Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1
Posted on May 25th, 2009
Yeah I guess the title sums this up. Reminds me of how ridiculous it was when VS 2008 was launched and wouldn’t run on Vista …
I tried to get this up on Windows 7 RC1 and it installed fine but when it loads the screen doesn’t paint correctly. After a few clicks I just get the frame of the IDE and nothing else … freaking joy.
I _might_ be related to running in a virtual machine but either way it should work otherwise I’ll be stuck with VS 2008 for quite some time.
edit: I knew this would come back to bite me, no point hiding it. The readme has the solution about vmware 3d acceleration issues. Turn it off and you’re good – not a great solution but still a solution. I’m not sure who is to blame for the issue.
Tags: visual studio
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Netflix coming to Media Center
Posted on May 20th, 2009
Well here you go, right from the horses mouth.
I mean it has only been 2 years since the unsupported version of this plugin was released so right in line for MS to finally connect the damn dots.
Hopefully this version is more stable than vmcNetFlix which was ok but never really stable and I suspect they were stealing login information but anyway … that aside nice to have this now since with multiple xbox extenders I refuse to have more than one gold account I can now stream netflix movies all over the place :)
Tags: netflix
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IPhone applications and objective-c
Posted on May 19th, 2009
So I wanted to post a little about the things I’ve found now working with Cocoa and the application I chose to target first was an iPhone application. I haven’t really had much time to dig into a native mac application yet.
Firstly lets talk a little about XCode. This great IDE comes free when you own a mac – pretty cool. Unlike Visual Studio which must be purchased if you want anything besides the free version. XCode is a great IDE, it is fast and simple enough to use. Apple has included everything you need including performance and memory profiling tools.
The extensions to support iPhone development are totally seamless so that was a nice find. Once I started getting into objective-c I thought my eyes were going to bleed :) Really, it is too old. The future is with managed languages and the thought of any form of memory management is pretty lame but right now, I have no choice. If you want an iPhone application you’re going to be using obj-c.
The language did have a couple positive points, at least what I’ve discovered so far. The way it passes around messages is a cool idea. Parameters are named when passing values to a method. (msg) – this makes for more coding but it makes it a hell of a lot easier to read the code later.
I did like Apple’s take on controller and view separation. Even using a separate tool for the interface design is a great way to keep the UI developer out the controller code. Up until Microsoft released the new ASP.NET MVC framework all views and code behind files were tied together. Unfortunately for traditional ASP.NET and WinForm development this is still true.
So right now I’m impressed and enjoying the development process. I think Microsoft could learn a few things from Apple however …. I do feel strongly that Apple need to connect the dots and that their code needs to move to a managed environment. They could adopt Ruby more rather than just supplying the API bridge.
Tags: iPhone, obj-c, xcode
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Keep your GMail page closed!
Posted on May 19th, 2009
Just a little something here that I’ve noticed especially on my macbookpro which I routinely overload. I used to always have a browser window open with my gmail in it. Turns out GMail puts a lot of load on the browser process, way too much to just have it open all the time. I’ve noticed this in FireFox 3 on the mac for the most part.
Since I’ve had plenty of issues with FF on the mac it may just be that. Safari 4 beta seems much better but still, it generates too much load. I can imagine it is busy checking for mail and other things but it is not really an acceptable back ground process.
Of course on my workstation who cares … 8 cores can deal with it :)
Tags: firefox, gmail
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Rails, Grails and .NET MVC
Posted on May 3rd, 2009
We certainly do have a lot of choices when building applications these days! :) Here is a little insight into my latest project application choice. It might or might not work for you and it is not intended to be a guide per se since as good programmers know – pick what makes sense for your application.
I needed a new web application that was only going to be used for internal administration and so I could do something fun and not care about how it scales. Here are a couple key requirements so we can discuss over them. Firstly, I need page authentication and I have no need for a database since I’ll use SimpleDB so the DAL isn’t as important.
My initial thought was, lets just roll with Rails since in the last couple months I’ve been doing a lot of R&D using Ruby and Rails however I recently started some work on Grails and so the decisions begin.
Let me prefix first by saying I could have built this using .NET MVC and I believe that would have been the fastest way, sorry but it is – that isn’t bias for Microsoft just a fact especially since my skills lie heavily in that area … but I wanted something more fun :)
ASP.NET MVC
- Easy to use for sure, especially if you’re already a .NET developer.
- Tools are fantastic.
- Authentication is as simple as using the [Authorize] decoration on your controllers.
- Data is via an existing SimpleDB Provider I wrote.
- Doesn’t run well on anything but IIS
- No exposure to other technologies <- the fun part :)
Ruby on Rails
- I think Ruby is pretty easy to learn.
- The tools are getting better – don’t be a hero, use and IDE like NetBeans/Eclipse.
- If you have complex database requirements activerecord is going to be painful for you.
- I’ve found the community a bit broken with Rails, you can generally get help but not always the easiest to understand.
- Far too many depreciated gems floating around and even the Rails wiki is out of date.
- As for authentication, well nothing easy to find – does require more code than I’d like. Not sure what is best.
- SimpleDB access was OK but not great, relative name spaces break when importing classes while using Amazon libraries so that wasn’t cool. Had to hard code some paths.
Grails
- Just started R&D on this and I didn’t feel like jumping into Groovy although it is close to Ruby I’d rather learn one new thing at a time.
- Does have the huge benefit of running on the JVM and also being able to use existing java classes.
- Can be deployed on well established application servers, so that is great.
- Tools are ok, new at this stage but Netbeans seems to do the job.
- Authentication is ok, there is a good plugin but still requires far too much code for my liking compared to .NET
- I can’t find a Grails/Groovy SimpleDB library but there is one for Java so I guess I can just use that.
and then I found ….
JRuby
- Will allow me to keep on the learning curve with Ruby but
- Lets me deploy in single packages and do java application containers.
- Exposes me to more java technology.
- Tools are pretty good and I’m using NetBeans right now.
So that kinda sealed the deal. I wanted something fun and like Ruby so JRuby lets me keep that knowledge but also I get better exposure to Java technologies. You might wonder, “If you want Java exposure why not use JSP or similiar” … right, no thanks :) Keep it simple!.
I’ll post when I’ve deployed my first working JRuby application and I plan to run it on Tomcat/Ubuntu 9x.
Tags: grails, MVC, rails
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