Posts about ‘.Net’
Jul
27Ruby on Rails from the perspective of a .Net Developer
27
Posted: 27th July 2007
Tags: .Net, dotnet, Ruby on Rails
Posted in .Net, Ruby on Rails
Comments: No Comments »
My blog entries have been a little infrequent of late as I have had my nose deep in the excellent Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers)
For those of you that don’t know Ruby is a dynamic open source language created by Yukihiro “matz” Matsumoto in 1995. Rails is an open source framework created by David Heinemeier Hansson in 2004 to support the development of 37 Signals suite of web applications (Basecamp, Packpack etc.)
So two months later what have I learnt ..Well enough to be a competent rails coder, but more importantly, I feel the the process has been nothing more than an awakening to a new approach in Software Development. I have to admit when I first heard about Ruby on Rails I was skeptical and it was easy to state through away comments such as rails is slow, it’s not scalable, it’s difficult to deploy, you can do the same thing on .Net blah blah blah. And to some extent these are all true, but back to that in a bit.
So have I given up on .Net well no, of course not, however there is a time and place for .Net just as there is a time and place for Ruby on Rails. Before I spent time with Rails I easily got caught up in the .Net vs Java vs PHP arguments but at the end of the day all these languages have their place and software development is an art that is transferable to any language. I really can\’92t understand why some people are so defensive about the programming languages they use, I have programmed Basic, Visual Basic, Pascal, C, C#, Java, PHP, Javascript etc in my past however Rails is different but not to the extent that it makes any skills I have learnt obsolete, it just teaches an approach that I can take back with me and use with any other language I use and made me a better software developer.
And this is why I am so excited about Rails, I have been programming since the age of 6 (24 years) and discovering Ruby on Rails has been like rediscovering programming again for the first time. It is taking a disciplined approach to development which then allows a flexibility and freedom to really allow creativity.
As I said earlier I was not convinced with Rails at first so I set myself a challenge. I had a personal project that I had been working on for just over a month, using .Net and Subsonic. So if in one month I could not only learn Ruby on Rails but get to the same point in a RoR version of my project I would be convinced.
Did I achieve this. Of course I did or I wouldn’t be raving about it now. I picked Ruby up enough to get started in two weeks (evenings and weekends) and it took me two weeks to get to the same point I had done with the .Net equivalent, not only that I had produced a better product as I had not had to implement workarounds for various technical barriers I had previously had with .Net.
So of these bad points well yes Rails is slower than compiled languages but it can still handle huge amounts of traffic, Basecamp is a good example. Hosting for Rails is patchy especially in the UK, there are one or two hosts but my advice is to have a form of dedicated or virtual host which you can configure with Apache, Mongrel (Ruby on Rails Application Server). As for scalability, there is no problem at all as sessions can be stored in a database or using Memcache and it uses mysql on the backend.
So the upshot is I really recommend all developers, not just .Net to look at Ruby on Rails. Like me I hope you will discover a flexible web framework which not only makes your life easier but more enjoyable and rewarding, but it might just make you a better developer.
For more information:
Ruby: http://www.ruby-lang.org
http://www.rubyonrails.org
Apr
26Using ASP.Net / AJAX slide extender to create a color selector
26
Posted: 26th April 2007
Tags: .Net, AJAX, dotnet, Javascript
Posted in .Net, Javascript
Comments: 1 Comment »
Using the MS AJAX ASP.Net Extensions and the Ajax Control Toolkit (available through codeplex) You can easily make a colour selector using the Ajax Control Toolkits Slider Extender control.
The Slider Extender included in the Ajax control toolkit renders on the screen as a control that allows the user to click and drag to adjust a numerical value. Out of the box the slider extender is given an ASP:TextBox as it’s Target Control ID, the slider extender automatically hides these textboxes. We can use three slider controls to create a Red, Green and Blue sliders to set a colour. When working in RGB we can set a value of 0 to 255 for each of Red, Green or Blue. So the first thing we need is the three sliders on our HTML page.
