for_editing() { } [Observation] public void should_see_some_chapters_are_editable_and_are_not_locked() { } [Observation] public void should_see_some_chapters_are_not_editable_and_are_locked() { } } and the output from the specunit report tool is: Chapter Editing specifications    1 context, 2 specifications Chapter Editing, when pre editing a chapter    2 specifications should see some chapters are editable and are not locked should see some chapters are not editable and are locked The intent is to provide a clear mapping from story –> scenarios –> bdd tests.

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• DDD East Anglia, 29th June 2013 - Async Patterns presentation and source code

  - by Liam Westley

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/archive/2013/07/01/ddd-east-anglia-29th-june-2013---async-patterns-presentation.aspxMany thanks to the team in Cambridge for an awesome first conference DDD East Anglia.  I definitely appreciate how each of the different areas have their own distinctive atmosphere and feel.  Thanks to some great sponsors we enjoyed a great venue and some excellent nibbles. For those who attended my Async my source code and presentation are available on GitHub, https://github.com/westleyl/DDDEastAnglia2013-Async.git If you are new to Git then the easiest client to install is GitHub for Windows, a graphical UI for accessing GitHub. Personally, I also have Git Extensions and Tortoise Git installed. Tortoise Git is the file explorer add-in that works in a familiar manner to TortoiseSVN. As I mentioned during the presentation I have not included the sample data, the music files, in the source code placed on GitHub but I have included instructions on how to download them from http://silents.bandcamp.comand place them in the correct folders. Also, Windows Media Player, by default, does not play Ogg Vorbis and Flac music files, however you can download the codec installer for these, for free, from http://xiph.org/dshow. I have included the .Net 4.0 version of the source code that uses the Microsoft.Bcl.Async NuGet package - once you have got the project from GitHub you will need to install this NuGet package for the code to compile. Load Project into Visual Studio 2012 Access the NuGet package manager (Tools -> Library Package Manager -> Manage NuGet Packages For Solution) Highlight Online and then Search Online for microsoft.bcl.async Click on Install button Resources : You can download the Task-based Asynchronous Pattern white paper by Stephen Toub, which was the inspiration for this presentation from here - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=19957 Presentation : If you just want the presentation and don’t want to bother with a GitHub login you can download the PowerPoint presentation from here.

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• Finally, I have my HP 6910p laptop running with 8Gb RAM

  - by Liam Westley

  Today, I received two Corsair Value Select 4Gb DDR SO-DIMMs (from overclock.co.uk) for my aging HP 6910p to give it the extra lease of life to keep it going until the end of 2010.  And here is the proof that Windows 7 64-bit happily sees all 8Gb, There are no 4Gb modules are officially supported for the HP 6910p (they didn’t exist when it was first build).  I was taking a bit of a gamble, and relying on the UK distance selling regulations which meant that even if they didn’t work I’d be able to send them back, getting a full refund and only paying for the return postage. I’d read Keith Comb’s blog back in 2008, (http://blogs.technet.com/b/keithcombs/archive/2008/07/05/loading-a-hp-6910p-with-8gb-of-ram.aspx) where he mentioned ‘trying’ out 4Gb samples of SO-DIMMs in a HP 6910p laptop, but there still appears to be no mentions of running this configuration in any other blog. Seeing how the 8Gb of memory is used is made easier with the new Resource Monitor available in Windows 7.  With two copies of Visual Studio 2008, Outlook, Firefox (with 30+ tabs), TweetDeck (an infamous memory hog) and VMWare workstation running a virtual machine allocated with 2Gb of memory, you might have no ‘free’ memory remaining, but the standby memory is an awesome 2.4Gb, and once the VM is up and running the Hard Faults/sec hovers around zero,   It’s the page fault figure which really counts, because reducing that value means that you are preventing the Windows 7 system drive from being used for virtual memory paging operations.  Even after only a few hours of use it’s noticeable that disc access has been reduced and applications feel more responsive and ‘snappy’.  I did consider the option of purchasing an SSD to replace the main drive, rather than go for 8Gb of RAM, but I think I’ve probably made the correct decision. Given my hobby topic of virtualisation, I take the view that you can never have too much memory.   It was also a decision made easier by the price differential between 8Gb of RAM compared to a decent size SSD.  In the 18 months since Keith Comb tested the first 4Gb SO-DIMMS they have plummeted in price, at just under £100 per 4Gb, they are around a fifth of the price when launched. So if you ever wondered if a HP 6910p can handle 8Gb, now you know.

