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.

It seems to me that some of the best pieces of code I’ve ever written are the ones I wrote to solve a problem that I had. The two WordPress plugins I wrote (Random Image Selector and Admin Links Widget) have met with far more success and way more downloads than I ever would have thought possible.

In that same vein of ‘solving my own problems with code’ I bring you FeedPublisher. This does only one thing, and it does it reasonably well: It downloads the contents of an RSS feed and creates an EPUB book out of it, suitable for transferring to your favourite eBook reader.

The bulk of the idea for this project came from my experiences with an application called Calibre which was shown to me by Knightwise. I’m paraphrasing a bit, but he had said it was the best application to come along for dealing with eBooks that he’d ever used. High praise coming from someone who prides himself on finding and using the best free cross-platform software that the Internet has to offer.

So I tried it out and really did like most of what it did. It can manage conversions to and from a number of different formats, it deals with PDFs like nobody’s business, and it had a really cool feature: download and convert blogs to eBooks.

The first thing I thought was that this would be a brilliant way to handle eBooks. But as I used it, a couple of things that just weren’t quite what I wanted. The created eBooks were a bit on the ugly side (and had notices that they’d been created with Calibre). But the larger problem was that it wasn’t really possible to schedule the download of the feeds. Calibre had to be running all the time for you to pick them up. This scheduling problem proved to be the final push I needed to get off my butt and create FeedPublisher.

FeedPublisher itself is a command-line app (for Windows only at the moment) which downloads the contents of a selected list of RSS (or Atom) feeds. Each feed becomes its own ePUB book containing the contents of the blog posts. This first version works quite well and rarely crashes but it’s definitely ‘beta’ quality software. Chances are it will work for you.

The project is still in its infancy, but if you’re interested, check it out!

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!

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.

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 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!

For those of you who haven’t read my previous posts on the subject, the Express editions are standalone IDE’s for VB, C# and Web Development, as well as an express edition of SQL server which can all be used and distributed royalty-free.

I’m looking forward to poking around in VS 2008 a bit more in the coming months.  So expect to see some more of this, and a bit less focus on the Mac platform for the next little while.

On October 3rd Scott Guthrie, manager of the teams who build the development and platform tools at Microsoft, announced that the source code for the .NET Framework would be released with the next release of Visual Studio (VS 2008).  This announcement is the latest in a series of moves by Microsoft over the past couple of years.

Though the source code will be available for download and reference by software developers, it will be licensed under the Microsoft Reference License, meaning that the source will not be freely distributable.

Still, this is a major step forward for the software giant, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the next step will be on the journey toward peaceful coexistence with the open source community.

On average, in the exactly 2 months since it’s release about 15 people are downloading the plugin.  And on September 22nd, it hit the 1000 download mark!

Thank you to all who have provided feedback on the plugin, and suggestions for the next version.  I am working on it now and expect to have something released by mid-October once all the WordPress 2.3 testing is completed.

Thanks again, and happy downloading!

Virtual PC images of the new VS install were made available from the Microsoft Downloads website on August 3rd.  I’ve included a direct link to the download page.

A bit of idle speculation…?  Microsoft may have features in store for Rosario that were originally been slated for Orcas, but were bumped due to the changes in the Windows Vista feature set… WinFS anyone?

I haven’t had a chance to read over the whitepaper yet, but It seems strange to me that they would be so far along with Rosario when Orcas is still several months away from RTM.

Have a look through Jeff’s post for more details on what precisely we can expect from VS ‘Rosario’.