IT-Box

Since i’m coding with Microsoft software development stack for years, recent days i’m very confused with my observations about Microsoft’s new technologies and returning reactions by it’s communities.

The big picture what i see is; there is a world of wonders which has a god (Microsoft), and prophets (Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, Rob Connery : The last Prophet etc.) and we all the creatures. We are all crying out to our god:

God:

- Hoo Hoo hooo, give me your soul poor man, i will bless you. With your $acrifices, i would be appreciated.

Prayers:

- oh my god, please please give me food, i gave you my soul already, please give me some more.

Among all these my posts below in the blog, it’s interesting that why i’m talking about like that for now? Nowadays, everyone is aware of the ASP.NET MVC framework you know and all the Microsoft folks waiting for it in a lather (sadly me too!). Every other’s blog which i get in, get me out with the comments like

# re: .NET Web Product Roadmap (ASP.NET, Silverlight, IIS7)
Thursday, November 29, 2007 1:39 PM by Wallstreet

Give me silverlight 2.0 or give me death!

comment on Scott Guthrie’s “.NET Web Product Roadmap (ASP.NET, Silverlight, IIS7)” post

Kevin Isom
October 19th, 2007

But in saying all of that I can’t wait to get my hands on the MVC stuff as well.

comment on Rob Connery’s “Have We ASP.NET Geeks Lost Something?” post

These comments describe what i exactly trying to mention. I called this “followship”. We all ms guys playing around with the toys that Microsoft gave us. Everyone in the community looks for Scott Guthrie’s mouth for any lips movement. We are greedily waiting for MVC ctp deadline, when we eat it, our god will feed us with an another toy. What’s new here? MVC patterns exists for years and when Microsoft implements it it becomes one of holy grails. The followship buzzword sits on the right meaning for Microsoft community IMHO.

Then what is “fellowship” ? I won’t describe the the meaning what i load to, But i’ll gave you some steps to open your wings to gain full freedom and to open doors to no headed community.

• Get you pc Ubuntu/Linux installed (or any other popular linux distro)
• Open your distro’s packet manager.
• Get your distro Apache Http Server installed
• Get your distro Eclipse installed
• Get your Eclipse PyDev and CDT plug-ins installed
• Welcome to the fellowship of the free software

All you need to develop really real world software is on your hands for FREE even in enterprise solutions. Take it so:

1. Do you need speed? No doubt : take C programming language, learn it, experience it, tool it for you box, in Eclipse IDE with CDT plug-in.
2. Do you need efficiency? No doubt : take JAVA programming language, it won’t hurt you if you already code with C# also it has extensive Enterprise Frameworks like Spring, Struts and Eclipse IDE is the hometown for JAVA.
3. Do you need productivity? No doubt : take Python programming language, learn what it can save for your life time, again in famous Eclipse IDE with PyDev plug-in.

The all stack comes with real cross-platform comformance, they are not built for a specific platform like IIS or Windows api. They can extend on free Apache http server which works on all platforms, they can extend on Gtk+ GUI toolkit which works on all platforms etc. etc. etc. Give them a chance and with your individual skills you should be number one coder and developer with community support, GPL support and freedom support Believe in that here no one expects nothing from someone except some help without get paid.

Anyone may vary easily in his/her thoughts, so do i. Give a try for steps i pointed above, you’ll be exactly excited for only in 7 hours… From now i’ll hold this stack with my right hand and swap my Microsoft related (really experienced) knowledge to my left hand.

And it’s time for you to face with your own realities…

• 0 Comments

Here is my simple, some spare time project, one that smartphone game based on a southpark theme. It’s a simply working game that coded for dummies. You can download the source code below the post but unfortunately the code had not been commented, but it promises to be really simple. In fact it’s not really a tutorial, i only exposed the code for dummies, only enjoy it if you wish.

Although it’s a simple tutorial like game, it’s surely entertaining and enjoying. As you know Cartman is very angry as always and tyring to avoid things that he hates.

The game uses GDI with custom double buffering model, so it DOES NOT use windows controls such picture boxes. It’s based on bit blitting technique. Honestly the code wasn’t written perfectly, as i said before it’s a spare time project, but it can give the general basic game programming concepts to newbies altough i’m not a game programmer.

