Bart's Blog

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Flex Builder Linux installs new Flash Player

Seems I have a new version of Flash Player 9 after installing Flex Builder Linux on my Ubuntu system. Adobe's Flash Player site reports the following:

9,0,60,235 installed

Hmmmm....interesting. Wonder what's changed?

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Flex Builder for Linux alpha posted

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder_linux/

Looks like Adobe's getting very serious about Flex development. Very good to see. I've been using Flex Builder on the Mac and it's OK, but Linux has Java 6. This alpha works with Eclipse 3.3 (Europa).

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Using autotest and RedGreen

http://errtheblog.com/post/15

Nice blog entry about using autotest and RedGreen together for Rails testing. Works like a charm. Thanks Ted for this "gem".

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Ruby on Rails screencasts from PeepCode

PeepCode screencasts for Ruby on Rails developers

Very cool way to learn Ruby on Rails. I bought a 10-pack of credits. Very well done screencasts. Highly recommended.

Sunday, September 09, 2007

Aptana as a Ruby on Rails IDE

I'm using Aptana as my IDE for learning Ruby on Rails. So far, so good. Has a lot of good Rails support and works well with Rails on both Windows and Linux. Not bad for free, open source software.

Building Mongrel on Ubuntu Linux

Had some problems installing the mongrel gem on Ubuntu. This link quickly solved my issues. Full steam ahead on this Ruby on Rails endeavor.

Friday, August 17, 2007

More on IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 M2 EAP and JetGroovy

Just tried out the test runner and the debugger for a Grails application. Both work awesome without any setup or configuration. My integration tests ran within the typical IntelliJ IDEA test runner and the debugger worked too. I'm just stoked about Groovy and Grails development now!!

First impressions of JetGroovy in IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 M2

Holy crap!! JetBrains really knocked the ball out of the park on this one. The newly released IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 M2 EAP supports a new Groovy/Grails plugin, JetGroovy, also created by JetBrains. I've been working with Grails 0.56 in Eclipse using the Grails Eclipse plugin. The plugin is not great and has some serious performance issues. BTW, I'm running all of this on Mac OS X 10.4. I tried out the new IntelliJ EAP with JetGroovy tonight. It absolutely rocks!! It found my Grails and Groovy distributions without intervention (they were setup in the environment on the OSX). Creating new domain objects, controllers, views, etc. is all done through the New... menu item. What's really cool is the quick view of the domain object, its controller, view, controller test, and domain test classes. Links to each are at the top of the editor window, and selecting a link changes the editor window contents to that file. Very, very cool. This plugin will singlehandedly get people playing with Grails and Groovy. Looks like a winner. Can't wait to see where this goes over the rest of 2007. IntelliJ IDEA 7.0 is set to be released in early 2008.

Sunday, August 05, 2007

HTTP Scoop utility for HTTP sniffing

If you're on a Mac and doing web development, HTTP Scoop is a nice little tool for sniffing HTTP traffic. My friend Ted hooked me on to this tool. Very nice and super easy to use.

Got a MacBook from my consulting client...

and I'm loving it!! This is really the first time I've ever done anything substantial on the Mac OS X platform. Wow! What a difference it is over Windows. I'm really enjoying myself on this thing. We're doing Adobe Flex and Groovy/Grails programming at my client and the Mac platform is great for this type of development. I just came from a .NET 3.0 programming gig using WPF and WCF and the Windows environment was really flaky, even with its own development tools. For Flex programming, I'm using Eclipse 3.2.2 and the Flex Builder 2 plugin for Eclipse. Works without a hitch. I've been pleasantly surprised by the plugin when running Eclipse on Mac OS X. It's very quick and responsive and development is a breeze. I'm really enjoying the Flex programming (two weeks in so far). I pretty sure my next laptop is going to be a MacBook Pro with the high resolution (1920x1200) display. The MacBook that I'm using now is great, but we're hooking up external LCD monitors for primary display. The 13" display on the MacBook isn't enough for development.

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Adobe Flex 2 XML Schema for MXML markup

If your interested in using some other tool besides Flex Builder 2 for building Flex applications, you'll probably end up looking for an XML Schema (.xsd file) for MXML markup. I found one here.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Installing Dreamweaver CS3 on Windows Vista

It seems that the Dreamweaver CS3 installer will not work with Windows Vista x86 directly out of the box. I tried it a couple of times and every time it complained with an internal error 2739. Here's what needs to happen to make it go smoothly:

Open up a command prompt as Administrator by right clicking the command prompt icon and selecting Run as Administrator.

