You can get a list of the latest rubies supported by Heroku here:
Heroku Rubies

If you are an RVM user like myself, feel free to add an .rvmrc file that will match what version Heroku is on for even more consistency goodness.

rvm --create --rvmrc 1.9.3-p327@mycoolproject


http://sproutnewmedia.com/how-to-use-akismet-protect-contact-form/

Haven't had any spam since, form works fine, and no CAPTCHA's needed!

This time of year is all about giving, so I thought I would try to find a better/lighter way of doing this. A few googles later, I found the tablesorter lib and this looked like a pretty decent compromise.

Thinking I was onto something, I ran the idea by my resident javascript expert Michael Sarchet (b / t). His response was so simple and on point that I was slightly offended I hadn't thought of it. "I just use Knockout for that." Advantages of this are that I'm not having to keep up with another lib (knockout is a default lib in MVC4) and this solution will be able to apply to collections outside of just a table. Thus, another life skill was born.

Code Time
Controller:

var burritos = db.Select<Burrito>("select name,price from burritos");
var tacos = db.Select<Taco>("select name,price from tacos");
            
var viewModel = new viewmodel_Food
{
  burritos = burritos
  , tacos = tacos
};
return View(viewModel);

View:

@model burritoroll.web.Models.viewmodel_Food
@{
    ViewBag.Title = "Index";
}

<h2>Index</h2>

<b><em>Can you dig our burritos?</em></b>
<table><thead><tr><th>Burrito</th><th>Price</th></tr></thead>
 <tbody data-bind="foreach: burritosarray">
  <tr><td data-bind="text: name"></td><td data-bind="text: price"></td></tr>
 </tbody></table>
<b><em>Can you dig our tacos?</em></b>
<table>
 <thead>
  <tr><th>Taco</th><th>Price</th></tr>
 </thead>
 <tbody data-bind="foreach: tacosarray">
  <tr><td data-bind="text: name"></td><td data-bind="text: price"></td></tr>
 </tbody>
</table>
@section scripts{
	<script type="text/javascript">
	function viewModel() {
		var self = this;

	    self.tacosarray = ko.observableArray(@Html.Raw(Json.Encode(Model.tacos.ToArray())));
	    self.burritosarray = ko.observableArray(@Html.Raw(Json.Encode(Model.burritos.ToArray())));
	    
	    var sortitFunction = function (a, b) {
	        return a.name.toLowerCase() == b.name.toLowerCase() ? 0 : a.name.toLowerCase() < b.name.toLowerCase() ? -1 : 1;
	    };

	    self.tacosarray.sort(sortitFunction);
	    self.burritosarray.sort(sortitFunction);
	}

	ko.applyBindings(new viewModel());
	</script>
}

"Should I hand-roll my DAL?"

No. Unless you just want an academic/code exercise. The libraries I'll mention in this post are already built, tested, fast and easy to use. If you are serious about building your application, don't waste time reinventing this wheel.

"I don't fear dynamics and I want something easy or rapid prototyping"

Massive - This ORM is simple to use, completely gets out of my way and lets me get right to building.

"I don't fear dynamics and I want some codefirst action"

Oak - One of my coding heroes Amir Rajan has gone and taken everything good about ActiveRecord and melded it with Massive.

"I want POCOs, an old school feel and Stored Procs"

Dapper - When you need uncompromised speed and ease, Dapper is your tool. The Stackoverflow team uses it and that is one heck of a merit badge.

"I want POCOs with some codefirst action"

OrmLite - ORMLite is a Post-CRUD augmentation to Dapper. In some ways, it is to Dapper what Oak is to Massive. Coded in awesome, covered in love.

"I'm using ServiceStack or planning to"

OrmLite - This one is kind of obvious as OrmLite is part of the ServiceStack family.

"I am a huge fan of T4 and code gen"

PetaPoco - PetaPoco is pretty fun regardless of your needs. If you are already pretty invested in T4 then this is for sure a love connection.

"I want POCOs and I might be doing some MongoDB in my app"

Simple.Data - I have personally not used this one yet, but I always hear wonderful things about it.

"My boss says we just have to use something ~Enterprisey~"

Use OrmLite and tell them it is a MS ADO.NET CPT Gen2 Release of EntityFramework with Enhanced Cloud Coverage™ and Synergized Mix-ins™.

While all these ORMs are pretty easy to use, you should always be doing yourself/your app (and of course your DBA) a favor and profile your DAL. I highly recommend ORMProfiler. I think it supports most if not all of the above ORMs, has a low cost, and you get a ton of information from it.

1st: I added a Unicorn config file: touch config/unicorn.rb and added the following:
worker_processes 3
timeout 30
preload_app true


2nd: I added Unicorn to my GemFile:
#rack server
gem 'unicorn'

3rd: I added a Procfile to the root of my app: touch Procfile and added the following:
web: bundle exec unicorn -p $PORT -c ./config/unicorn.rb

Commit it into Git, then git push heroku branchname and you are enjoying the sweet sweet threading love of Unicorn.

On our Ubuntu box, after we finish the easy as candy install, we're going to want to install Mono. Check out this previous post on how to do that and set it up in your /etc/environment.

