Rake is a quite popular build framework, that has its strengths in the fact that it is code (no more xml), and it is very simple to get started with. Actually setting it up is a 3 step process.

1. Make sure the path environment variable is set to point at your ironruby/bin folder.
2. Run “igem install rake” from the commandline
3. Write a Rakefile.rb like the following and place it at the root of your site

require 'rake'

task :default => [:say_hi]

desc "Does quite a bit of greeting"
task :say_hi_to_me do
    puts "Hello me. Now that was easy."
end

task :say_hi_to_world do
    puts "Hi world!"
end

task :say_hi => [:say_hi_to_me,:say_hi_to_world] do
    puts "I’m, all hellowed out"
end

This really all it takes, so now you are ready to run your tasks from the commandline by writing: “rake” or “rake say_hi_to_me”.

Now for this to get really interesting you will need albacore which makes it easy to do all kinds of basic tasks.

This is installed with the command “igem install albacore”, and makes it possible to do builds and run unittests like this:

require 'rake'
require 'albacore'

task :default => [:full]

task :full => [:clean,:build_release,:run_tests]

task :clean do
    FileUtils.rm_rf 'build_output'
end

msbuild :build_release do |msbuild|
  msbuild.properties :configuration => :AutomatedRelease
  msbuild.targets :Build
  msbuild.solution = "TestApp/TestApp.sln"
end

nunit :run_tests do |nunit|
    nunit.path_to_command = "tools/nunit/nunit-console.exe"
    nunit.assemblies "build_output/TestAppTests.dll"
end

A couple of months ago I was starting to read about IronRuby, and while thinking about what my first little pet project should be I saw a tweet from a guy who was enjoying the combination with Silverlight. I gave the idea some thought and liked the idea of using a dynamic language to make a rich internet application. So after reading IronRuby UnleashedI started out doing a version 2 of my dotnetnerd.dk site – which is just a little toy selfpromotion site.

Getting started was pretty straight forward because with IronRuby there is a small webserver called Chiron, which can make a project template. All you have to do is open a cmd, and go to the library where IronRuby is installed and type script\sl.bat ruby <projectpath>

Armed with my starter template I began playing around and got my layout in place. I also tried using some 3rd party components by referencing some dll’s and all that basic stuff. Most of it went smoothly, but I did run into an assembly (Flickr.net) that threw an exception when used with Silverlight/IronRuby. Using it from a console project in IronRuby worked fine, so I quickly decided to just go directly against the flickr api using the .NET WebClient class. Running the site from chiron was as easy as calling script\chr.bat /d:<projectpath> /b:index.html

When I had the first couple of pages ready and had written a picturegallery showing the last 5 pictures I have uploaded to flickr I wanted to get the site deployed, so I would no longer depend on chiron. From my book and by looking at blogs it seemed to be smooth sailing, because chiron has a function that makes a .xap file which is all you need. To my surprise when I referenced the .xap file from the html file in my my project it looked like it loaded, but then just stopped at 100% without showing my actual site. I felt pretty stuck, because I had no exception or anything to go on, and my site ran fine when I was using chiron.

I then wrote an email to “Iron” Shay Friendman, who wrote the book that I was using as my inspiration. I thought it was worth a shot, and that I could not be the only one with that problem. Later that day he wrote back, and (as the nice guy he is) told me that he did not know the solution off the top of his head but he would look at it as soon as he had a couple of available hours. A few days later he had found a solution, and it turnes out a few things need to be done differently when running it outside of chiron. So this is basically what I want to share with this post :)

What you need to do is:

1) If your .rb files contain references like “app.xaml” it should be changed to app\app.xaml – in other words the references should be from the root of the solution and not from the app folder where the file is located.

2) Make the .xap file using the command script\chr /d:<projectpath> /z:<projectpath>\app.xap

3) In the index.html file where the .xap file is referenced find the like starting with <param name="initParams".
Change its value attribute to "start=app\app.rb,reportErrors=errorLocation".

And easy as 1-2-3, your site should work when running the index.html file.

Shortly put it really has been a fun project, and I really like the IronRuby and Silverlight combination, so it is definately not my last project where I will combine the two.

Since my last post Rob Connery has joined the team working on MongoDB, and he recently blogged about the latest additions he has made on github. I couldn’t resist taking a look at the latest changes, and even though there is still some way to go it is nice to see the improvements to the drivers for .NET.