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• Killer content for my Kindle - The Economist with no need for an iPad - yipeee!

  - by Liam Westley

  I admin it, I was jealous of someone's iPad. They were reading The Economist, for free, as they were a print subscriber. I'm a print subscriber too. However, I don't have an iPad or an iPhone, just an Android phone and a Kindle. As soon as I got the Kindle, I looked up how to get The Economist on it. £9.99 per month. Hmmm, twice as much again as a my print subscription and I wanted to maintain the print subscription. No way Amazon. Fortunately some nice person wrote similar comments on The Economist subscription for Kindle, but added a very important additional nugget of information; and there is no need, as a print subscriber you can just use the free Calibre e-book creation tool anyway. So I downloaded it, searched for The Economist online 'recipe', entered my login name and password (part of my print subscription) and off went Calibre to screen scrape every single article from the Christmas 2010 issue into a .mobi file, complete with front cover image and full indexing. It's wonderful. Truely wonderful. Every section individually indexed, with each article separated and all inline images preserved. It even feels wonderfully retro, back to the days when The Economist only used black and white images. So many thanks the guys behind Calibre and The Economist recipe creators. Finally, I have my essential Kindle content that I've been waiting for.

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• Craftsmanship Tour: Day 2 Obtiva

  - by Liam McLennan

  I like Chicago. It is a great city for travellers. From the moment I got off the plane at O’Hare everything was easy. I took the train to ‘the Loop’ and walked around the corner to my hotel, Hotel Blake on Dearborn St. Sadly, the elevated train lines in downtown Chicago remind me of ‘Shall We Dance’. Hotel Blake is excellent (except for the breakfast) and the concierge directed me to a pizza place called Lou Malnati's for Chicago style deep-dish pizza. Lou Malnati’s would be a great place to go with a group of friends. I felt strange dining there by myself, but the food and service were excellent. As usual in the United States the portion was so large that I could not finish it, but oh how I tried. Dave Hoover, who invited me to Obtiva for the day, had asked me to arrive at 9:45am. I was up early and had some time to kill so I stopped at the Willis Tower, since it was on my way to the office. Willis Tower is 1,451 feet (442 m) tall and has an observation deck at the top. Around the observation deck are a set of acrylic boxes, protruding from the side of the building. Brave soles can walk out on the perspex and look between their feet all the way down to the street. It is unnerving. Obtiva is a progressive, craftsmanship-focused software development company in downtown Chicago. Dave even wrote a book, Apprenticeship Patterns, that provides a catalogue of patterns to assist aspiring software craftsmen to achieve their goals. I spent the morning working in Obtiva’s software studio, an open xp-style office that houses Obtiva’s in-house development team. For lunch Dave Hoover, Corey Haines, Cory Foy and I went to a local Greek restaurant (not Dancing Zorbas). Dave, Corey and Cory are three smart and motivated guys and I found their ideas enlightening. It was especially great to chat with Corey Haines since he was the inspiration for my craftsmanship tour in the first place. After lunch I recorded a brief interview with Dave. Unfortunately, the battery in my camera went flat so I missed recording some interesting stuff. Interview with Dave Hoover In the evening Obtiva hosted an rspec hackfest with David Chelimsky and others. This was an excellent opportunity to be around some of the very best ruby programmers. At 10pm I went back to my hotel to get some rest before my train north the next morning.

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• CoffeeScript Test Framework

  - by Liam McLennan

  Tonight the Brisbane Alt.NET group is doing a coding dojo. I am hoping to talk someone into pairing with me to solve the kata in CoffeeScript. CoffeeScript is an awesome language, half javascript, half ruby, that compiles to javascript. To assist with tonight’s dojo I wrote the following micro test framework for CoffeeScript: <html> <body> <div> <h2>Test Results:</h2> <p class='results' /> </div> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/coffeescript"> # super simple test framework test: { write: (s) -> $('.results').append(s + '<br/>') assert: (b, message...) -> test.write(if b then "pass" else "fail: " + message) tests: [] exec: () -> for t in test.tests test.write("<br/><b>$t.name</b>") t.func() } # add some tests test.tests.push { name: "First Test" func: () -> test.assert(true) } test.tests.push { name: "Another Test" func: () -> test.assert(false, "You loose") } # run them test.exec(test.tests) </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="coffee-script.js"></script> </body> </html> It’s not the prettiest, but as far as I know it is the only CoffeeScript test framework in existence. Of course, I could just use one of the javascript test frameworks but that would be no fun. To get this example to run you need the coffeescript compiler in the same directory as the page.

