I have spent this weekend at a codecamp around the Windows Phone 7 developer tools which was hosted by Trifork here in Århus. We looked at developing apps with Silverlight saturday and at XNA today sunday. It has been a lot of fun, and gave a lot of insights into what we can do with the tools.

Good news on deployment

Since I blogged about my initial thoughts on Windows Phone 7 I have heard a couple of good news around app deployment. First of all I was a little skeptical about the 99 dollar fee, when it is not possible to charge anything for the apps. The good news here is that the 99 dollar fee is refunded when you have deployed two apps to the market. So as someone put it at the codecamp “two fart-apps and you have your money back”. Besides that I heard that you can deploy up to 10 apps directly to the phone when you have the licence – so thats all good.

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Apparently I was not the only one who fell in love with the NU project, that I blogged a while ago. Microsoft just launched their own NuPack project which provides the same basic features, as well as integration directly with Visual Studio. As a cool sidenote it will be included in the install if you install the latest MVC 3 beta. To get started or just to see a quick runthrough of how it works take a look at Scott Hanselmans post on the subject.

This past week I went to a meeting at Trifork about Windows Phone 7, with very big expectations. As an enthusiastic .NET developer the prospect of Microsoft “getting in to the game” of phone development is incredibly interesting. My thoughts before the meeting was that I would probably be talked into buying one right off the bat, so I could get started with writing my own apps.

The meeting started out great with the presenter being all smiles, and with a lot of praise for the phone and the experience he has had playing with it and with the developer tools. He was also happy to show a little app he had written and talked about the nice experience of working with the developer tools and MVVM light. In spite of the presenter being happy about the product, quite a bit of the talk ended up revolving around limitations arund the software that you get out of the box, as well as limitations for the developer.

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These days a lot of people in the software business, including myself, do (or should do) some work to keep up with technologies, and what experiences others have. This includes quite a bit of reading both on misc websites and blogs. This can at times feel like quite a bit of work, because technologies that might be relevant tends to come in bundles, and if you wish to follow the relevant blogs it may be quite a few which means new updates every day.

These are a few of the links I have added to my delicious bookmarks within the last year. I am thinking about doing a “see which links i added post” once in a while, so this is just to get off to a start. This is also my trial run of Delicious Bookmarks Plugin for Windows Live Writerwhich seems to do just what it promises :)

• EF Feature CTP4 Walkthrough: Code First - ADO.NET team blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
Mærker fra Technorati: links
• Code-First Development with Entity Framework 4 - ScottGu's Blog
• Scott Hanselman - Simple Code First with Entity Framework 4 - Magic Unicorn Feature CTP 4
• 10 Commandments of Usability — David Laribee
• Mega Collection Of Cheatsheets for Designers And Developers | SpyreStudios
• Getting Started with HTML5 Local Databases « Dark Crimson Blog
• The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code - Joel on Software
• Everything you need to know about HTML5 video and audio - Opera Developer Community

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I just had a look at NU which is made to be for .NET what gems are for Ruby. Why should you care? Well if you are like me downloading new versions of miscellaneous open source projects and updating them along the way is not your favorite thing. It’s just tedious and seems to be a hassle for something so basic. This is where NU gives you a hand.

If you have IronRuby running simply open an command line and type:

igem install nu

Then when the installation is done go to the root of your projects folder (eg. D:) and type:

nu install <some_gem>

I started out running “nu install nunit” and “nu install nhibernate” and in less than a minute I had nunit, unhibernate, log4net, castle.core and castle.dynamicproxy2 unpacked to D:\lib like this.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been looking at quite a few new frameworks, tools and plugins. My focus area has mainly revolved around an app that I will be building that needs to pop and therefore it will make pretty heavy use of javascript and css - and of course by extention jQuery.

First of all dotLessCss deserves a mention, even though its actually not one things I looked at now. Basically it allows you to do some of the stuff you probably miss when working with css. Variables, mixins and nesting really helpes reduce all the repetitiveness. SquishIt is a little library I read about a while ago. It makes bundeling and minimizing javascript and css files as easy as can be. On top of that it also makes sure the files get versioned, so you won't run into users running on an old cached version.