My last sample is already depricated, so Ill shamelessly steal his sample, and modify it slightly just to see the new bits running with entities that I worked with last. So Ill recommend looking at the sample from the blogpost, since I’ll be using his session class.

First thing to notice from Robs sample is that I don’t have to think much about mapping classes to documents any longer. One thing that is already depricated even from Robs own sample is that it is now a requitement that the class has an identifier. So going with the simplest thing possible I added an ID integer.

using (var session=new Session()){
   session.Add(new Actor { ID = 1, Name = "Hans", Age = 40, Gender = Gender.Male });
   session.Add(new Actor { ID = 2, Name = "Eva", Age = 22, Gender = Gender.Female });
}

So comparing to Db4o, we are now closer to a similar experience. One of the things I’ll wait to look at, but I see as fairly importait is how either will handle Lazy<T> properties and other kinds of more advanced scenarios.

With the above objects saved the data can be accessed using a Linq query like so:

using (var session=new Session())
{
   var actors = session.Actors;
   foreach (var actor in actors.Where(a => a.Gender == Gender.Male))
   {
       Console.Write(actor.Name);
   }
}

The LINQ provider is still not too far along so I’ll leave it alone for now, but it is also one of the places where it will be interesting to compare e.g. db4o and MongoDB in the future.

Ayende, who most know to be one of the Guru's when talking about ORM's and by extention working with relationel databases came to a very interesting conclusion a couple of days ago when he received a phonecall. To parafrase his point in "Slaying relational dragons" in a few words, a very real and complex problem had one very simple and elegant solution - do not use a relational database. This acknowledgement is as a see it a strong incentive to take a look at what NOSQL solutions like document and object based databases has to offer. And his blogpost is something I would definitely recomment reading...

As the next step in my recent adventures into NoSQL country I decided to take a look at db4o. Shortly put I hope it will give me more than the document based databases, like Mongo that I have also been taking out for a spin.

My interest in NoSQL has been kindled further than it already was because of blog posts from Rob Connery, who looked into practical approaches and posts on CodeBetter provokingly entitled Using an ORM is like kissing your sister. Basically what they are all saying is that it is very limiting that we always start out with a relational database without even considering this very very important architectural decision.

Object vs Document

Similar to the document based database, the big win is that there is no schema, and no need to map between objects and a relational model. Actually with document based databases you do map to key/value pairs, so it’s not the whole truth, but still simpler than mapping to a relational model.

Mapping can be expensive in two ways – because it takes time to write the code, and it does warrant a certain overhead. On top of that db4o as an object oriented database has a concept of relations between objects. This means that rich querying capabilities are build in and that it performs really well.

When comparing to MongoDB the big thing missing is that it basically works on a flat file out of the box. So you need something to handle concurrency and stuff like that. Rob Connery posted a nice sample of how this could be done, and its really quite straight forward, because db4o does provide all you need to do it.

The basic stuff

In the interest of simplicity I’ll just sample how to work with db4o directly. Also this will illustrate just how straight forward it really is. The first thing that brought a smile to my face was how little I had to do to save and query a bunch of objects.

using (IObjectContainer context = Db4oEmbedded.OpenFile(Server.MapPath("myDatabase.yap")))
{
    var empolyeeToSave = new Employee() { Name = "John", Card = new TaxCard() { Number = "12345678" } };
    context.Store(empolyeeToSave);

    IList<Employee> retrievedEmployees =
        context.Query<Employee>(employee => employee.Card.Number == "12345678");
}

As you can see it’s very straightforward stuff. Besides this type fo querying which takes a predicate, there is also a QueryByExample, which works as one would expect. Another nice thing is that all calls to the Store method make up a transaction, so there is a Rollback method available. When the context is disposed the convention is that Commit is called for you, so when you don’t need rollbacks you don’t have to think about it.

Indexing is also possible with db4o, and it is also very simple to do, so if for instance I would like to apply an index for the name property on my Employee I could do this.

Db4oFactory.Configure().ObjectClass(typeof(Employee)).ObjectField("Name").Indexed(true);

Moving along

Some of the first things that I have heard people think about when I say object/document based database is how to handle versioning and querying. With querying in this case I mean how to enable a scenario similar to opening SQL Manager and writing some queries to take a look at the actual data.