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• Executable Resumes

  - by Liam McLennan

  Over the past twelve months I have been thinking a lot about executable specifications. Long considered the holy grail of agile software development, executable specifications means expressing a program’s functionality in a way that is both readable by the customer and computer verifiable in an automatic, repeatable way. With the current generation of BDD and ATDD tools executable specifications seem finally within the reach of a significant percentage of the development community. Lately, and partly as a result of my craftsmanship tour, I have decided that soon I am going to have to get a job (gasp!). As Dave Hoover describes in Apprenticeship Patters, “you … have mentors and kindred spirits that you meet with periodically, [but] when it comes to developing software, you work alone.” The time may have come where the only way for me to feel satisfied and enriched by my work is to seek out a work environment where I can work with people smarter and more knowledgeable than myself. Having been on both sides of the interview desk many times I know how difficult and unreliable the process can be. Therefore, I am proposing the idea of executable resumes. As a journeyman programmer looking for a fruitful work environment I plan to write an application that demonstrates my understanding of the state of the art. Potential employers can download, view and execute my executable resume and judge wether my aesthetic sensibility matches their own. The concept of the executable resume is based upon the following assertion: A line of code answers a thousand interview questions Asking people about their experiences and skills is not a direct way of assessing their value to your organisation. Often it simple assesses their ability to mislead an interviewer. An executable resume demonstrates: The highest quality code that the person is able to produce. That the person is sufficiently motivated to produce something of value in their own time. That the person loves their craft. The idea of publishing a program to demonstrate a developer’s skills comes from Rob Conery, who suggested that each developer should build their own blog engine since it is the public representation of their level of mastery. Rob said: Luke had to build his own lightsaber – geeks should have to build their own blogs. And that should be their resume. In honour of Rob’s inspiration I plan to build a blog engine as my executable resume. While it is true that the world does not need another blog engine it is as good a project as any, it is a well understood domain, and I have not found an existing blog engine that I like. Executable resumes fit well with the software craftsmanship metaphor. It is not difficult to imagine that under the guild system master craftsmen may have accepted journeymen based on the quality of the work they had produced in the past. We now understand that when it comes to the functionality of an application that code is the final arbiter. Why not apply the same rule to hiring?

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• Short interview I gave about Commercial Software Development is now available

  - by Liam Westley

  At the DDD8 conference in January I gave a quick interview to Sara Allison expanding my Commercial Software Development presentation (available here).  The interview has just appeared on the Ubelly.com site, run by some of the Microsoft UK team,   http://ubelly.com/2010/04/how-to-succeed-in-commercial-software-development-2 For those of you for whom video just isn't enough, you can get Commercial Software Development in person at DDDScotland and DDDSouthWest.

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• .NET CoffeeScript Handler

  - by Liam McLennan

  After more time than I care to admit I have finally released a rudimentary Http Handler for serving compiled CoffeeScript from Asp.Net applications. It was a long and painful road but I am glad to finally have a usable strategy for client-side scripting in CoffeeScript. Why CoffeeScript? As Douglas Crockford discussed in detail, Javascript is a mixture of good and bad features. The genius of CoffeeScript is to treat javascript in the browser as a virtual machine. By compiling to javascript CoffeeScript gets a clean slate to re-implement syntax, taking the best of javascript and ruby and combining them into a beautiful scripting language. The only limitation is that CoffeeScript cannot do anything that javascript cannot do. Here is an example from the CoffeeScript website. First, the coffeescript syntax: reverse: (string) -> string.split('').reverse().join '' alert reverse '.eeffoC yrT' and the javascript that it compiles to: var reverse; reverse = function(string) { return string.split('').reverse().join(''); }; alert(reverse('.eeffoC yrT')); Areas For Improvement ;) The current implementation is deeply flawed, however, at this point I’m just glad it works. When the server receives a request for a coffeescript file the following things happen: The CoffeeScriptHandler is invoked If the script has previously been compiled then the compiled version is returned. Else it writes a script file containing the CoffeeScript compiler and the requested coffee script The process shells out to CScript.exe to to execute the script. The resulting javascript is sent back to the browser. This outlandish process is necessary because I could not find a way to directly execute the coffeescript compiler from .NET. If anyone can help out with that I would appreciate it.

