DaveTheNinja.Net

Bye Bye Scotland! It was fun...

david.nospam@nospam.davetheninja.net (DaveTheNinja) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:14:00 -0500

I will be moving to Hong Kong early next month to work freelance for a while until I find permanant employment.

I will miss Scotland, like a hole in the head

So cheerio, and ill be on my usual haunts of twitter "davetheninja" and the blog will be back up soon.

Ninja

Developer Day Scotland this Saturday 2/May/2009

david.nospam@nospam.davetheninja.net (DaveTheNinja) — Fri, 01 May 2009 08:35:00 -0500

About Developer Day Scotland

Developer Day Scotland (DDS) is a community event, run by community for community, which is based upon the highly successful Developer! Developer! Developer! (DDD) community conference events.

Scottish Developers is pleased to bring this phenomenal success to Scotland once again. The very best of the UK speaker community will be presenting on the topics delegates wish to see.

Highlights of Developer Day Scotland

Listed below are some of the key highlights of the day:

Modern state of the art conference facility courtesy of Glasgow Caledonian University.
Four technical tracks with a capacity of of 200 delegates.
Sixty minute in-depth technical content sessions.
Leading international speakers and technology specialists.
Networking area, CPD resources.
Sponsor area to facilitate networking with delegates

The Developer Day Scotland team are constantly working on adding resources and more value to the day, so remember to come back from time to time to see what’s been added.

Who Should Attend?

Anyone involved in the software development or software engineering world.

Delegates will typically be drawn from software professionals and soon-to-be professionals, including business analysts, designers, DBAs, software developers, software engineers, students, team leads, testers and not forgetting managers of all levels.

Dates & Times

DDS will run from 9am to 5pm on Saturday 2nd May 2009.

Venue

The Continuing Professional Development Centre, Glasgow Caledonian University, Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow G4 0BA.

See the location on Google Maps or the Caledonian University website

Cost

Now the very best part! This event is free thanks to the generosity of our sponsors and supporters.

Agenda

jQuery Deep Dive : Andy Gibson
Virtualisation for Developers - What? Why? Where? : Liam Westley
Everything you wanted to know about refactoring but were afraid to ask! : Gary Short
Testing the SQL Database - Best Practice : Satya SK Jayanty
TDD? I don't have time : Craig Nicol
Real-world MVC Architecture : Steven Sanderson
Embracing a new world - dynamic languages and .NET : Ben Hall
77 SQL Server Myths : Simon Sabin
What's new in C# 4.0 : Guy Smith-Ferrier
ASP.NET MVC Best Practice : Sebastien Lambla
Make Patterns with Patterns - Introducing the MVVM design pattern for WPF : Ray Booysen
SQL Server Optimisation - Best Practice for Writing Efficient Code and Finding and Fixing Bad SQL to Improve Performance : Iain Kick
Stop your website being stung : Barry Dorrans
What is functional programming? : Barry Carr
When Good Architecture Goes Bad : Mark Dalgarno
Who Needs Schema When You Have SQL Data Services? : Eric Nelson
ASP.NET 4.0 : Mike Ormond
Scrum Pain - Lessons learned swimming against the current : Abid Quereshi
AOP with Castle Winsor and PostSharp Chris Canal SQL Server Architecture - The Life of a Query : Christian Bolton

You can view the full agenda on the Developer Day Scotland website.

PATCH: TestControllerBuilder to allow stubbing of Request.AcceptTypes

david.nospam@nospam.davetheninja.net (DaveTheNinja) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 03:18:00 -0500

I currently have the requirement to set the Request.AcceptTypes property for a controller test. AFAIK there is currently no way of doing this within the MVC-Contrib TestControllerBuilder.

I updated their latest trunk and have created a patch file in case you, or the MVC-Contrib guys want to use it.

Heres the test:

        [Test]
        public void CanSpecifyRequestAcceptTypes()
        {
            builder.AcceptTypes = new[] {"some/type-extension"};
            var controller = new TestHelperController();
            builder.InitializeController(controller);
            Assert.That(controller.HttpContext.Request.AcceptTypes, Is.Not.Null);
            Assert.That(controller.HttpContext.Request.AcceptTypes.Length, Is.EqualTo(1));
            Assert.That(controller.HttpContext.Request.AcceptTypes[0], Is.EqualTo("some/type-extension"));
        }

Heres the code

		protected void SetupHttpContext()
		{
			...
SetupResult.For(request.AcceptTypes).Do((Func<string[]>)(() => AcceptTypes));

.....
		}

Download the patch: click here

Dave the Ninja

Stage 1 of the move complete

david.nospam@nospam.davetheninja.net (DaveTheNinja) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 02:44:00 -0500

As of sunday evening all of my domains were successfully moved to GANDI.net

Next on the agenda is getting my old clients sites off my servers and on to their own hosting plans.

Windows 2008 Server, your days are numbered!

david.nospam@nospam.davetheninja.net (DaveTheNinja) — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 11:51:00 -0500

It is with great joy *achem* regret that I am getting rid of my dedicated servers over the next few weeks.

