If done correctly, an application can reside anywhere in the file system and be deployed to a virtual directory at any depth without causing a problem with URL resolution. In the code-behind of a web-forms page, the code is simple:

string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("~/somefolder/myfile.xml");

However doing this from another page involves just a little bit more work:

Using System.Web;
string physicalPath = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/somefilder/myfile.xml");

It’s really quite straightforward when you see it, and I can’t believe that I forget how to do it. This method will also provide you access to lots of other useful objects which makeup the “state” of the application from an HTTP perspective.

One of the things that changes when you have a new baby is the amount of time you can spend on yourself and your own hobbies and pursuits. I used to spend upwards of 4-6 hours every day outside of work on the computer blogging, coding, or otherwise toiling in one digital adventure or another. Now I find that the number ranges somewhere in the range of 0-2 hours per day. That is a pretty drastic reduction no matter how you slice it (about 80% for those of you scoring at home).

There are a number of projects that I have started and stopped over the past few years each of them trying to build a better mousetrap, or re-make something from scratch just to see if I could do it. With the limited time available to me now, I have become more focused on wanting to actually do more with the time I have — this means not reinventing the wheel every chance I get.

My wife and I have both found that we have become far more effective with our time, getting more done with less time than we ever have before. In the past couple of months I have started to extend that to my digital life as well. Gone are the days when I focused on a writing a to-do list, a backup utility, a blogging engine, a photo manager or a disk-erasing tool. There are lots of great (free) tools out there which can handle those tasks very well, even if they don’t satisfy all my neurotic desires (like how my historic completed work tasks should be handled, cataloged and stored for reporting purposes (you know, for when I will pull metrics on my completed work)).

I have also decided that diving in to learn a new, modern programming language is probably something that would realistically take more time than I’m willing to devote to the enterprise. Python, Ruby, Java, and the ASP.NET MVC framework are all on my list, but are undergoing changes and enhancements so frequently that I’m having trouble keeping up with what’s out there, nevermind trying to actually learn the stuff. But I do want to become a productive programmer in some language outside the rather constrained, and somewhat self-imposed, .NET bubble in which I have spent the majority of my professional career. Ideally I would like to write in something that I can port between operating systems without too much headache. Being able to produce code that will run on anyone’s machine is a great asset — especially when you have Windows, Mac and Linux machines in your own house to start with.

So the question is what can I learn that will allow me to:

1. write code for multiple platforms
2. grow as a developer
3. not have to keep up with constant enhancements

The answer I came to was 42 C. It seems to satisfy all of the criteria above for me in a way that other languages don’t.

C is by nature intended to be a multi-platform system. If you’re able to confine your applications to CGI or the command-line this is made even easier.

C also requires developers to know much more about how computers and compilers work than more contemporary languages like C#, Java or Python. Though it arguably makes programming more difficult, I think it will help me become a better programmer over time as I learn some of the trickier parts of getting a computer to do what I want it to do.

The current ANSI standard specification for C was introduced in 1999. This means that for the past 12 years, the standard for C programming has remained essentially unchanged. This makes C a good choice for someone who doesn’t have a great deal of time to keep up with changes and enhancements in the specification.

For all these reasons, and my own simple curiosity I’m embarking on an adventure to learn and become proficient in C. I make no assertions that I’m trying to master the language as I can’t see myself getting beyond the hobbyist or perhaps open-source contributor stages. I do have some ideas for the first couple of projects I would like to tackle once I get the basics out of the way. Hopefully I’ll be able to release some source code back into the world over the next year or two — after all, I’m in no hurry.

UPDATE 12-Apr-2011: After some fantastic discussion elsewhere I’ve modified the code to handle a number of additional scenarios. A point was also raised that a combination of Int64.TryParse() and Decimal.TryParse() would accomplish the same thing. They would, almost, but those methods test for valid 64-bit integers and valid 64-bit decimals — they don’t test whether a string is numeric. Feed them a long enough string of numbers and they’ll return false. It’s a pretty fine distinction, I grant that, but I figured since I was writing the code I might as well make it as robust as possible.