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• Hyper-V for Developers - presentation from London .NET Users and VBUG Bracknell

  - by Liam Westley

  Thanks to both London .NET User group and VBUG Bracknell for allowing me to present my Hyper-V for Developers talk last week.  A weekend at DDD Scotland followed by two user group presentations means I'm a bit late getting the presentations uploaded to the blog, so many apologies if you've been waiting.   LDNUG - www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/LDNUG-HyperV4Devs.zip   VBUG - www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/VBUG-HyperV4Devs.zip Also, at VBUG Bracknell I was asked if you could configure a Hyper-V server to user wireless networking (which might be useful if you have a laptop for demonstrations).  Well here's the post from Ben Armstrong (Virtual PC Guy) which details how that can be configured,   http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2008/01/09/using-hyper-v-with-a-wireless-network-adapter.aspx ... and it's also detailed on the TechNet wiki as part of running Hyper-V on a laptop,   social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/hyper-v-how-to-run-hyper-v-on-a-laptop.aspx

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• Alt.net Seattle 2010 Photos

  - by Liam McLennan

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• NHibernate Error - Expression argument must be of type ICollection

  - by Liam McLennan

  The above error occurred when I executed a linq query using the following expression: (s) => s.Book.Slug.Equals(bookslug) && ids.Contains(s.Id); ids in this case is of type IEnumerable<Guid>. As indicated by the error message the fix is to change ids to ICollection<Guid>, then the query executes successfully.

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• Syntax Highlighting for Gherkin (Cucumber Language)

  - by Liam McLennan

  SyntaxHighlighter is the de facto standard for syntax highlighting on the web. I am currently working on a tool for publishing BDD specifications on the web and I want syntax highlighting. Unfortunately, SyntaxHighlighter does not support Gherkin, the language Cucumber and SpecFlow use to define BDD specifications. Writing new language parsers for SyntaxHighlighter is very easy, so I implemented one for Gherkin. Here is what a syntax highlighted Gherkin file looks like: # A comment here Feature: Some terse yet descriptive text of what is desired In order to realize a named business value As a explicit system actor I want to gain some beneficial outcome which furthers the goal @secretlabel Scenario: Some determinable business situation Given some precondition And some other precondition When some action by the actor And some other action And yet another action Then some testable outcome is achieved And something else we can check happens too Like all SyntaxHighlighter brushes to use this one you need to install the brush (shBrushGherkin.js). I have also used a custom theme to get it just the way I wanted it (shThemeGherkin.css). If you would like to use my Gherkin brush you may download the code and example page.

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• Seattle Code Camp 2010

  - by Liam McLennan

  Seattle Code Camp was a two-day intensive software development conference. Ostensibly a technology agnostic event the reality is that code camp continues to focus on Microsoft technologies. Notable exceptions were talks on Ruby and iPhone development. If you were not able to attend you can view all of the sessions online. Code Camp was a good opportunity to catch up with my friends from last weekend’s Alt.NET conference and also to participate in some great sessions.

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• Software Craftsman Pilgrimage Comes Together

  - by Liam McLennan

  Last week on Software Craftsman Pilgrimage I was trying to organise where I will be travelling, and the companies I will be pairing with. I now have a confirmed itinerary. 9 - 11th April Alt.NET Seattle 12th April Craftsman visit with Didit (Long Island) 13th April rest day :) 14th April Craftsman visit with Obtiva (Chicago) 15th – 16th April Craftsman visit with 8th Light (Chicago) 17th – 18th April Seattle Code Camp I am looking forward to all of my visits and talking to all the smart people who work there. I will be blogging my progress and hopefully shooting some video. If you are in Seattle, New York or Chicago and would like to meet up to chat about craftsmanship, programming, ruby or .NET please email me.

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• Changing Platform

  - by Liam McLennan

  From time to time a developer makes a break from their platform of choice (.NET, Java, VB, Access, COBOL) and moves to perceived greener pastures. Zed Shaw did it, jumping from Ruby to Python, and Mike Gunderloy went from .NET to Rails. But it can be difficult to change platform. My clients don’t come to me looking for  a software developer, they come looking for a .NET developer. This is a tragic side effect of big software companies marketing. If your village is under attack by bandits, would you turn away the first seven samurai who offered to help because you didn’t like their swords? What matters is how effectively they can defend your village. You should not tell your carpenter what sort of hammer to use and you should not tell your software developer what platform to use.