The versioning part may take a little work, but there are methods to help with e.g. renaming directly baked in - and besides, it takes work no matter what kind of database your using. On top of that my thought is that both of these issues can be addressed with a dynamic language. My plan is to take a look at this at some point, and that it will fit nicely because my copy of IronRuby Unleashed should be on it’s way :)

I have been working primarily with ASP.NET MVC for a little over a year now, and this has prompted me to do quite a bit more Ajaxy functionality. So while doing this I have been looking at quite a few Ajax/Javascript libraries.

As most other developers I have been swept away by JQuery, which by far is the most important component when I am doing Ajax and manipulating the html DOM - see cheatsheet. Besides making a lot of these things easier, it also provides a wide variety of plugins that enable all sorts of shiny fancy features without much work. One of the very usefull ones that I find myself using on all kinds of projects is tablesorter- that makes clientside table sorting almost free.

Working in the Microsoft domain I have of course also been working with Microsofts ASP.NET Ajax Librarywhich also brings quite a few cool things to the table. Most basically it enriches the javascript experience by providing namespaces, intellisence and a bunch of extentions to the basic javascript type system. On top of that there are a lot of extenders to work with accordions, watermarks, listsearch etc. were most projects will find something that is useful to provide a better UI experience. The latest addition, that I am already very fond of even though it is still just in the beta version is templates. This gives us a easy way to do databinding on the client - one-way/two-way livebindings, and ways to do this both declaratively and imperatively. In other words it provides a rich templating experience and no more clumbsy string manipulation!

Next thing that is important when working with Ajax is having some solid libraries to do JSon serialization. Here I will strongly recommend JSON2for the client because eval is evil. Also a small but important thing to know is that data must be serialized and provided as a string when using JQuery to call a WCF service. On the serverside, I recommend Json.NET or maybe Json for the compact framework if you need something that is easier and more extendable than the .NET build in DataContractSerializer.

Finally something that might also be worth looking at to get better performance is using a content delivery network to reference the different scripting librarys. Here I will recommend looking at either Microsoft Ajax Content Delivery Networkor Google AJAX Libraries. Both seem very reliable and will give what you need, so its mostly a matter of personal preference.

Even though I have been pretty disconnected during the holydays I couldn’t help read that Rob Conery wrote quite a bit on his blog about his thoughts on Ayendes “EF vs NHibernate” discussion. Rob Conery argues that he is tired of these discussions and that we need to look at the NOSQL movement and instead focus on alternatives to relational databases.

I found this pretty interesting and decided that it was finally time for me to take a look at one of the document based databases out there. As Rob mentioned MongoDB I thought this was a good a place to start as any. Based on my experiences I then decided to do this post on what I learned about getting MongoDB up and running. So first of all, the steps to get a MongoDB server running are:

1. Download and unpack from: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Downloads
2. Create folder C:\data\db and make sure the server has read and write access
3. Run the server from cmd. Go to dir where you unpacked (eg: "c:\MongoDB\bin") and run "mongod"

You can now work with the database from the commandline, but to start writing some code you need to get a driver that suits you. In my case I went with a driver so I can write my code in C#. This driver along with a early edition of a LINQ library can be downloaded from http://github.com/samus/mongodb-csharp/downloads 

This is all you need to get going, so just create a new project and start coding!

A good sample can be found here http://blog.dynamicprogrammer.com/2009/11/10/UsingMongoDBFromC.aspx and if your into F# this might be interesting http://gist.github.com/218388

The first sample focuses on two ways to handle converting objects into documents.

1. Serialize object(hierarchy) into JSon using JSonConverter - which was the sample I focused on.
2. Make entities implement the IMongoEntity interface – which basically just makes your entity expose a Document property which then contains the state for the entity.

Of course I wont cheat you from seeing the bit of code I started out with, which is heavily inspired by the before mentioned blog posts.

