Mischa Kroon : General

A very nice opinion piece about: google and agile programming

Mischa Kroon — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 10:22:00 GMT

An article by Steve Yegge who I actually didn't know until he was included in a question session with some of the big names in the software industry a while back. A very good writer, anyway the article: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile...(read more)

A DAL layer that blows me away... ( Actionpack for .Net )

Mischa Kroon — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 03:14:00 GMT

Watch this and be blown away as well: http://www.wekeroad.com/actionpackintro.html A DAL which creates classes for Stored procedures, tables etc. And all that is needed to set it up is a * in a file. Home of this DAL layer: http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki...(read more)

Another free webeditor - Aptana

Mischa Kroon — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 07:26:00 GMT

Aptana is a free / open source project built on the eclipse RDT environment.

It's main focus is on javascript.

For which it brings a nice code completion / information interface and delivers hints and code completion for:

Javascript
CSS
and HTML

There are also quite a few videos about how well it supports the different Javascript libraries out there.

You can check them out here.

Parameter passing / referencing in .Net

Mischa Kroon — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 12:16:00 GMT

When looking at the following code:

StringBuilder first = new StringBuilder();
StringBuilder second = first;
first.Append ("hello");
first = null;
Console.WriteLine (second);

What would you think the output would be ?
If it is anything other then: hello

You will want to look at the following tutorial:
Parameter passing in C#

Must read article about performance

Mischa Kroon — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 02:43:00 GMT

Discusses common errors about:

Caching and forms authentication
View state and session state
Profile property serialization
Thread pool saturation
Impersonation and profiling

Keep Sites Running Smoothly By Avoiding These 10 Common ASP.NET Pitfalls

Some links and tutorials about Django

Mischa Kroon — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 11:17:00 GMT

2 Articles about Django from 2 different people:

Django: first impressions - overview with links

Django: first impressions - technical overview

The first one covers a lot of ground through it's links and is a pretty good starting point for Django.

The main upside of Django is that it gives you a very nice Admin interface with almost no work + it has a pretty nice template language.

Reading and writing excel files and other Ado.Net tutorials

Mischa Kroon — Tue, 30 May 2006 10:06:00 GMT

I've known for some time now that it's possible to use Ado.Net to read from Excel files, I didn't know it was also possible to write to them.

At least I have found a workaround by using SQL server and registering Excel files as an external resource.

Reading and writing from excel.

Other Ado.Net tutorials.

I have no idea how this performs but it should be an interesting alternative to using the

Other methods of exporting data to excel.

Developments in Ruby - Part 2 - Ruby and DotNet

Mischa Kroon — Sun, 14 May 2006 11:02:00 GMT

I'm hearing some people think:

Ok cool that Ruby is happening and all that but we are a DotNet Community site.
Very true, but there are quite a few links to the DotNet world going on and developing at quite a nice speed.

The bridges available now are:
http://rubydotnet.sourceforge.net/ ( - 2003 )
http://www.saltypickle.com/RubyDotNet/ ( - 2004)

And under active development and most promising:
RubyClr from: www.iunknown.com ( active )
http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyclr

This seems to be very usable, he already has some advanced things like Databinding ActiveRecord ( Ruby ORM ) and a huge amount of other stuff working.
There unfortunately isn't a recent download link at the moment so for this we will have to wait.

The bad thing of these solutions is that there is the performance penalty of using the Ruby interpreter for executing Ruby code.
there are also some other solutions in the works which are full blown compiler implementations.

Ones I'm aware of:
Wilco Bauwer is working on a IronRuby compiler.

Also a university in Australia has a Microsoft sponsored project going on for a Ruby.Net compiler.

These 2 currently aren't ready for production or even have any releases out, but check back in a couple of months to see how far along they are :)
Offcourse there is also another way to use Ruby in .Net apps and that is by the scripting bridge already

This can be done using ActiveScriptRuby and then enabling the good old MS Active scripting engine.

Offcourse one can also use this technique to enable other languages like:
http://www.mvps.org/scripting/languages/

Developments in Ruby - Part 1 - Editors

Mischa Kroon — Tue, 09 May 2006 12:53:00 GMT

Ruby's star is rising fast at the moment.

It's star is rising fast it even has the thought leadership at the moment according to Don Box.

IDE support is rising for it as well in the form of free editors and paid editors alike.

RadRails is going strong in the Eclipse camp, this isn't really a Ruby perse editor but an editor made especially for Ruby on Rails.
Which is also playing a very big part in getting Ruby out to the world.

The editor is good but there is still a lot of room for improvement when your main issue for productivity is a key combo to switch views.
Which in this case means switching from controller to view to model since we are talking about a MVC framework with Rails.

It is a great feature though :)

A new player in the field is, Sapphire in Steel which is an editor plugin for VS 2005 which hits a bit closer to home for me :)
They already seem to have a first draft of a debugger running, code completion and quite a few other things are also on their roadmap.