Now that Mono is rocking, lets hop over to our CI install. At the time of this post, the latest version of TeamCity is 7.0.2a. Looking at the code below, we're going to install Java, pull down the latest version of the TeamCity linux tar, decompress it, switch directories and fire it up :

sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre
wget - http://download.jetbrains.com/teamcity/TeamCity-7.0.2a.tar.gz
tar xfz TeamCity-7.0.2a.tar.gz
cd Teamcity
sudo ./bin/runAll.bat start


Pretty easy right? Lets check out our web interface:

Yay! Everything works! You're also at a ubiquitous web interface which will likely give the Softie in you some solace. There are tons of resources online for setting up your project in TeamCity to check it out, build it, run tests, deploy, yada yada yada. If you are just getting started, I highly recommend Troy Hunt's post. You can also install Ruby on this server and have a wonderfully awesome auto-deployment method via Capistrano. If you are interested in deploying with Capistrano, let me know I'll try to barf out a quick post on it. This is a pretty short and to the point post, if it needs more content with regards to project checkouts and stuff, let me know and I can barf that out as well.

I'm not going to show you how to set up and install your Ubuntu Server, as there is a ton of internet out there that can handle that for you and the installer itself is pretty hard to mess up. What I will cover is what to do after that last reboot where it is just you and Bash, together... at last.

SSH into your fancy new Ubuntu box with Putty and Run this:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y install git-core curl python-software-properties

This is going to let us add the ppa(think of this as a package location) to install a current nginx:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nginx/stable
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y install nginx

Yes! We can now git things, we can curl things, and we can nginx things! Rawwrr!!! Let's kick some other processes to the curb... like that skank MySQL and that wet blanket Apache:
sudo update-rc.d mysql remove &&
sudo update-rc.d apache2 remove && mkdir mycoolapp

Now for the fun part, let's get Mono up and running. We really want the latest version of Mono, and like Nuget, not all packages in Ubuntu stay current. The fix for this in the mono world is to just grab this dudes install script and go have a drink because it takes a bit to finish:
mkdir mono-2.11
cd mono-2.11
wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/nathanb/iws-snippets/raw/master/mono-install-scripts/ubuntu/install_mono-2.11.sh
chmod 755 install_mono-2.11.sh
./install_mono-2.11.sh


Now to check that we have the current version, we just run the following:
/opt/mono-2.11/bin/mono -V

Cool! We're current, but what we really need is to just be able to run "mono -V" anywhere we want. We can do that by modifying our /etc/environment file:
sudo nano /etc/environment
#then insert ":/opt/mono-2.11/bin" at the end of that path string. Log out, log in for it to take effect.

I don't now about you, but all this sys-admin crap is putting me to sleep and I want to code. Back on our Widows/Dev box, we're going to new up an empty MVC4 project (up to you to figure out how to get MVC4 going on your box, I used Web Platform Installer). After the project is new'ed up:

• Add a controller
• Add a view based on that controller
• Hit F5 and make sure it works
• Remove the EntityFramework.dll because we love our data and don't want to give our app a low self esteem
• Once removed, hit F5 again

If everything is still running, then do a file system deploy to a local folder of your choice. Go check out what was just deployed, specifically the '/bin' folder. We want to remove the Web.Infrastructure.dll because Mono already has this built into its GAC. High Five Mono! With that out of the way, we are going to copy that deployment over to the 'mycoolapp' folder on our Linux server using WinsCP. While I don't have a WordPress plugin to read your mind, I hear you thinking "Rob, surely there are better ways to do this." and you are right. However, this post is long enough and that topic will likely go into its own post.

SSH back into your linux box, and 'cd mycoolapp'. "cd" into your "mycoolapp" directory, type in 'ls' to see the contents and make sure your app made it over. Once we see it, we can do a cassini like run of it by typeing out xsp4 and hitting enter. Try and hit your box on the port 8080 (xsp4 should tell you what it is running on) and see if you can see your app:

Yay! Our code works and we're so open source now that we can wear tight jeans at Starbucks and put Bon Iver on our ipod... just like those Rails wankers! As for nginx and running our site as a Mono service, we can just use some of the nice documentation over at the Mono site:

Nginx config:
http://www.mono-project.com/FastCGI_Nginx

Mono as a service:
http://yojimbo87.github.com/2010/03/14/mono-startup-script.html

Argenis went on some blabfest about how life got better for him after he started to really focus on SQL Server. He's a SQL Server certified Master, is incredibly helpful and one of the reasons I don't over commit myself to specific mastery. "But Rob, how can you say that? MCM's are reveled by everyone!!!" It's true. I take nothing away from a MCM and it is one of the few certs that are actually respected. But it's also not for me. Most of my shining moments as a DBA have nothing to do with a mastery of say quirky transaction scope of full text indexes or being the Chuck Norris of international merge replication scenarios and everything to do with knowing how things work on the whole. The more I know on the whole, especially with concepts, the better a DBA I am. When I'm getting Win-Auth errors, I don't need to be a Kerberos God ("When someone asks if you're a Kerberos God, you say YES!") to start to troubleshoot, but I need to know enough to ask the right questions. Being a jack of all trades typically lets me know when I'm in over my head and need to call in an expert - like my good friend Google or Argenis... which brings me to my next point:

As someone with an insatiable appetite for pizza...err learning, technology simply moves too fast and brings me too much joy to try to really master a facet of a single product. That is not a global rule, that is my personal choice and more importantly a personal defense mechanism from burnout. That is another thing that is fun about technology. There are usually many correct paths to success and interweaving those paths can build some really incredible software... which brings me to my final point:

As someone with no shortage of ego (I am a DBA afterall!) if you want to go down the path of being a jack of all trades, you better be friends with Masters and put your ego to the side and ask for help. There are few things more dangerous than not asking for help when you need it. We all write code that doesn't work the first time, we all have asked silly questions before, and we (as individuals) don't know everything.

Hello Postgres

Show notes and scripts will be put up on GitHub when I get back in town.