        public static bool IsNumeric(string s)
        {
            return IsNumeric(s, false);
        }

        public static bool IsNumeric(string s, bool allowDecimal)
        {
            bool result = true;
            if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(s))
            {
                return false;
            }

            if (s.StartsWith("-"))
            {
                s = s.Substring(1);
            }

            char[] chars = s.ToCharArray();

            if (allowDecimal)
            {
                bool decimalFound = false;
                foreach (char c in chars)
                {
                    if (c == '.' && !decimalFound)
                    {
                        decimalFound = true;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        result = result & (char.IsNumber(c));
                    }
                }
            }
            else
            {
                foreach (char c in chars)
                {
                    result = result & char.IsNumber(c);
                }
            }

            return result;
        }

I built 14 39 unit tests for this on the project I built it for throwing all sorts of weird and null data at it, and it seems to run fairly well and reasonably quickly. Any comments/suggestions are welcome.

So I said to myself: “Self! You can write code, build the damn thing yourslef!”. So I did.

The initial version of the library has been published up on Google Code and is probably full of holes. If you’re interested, have a look and let me know what you think.  I’ll try to publish some more detailed specs for what the library does in the coming weeks.

For now, it can get got at: http://code.google.com/p/epubsharp/ — and yes, the documentation on that page is as sparse as it is here. 

The new show called Short Order Code. The show will be a
series of audio podcasts and video screencasts focusing on a number of
areas of practical software development.

The first episode is out now, and the next few are in various stages of being produced while I put together the final bits and pieces and trying to sort out my process.  Once that’s done and the first few episodes have been put together
I’ll try to provide more information around long-term plans for the
show.

For those who may be wondering, this is not going to affect my
affiliation with the Aussie Geek Podcast (despite our . I love doing the show, and plan to continue in my co-hosting role for the foreseeable future as long as the AGP community is willing to have me. Time zone considerations will probably continue to make a mess of our schedule, but we’ll do our best to produce a great show for the community as often as we possibly can.

So keep your eyes peeled for more information, and head on over to the website at shortordercode.com and subscribe to the feed!

In some of my relaxation time (while babysitting my sleeping 7-month old niece) I got the chance to do a bit of software development. My brother-in-law and I got to talking one night about a project he was hoping to get some help with. He had asked me as an adviser, and since the work was similar to things I’d done for work in the past I felt compelled to offer to help.

The project itself was simple enough: take this text file and put its contents into an Access database. The process has reminded me about why I like software development, and why I miss it.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks we went through a half-dozen iterations of the application, much in the same way that I would have worked with end-users inside our business unit at work.  It allowed me to work through a problem, understanding the true nature of the business problem that he was trying to solve, not necessarily just the problem as it was described in the initial requirements discussion.

I had the chance to pull out skills that I hadn’t exercised much in the past couple of years since my job role has changed, which was a great shift for me.  It’s given me the push I needed to get the podcast going, and to dive in to a few of my other projects with a bit more gusto.  Software is a craft, and its one that I need to continue to hone as time moves forward.  I could probably be considered little more than an apprentice right now, but with the entire Internet as my journeyman instructor I should be able to earn my ticket in the months to come.

During a recent vacation I had the opportunity to help my brother-in-law with a project. It took a few iterations but we managed to get some code written which fulfilled the need in just a few nights’ work. Though the complexity was about the same as my own small personal projects, this project was different.  It was for a client — albeit a client who I wasn’t charging money for the work.  Someone else was going to read and maintain this code so I knew that I had to take some measures that I hadn’t been used to taking recently.

The first was refactoring. I refactored the crap out of this application — and for the most part things worked out nicely. I was able to turn all my poorly named and one-character variable names into elements and objects with meaningful monikers.

Commenting was the next step.  After the refactoring was completed I could move on to the next step of the application which was to put in some descriptive comments in the applications.  These comments describe not the what, but the why.   This is the approach I’ve tried to take relying on good naming within the application to describe the what, and comments to provide rationale.

The final thing I did was take my brother-in-law through the code.  He has a background in software but has never done much in the way of OO (he writes Cobol) and hasn’t ever worked with the .NET languages.  In doing the walkthrough we came across a few minor issues and a couple of small enhancements for the application.