Looking very promising....

In the commercial arena, it looks like: Arachno Ruby is hard to beat.

But this isn't all, there are also some project underway for getting Ruby running on our sweet lil CLR.
Hopefully I will be able to give an overview of whats coocking in this department soon.

And this time a programmer takes your commands

Mischa Kroon — Tue, 02 May 2006 00:38:00 GMT

Ok, last one before getting back to some serious posts :)

http://www.subservientprogrammer.com/main.aspx

This one features a programmer :)
So I should be wel underway to serious postings once again.

Warning !!! - IE behaviour modified on: Active X / Flash / Movie content + Solutions

Mischa Kroon — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 01:21:00 GMT

Microsoft says that, from now on, ActiveX control activation will require that, "when a web page uses the APPLET, EMBED, or OBJECT elements to load an ActiveX control, the control's user interface is blocked until the user activates it. If a page uses these elements to load multiple controls, each interactive control must be individually activated."

This effects:
ActiveX controls, Adobe Reader, Firefox plug-ins, Java applets, QuickTime Player, Windows Media Player, etcetera

Excerpts from: http://www.emailbattles.com/archive/battles/ip_aadahdadhj_jf/

How to get around it:
use document.write to write the tags.

solutions:
http://blog.deconcept.com/flashobject/

http://www.bobbyvandersluis.com/ufo/

The MSDN Link

Asp.Net webserver alternatives

Mischa Kroon — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 23:13:00 GMT

When your on Windows xp Home Edition you can't easily host websites with IIS.

There are some alternatives the most well known is the cassini webserver, this has been enhanced a bit by various party's a good example of this is:

xNetserver which is a VB.Net port of Cassini with a lot of extra's built in.

What does it do:

XML file to set all security and configuration settings;

W3C Format Access logging to write connection data to disk;

Enhanced Disk Eventlog debugging (debugging Server errors or .NET handling errors);

Built into Windows Service;

Basic Windows Eventlog logging for critical server failures;

Specify the Port, Virtual Directory and Physical Path of the .NET web application in the XML file;

Direct File Handling and content-type handling for any configured file type (e.g.: SWF, JPEG etc.);

Security for maximum length of URI (Request);

Security for accepting either local or remote IP addresses;

Configure only specific IP addresses that are able to connect and process content;

Disable/Enable directory browsing;

Custom Version/Server Header configuration;

Security for handling only specific Request types such as GET, HEAD and POST;

Disable certain file extensions from being handled by the server;

Define multiple default document names for the server.

Apache 2.0 now also supports Asp.Net

http://httpd.apache.org/cli/ is the place to get mod_aspnet.

Limitations:

- It will only work on windows NT compatible
- It is .Net compatible not Rotor not MONO
- It needs Apache 2.0

Other then that it seems like a very good choice.

Ruby on Rails finally gets it's editor

Mischa Kroon — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 05:18:00 GMT

One of the big things in stopping people from adapting Ruby on Rails is it's lack of a good editor.

Now it seems that this is a thing of the past.

Some people have made it possible to make Dreamweaver mx 2004 into a good Ruby on Rails editor.

The howto for rhtml files.

The howto for intellisence on .rb files.

This is a very big step for Ruby on Rails.

More about Ruby on Rails and comparing it to Asp.Net will come later.

More on databases

Mischa Kroon — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 14:11:00 GMT

Today is another fine day to read up on some database knowledge:

A wikipedia article examining differences between the big databases.

and

an article about the different sql dialects

MySql developments

Mischa Kroon — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 10:54:00 GMT

Interesting development going on currently surrounding MySql every ones favorite sql 92 / ACID incompliant database.

MySql AB has recently transfered the license of MySql from LPGL to PGL.
For those not so well informed in what the difference is:
"using the Library GPL permits use of the library in proprietary programs; using the ordinary GPL for a library makes it available only for free programs."
And offcourse GPL code may not be used in anything which isn't licensed with a GPL compatible license.

MySql is offcourse dually licensed Commercial + GPL so if you want to use it for anything commercial then you have have to pay up, unless your making use of the web loophole:

"At present, companies that distribute GPL-licensed software must make the source code publicly available, including any modifications they've made. Though the rule covers many businesses that use GPL-licensed software for commercial ends, it doesn't cover Web companies that use such software to offer their services through the Web, as they're not actually distributing the software."

Ok, so the whole thing became a lot less .Net friendly :P

Now there is a new development on the MySql horizon: Oracle buys INNO DB

Which looks like a very tactical move by Oracle to crush MySql...
MySql 5 which just went into release candidate mode, might have looked a bit too much like a "real database".

All things said be very aware of where MySql is going... and if you have alternatives for a new project I suggest you have a good look at them.

Things might get ugly around MySql soon.