Navigate to \Windows\system32 directory.

Run the following command from the Command Prompt: regsvr32 jscript.dll

That seems to solve the issue.

Monday, June 04, 2007

Good article on why agile adoptions fail

Jean Tabaka lists 11 reasons why agile development method adoptions fail. Good article.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

User Account Control (UAC) on Vista

I've been fascinated by the amount of User Account Control or UAC dialog prompts I've been getting in Vista. Think of UAC as a graphical sudo. Basically you don't run as Administrator in Vista--you are prompted to allow administrative authority when a process needs it. It's actually pretty annoying, given that most Windows .NET development software needs administrative privileges. My Visual Studio development experience is vastly different on Vista than it is on XP. Not sure what to think of UAC. It certainly clues you into heightened access by programs, but it never prompts for an administrative password (for example in Linux when the adept notifier is opened, it will prompt you for a sudoer's password).

Monday, April 30, 2007

Getting Ruby on Rails up and running on Ubuntu Linux

Install RubyGems: sudo apt-get install rubygems

Install Rails: sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies

Download and unzip Eclipse.

Get Ruby Development Tools via Software Update: http://updatesite.rubypeople.org/release

Get RadRails via Softwware Update: http://radrails.sourceforge.net/update

http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6998

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Flex Builder 2.0.1 - Terrible first impression

I downloaded Adobe's Flex Builder 2.0.1 for trial drive. I'm interested in rich client development and Flex and Flash seem to be where the action is at. I'm currently doing WPF in the .NET world, but that necessitates installing .NET 3.0 on the client machine and XBAP deployment is still a bit shaky these days (partial vs. full trust issues come to mind). Anyways, I thought I'd try out Flex Builder 2 for 30 days. Well, it only took me a few minutes to see that this tool probably won't be very productive for me. The thing is terribly slow in source code mode, to the point that it becomes unusable. The design mode seems to work OK, but switching to source mode just brings the tool to its knees. It is built on Eclipse 3.1.2 and I've been lukewarm on Eclipse these days too. Not sure if its the Flex Builder stuff or Eclipse causing the issue, but it ain't good either way. Now looking for other tooling to help with Flex development. Luckily, it does look like I could just use a text editor and use Ant and the Flex build tasks to build stuff up. Stay tuned.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

When pair programming rocks

I recently spent about 2.5 days pair programming with another developer at a client gig. We camped out in a small conference room for the entire time and set up a laptop with a nice 20" widescreen LCD monitor so both programmers could easy see what was happening. Wow!! What an awesome experience and when the time was up, we had refactored some nasty eventing code into a thoughtful design that has a nice set of unit tests around it (where as the previous code had no unit tests). An awesome agile development experience. Probably one of the only times I've truly felt super-productive on this project. Looking for more opportunities like this at this current client engagement. Kudos Mike!

Goodbye, ankhsvn!

Well, I and a couple other developers at my current gig stopped using ankhsvn within VS 2005. Cool tool and it works great if your solution doesn't get too big. But our stuff is getting huge and it just became a drain on resources. It needs some serious perf tuning, but I'm hoping that it does improve to the point that I can one day use it. Just not ready for prime time at my client. Now I'll have to manually maintain the svn adds from TortoiseSVN. Not real excited about that, but I can't take the hit on performance that ankhsvn subjects me to.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

SharpDevelop's SVN support

Seems SharpDevelop is using the excellent TortoiseSVN component to handle Subversion integration in the IDE.  I'm really impressed at how far SharpDevelop has come in the past few years.  It's a very capable IDE and much faster than VS 2005. 

New Dell 2407WFP monitor

Just received a new 24" Dell widescreen flat panel LCD monitor. It's quite nice! I have it hooked up to my Dell XPS M170 laptop and its a dream. I had a Dell 20" widescreen flat panel LCD monitor previously connected to this laptop, but the 24" will run at the Dell XPS native resolution of 1920x1200. Sweet! I paid $569 (no including tax); there was a email coupon offer that I used to get the monitor at that price. If you have the money and a video card that will drive a monitor of this resolution, it's well worth the cost.

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