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Apr
24Tip: ASP.Net/AJAX - Javascript in Label/Textbox Text
24
Posted: 24th April 2007
Tags: .Net, AJAX, dotnet, Javascript, tips
Posted in .Net
Comments: No Comments »
Hi All,
I though I would share a problem that I had (and resolved) using ASP.Net AJAX. The problem occurs if you want to output some Javascript to a Textbox (for example: for a user to copy and paste into their own page), which is nested in an UpdatePanel. AJAX returns an HTTP 500 error.
The reason seems to be that the Javascript in the textbox interferes with the javascript generated by MS AJAX to handle the partial page updates of the UpdatePanel.
So if like me you need to output some Javascript to the page for a user to cut and paste, a work around is to use a literal control and the HTMLEncode function of the Server object as follows:
- Literal1.Text = Server.HTMLEncode(“<Script src=’example.js’ type=’text/javascript’></script>“)
I hope that helps anyone that has been puzzled by this error.
Apr
20Excellent WYSIWYG HTML editor (all platforms)
20
Posted: 20th April 2007
Tags: component, dotnet, Misc..
Posted in .Net, Javascript, Ruby on Rails
Comments: 4 Comments »
I have been trying out several HTML editors for ASP.Net and thought I would share this excellent find that works with several platforms, including ASP.Net, ASP, PHP, Java etc. Up until now I was using FreeTextBox, however this was giving me grief in Firefox so decided that I needed to find a new solution.
FCKeditor is an excellent HTML WYSIWYG editor for ASP.Net as an ASP.Net control is available to use with the Javascript source files to allow you to interact (Get / Set text) etc programmatic ally as you can do with FreeTextBox. In addition to this, FCKEditor allows you to upload images and other files making adding images a breeze and also includes a spell-checker.
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Mar
29Tim Shankarian’s MS Ajax Autocomplete Patch (and how to use)
29
Posted: 29th March 2007
Tags: .Net, AJAX, dotnet, Javascript
Posted in .Net
Comments: No Comments »
Contrary to the advise I have received from several fellow developers (and never being one to miss a challenge), I have decided to ignore all advise and attempt to use the Microsoft Ajax framework with my current .Net project for TktIt.com. The MS Ajax Frawework is extended to provide functionality such as Autocomplete etc using the AjaxToolKit. Although a lot of these are excellent, (like the pop-up calendar control) the Autocomplete feature is poor compared to many others out there. However, thanks to Tim Shankarian, it has got a little better!
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Mar
22JQuery Interface Autocomplete with .Net
22
Posted: 22nd March 2007
Tags: .Net, AJAX, dotnet, Javascript
Posted in .Net, Javascript
Comments: 1 Comment »
JQuery is an excellent easy to use Javascript Framework and has several excellent plugins, one of which is the Interface plug-in by Stefan Petre which provides lots of effects and features. One such feature is the autocomplete feature, which provides suggestions as the user types into a text box. Unfortunately the Interface plugin’s documentation does not cover how to implement the server side, which I will cover in this article.
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Mar
9Writing an XML-RPC server or client in ASP.Net: Part 2
9
Posted: 9th March 2007
Tags: .Net, dotnet
Posted in .Net
Comments: 1 Comment »
In my previous article I covered how to setup an XML-RPC server in .Net, in particular looking at how to service XML-RPC MetaWebLog API requests. In this second part I am looking at how we can easily construct an XML-RPC client to ping blog directory or search services such as Technorati, Google BlogSearch, blo.gs etc.
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Mar
3Writing an XML-RPC server or client in ASP.Net: Part 1
3
Posted: 3rd March 2007
Tags: .Net, dotnet
Posted in .Net
Comments: 1 Comment »
I have recently be working on a project which needed to implement the blogging MetaWebLog API, allowing users to post blog messages from their favorite blog editor, such as Windows Live Writer or blog directly from MetaWebLog API enabled websites such as Flickr or Digg. My tutorial below will show you how to easily create or consume an XML-RPC service such as the MetaWebLog API.
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