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• Commercial Software Development – presentation slide decks for DDD SouthWest 2.0

  - by Liam Westley

  Thanks to everyone who voted me onto the DDD SouthWest agenda, and a big thanks to all who attended the session and took the time to give feedback to rank me No.3 in the overall conference in presentation skills. There were some good feedback comments, which I'll try to make sure I take note of for future presentations. For those who came to the session, or even for those who were on one of the other tracks, I’ve uploaded the presentation for you to download.  I created a more simple, and smaller, PowerPoint without all the fancy animations and video clips, which is available as a compressed ZIP file,   http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/dddsw/commercialsoftwaredev-dddsw2.zip I also printed the presentation with speaker notes (which contain most of the information I was talking about) using PDFCreator, which is available as an Adobe Acrobat PDF here,   http://www.tigernews.co.uk/blog-twickers/dddsw/commercialsoftwaredev-dddsw2.pdf ... and if PowerPoint presentations don't do it for you, also thanks to Craig Murphy, you can watch a video of the presentation that I gave at DDD8 in Microsoft TVP, Reading,  http://vimeo.com/9216563

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• Software Craftsmanship Explained

  - by Liam McLennan

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• My Latest Hare-Brained Scheme

  - by Liam McLennan

  I have not had a significant side project for a while but I have been working on a product idea. Its an analytics application that analyses twitter data and reports on market sentiment. The target market is companies who want to track trends in consumer sentiment. My idea is to teach the application to divide relevant tweets into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ categories. If the input was the set of tweets featuring the word ‘telstra’ the application would find the following tweet:   and put it in the ‘negative’ category. Collecting data in this fashion facilitates the creation of graphs such as: which can then be correlated against events, such as a share offer or new product release. I may go ahead and build this, just because I am a programmer and it amuses me to do so. My concerns are: There  is no market for this tool There is a market, but I don’t understand it and have no way to reach it.

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• Craftsmanship Tour Day 1: Didit Long Island

  - by Liam McLennan

  On Monday I was at Didit for my first ever craftsmanship visit. Didit seem to occupy a good part of a non-descript building in Rockville Centre Long Island. Since I had arrived early from Seattle I had some time to kill, so I stopped at the Rockville Diner on the corner of N Park Ave and Sunrise Hwy. I thoroughly enjoyed the pancakes and the friendly service. After walking to the Didit office I met Rik Dryfoos, the Didit Engineering Manager who organised my visit, and got the introduction to Didit and the work they are doing. I spent the morning in the room shared by the Didit developers, who are working on some fascinating deep engineering problems. After lunch at a local Thai place I setup a webcam to record an interview with Rik and Matt Roman (Didit VP of Engineering). I had a lot of trouble with the webcam, including losing several minutes of conversation, but in the end I was very happy the result. Here are the full interviews with Rik and Matt: Interview with Rik Dryfoos Interview with Matt Roman We had a great chat, much of which is captured in the recording. It was such great conversation that I almost missed my train to Manhattan. I’m sure Didit will continue to do well with such a dedicated and enthusiastic team. I sincerely thank them for hosting me for the day. If you are looking for a true agile environment and the opportunity to work with a high quality team then you should talk to Didit.

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• Craftsmanship Tour Day 0: New York

  - by Liam McLennan

  Arriving at JFK, at dawn, is beautiful. From above 1,000ft I can see no crime, poverty or ugliness – just the dark orange sunrise-through-smog. The Atlantic appears calm, and I take that as a good sign. Today is the first day of my software craftsmanship tour. I will be visiting three of the shining lights of the software industry over five days, exchanging ideas and learning. Arriving on the red eye from Seattle I feel like hell. My lips, not used to the dry air, are cracked and bleeding. I get changed in the JFK restroom and make my way from the airport. Following Rik’s directions I take the airtrain to Jamaica. Rik is an engineering manager at Didit in Long Island, the first stop on my tour. From Jamaica I take the Long Island Rail Road train to Rockville Centre, home of Didit.