All told I spent about 25 hours working on this project, and in that short amount of time, I really did begin to regain my programming chops.  I’ve got a ways to go yet before I get to a level that I’d be comfortable with, but it’s a start.

The site is focused on the interaction between software developers which is truly how most of us learn the best — by working with, interacting with and drawing on the wisdom of other developers.

The site draws on a whole bunch of different elements that set it apart from other Q&A sites.  Creator Jeff Atwood describes Stack Overflow as a free Q&A site that’s built and maintained by the community of developers.

While the site was built to answer developers’ questions, it also has some stiff competition in the form of the Experts’ Exchange.  Most developers know about EE, and are annoyed by the fact that the site purports to charge money for access to the answers to development questions.  As it turns out, it’s all available for free, you just need to look around a bit harder to find stuff.

Stack Overflow has been built with transparency and ease of use in mind since its inception; the model is to get as many eyeballs on a question as needed to get a good answer.  Good questions and good answers are up-voted by the community — similar to the way Digg works, except it’s harder to game the system.  Up-votes provide reputation points which at lower levels unlock some of the site’s features.  The site also gives out badges for meeting certain goals on the site, based on the ability to get badges or special goals on Xbox live.

Jeff Atwood’s passion is around developing software from a more human perspective. Much of the design of the site for Stack Overflow, and the code behind it are based on driving positive behaviours within the developer community.  Instead of lots of hard-and-fast rules, there are easy ways to do good things, and more difficult ways to do things that shouldn’t be overdone.

As a side-note, Stack Overflow’s codebase is written in C# using the ASP.NET MVC framework, and has been in use since the very early CTP days of MVC.  It’s a great example of the power that can be brought to bear on the web with this toolset.

I love the site, it’s been a great resource for me for the past year or so, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has a development dilemma that they need to solve.

I was wanting to get some source control in place for a few of my personal projects.  I chose to go with Subversion for my source control server for a few reasons, not the least of which was that my hosting company supports auto-configuration of SVN repositories, so I was able to get that set up in just a couple of minutes.  That left me some time to contemplate how I would access the repository from the client.

I’m running Visual Studio 2008 on my development machine and this gives me the ability to use plugins for the IDE, a feature that is sadly missing from the express editions.  There were a couple of good options available for SVN plugins, VisualSVN which is the 800lb gorilla in this space, and the open-source option CollabNet’s AnkhSVN.  Given the fact that this was for personal exploration of the toolset, the open source (free) option was the obvious choice.

The setup for AnkhSVN was quick and painless, and when the IDE opened up it put options for source control right in the menus where they were nice and easy to find.  I created a project, and selected the “add to Subversion” checkbox, entered the necessary credentials and created the project in my SVN repository.

When in Visual Studio, the AnkhSVN controls are located on a tab at the bottom of the IDE, alongside other solution-wide functionality like the To-do list, output window etc.  This pane tracks all of the changes (adds, deletes and updates) that you’ve made to the solution files.  This is extra handy as a review when you’re ready to make your commits back to the repository.  By quickly scanning the list of changes you’re able to write solid commit comments to provide some decent documentation for you, or those who come after you.

I’m still relatively new to Subversion and AnkhSVN, but I’m looking forward to exploring them in more detail — maybe I’ll even do a podcast episode about it!

This past week I’ve gone back to the ASP.NET website and discovered that there is now a long list of tutorials which have been put in an order to help make the major features of the MVC framework more learnable, particularly for those of us who haven’t had that MVC-heavy comp-sci education.  The tutorials come in either written or video form (there is some overlap) and do provide some good step-by-step instructions for exploring the new methodology.

Expect me to get into more detail about the ins-and-outs of the MVC framework in upcoming editions of the new podcast (more details soon, I promise!!)

You can, of course, download and use the MVC framework with Visual Studio 2009 without the tutorials, but I would highly recommend giving the first few a once-over.  Have a look at the tutorial site and see what you think.

Over the past year or so I’ve been kicking around the idea of starting up a podcast of my own to go along with the efforts that I’ve put in with Dave and Cait on the Aussie Geek Podcast. I love doing the AGP and it helps to stimulate a large portion of the geek side of my personality… but not all of it. The one piece that it leaves off is the developer piece.

