Setup

Since I’ve been using MacVim more and more in my personal development projects, I’ve grown to have a significant amount of muscle memory. Pretty frequently now I find a string of ‘jjjj’ in the middle of my C# code as I’m trying to take a look at what it’s doing. So I figured it was time to explore the possibilities of getting viemu up and going. The biggest hurdle was my concern about losing CodeRush/Refactor Pro! support. I am heavily dependent on them so they had to play nice together. Good news. This worked out of the box. After a quick install of viemu and a firing up Visual Studio, I was off and running.

Small tweaks

I did have to make a couple of small adjustments. First was my key re-mappings. In my configs , I snagged a couple of key mappings that I’ve found really helpful. I needed these same behaviors in viemu in order to take advantage of all my muscle memory. The key was creating the .viemurc file in my home directory since it picks that file up by default.

I also had an issue with colors – I prefer dark themes both in vim & Visual Studio. By default, the highlight in viemu clashes so strongly with my theme that I had to disable it. I couldn’t get it to switch up the color schemes appropriately either so I’m guessing I’ll have to dig a bit more to get that working but overall I’m pretty happy. If I find a way to get this working properly, I’ll update the post.

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.

On April 30th, Improving Enterprises and Microsoft are hosting the Agile.NET conference at Microsoft’s Irving office. It’s a conference that will showcase agile principles and practices as well as tools in the .NET ecosystem. I’m excited to be doing a talk on git as it’s become a big point of evangelism for me personally but I’m also interested to hear some of the other tracks of great speakers.

Regardless of whether you’re new to agile concepts or already moving towards adoption, you will have an informative and good time. Space is limited so be sure to go sign up while there are still spaces available.

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.

Binding

As I mentioned, we used the model attribute to decorate our models when they are in the method signature. This attribute was based on the AbstractParameterBinderAttribute from MvcContrib (if you’re using ASP.NET MVC and NOT using MvcContrib, you’re probably re-inventing more than a few wheels) which is just a CustomModelBinderAttribute with a little bit of happy sprinkled in. Here’s what our binding looked like:

public override object BindModel(ControllerContext controllerContext, ModelBindingContext bindingContext)
{
	ViewDataDictionary viewData = GetViewData(controllerContext.Controller);
	object result = null;
	if (viewData != null)
	{
		result = viewData.For(controllerContext, bindingContext);
		SetViewData(result, controllerContext, bindingContext, viewData);
	}
	return result;
}

The GetViewData and SetViewData are pretty self-explanatory but the real heavy lifting is in that extension method. Let’s take a look at it.

DictionaryAdapter

We know that we have a giant dictionary holding on to our data and tedious mapping using strings make me itchy, not to mention it breaking my refactoring tool, so how do we push the values without them? DictionaryAdapter from Castle. This little known, under utilized piece of work was shown to me by Craig Neuwirt, it’s creator, and I’m constantly amazed at it’s usefulness. Observe the following extension method for ViewData:

private static readonly IDictionaryAdapterFactory
	ViewDataFactory = new DictionaryAdapterFactory();

public static object For(this ViewDataDictionary viewData, ControllerContext controllerContext, ModelBindingContext bindingContext)
{
	ViewDataAdapter data = new ViewDataAdapter(viewData);
	object adapter = ViewDataFactory.GetAdapter(bindingContext.ModelType, data);

	IDictionaryAdapter meta = adapter as IDictionaryAdapter;
	meta.FetchProperties();
	
	return adapter;
}

It’s that simple. No, really. The DictionaryAdapter will match up the properties on the interface you defined with the corresponding elements in the ViewData and push their values into an instance of the model. All of that, without you even having to buy it dinner.

There’s more??

This approach worked great for us and gave us most of what we needed, however, this code doesn’t handle rehydrating objects from ActiveRecord – yet. But that’s a post for another night…

CORRECTION: Craig informed me that he did not create it originally but re-wrote it’s initial implementation to what it is now. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.

