Danny-T.co.uk

I'm back

Jeez, that’s been a heck of a long time since I last posted… or that my site has even been visible!

Back around mid 2008 some scrawny, b*&$$d, a$$*&, s*($&£, c&(£& git hacked my wordpress site. At first I didn’t notice because all they’d done was inserted some inline css to style a few select words in my posts to look just like the rest of the text but had added in a load of links to who-knows where. Shortly after that I was duly notified by my business partner that upon looking at my site his laptop completed barfed and was seriously infected with a whole load of nastiness. Humorously I’d not noticed any of this as I’d only looked at my site recently on my mac (he has since become the original mac fanboi btw). Anyway, needless to say I immediately took the site down with the intentions of sorting it out and bringing it back. Which I’ve now done albeit an entire year after all this happened.

Anyway, quite a bit has happened since I last posted, I’ve presented at Flexcamp London, attended last years FOTB, started writing for InsideRIA and had a whole host of opinions and discoveries that you’ve all been spared for the past year (assuming there is anyone left out there!).

Well I’m not going to dwell on the past and try to regurgitate my thoughts and opinions of everything that has been missed, onwards an upwards. I hope to make blogging a fairly frequent activity again (even though twitter seems to have slowed alot of people down of late). I will be trying to keep on topic of RIAs specifically related to the Adobe and MS offerings. So that’s me back in the game.

And to the scum who hacked my site, “in the words of my generation UP YOURS!”

UP YOURS

This was an extremely odd error that I’m posting here for others and probably my own future reference.

We recently deployed an Intranet system that used some of the ASP.Net AJAX framework, two users were receiving a javascript error and not displaying a tabcontrol. The first js error was “invalid character at line 0″ and the second was “ajaxcontroltoolkit is undefined”. This baffled me as all the client machines were identical (in fact they were using a Citrix client so they were definitely identical).

Anyway turns out it’s something to do with the last modified date of the assembly if it’s somehow set to be in the future compared to the date of the server it is running on (possibly due to a converstion from UK to US date formats for example) you will get this error.

The solution is to simply change the last modified date of the assembly which can be done either using one of several freeware applications available or by using the very simple console application provided at Plain Old Stan’s blog. I used this and just set the date back a year and it resolved the issue.

Hopefully that’ll be of some use to someone.

Just posting this for my own reference really, these are ages old but Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo has written a bunch of excellent articles on getting started with NAnt here.

I’m slowly getting my head around IoC containers and want to note a few useful links for future reference. As things tend to go in my geeky exploits I read about and learn these ideas from the .net world, who often have picked things up from the Java world, I then try to find out who’s doing similar stuff in the Flex world and am generally not disappointed, which is very cool. So these links below are a mashup of various technologies but should be useful to anyone who has been hearing about
IoC and wants to learn more regardless of language/platform.

The ‘Textbook definition’ by Martin Fowler
Very useful explanation with some basic sample code (.net) by Ayende
Castle Windsor step by step basic intro (.net)
Prana – a Spring-ish IoC Container for AS3 by Christophe Herreman (via jesterxl)

This stuff doesn’t come naturally to me to say the least so if anyone else has any links they want to share feel free to post them in the comments.

I’m trying to setup a dev environment for an Intranet application we’re working on and needed to test users for displaying role-based content (namely admin edit buttons etc). So I needed to create some test users and roles. The site will ultimately be hosted on a Windows server and the users will use their domain logins from Active Directory so I needed to replicate this.

Anyway my dev environment is Windows XP and there is no obvious way to create roles (or Groups), to access this simply click Start, Run and enter compmgmt.msc and click go to launch the Computer Management Console.

From here you can administrate users and groups under the “Local Users and Groups” folder.

I hope to find some time for a more thorough post on this but there is a new Code Coverage tool available for
Flex<, check out Flex Cover on Google Code:

http://code.google.com/p/flexcover/

Okay so I’m a couple of days late on this one, however taking 3 days out of work takes it’s toll on the remaining 2 days of the week when you get back.

We got to the hotel on Sunday morning with the best intentions of spending the day doing touristy things, unfortunately because of our flight timings we basically traveled throughout the night and just got the hotel and crashed for a few hours. First thing I did after I’d caught up on sleep was sort out wifi access, not good. Best part of £70 for 3 days wifi is ridiculous… and it was slooooow. This was definitely an issue for a hotel full of geeks and would suggest anyone organising a conference takes internet access into serious consideration when finding a venue.

We later went down to the speaker dinner which was a relatively quiet affair but was great to meet new people and the dinner was pretty decent. At this point to be honest I didn’t have particularly high hopes for the conference because of the low number of attendees. Fortunately however my initial concerns were not upheld.

The first day of the conference for me went something like this:

Keynote: nothing new for me here but good to see Adobe having a presence.