Download the source project here

• 0 Comments

i’ve got two tasks for you. The first one is; you will connect to your working database, make a query to fetch all your contacts, and display’ em in a grid like control on a windows form. You bet it’s very simple, especially if you’re using Visual Studio. Now with Visual Studio 2008 by drag&drop operations i can do this without writing any code snippet and even have ability to display relational data.

Oh my, visual studio is really great IDE software, it makes all the things for me and now i could really dive into thinking the real problems of my software needs. But where is analytical thinking? Trying to solve the big picture puzzle of software is really an analytical thinking? I think the nature of computer programming is writing code that computers undertands and trying to solve problems by using innovational or existing algorithms. So the one who solves computional problems by algorithms is a computer programmer in a nutshell i think.

If you doubt, one main question have to be asked:

What is analytical thinking?

Here comes my second task for you that you have an array of digits those random positioned like this one:

int[] digits = new int[]{4, 5, 2, 7, 9, 3, 1, 8, 6};

So please give a try to sort this array ascending like this one {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 } without using Array.Sort() or any library method. This sounds very simple, is it? i can hear your laugh, saying how an easy thing this is. If you give a chance yourself to solve this problem i guess and suppose that you will find how much an analytical thinker you are.

*

Here i do not advocate that not to use visual studio or framework libraries, certainly they make our life more easier, but all programmers who says that i’m a programmer and have ability to solve any kind of problems by using my favorite programming language, must do training and exercise in basic algorithms, learn historical solutions to generic problematic issues and have a look at some framework base classes how things done.

I’m neither a perfect programmer nor a expert analytical thinker, but i’m trying to do and always give myself some time to understand some basic and base concepts. I guess and believe these will make me soon a good big picture puzzler, a senior developer or solution developer.

• 1 Comment

Here is my work that auto generates a web service proxy into an assembly with a BuildProvider implementation. It’s a protoype, the rest could be implemented in your own way but it is surely working as it is (i won’t develop it further). Once it is built, the c# code wrapper of web service description generated and compiled into memory (infact into an assembly in asp.net temp directory), so you can use intellisense support of Visual Studio.

It could stand as an alternative for wsdl.exe tool of .NET Framework sdk or Visual Studio’s web referencing feature.

I won’t describe the code one by one, you can watch the poor and short video below and download the project source code at the and of this post to digg in somemore. It can cause reinspirations nicely, if you catch one please let me know, i would like to help. So enjoy it!

P.S: If you have interested in SubSonic project which is exactly popular nowadays, this work inspired a bit from it.

Download Project Source Code

• 0 Comments

Finally, for a few weeks ago my company’s CMS project named ‘WebSayfam’ released locally for Turkish folks. The video below describes briefly on the fly page editing work flows (Interface language is Turkish for now).

Some of the core features of this project are:

• On the fly page editing, by ‘remind me’ option.
• SEO friendly URLs
• One application, multiple domains (does not require installation per domain on the web server)
• Enchased content module api (only implement IModule then deploy it)
• Fully flexible template access ( can bu user defined) and multiple template mastering.
• Template changes do not cause content lost. Only the look and feel changes.
• Drag ‘n Drop content replacement, fully integrated AJAX content management on the fly.
• So so so, i don’t want to advertise this product, i only share it’ features.

Behind the scenes the project is built on top of .Net Framework, Ms Sql Server, Nhibernate, Prototype Javascript framework. The core idea behind the project was that “build one application, handle hundreds of domains on the same web server” so we design software to be global on IIS. To do this task we implemented IHttpModules and IHttpHandlers to filter domains which uses CMS application and generate relevant contents with the manipulaion of HTML templates then registered them to machine level web.config file while loading required assemblies to the GAC. This approach solved our centric application model then we all pay our attention to the core development. While coding the project the most difficult part had became keeping module states inherited from IModule interface. And we get over this problem by binary serializing modules into the database and NHibernate helped us much with deserializing modules easily as it is.

Sorry for poor video, but i wish if it helps for some imagination with my brief explanations. I only wanted share our approach to this CMS application model and get feedbacks from you. Hope this helps some inspirations to you to share us.

• 0 Comments