Be careful where you get your information

The internet is rife with misinformation.

As a developer you tend to depend heavily on searching for examples of how to solve a particular problem such as code snippets, and patterns and practices. There is very little ground breaking work and it is almost certain that someone has been there, done that, and blogged the solution to your problem already.

Problems arise when you choose the wrong source to trust. For example, today I was trying to figure out how to get ASP.NET not to render a name attribute for the form element as we are starting to target XHTML 1.1 compliance for BeforeYouBuy. A quick google came up with this.

Certainly the answer that is proposed is "a solution", but it's certainly not "the solution". A slight modification to my search turned up this how to on the msdn site.

It's really down to knowing where to look.

BeforeYouBuy is online!

After a long time and a huge amount of hard work BeforeYouBuy is finally live! I'm very proud of what we've achieved and excited about what the future holds.

We've got an almost endless list of enhancements and improvements already, but the site is pretty usable and functional already.

It's been a great journey, learned a lot of new tricks, tackled a fair bit of new technology and hit more than our fair share of challenges. Now that we're finally online expect to see a few more posts. We're always interested in any feedback you might have too!

Superstring theory 101

I thought I'd post this presentation Brian Greene did at TED in 2005 given that it seems a few people are interested in the book I'm currently reading:

The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

.


The presentation is a fantastic primer on Superstring theory and, should it wet your appetite, the book will certainly appeal.

SpaceX Falcon 9 progress

Very excited to see SpaceX's progress on the assembly of their Falcon 9. Let's hope they enjoy as much success with the Falcon 9 as they have recently had with the Falcon 1.

Just for fun, here's the highlights of launch 4 again:

Mono gets some first class love in Ubuntu!

I was pretty excited to see this article on mono in Jaunty Jackalope over at arstechnica today.

It looks like there is going to be a real effort to improve Mono support in Ubuntu and migrate all applications and the CLR to the 2.0 profile.

This is fantastic news - great work Ubuntu devs!

We're typists first... really?

I read Coding Horror on a semi regular basis, and generally Jeff has a pretty engaging writing style and his posts are fairly interesting. I was really surprised when I read this one though.

Jeff ascertains that "We are typists first, and programmers second".

Well, I vehemently disagree. While typing ability is obviously important in the job and a necessary skill, saying that we are typists first places very little value on the technical skills required of programmers to do their job well (not to mention the years at university most of us have spent earning our Computer Science degrees, Masters and in some cases PhD's!).

Personally I don't even like the label "Programmer". I feel it undervalues the skills I have. Software Engineer is far more accurate description of the job most of us do. Writing a non-trivial application these days requires an understanding of many challenging concepts.

Todays Software Engineers need to consider concurrency issues, network theory, efficient persistence mechanisms, efficient search algorithms (the volume of data we are dealing with is growing exponentially), but to name a few.

Let's not sell ourselves short by calling ourselves programmers.

Returning to Jeffs' typists first allegation though, one comment on his post summed it up nicely for me:

I’ve always really liked your blog Jeff, but this is a BS post

Thoughts?

The Big Bang Theory, the best thing on TV right now?

If you haven't yet seen The Big Bang Theory you should make an effort to rectify the situation immediately. It really is an excellent show based around intelligent witty humor rather than cheap laughs and tremendously funny.

The story focuses around two ubergeeks, Leonard and Sheldon and how their life changes when they meet Penny their new "normal" (and very pretty) neighbor. I love the fact that the show celebrates the geeky, ultra intelligent side of their characters and although most of the laughs come from their lack of ability to deal with normal every day social situations, the writers do it in such a way that is funny without making Leonard and Sheldon the butt of every joke.

The Big Bang Theory manages to mix in enough scientific content and references to keep us geeks happy while still being incredibly watchable and entertaining for those with less of a penchant for things science.

Check out a few snippets from the first show of season one:



If you haven't seen season one it's already out on DVD, grab your copy now, you won't be disappointed!

MooTools ASP.NET Webservice Ajax calls.

I had some trouble trying to find an example of how to call an ASP.NET webservice from MooTools. I eventually pieced the bits together from a couple of forum posts and thought I'd post an example here in case anyone else was having the same problems.