The main reason is cost, and limitations. I have decided to get hosting from now on, on a project per project basis, with my domains hosted over on GANDI.net

I will be re-doing my blog within the next week or so over to a Ruby on Rails blog engine - and I will/should be moving my site over to brightbox.com for hosting.

Hopefully this will be quite easy to do *fingers crossed* and should not interupt the site too much.

I will blog on my experiences after its complete

Ninja

Official launch of www.richpictures.co.uk

david.nospam@nospam.davetheninja.net (DaveTheNinja) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 02:55:00 -0500

I had been working for some time on a project for my friends company Rich Pictures Ltd, who are based in Glasgow - Scotland (UK)

The site had been up and running for quite a while as we ironed out the remaining features such as the shop and PayPal integration but on Monday I flicked the switch and rolled over to the final release of this application.

The website is designed to showcase the works of Lisa Clelland, and to enable her to clients to log in and select which photographs they would like prints of and then add them to cart for purchasing.

I am really happy how this site has evolved and with the design of the site. This was a 1 man job from start to finish, working closely with Rich Pictures throughout the design processes

I twittered on it and have received some lovely comments so far, two of which were from Phil Haack (Microsoft MVC) and Louis DeJardin (Spark View Engine Creator)

I see big things for the future of this site and company as a whole as Lisa is a very talented photographer, as you can see from looking at the site.

You can visit Rich Pictures at www.richpictures.co.uk or contact Lisa directly on 07786 077 891 if you are interested in booking her (quote you got the link/number from me)

Dave the Ninja

Design your own Visual Studio Theme

david.nospam@nospam.davetheninja.net (DaveTheNinja) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 10:55:00 -0500

http://www.frickinsweet.com/tools/Theme.mvc.aspx

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!

Dave the Ninja

PATCH: RouteTestingExtensions for when RouteValue is a complex type

david.nospam@nospam.davetheninja.net (DaveTheNinja) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 08:43:00 -0500

Update:

This fix is included in the current release of MVC-Contrib.

I have been using the MVCContrib RouteTestingExtensions today for the first time and they have been working really well.... that is until I started writing a custom route that returns a complex type to the RouteValueDictionary.

The tests that I had assumed would work and pass were like the following:

    [TestFixture, Category("Routing")]
    public class When_Url_to_route_is_dynamic_with_trailing_slash_and_no_html_extension : DynamicContentRouteSpecification
    {
        public override void Given()
        {
            base.Given();
            currentUrl = "~/business/something/";
            dynamicUrl = new DynamicUrl(currentUrl.Substring(2));
        }

        [Test]
        public void Then_the_current_url_should_map_to_DynamicContentController_Render_action()
        {
            route.ShouldMapTo<DynamicContentController>(a => a.Render(dynamicUrl));
        }
    }

In my code sample above the DynamicUrl is a class that wraps additional logic around the passed in url, and I have a ToString() method on it that simply returns the original url value.

This test kept blowing up, and after looking at the tests and code from MVCContrib I found the code that was causing all of the problems.

        public static object GetValue(this RouteValueDictionary routeValues, string key)
        {
            foreach(var routeValueKey in routeValues.Keys)
            {
                if(string.Equals(routeValueKey, key, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase))
                    return routeValues[routeValueKey] as String;
            }

            return null;
        }

This GetValue method within the RouteTestingExtensions would work as expected until the return "as String". As we know "as String" returns a string if it can be converted or null if it can not.

To resolve this issue I amended the MVCContrib code to the following:

        public static object GetValue(this RouteValueDictionary routeValues, string key)
        {
            foreach(var routeValueKey in routeValues.Keys)
            {
                if(string.Equals(routeValueKey, key, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase))
                    return routeValues[routeValueKey].ToString();
            }

            return null;
        }

After making the changes and running the MVCContrib tests, they all passed.

I then re-built and referenced the new assembly builds in my project and HAZZA! my tests started passing.

I have uploaded the patch and you can download it here

If anyone has any feedback on this, or if I have gone about using the helper the wrong way please leave me a comment.

David the Ninja

Film: Katakuri-ke no kôfuku (aka The Happiness of the Katakuris)

david.nospam@nospam.davetheninja.net (DaveTheNinja) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:06:00 -0500

What can I say about this film?

IF IT IS THE LAST THING YOU DO ON THIS EARTH, WATCH THIS MOVIE!

I was doubled over laughing the whole way through, director Takashi Miike has done an amazing job once again directing this master piece!

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0304262/

I think I have a new favourite movie!

Ninja

Learn a new language every year....

david.nospam@nospam.davetheninja.net (DaveTheNinja) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 03:54:00 -0500

..or thats what they say anyways

I have decided that this years programming language that I am going to learn is Ruby / Ruby on Rails. I have just bought Agile Web Development with Rails: Second Edition from the Pragmatic Programmers.

I have only had time to glance through the book but it seems excellent so far, real life examples and what looks like full rails programming reference.

I am looking to start properly coding my first app in rails within the next week or two so I will blog on my experiences.

I am also learning Cantonese which is proving to be possible but very difficult

@ dgi p.s CMS part 4 is coming soon, ive not forgotten about you

Dave the Ninja