I’ve tried to stimulate this in a few different ways in the past, writing blog posts around pieces of code; trying to kick off a standalone open-source project and writing my two plugins for WordPress (Admin Links Widget, Random Image Selector). Though these were all items that I enjoyed they lacked a certain interactivity.

When Jeff offered to let me co-host WordPress Weekly to provide a developer’s perspective it gave me the unique opportunity of mixing my interest in software development with an interaction with a community. I only did a handful of shows at the end of last year, but it helped to reinforce that I really enjoyed putting my skills to use providing information for other people.

There are a great number of development-focused podcasts which discuss wider abstract concepts, and complex topics but precious few which dive into the nuts and bolts of specific software development topics.  Examples of a couple that I’ve really enjoyed listening to lately are the .NET Rocks! podcast (Carl Franklin, Richard Campbell) and the Stack Overflow podcast (Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky).

Realistically, this new show idea won’t come to pass until later this year, probably in the April-May timeframe as I have several weeks of school to get through before I explain to my lovely wife why I’m spending yet more time in front of the computer.

So there it is, out in the open: I hope to be releasing a development-focused show sometime later this year.

In the industry I’m in, this story really hits home. It’s very common for us to make decisions based on the short-term, tools which we don’t expect to be around for a long period of time. We should have learned over that this kind of “short-term gain” strategy almost always leads to long-term pain.

The lesson: Take some time to make sure that tools you build can be left unattended even after the cleaning crew vacuums under your desk.

Due to the covoluted nature of my own school experience, I haven’t had much in the way of formal exposure to MVC concepts.  In fact it wasn’t until about 18 months ago that I first heard the term when we were rolling out a new Java framework at work.  This was a pretty major shift in direction for my team as we’d been using ASP.NET and webforms to do web application development for the past few years.

The transition hasn’t been an easy one.  Most of the folks involved in the project are new to the company, new to the working world in general and the training on MVC was at a minimum.  (I’m leading a team to replace that framework now, but I’ll talk more about this in some future posts.)

So over the past few months I’ve been reading posts by Scott Guthrie and listening to every episode of the Polymorphic Podcast that I can get my hands on.  The PMP in particular has proven to be an excellent resource for information relating to the ASP.NET MVC framework.  Craig Shoemaker regularly brings on guests who are experts in the field of .NET development and key players in development of the framework.

Over the next few months (in amongst my myriad other projects) I want to take a closer look at the MVC framework and see what all the hype is about.  I need to figure out how to get a decent windows development environment up and running.  For that I’m thinking about returning to a Boot Camp setup to give me a bigger boost when running my Windows environment locally on the Macbook.

Since my new role doesn’t involve a lot of development work, I’m really looking forward to getting my hands dirty again, and diving under the hood once again.

First, THANK YOU to everyone who has downloaded the widget.  It has been downloaded an astonishing 2300 times since the inaugural release on August 14th of last year.

The most significant changes for this version are the addition of two new links that you can add to your site:

1. Edit This Post
2. Edit This Page

These links provide you the opportunity to edit a specific page or post from a link in the sidebar whenever you’re viewing a single page or post (ie not the front-page, or a search result).  This is particularly useful for blogs which don’t have an edit link built into their current theme.

Please take a moment and download the latest version of the plugin from the WordPress plugin repository.  And as always, if you have any feedback, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment on the blog.

The project in question was a very simple installation of TwitterFeed on my blog. In my recent rediscovery of Twitter, I’ve noticed lots of folks seem to be auto-creating tweets when new posts go up… and quite frankly, I wanted in on that action.

First, a description of the problem. The scope creep I talk about tends to come up when a simple project begins to show you options that you just have to could implement. Each option can really be a project in and of itself, and as a result the original project (which should have taken 10 minutes) has taken you the whole night and you’re up until one in the morning working on it and then blogging about the problem!

Here are the basic instructions for setting up TwitterFeed:

1. Step One: Decide you want TwitterFeed
2. Step Two: Provide OpenID credentials
3. Step Three: Start using TwitterFeed
4. DONE!

Here is the example of what happens when you let your curiosity about the extendability of the same plugin get the better of you. Instead of getting this all to work as expected, it causes an evening of frustration.

