kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Tag Archives: Programming

Investigating the ASP.NET MVC Framework

Over the past few months I’ve been hearing more and more about a new framework being developed by Microsoft and the ASP.NET community.  It’s something that will bring a very common coding practice from the Java world and that’s the pattern of the model view controller (MVC) framework.

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.

Admin Links Widget for WordPress 1.1.0 Released

Well after a far more successful 2007 than I could have imagined, I’ve released the first significant feature update to the Admin Links Widget.

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.

Flickr Fight Follow-up: The proof

After the post I did a couple of days back about FlickrFight using images and not attributing them to the photographers who took and own the images, I thought it might  help to actually point to some of the things that FlickrFight is doing.

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: onurati on Flickr

Photo Credit: mandyseyfang on Flickr
Photo Credit: mandyseyfang on Flickr

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

SimCity Source Code Released Under GPL

Bil Simser has posted an article on his blog about the release of the source code for the original SimCity under the GPL. The GPL’d version has been renamed under the original working title Micropolis to protect the trademarks of Electronic Arts who currently own the intellectual property for the Sim* franchise. If the original title had stuck I wonder what they’d call The Sims these days….

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 future of Gaming?

I was sent a link to this YouTube video a couple of days ago, and it took me a bit of time to get around to watching it in its entirety. When you stop to think about what this means for the future of gaming, the future looks pretty cool. This type of thing could give a whole new element to not only first-person shooters, but many other game types too.

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.

Random Image Selector 1.2.0 Released

I’ve just put the finishing touches on the latest version of the Random Image Plugin that I originally released in the summer.  This plugin will allow you to produce an <IMG> tag containing a randomly selected image from a folder of your choice on any wordpress page (or post if you allow php).

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!

Microsoft Releases VS 2008 “Orcas”

VS 2008This news is a couple of weeks old now, the latest version of it’s development software, Visual Studio 2008 (formerly codenamed “Orcas”) has gone RTM.  The newest version of (imho) the best IDE on the market follows the “Whidbey” release and has also shipped in “Express” editions.

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.

Microsoft to Release .NET Framework Source Code

Microsoft .NET FrameworkI’ve covered a few stories on this blog [1], [2], [3] where Microsoft is making some positive strides toward opening up to the concept of open source, particularly in relation to it’s software development arm.

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.

Random Image Plugin — 1000 Downloads!

Exactly 2 months ago, I released my Random Image Selector plugin for wordpress.  Every now and again I take a look and see how many people are downloading the random image plugin.

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!

Visual Studio ‘Rosario’ — CTP

I just read on Jeff Beehler’s blog that Microsoft has released a CTP (Community Technology Preview) of the next version of Visual studio… and I don’t mean VS 2008 “Orcas”.

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’.