If I have an ASP.NET webservice that has a GetById method that takes a single int parameter and returns an object I can call it with the following code:

function doAjaxWebServiceRequest (id) {
var completeDelegate = Function.createDelegate(this, this.callback);
var failureDelegate = Function.createDelegate(this, this.error);
var request = new Request.JSON({url: 'http://hostname/MyWebService.asmx/GetById',
onComplete: completeDelegate,
onFailure: failureDelegate,
urlEncoded: false,
headers: {"Content-type": "application/json"}
});
request.send(JSON.encode({'id': id}));
},

The returned object will be in JSON format. The lines where I create my callback delegates using the Function.createDelegate method allow me to set the scope of 'this' in my call backs to be the object I making the request from.

Hope that helps someone out!

Mootools differences in IE and Firefox

We're using the MooTools scripting framework on our site and today I discovered a strange difference between Firefox and IE. I was creating an element and injecting it into the DOM and then trying to change its CSS class and styles.

addClass and setStyle
MooTools provides methods on it's Element class that allow you to manipulate the CSS styling of an element. You can do things like:

// Add a css class to the element with the id foo
$('foo').addClass('fooStyle');

// Set the width of the foo element
$('foo').setStyle('width', '100px');

Unfortunately when viewing an ASP.NET page in IE that includes a script that uses these functions you get a script error saying that the "Object doesn't support this property or method"

At first I thought the solution was to go back to basics:

// Add a css class to the element with the id foo
$('foo').className = 'fooStyle';

// Set the width of the foo element
$('foo').style.width = '100px';

However I then realised that I was trying to call the MooTools Element methods on a vanilla element object rather than a MooTools one. The second line below solved the problems in IE and meant I could go back to the first way of applying the styling.

var myelement = document.createElement("a");
myelement = $(myelement);

IE vs Firefox
In retrospect it seems strange that this worked in Firefox, I guess Firefox must be able to do some sort of implicit conversion to a MooTools element in order to resolve the method call.

MooTools seems really great, it's lightweight and easy to use. The learning curve seems much lower than some of the other more complicated offering available.

The only reservation I have at this point is that from what I've read on the forums it doesn't play nicely with any other scripting framework due to it's lack of namespaces and the maintainers seem quite hostile to anyone who suggests that would be a good thing.

NMock and out parameters

While trying to create a unit test the other day I came across the situation where my mock object needed to return a value via an Out parameter. A quick google turned up this post over at dev:ices.

I thought that had answered all my questions but when I tried it I kept getting a very unhelpful error:

------ Test started: Assembly: Tests.dll ------

TestCase 'Tests.BatchOrderMessageHandlerTests.TestNMock'
failed: NMock2.Internal.ExpectationException : unexpected invocation of foo.DoFoo(<1>, <1>, out)
Expected:
1 time: foo.DoFoo(equal to <1>, equal to <1>, equal to ), will set c=<2>, return <1> [called 0 times]
at NMock2.Mockery.FailUnexpectedInvocation(Invocation invocation)
at NMock2.Mockery.Dispatch(Invocation invocation)
at NMock2.Mockery.MockObject.Invoke(Invocation invocation)
at NMock2.Monitoring.Invoker.Invoke(Invocation invocation)
at NMock2.Monitoring.ProxiedObjectIdentity.Invoke(Invocation invocation)
at NMock2.Monitoring.ProxyInvokableAdapter.Invoke(IMessage msg)
at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.PrivateInvoke(MessageData& msgData, Int32 type)
at Tests.BatchOrderMessageHandlerTests.IFoo.DoFoo(Int32 a, Int32 b, Int32& c)
C:\svn\GLGParnters.TradeIdeas\PositionManager\src\Tests\BatchOrderMessageHandlerTests.cs(136,0): at Tests.BatchOrderMessageHandlerTests.TestNMock()

0 passed, 1 failed, 0 skipped, took 0.77 seconds.