//Connect to the database
var mongo = new Mongo();
mongo.Connect();
var db = mongo.getDB("movieReviews");

//Access the collection that you wish to work with
var movies = db.GetCollection("movies");

//Add a document
var movie = new Document();
movie["title"] = "Star Wars";
movie["leadActor"] = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(
 new Actor() {Name = "Mark Hamill", Age = 26, Gender = Gender.Male});
movie["releaseDate"] = new DateTime(1977, 5, 25);
movies.Insert(movie);

//Do a query
var result = from mov in movies.AsQueryable()
             where (string)mov["title"] == "Star Wars"
             select mov;

//Write out info from document
foreach (var document in result)
 foreach (string key in document.Keys) Console.WriteLine(document[key]);

//Deserialize and write name
Console.WriteLine(JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Actor>((string)result.First()["leadActor"]).Name);

//Disconnect from database
mongo.Disconnect();

You'll also need this simple class for the sample:

public class Actor
{
 public string Name { get; set; }
 public int Age { get; set; }
 public Gender Gender { get; set; }
}

public enum Gender
{
 None = 0,
 Male = 1,
 Female = 2
}

During the hollidays I was visiting some friends for a round of junkfood and movies. As one of my friends was showing off his new tv I noticed how his menues looked a lot like what I get when accessing my PS3 over the network. I know however that he does not own a PS3. so I got curious. It turnes out that he had installed a PS3 media server on his PC.

I had never heard about the PS3 media server before, so I looked into what it has to offer. It turnes out that it is a free application that makes it possible to allow access to any folder on your network through the PS3. This was a limitation that had annoyed me immensely when using the PS3 to access media on my LAN (my Synology NAS box actually was the one giving me a hard time), so I quickly downloaded and installed the media server on my own box. It worked without any questions asked, and solved the one thing that I was not happy with when using my PS3 to play movies and music. So I can only give it my clear recommendation.

Well this is one of those posts that start out being as a reminder for myself, since I had to do a script that I don't want to waste my time having to write again later on. Basically I ran into a customer who wanted week numbers added to a calendar. This seemed basic enough, but apparently getting a weeknumber is not a native thing in javascript.

First I picked up a script to add a getWeek method to the Date prototype, and I was a happy man. Sadly not customer not quite as much. It turns out that we do not follow the ISO 8601 standard for defining weeknumbers here in Denmark. According to my projectmanager the rule of thumb is that the first thursday always falls in week 1. This made me add a little extention so I now have a getIsoWeek and a getWeek method on my Date objects and this is how it was done.

/**
* Get the ISO 8601 week date week number
*/
Date.prototype.getIsoWeek = function() {
    // Create a copy of this date object 
    var target = new Date(this.valueOf());

    // ISO week date weeks start on monday 
    // so correct the day number 
    var dayNr = (this.getDay() + 6) % 7;

    // Set the target to the thursday of this week so the 
    // target date is in the right year 
    target.setDate(target.getDate() - dayNr + 3);

    // ISO 8601 states that week 1 is the week 
    // with january 4th in it 
    var jan4 = new Date(target.getFullYear(), 0, 4);

    // Number of days between target date and january 4th 
    var dayDiff = (target - jan4) / 86400000;

    // Calculate week number: Week 1 (january 4th) plus the  
    // number of weeks between target date and january 4th  
    var weekNr = 1 + Math.ceil(dayDiff / 7);

    return weekNr;
}

/**
* Get danish weeknumber.
* According to danish weeknumbers the first thursday always falls in week 1
*/
Date.prototype.getWeek = function() {
    var weekNr = this.getIsoWeek();

    var firstThursday = new Date(this.getFullYear(), 0, 1)
    while (firstThursday.getDay() != 4) firstThursday.setDate(firstThursday.getDate() + 1);

    if (firstThursday.getIsoWeek() == 2) weekNr--;

    if (weekNr == 0) weekNr = 1;

    return weekNr;
}

Not too long ago Microsoft released the Ajax Minifier, which can be downloaded from codeplex. It's basically just another javascript minifier, but the good thing about is it that the download includes both a commandline tool, an MS Build task and an assembly, so you can do your minification any way you like. Either way you wait to use it is very simple and it is explainted in the chm file which is included in the installation.

Today I finally got around to using it, for a HttpHandler that I wrote to serve some javascripts that I wanted to aggregate into one file and have them minified. It really took no time at all, and reduced my site from needing 13 files to 1 that was reduced in size by a little over 30%. All it required was about 10 lines of code in the HttpHandler (including handling caching). So basically what I am saying is that there is no excuse not to get this performance boost, since it is really low hanging fruit ripe for the plucking.