Check it out at: Improving Podcasts

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.

public ActionResult Login(string username, string password, bool rememberMe)
{
  ...
}

it ended up looking like this:

public ActionResult Login([Model]ILoginModel model)
{
  ...
}

with the declaration of the model looking like this:

public interface ILoginModel
{
  string Username{get;set;}
  string Password{get;set;}
  bool RememberMe{get;set;}
}

Our model attribute was responsible for pulling in the values from our ViewData and then binding them using the DictionaryAdapter (probably one of the most powerful, under-documented pieces of the whole stack) from Castle.

Advantages

Doing this allowed us to keep our dealings with the models strongly typed (yes, this is NOT unique to using interfaces vs. classes), minimized the code needed for the model since it’s just an interface but also keeps anyone from “accidentally” pushing logic down into the model that belongs elsewhere.

Next up, the guts of how we used DictionaryAdapter to do this…

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.

Building a Castle: Introduction to Windsor

Getting introduced to Castle Windsor can be a daunting thing, I know since I’ve gone thru it. But under the covers, there is a great power. This talk will introduce the concepts as well as the methods to harness and take full advantage of all that power without getting overwhelmed.

CodeRush Ninja Training

If your not using a productivity tool, you’re ripping off your customers and wasting your time. We will take a look at how CodeRush can help you to be more productive in code and have a great time doing it. With a little practice, you can learn to be a CodeRush ninja too.

Come sign up and I look forward to seeing you there.

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.

Tweak It

Never one to stop fiddling and exploring, I recently ran across this post where a guy was complaining that they’d messed with the sleep behavior between his trusty Powerbook and the new MacBook. He detailed a tweak that made this already great (albeit occasionally flaky) feature even better along with a good explanation of the details of the change. He claims it’s more reliable but I haven’t had it long enough to say one way or the other yet but I can tell you, my MBP sleeps and wakes nearly instantly now. The only thing that this tweak takes away from you is the ability to swap out batteries while the machine is in sleep mode. Since I didn’t even imagine I could do that and I’m not really sure I would do that anyway since I don’t have any spare batteries, I didn’t feel like I was giving anything up. I’m duplicating the tweak here for reference purposes and you “lazy” folks who aren’t going to go read the original post:

From the terminal, you should check your current mode using:

pmset -g | grep hibernatemode

Then set you machine to use mode 0:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

And reboot.
If you’d like to clear out the file where the memory was being written to, you can use this:

sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.

Background

Recently, I’ve decided to work with Ruby a little more and I’ve been trying to wrap my head around a number of new things. I’m working to put together a series of posts that will detail my exploration but I ran into a nasty issue and wanted to get something up to help anyone else who falls into this little pit.

Setup

I have been using Heroku in my explorations and have come to truly dig their service. These guys know what the heck their doing and really make me feel like I do as well. Anyway, since I needed a CMS for the project I was working on, I grabbed Radiant and started playing. It worked quite well out of the box for me and was supported on Heroku (directions here) so I installed several of the extensions that I needed and pushed it up to Heroku.

Uh oh. No worky.

I pulled down the logs from Heroku, I sent emails to everyone I could think of, I Googled, I re-pushed (yes, I know that’s the definition of insanity), I even shook my fist at the bash shell but could not get it to work.

Resolution

Along the way, I came to find a couple of rather important pieces of info. Heroku doesn’t support Git on the server side (like git-wiki). And Git has sub-modules. These two important details, and the fact that I was unaware of the previously, is what lead to me to grab a copy of what was on the production server (the bundle command on Heroku) and dissect it. The extension directories were completely empty. Because of the sub-modules, Git wasn’t pushing them to Heroku and so the extensions weren’t loaded. Removing the sub-modules and then adding the files from the extensions, followed by a re-push and I was back in business.
Hope this help.

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.

Regardless of whether you’re new to agile concepts or already moving towards adoption, you will have an informative and good time. If you’re interested, go sign up while there are still spaces available.

David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.