A bit confused I quickly whipped up a trivial test as my unit test was a bit complicated and returned an enum as the Out parameter. My hypothesis was that NMocks couldn't return an enum as an Out parameter.

public interface IFoo
{
int DoFoo(int a, int b, out int c);
}


[Test]
public void TestNMock()
{
IFoo foo = _mockery.NewMock();

Expect.Once.On(foo).Method("DoFoo")
.With(1, 1, Is.Out)
.Will(new SetNamedParameterAction("c", 2), Return.Value(1));

int result = 0;
int a = foo.DoFoo(1, 1, out result);

_mockery.VerifyAllExpectationsHaveBeenMet();
Assert.AreEqual(2, result);
}

This also failed so I checked what version of NMocks I was using. My NMock2.dll assembly had a revision number of 1.0.2313.18049. I downloaded the latest binaries from the NMock website. Checking the version number of the latest build shows it to be 2.0.0.44.

Rerunning the unit tests against this version of the NMock library everything now works!

So, if you're having trouble with out parameters in your NMock mocks, upgrade your build version.

NHibernate 2.0 and the join table syntax

I've noticed my post on Mapping a view with NHibernate is always quite popular. Resorting to mapping from a view has worked fine in the past as long as you only required read access, but if you wanted to build a complex object relational mapping that you could update you were in trouble...

Until Now

With NHibernate 2.0 recently being released we now have access to the join table syntax in our mapping documents. This means we can now build more sophisticated domain objects that map on to more than one table. NHibernate takes care of the multi-table inserts and updates behind the scenes making your life easier.

This has to be one of the most underrated features of NHibernate 2.0 as it finally allows you to break away from the one to one mapping between domain objects and your relational model which has ultimately caused compromises in the past.

I urge you to check out this and the other fantastic new features available in the latest NHibernate release.

Book Review: CSS Mastery

As a web developer I've had to do a certain amount of CSS development over the years but never really felt like I understood it. CSS can be a bit of an esoteric beast and I wanted something to clear the fuzz away.

CSS Mastery was the solution I had been looking for. Andy Budd writes in a clear and engaging manner and the book is extremely readable for a technical text. Andy starts by getting right back to basics covering the Cascade and the Box model in the first two chapters.

The book covers most aspects of CSS with concise and easy to understand examples used through out. Andy also spends a good amount of time on cross browser compatibility issues where appropriate, as well as including a whole chapter of hints and hacks on this topic at the end.

If you are just starting out with CSS, or like me have used it for years but never really understood it at a visceral level then I urge you to give CSS Mastery a try.

Book Review: Iron Man: Extremis

This is the first Iron man comic I've read (Extremis is actually a 6 part series grouped into a single volume) but I absolutely loved it. I got inspired to give Iron man a go after seeing the recent movie which I also really enjoyed.

Extremis covers the genesis of the modern Iron Man character, although it is slightly different to the movie version. The comic doesn't dwell on the back story but drip feeds the reader with a series of flashbacks. This makes it interesting without feeling contrived.

The artwork is simply excellent; the storyline is compelling and well written with the exception of a couple of pieces of weak and slightly mellow dramatic dialogue.

I particularly like the modern references to both technology (Bluetooth, WI-FI, 3G phones) and people (Dean Karmen, Edward Teller and Clive Sinclair). It helps to anchor the story in a contemporary setting and prevents the dated feeling you get from some comics (although that will go against it in years to come!).

All in all I really enjoyed Extremis and am looking forward to reading "Iron Man: Execute Program v. 2" next!

Who wouldn't want to be Iron Man?

Or more specifically Tony Stark, I mean come on - the guy has everything a geek could dream of!

I saw the movie last night and although the super hero story and the wow factor of the suit definitely captured my imagination, my slightly geekier side couldn't help but be almost equally impressed by stuff that would have slipped into the background for most of the audience.

Take Tony's bachelor pad for example, how cool is that bedroom? Wake up in the morning and as you step out of bed, your room senses that you're getting up and throws up the news, weather, your daily calendar on transparent screens built into massive windows while simultaneously filling you in verbally on the really important stuff - that's cool. In fact, I thought it was so cool I did a little research thinking maybe there's a fun project there, but alas it seems that transparent display technology is still a few years away yet.

But wait, what about that workshop? It was rammed full of enough hi-tech toys to make any geek wet their pants. A robotic arm that you can give verbal commands to - awesome. A holographic 3d modelling tool - yikes!

The really neat thing is that some of this stuff really isn't that far off at all. Of course we are going to be waiting a wee while before we have a fully integrated AI in our homes...