Over the past decade JavaScript standards and best practices have improved but dealing with dependencies and modularity is difficult. Frameworks like Require.js (and others) remedy these issues and more. Don’t be mistaken, there are teeth and merit to this new shiny toy. Sit down, buckle up, and keep all hands and arms inside as we teleport through the JavaScript time machine!
Yesterday my SQL Server 2008 R2 installation decided to pull a looney tunes on me and GO KA BOOM! One minute I was debugging a knockout.js binding issue, the next trying to understand why all of a sudden my Web API call to SQL Server couldn’t open a connection. The initial error was complaining no instance was available or was not currently running. Say what!? Two seconds ago all was golden with my data requests. After doing the normal checks it was time to load SQL Server Configuration Manager. There she blew, KA BOOM! The SQL Server Configuration Manager error message was nothing I’d seen before and hinted to an issue with WMI integration.
Cannot connect to WMI provider. You do not have permission or the server is unreachable. Note that you can only manage SQL Server 2005 and later servers with SQL Server Configuration Manager. Invalid class [0x80041010]
Direct from the mind of Nik Molnar and Anthony van der Hoorn the brains behind Glimpse bring you Open Source Perks. Open Source Perks is a list of tools and services made freely available to open source projects. The site is currently in Beta, hosted on GitHub.
In more general terms, I’d like to see an OSS hub, temperature of OSS so to speak that lists perks, top and bottom projects contributed to via the many repos, contacts, projects that need support, maybe even a voting system to collectively garner a group of folks to contribute on a large scale to projects for a short time-frame. I’m not sure what this looks like but would be interested in conversations. Maybe this already exists or has been attempted in the past. Welcome conversations and opinions.
What is the OOS Perks plan?
The long term plan is to build something big and beautiful that provides value for open source projects, consisting of a community edited information source. But for starters we’re keeping it simple while taking the pulse of the community. Is there any interest? What are the needs?
Check it out! What are you waiting for? Take action! Contribute your favorite perk via a pull request, learn more below ( taken from OSS Perks Readme at time of writing ). For full details please visit OSS Perks.
On a side note if you are looking to see how to get involved in OSS check out the lastest production from tekpub –> Get Involved.
How to Add Your Favorite Perk
Fork the repository
Use the following template to create an additional perk.
app.config
1234567891011121314
<li><divclass="product-overview"><divclass="product-title"><h2><ahref="{URL to Tool/Service Page}">{Name of Tool/Service}</a></h2> by <divclass="tag company"><ahref="{URL to Vendor Site}">{Name of Vendor}</a></div></div><divclass="tag platform">{Platform}</div></div><divclass="product-description"> {Description of Tool/Service}
</div><divclass="tag category">{Category Tag}</div><!-- This node can be repeated for multiple tags --><divclass="clear"></div></li>
Add the results to the <ul class="product-listing reset"> within <section class="products"> on index.html.
Make a pull request
Notes
Try to use {URL to Tool/Service Page1} that points to information about what is needed to qualify for a free license.
{Platform} is a development platform like .Net, Java, JavaScript or Ruby.
For non-platform specific tools, enter any, not an operating system.
Checkout my blog as a bubble chart below using D3.js. Convert any page to a bubble chart using this link. At first glance D3.js appears to be more advanced than Raphael.js, Processing.js, and Bonsai. Wish I had more time to take a closer look … not for awhile. Read an interesting article combining the power of D3.js and Raphael.js Network Graph.
D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.
Over the last long weekend took a 12 hour family road trip to VA Beach, VA to see family. Of course to survie the round trip a good podcast line-up was necessary. The faithful consisting of Herding Code, The Hanselminutes Podcast, .NET Rocks didn’t disappoint plus but two new comers showed great promise The Treehouse Show and JavaScript Jabber.
Oak is a frictionless development suite for ASP.NET MVC SPAs inspired by Ruby On Rails tools suite leveraging C# DLR to connect the dots. After listening to this talk I was jazzed to review the framework. Moving to the top of the list after Ember.js and Angluar.js.
PlasticSCM is one of the most powerful distributed version control systems on the market today providing advanced branching and merging plus integrates with all the major SCMs. Looking forward to taking this tool for a test drive. Product is FREE for 1-15 person teams.
