GuruStop.NET

It’s this time of the year, and DDD Sydney is taking place again by end of June 2012 :-)
Yes, it’s “the other” DDD …  Developer Developer Developer!

If you don’t remember the way sessions get chosen in DDD is that call for submissions is first open for everybody for a couple of weeks, then the submitted sessions are listed for public voting for similar time (or so). Anyone can choose up to 10 (TEN) sessions that they want to have available if they decide to register for attending the event. Later, most voted sessions are what gets into the event agenda.

The registration is usually open by voting time (now!), although more actively publicized after the vote is closed.

My Session Proposals

Like last year, I have submitted some session proposals for DDD in the hope to get one of them voted most to deliver within the day.

You can see all submissions and vote for the ones that interest you most from here. I have included a copy of my submissions here in case you find the page hard to read (or just zoom-in a bit).

An Example Of The Need To Use Absolute URLs

I have been doing some work around twitter and ASP.NET MVC. The way twitter authentication works, is that I have a page that creates a twitter URL, redirects the user to twitter, the users accepts to use the application associated with the website, and twitter redirects the user to a callback URL, the completes processing of the user credentials. In order to set a callback URL dynamically (especially in development, when the callback is likely a localhost one), we need to send the absolute URL to twitter.

Other examples might include having a “permanent URL” for some resource (product, blog post, etc..), or maybe a link to be used in emails or so. There can be many usages, so, let’s see how to do it!

How We Did It In Webforms

In webforms, the easiest way to do it was to use the Control.ResolveClientUrl() method.

Typically you pass a URL relative to the current code file (.aspx, .master or .ascx file). and it returns the corresponding absolute URL of that. Of course when the file is a control or a master page file, we don’t always want/have a path relative to this file. The work around for this was passing a relative URL that starts with “~/”. As you probably know, “~/” represents the root of the website.

If you downloaded Visual Studio 11 Beta, and tried to create a new ASP.NET MVC 4 empty project, looking at the “Scripts” folder, you’ll see this new file “_references.js”:

Which looks like the following:

/// <reference path="jquery-1.6.2.js" />
/// <reference path="jquery-ui-1.8.11.js" />
/// <reference path="jquery.validate.js" />
/// <reference path="knockout-2.0.0.debug.js" />
/// <reference path="modernizr-2.0.6-development-only.js" />

The VS <reference /> Syntax

As you probably know, the `// <reference path=”…” />` syntax was introduced in Visual Studio long time ago to make you able to have intellisense in any JavaScript file to include everything defined in the JavaScript located at this path.

In easier words, if you write the very first line in any JavaScript file, say “my-page.js”, and make sure the path points to the proper jQuery file, when you write code in “my-page.js”, you’ll get intellisense for everything in the jQuery file. The quality of the intellisense will vary based on the referenced jQuery file, whether it’s minified file (least intellisense info, only member names, sometimes), just standard source/debug file, or even one that VsDoc comments (best intellisense, might even have notes on what types you need to pass to methods, when defined in VsDoc comments).

A friend I know has been developing desktop applications with .NET for quite long time. He wanted to improve himself even more by going out of his comfort zone learning more stuff he’s not familiar with. So, he spent some time learning client side web technologies and wanted to add some “non” .NET server technologies to the mix. He emailed me asking for recommendations on what to learn,: “Ruby, Python, or PHP ?”.

After sending the answer, as with other previous emails, I thought maybe I’d share it with you here.

Python

Let’s start with Python, since it’s the language I know least about (take that as a disclaimer against everything I claim about it next). Note that Python also has similar options to Ruby (maybe even earlier than Ruby had for some of them) even the MVC application frameworks (like django), but they aren’t booming as much as, say, Ruby..

Python’s real power is that it’s one of the old languages with great standard library doing networking and several pieces of functionality, in a way closer to C++ than it is to .NET or Java. I think also it’s runtime is historically has better performance and wider platform support than, Ruby.

Too long to read?

Readify, the great consulting company where I work now, is hiring for Senior Developer (Consultant) and Senior Consultant positions all across Australia, and sponsors work visa for accepted international applications. You can apply here: http://bit.ly/readify-openings.
You don’t have to mention this post (but I’ll be happy of you do of course)

Working at Readify, what’s it’s like

Through blog, twitter stream, and more, you probably saw me talk about how awesome it is to work here at Readify. Being in the same company with Tatham Oddie (the creator of WebformsMVC and tons of other things, and frequent speaker in MIX and other events), Richard Banks (the father of ALT.NET Sydney, and great Agile master), Krzysztof Kozmic (the Castle Windsor guy), Philip Leonardo (the creator of LinFu dynamic proxy, used by default in NHibernate),, and .. the list is so long actually, and I have missed most of them…

Not just that, through my work at Readify, I have had the chance to play with a lot of technologies and frameworks. Windows Azure, OData, WebformsMVP, Windsor, Autofac, SQL Server 2008 R2, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, jQuery UI, knockoutJS, HTML 5, CSS3, and have all sorts of geeky conversations about the newest hypes like Windows 8 and VS 11.