1. Step One: Decide you want TwitterFeed
2. Step Two: Discover that TwitterFeed uses OpenID
3. Step Three: Read the OpenID tutorial and discover that you can host your own OpenID server
4. Step Four: Download the OpenID code
5. Step Five: Read the roll-your-own-OpenID tutorial and discover that you should use OpenSSL
6. Step Six: Do trial and error until you find a way to actually get the OpenSSL working
7. Step Seven: After 2 hours of searching, submit a support ticket and give up on the SSL for now
8. Step Eight: Go get something to drink. Something strong
9. Step Nine: Configure phpmyid
10. Step Ten: Add code to your site.
11. Step Eleven: Realize that it doesn’t work and use a regular OpenID account until you get more time…
12. DONE!

I rest my case. So let this be a lesson to you:

1. Figure out what you need to get done
2. Get it done
3. Make notes of the other options along the way
4. DONE!

First off, they’re not copying the images, they are getting them from the Flickr API.  As a result they have access to all the information required to properly attribute the photos, and I sorted that out after five minutes of looking through the Flickr API documentation.

Here are two Creative Commons licensed images that came up in my search for Sunrise vs. Sunset:

Photo Credit: onurati on Flickr

Photo Credit: mandyseyfang on Flickr

Get it together, FlickrFight.  Attribute the photos!  Everything you need to know is RIGHT HERE.

The goal, says Schwartz, is to put a Fortune 500 vendor behind the innovative technology powering many next generation web-based services. To accomplish that goal Sun is “putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP” (and MAMP, WAMP, and of course Sun’s own SAMP…).

Support of open source projects is nothing new for Sun. They have been a positive force behind several other projects in the past including Java, ZFS, NetBeans and OpenOffice.org. This bodes very well for the future of MySQL and companies offering other higher-priced options for production databases will be watching very closely to see what edge this provides in the Enterprise space.

With the acquisition Sun picks up “clients” who may not be using Solaris, or even Java in their implementation but are major players in the Web 2.0 market. These include Google, Facebook, Nokia and WordPress. Kudos to Sun for putting some more muscle behind the Open Source movement, and here’s hoping some more major corporations will now be willing to take a “leap of faith” and make more use of a proven and effective open-source technology.

The source code for Micropolis has been published on author Don Hopkins’ website. He has also included a bit of history about this branch of the SimCity project including some technical detail behind this iteration of the code.  The GPL version has also been ported to the version of Fedora Linux being run on the OLPC.  A great way to spread this brilliant game to those who are just getting a computer for the first time.

I love the fact that older software continues to be released to the public domain. I’d love to find a copy of Wing Commander… If there’s anyone out there from Origin (or EA) can we see a GPL’d version of WC1 so that we can play it on our Macs!!

The video was done by Johnny Lee, now a quasi-famous Internet personality for a series of articles he’s done about Wii-hardware-related topics on YouTube.  The other two being Finger Tracking and the Multi-Touch Whiteboard.

[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw]

The software for the demos are available from his website.  All of the PC development work has been done in C# using the Direct-X SDK and Visual C# Express (which I’ve blogged about before).

After seeing these videos I want a Wii more than ever.

The two biggest features in this version are:

1. Automatic discovery of your WordPress Folder:  One of the biggest barriers to entry for the non-technical folks who tried to use this plugin was a lack of knowledge (or access) for finding the physical path to the WordPress installation.   The plugin will now automatically detect and use this path.
   CAVEAT: If you currently point your plugin at a folder which is outside of your wordpress installation, you will need to move that folder to use the v1.2.0+ versions of the plugin.
2. Scaling/Sizing of the Displayed Images: One of the most requested features from the first iteration of the plugin was the ability to resize or scale images to fit in a particular location.  With older versions, if you wanted all the images to display at the same size or proportions then you needed to resize them all prior to uploading.  Well this is no more!  Now you can upload tons of randomly-sized images and the plugin will take care of the dirty work (including the calculation of just how much to scale-to-fit. 

I’d like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has downloaded the plugin, and particularly those who have taken the extra time to send me feedback.  As of this release the plugin has been downloaded over 2,400 times which far exceeds anything I thought I would accomplish.

So give this plugin a shot, and let me know if it works out for you!