Michael Labriola: Dense and Hot – An Introduction to Your Application’s Start Up
Michael has a great presentation style, he was relaxed and managed to get through quite a lot of very useful information in a relatively short space of time. I think conferences could do with more of these sorts of sessions as many seem to have a lot more introductory level sessions. I learnt a lot from Michael in the session and throughout the rest of the conference. He’s also a very smart and funny guy.

Marco Cassario: Better Flex and AIR Applications Using AJAX
Marco gave an interesting presentation on using AJAX in AIR but he also covered some general good practices for Flex development. I learned a few things AJAX related that I didn’t already know but I think generally AJAX just doesn’t get Flex developers very excited. Marco presented his session well and got through a lot of material but I would definitely like to see him present on some more advanced Flex stuff in the future.

Luca Mezzalira: Flex Bitmap Effects!
Luca gave a fun presentation on Bitmap effects and had some good samples to share. I’ve not really done anything with bitmap effects before and definitely now have the required knowledge to do so.

Piergiorgio Niero: 3D Render Engines in the Flash Platform
Piergiorgio gave a great presentation starting with some of the basics of 3D in flash then running through to demonstrate the build up of some very impressive Papervision3D demonstrations and Papervision in Flex. He wasn’t too confident in his English but certainly got everything he needed to across and the examples and sample code provided are great.

Sakri Rosenstrom:Invalidation Routines, Pounded into Your Cranium Once and for All!
Unfortunately I had to deal with some work issues during Sakri’s presentation which was really annoying as I wasn’t able to concentrate on it fully and it was a pretty technical session. What I did manage to keep up with was very useful and well presented and Sakri managed to deal with some unexpected technical issues very well. I hope to catch his session again some time.

Neil Webb: Cairngorm for Beginners
Neil’s a good friend of mine and I’d seen parts of his presentation beforehand but was looking forward to seeing the whole show. He was a little nervous at first and perhaps spoke a little quietly to begin with considering he wasn’t using a mic. However, once he settled into things the presentation went very well. He has some VERY funny slides and if you’re going to scotch on the rocks and/or 360 Flex San Jose definitely check out his session. Even if you know Cairngorm go see it for the Phat controller, Sexed up Flex Frameworks and Sexyometer! If you aren’t familiar with Cairngorm then Neil breaks it down into a very digestible manner and uses great metaphors to explain what’s going on.

Borre Wessel: Cairngorm Deepdive
Borre presented a good session on Cairngorm and other useful good development practices. He covered some topics that I’ve been looking into lately such as view patterns and did a good job of explaining the Presentation Model pattern which is a very nice approach. He seems a pretty laid back guy which made him approachable for questions but perhaps could do with a little more enthusiasm and volume to maintain the audiences interest. Nevertheless another useful session for me .

Finally it was my turn to do my presentation on Developer Best Practices. I was a little worried as I hadn’t prepared quite as much as I’d have hoped to (being ‘dragged’ out for pizza and 1 litre beers the night before didn’t help ). I was more concerned however by the fact that almost everyone I’d met was a very talented and skilled Flex developer who more than likely didn’t need to be told the best practices I was there to present.
This concern was re-affirmed as I kicked things off by asking the group “Who uses source control?” as the preamble to my 10 minutes I’d planned explaining source control… to which all but one of the attendees already did! After struggling preaching to the choir for a few minutes, I decided to scrap that and adopt my reserve tactic of opening the topics in the session up for debate.

This was also a concern of mine as in many of the sessions the audience tended to stay pretty much silent. Fortunately for me I had Michael, Sam, Neil, Robin, Sakri and various others in the session who really came into their own and spoke out. We discussed various OOP practices, design patterns, unit testing and a great debate on pair programming (always a good one to throw in if you want some audience participation!).

I enjoyed the session in the end and definitely would like to try the discussion approach in the future as I managed to learn a few things from the guys I was supposed to be presenting to and I’ve had some good feedback about it (despite the ropey start).

Overall, despite initial concerns 360 Flex Europe turned out to be a great conference and I’ve very glad to have attended. Thanks to the 360 guys for arranging it and thanks to everyone I met there.

Just to help spread the word, Day 1 of 360 Flex Europe is going to be absolutely free!

If you’re not already signed up go check it out now: Free 360Flex Conference day 1

(If you are already signed up, refunds for day 1 are being issued over the next couple of months).

via Peter Elst

Bill Simser has setup a Google Group for NHibernate, forums are old school and I much prefer mailing lists and blogs nowadays so thought I’d share it:

Nirosh has posted a great introduction to OOP concepts and architecture that attempts to provide a stepping stone for developers towards systems architecture. This article is a great read if you’re interested in, but frustrated by all the OOP best practice terminology and procedures that are flung around in the elite’s blogs and forums.

Read the article over on code project.

I also agree with Nirosh’s comments about the void between the experienced and the interested which is why this is very much in alignment with my upcoming talk at 360Flex Europe where I’m hoping to demystify some of our industry’s latest buzz best practices.

Check out 360Flex Europe.