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• Lessons Building KeyRef (a .NET developer learning Rails)

  - by Liam McLennan

  Just because I like to build things, and I like to learn, I have been working on a keyboard shortcut reference site. I am using this as an opportunity to improve my ruby and rails skills. The first few days were frustrating. Perhaps the learning curve of all the fun new toys was a bit excessive. Finally tonight things have really started to come together. I still don’t understand the rails built-in testing support but I will get there. Interesting Things I Learned Tonight RubyMine IDE Tonight I switched to RubyMine instead of my usual Notepad++. I suspect RubyMine is a powerful tool if you know how to use it – but I don’t. At the moment it gives me errors about some gems not being activated. This is another one of those things that I will get to. I have also noticed that the editor functions significantly differently to the editors I am used to. For example, in visual studio and notepad++ if you place the cursor at the start of a line and press left arrow the cursor is sent to the end of the previous line. In RubyMine nothing happens. Haml Haml is my favourite view engine. For my .NET work I have been using its non-union Mexican CLR equivalent – nHaml. Multiple CSS Classes To define a div with more than one css class haml lets you chain them together with a ‘.’, such as: .span-6.search_result contents of the div go here Indent Consistency I also learnt tonight that both haml and nhaml complain if you are not consistent about indenting. As a consequence of the move from notepad++ to RubyMine my haml views ended up with some tab indenting and some space indenting. For the view to render all of the indents within a view must be consistent. Sorting Arrays I guessed that ruby would be able to sort an array alphabetically by a property of the elements so my first attempt was: Application.all.sort {|app| app.name} which does not work. You have to supply a comparer (much like .NET). The correct sort is: Application.all.sort {|a,b| a.name.downcase <=> b.name.downcase} MongoMapper Find by Id Since document databases are just fancy key-value stores it is essential to be able to easily search for a document by its id. This functionality is so intrinsic that it seems that the MongoMapper author did not bother to document it. To search by id simply pass the id to the find method: Application.find(‘4c19e8facfbfb01794000002’) Rails And CoffeeScript I am a big fan of CoffeeScript so integrating it into this application is high on my priorities. My first thought was to copy Dr Nic’s strategy. Unfortunately, I did not get past step 1. Install Node.js. I am doing my development on Windows and node is unix only. I looked around for a solution but eventually had to concede defeat… for now. Quicksearch The front page of the application I am building displays a list of applications. When the user types in the search box I want to reduce the list of applications to match their search. A quick googlebing turned up quicksearch, a jquery plugin. You simply tell quicksearch where to get its input (the search textbox) and the list of items to filter (the divs containing the names of applications) and it just works. Here is the code: $('#app_search').quicksearch('.search_result'); Summary I have had a productive evening. The app now displays a list of applications, allows them to be sorted and links through to an application page when an application is selected. Next on the list is to display the set of keyboard shortcuts for an application.

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• Less is more: The making of a 37 signals style pizza

  - by Liam McLennan

  For years now we have been hearing from 37 signals that the way to bake a great web app is to build less – well the same is true of pizza. Our western hedonism has led us to pursue ever cheesier and more stuffed crusts at the expense of the simple flavours. All we are left with is a fatty, salty heart attack in waiting. The Italians know that the secret to great taste is simplicity. With that in mind I decided to base my pizza masterpiece on these simple flavours: tomato sopressa (spicy aged salami) mozzarella garlic basil Of course the first thing one needs when making pizza is a base.   A freshly made base is extremely important but unfortunately I was too lazy. Next up is the tomato sauce. My wife made the sauce by reducing some tomatoes and adding herbs and sugar. We had selected some fine ingredients to make our topping: sopressa salami, fresh basil and the best mozzarella we could find.   It is, according to google, important to bake pizza at a high temperature, so I set the oven to 250C (480F). Here are the before and after shots: Meanwhile, the dog did nothing.

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• New York Alt.NET Dinner

  - by Liam McLennan

  While I was in the New York area Stephen Bohlen graciously organised an Alt.NET dinner. I left Rockville Centre on the 17:15 train, thinking I had plenty of time to get to Toloache Mexican Bistro on W 50th St. However, when I changed at Penn Station I took the service downtown, instead of uptown. I corrected that mistake and made it to 51st St, but then ended up in completely the wrong place because I did not understand the street numbering system. For future reference I now have the following rules for NYC navigation: Uptown means North, Downtown means South Streets run East-West, Avenues North-South Street number are symmetrical on the 5th Avenue axis. That is, street numbers increase from zero both east and west of 5th Av. Having gotten totally confused I called Steve, who helped me find the restaurant. I still had my luggage, which we stowed in a corner. Over some descent Mexican food we had some great discussions about Alt.NET, the 2010 conference, and other things of interest to Alt.NET folks. Thanks to Steve for organising and to all the guys who turned up.

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