OWIN defines a standard interface between .NET web servers and web applications. The goal of the OWIN interface is to decouple server and application, encourage the development of simple modules for .NET web development, and, by being an open standard, stimulate the open source ecosystem of .NET web development tools. NancyFx and SignalR both can run on OWIN hosts. Need to find sometime to play with Katana, an OWIN implementation for Microsoft servers and frameworks.
Bootbox.js is a small JavaScript library which allows you to create programmatic dialog boxes using Twitter’s Bootstrap modals, without having to worry about creating, managing or removing any of the required DOM elements or JS event handlers.
This SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) Blog Series reviews how to integrate SSRS with PostgreSQL Database back-end. A month ago, I had to provide a POC in a day showing integration between SSRS and PostgreSQL Database. Here is my journey, hope this provides some help to the next person.
Topics covered, guidance around tool selection, configuration, and a couple gotchas reviewed in detail to help ease setup proof of concept. The goal is to connect SSRS to a PostgreSQL Database and demonstrate report creation, deployment and viewing. At some point, likely Part III I’d like to understand and demonstrate how deployment can be automated.
Part I covers three basic areas Assumptions, Server Configuration and starts Development Configuration. Part II will cover the remainder of Development Configuraiton, SSRS Configuration, Viewing, and Known Issues. Part III will attempt to offer discussion and couple options for Automation.
The Spring.NET Application Framework provides a series of social extensions for Twitter, Dropbox and LinkedIn. The focus of this post will be using the Twitter extensions. At the time of this writing the Spring.Social.Twitter Nuget Package is at 2.0.0.M1. The goal is to create a windows service to poll twitter for a users time-line and all followers and their time-lines. Please keep in mind the intent of the post is not to show best practices or build a complete end to end application but simply to play with Spring.Social.Twitter and RavenDB. I know there are applications out there already that do this but I wanted to build something. Recently, the itch returned, after a bit I found Spring.NET Framework Social Extensions and decided to give it a go. I did look at Linq2Twitter a while back but thought the authentication needed work and never really found the time to go further. It does appear to have been updated recently, will have to check it out again. That said, time to start building a simple console app to demonstrate how to
Authenticate with Twitter REST API using Spring.NET Application Framework Social Extensions.
Use SlowCheetah to do App.config transformations.
Setup RavenDb Embedded for data storage.
Leverage Spring.NET Application Framework Social Twitter Extensions to simply and quickly pull tweets in chunks of 200 and persisting the data in RavenDB.
If all goes as planned, subsequent post(s) will delve into refactoring the console application to do more (i.e. dealing with max_id and since_id for twitter polling ), eventually porting to a windows service.
I’m a fan of Glimpse and Ninject IoC. Glimpse is a powerful debugging tool for ASP.NET MVC3/4 and Web Form applications providing simple extension points for custom plugins. I’d like to announce the release of Glimpse.Ninject 0.8.5 supporting Glimpse 1.2.0. The fork is based on Ninject.Extensions.Glimpse by Jaben Cargman.
With the release of Glimpse 1.0, I revisited my goal to create a few Glimpse plugins. Creating a plugin is simple, the hardest part is getting the data out of the targeted frameworks. I set my eyes initially on two plugins, StructureMap and Funk IoC containers but found that I used Ninject often and decided to help update Ninject.Extensions.Glimpse by Jaben Cargman in the form of a pull request and an immediate release for my own use.
Glimpse is diagnostics and debugging tool similar to FireBug and Chrome Developer Tools, but Glimpse provides .NET ASP.NET platform specific details. Glimpse provides details into the context of .NET ASP.NET MVC ¾ and Web Forms execution, routing, urls, model binding, configuration and into referenced libraries and frameworks. Glimpse 1.x provides plugin model to create additional plugins for Inversion of Control containers ( Ninject, StructureMap, Autofac, etc. ), ORMs (NHibernate, EF, etc ), RavenDb, FluentSecurity, etc. for an available package listing check nuget and Glimpse Packages. Time to show how simple creating a Glimpse Plugin can be.
Over the last several months I’ve had to obtain the Public Key Token from a strong key or a signed dll for verification countless times. So many times I decided to write a script to do it for me. The .NET Strong Name Tool to the rescue. Use the code snippets below:
getPublicKeyToken.cmd –> pass file path to *.snk or ‘*.dll’ and presto out pops the PKT.
getPublicKeyTokenProcessDir.cmd –> pass dir path and presto out pops PKTs for each dll in the directory.