In the category nice jQuery plugins I have looked at quite a few things. jQuery cookie addin makes it a no brainer to work with cookies. Watching a video from NDC I learned that newer browsers now support other ways of saving data on the client called sessionStorage and localStorage. As always the problem is compatibility, but there is a shim to fix this for IE6 and IE7, which are the main culprits.

I also looked at a few flashy jQuery addins, and FancyBox and Cycle solve a few of the things designers crave these days while being super simple to implement. Now that we are in the design department Cufón helpes you do font replacement easily, so you can use cool non websafe fonts.

Video is an area where there are quite a few options available, and it is becomming a jungle figure out which players support which formats and run in which browsers. Video for everybody is a simple way to implement videos in a way that will work across all the popular browsers. The idea is to use the html 5 video tag and then default to others where it is not supported. If being crossbrowser is not quite that important but designing the player is Silverlight has some great optios as well as flowplayer. Both are also easy to work with from javascript almost as straight foreward as the html 5 player API.

Lastly I saw a tweet about TopShelf and decided to try it out. Safe to say, I'll probably use it everytime I need to write a Windows Service from now on. It makes it just a little easier, and allows you to run your app either in a console or as a windows service.

Finally LINQ is supported in IronRuby now from v. 1.1 and I think it has been solved quite elegantly without any real syntactical gooeyness. Trying it out has been made very straight forward by looking at the 101 LINQ samples rewrite for IronRuby.

From day one LINQ has seemed a natural fit with IronRuby already having a similar approach with functions such as .each {|item| ...} which is accessible on anything that can be enumerated - very much like a big part of LINQ is extentions methods to the IEnumerable interface. No doubt there has been some challanges around how to map generics, extention methods etc between the languages, but syntactically it seems a natural fit.

products.where(lambda { |p| p.units_in_stock > 0 and p.unit_price > 3.00 }).each { |x| puts x.product_name }

Combining functional methods from LINQ with the existing Ruby methods just makes the "Integrated Query" syntax even better. So now we get a .each method with LINQ even though Microsoft originally didn't want to include it :)

This will probably be one of the shortest blogposts I'll ever write, and probably the one with the least amount of code - besides an occational rant. The reason is that like pictures sometimes say more than a 1000 words, so does elegant code.

It might just be me who is weird - but I think this way of doing eg. a strategy pattern is pretty cool.

This week I ran into a problem when we were deploying a webapplication that uses ajax-enabled webservices to an environment that uses loadbalancing. The services were running fine in the stage environment and when each of the servers were called directly, but as soon as we went through the loadbalancer they failed.

I started by checking if the svc files could be reached, and surely enough they could be accessed from the servers, but through the loadbalanced domain I got a 404.

Reading blogposts on the subject provided little help – well actually it just hightened my degree of confusion. So after some time I started thinking about IIS bindings. I remembered that I had written a custom WebScriptServiceHostFactory because we had several bindings which IIS doesn’t handle too well.

using System;
using System.Configuration;
using System.ServiceModel;
using System.ServiceModel.Activation;

namespace MySite.ScriptingService
{
    public class MyCustomHostFactory : WebScriptServiceHostFactory
    {
        protected override ServiceHost CreateServiceHost(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses)
        {
            //This makes it possible to control which binding is used by sorting them in IIS.
            return new ServiceHost(serviceType, baseAddresses[int.Parse(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["BindingIndex"] ?? "0")]);
        }
    }
}

I started playing around with which binding we used, and as I suspected if the binding was not the one for the loadbalanced domain it returned the 404. This was one of those “doh!” moments. I still had a problem though, because the site could be accessed both with and without the www subdomain. A colleague pointed to the fact that we could use the URL rewrite plugin for IIS, and have it ensure all traffic was directed through one of the domains. As it turnes out it actually has a CanonicalHostNameRule that does just this because its a SEO good practice. Only issue I had left was that umbraco on the other hand has a practice that it must be accessed directly on one server, so changes are made on the master and replicated to the slave(s). This just required extending the conditions so it does not redirect if the umbraco folder is part of the path.

So now by posting this I hope Ill save someone else from getting a few extra gray hairs, and if not maybe I’ll save my self some other time when I can’t remember how I did…