Rick Minerich's Development Wonderland : blogging

Spam Overload

RickM — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:28:00 GMT

I’ve been hit pretty hard by the spam bots over this past weekend. It’s been getting worse at an exponential rate over the last few weeks. If this keeps up I’ll be spending all my time weeding out spam and will have no time to continue maintaining this blog.

As to stem the tide I’ve temporarily made it necessary to create an account to be able to post comments. Of course, long term I hope to find something better. If you know of something I can drop into Community Server 2.0 please send me an email.

Thanks,
-Rick

Discoveries This Week 01/02/09

RickM — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:42:00 GMT

It seems like the theme of this week is debugging. Not by my own choice really, I just kept running into really interesting articles on the topic.

Blog: Jake Lauzier’s Cross Domain Remote Debugging

My coworker Jake Opines has put together a great blog on remote debugging across domains in .NET. I was shocked at how simple it is to do and also that everything you need to do it is included with Visual Studio 2008. It’s a post worth checking out for any .NET developer.

Blog: Amol Ravande’s Debugging OutOfMemoryExceptions in managed code using Windbg

In this post Amol walks you through his experience using Windbg to find a memory leak in his application. Normally, I would use a profiler to figure out what was going on in a case like this. However, it is interesting to see how one could debug memory issues without the aid of expensive third party tools.

Blog: Mark Heath’s Debugging with Tracepoints

Tracepoints are much like breakpoints except that they print information instead of halting program execution. They are simple to use, much like breakpoints. Easy access to thread, process, function and instruction information are included. They even provide macro functionality, although I have not yet had a chance to explore it.

Now, I can’t help but wonder if it’s possible to easily save sets of Tracepoints for debugging different types of issues in a project so they could be shared in source control easily. What would be even more amazing is if Tracepoints could be used when running tests in NUnit or MSTest. In the case where a test fails, it could be run again with a predefined set of Tracepoints. When you go to fix the problem a big pile of useful output would be waiting for you. What about giving a client that is having an issue in your release build a set of Tracepoints and being able to see exactly what is happening? I doubt all of this is possible but it’s worth looking into.

Blog: Billy Gray’s Ranting Considered Useful

Despite this being a meta blog (a blog about blogging), I think the message inside is really important. The act of ranting allows a person to go out on a limb and express ideas without the normal idea filters we would have in use. The majority is not even usually correct and someone has to be there to point it out. Taking a contrarian view and running with it is a supremely creative process in that once you leave the bounds of the community’s hierarchy your mind is free to be creative without the boundaries laid down by the previous work of others. Also, I personally enjoy both reading and writing a good rant.

Discoveries This Week 12/19/08

RickM — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:21:00 GMT

I’ve decided to post a roundup for the week of what I feel were some of the most important blog posts and application releases I happened upon. Who knows, if it goes well maybe I’ll even make it a habit. In this edition: Windows Live Writer Release Candidate, Executor, IronPython 2.0, Saving DotNetKicks and The Real World Haskell Book Club.

Software: Windows Live Writer Update (Release Candidate)

I previously wrote about Windows Live Writer back in mid November. Since then, you may have noticed that I’ve been using way more images and code samples in my blog. This is because, after switching, these kinds of things just became so much easier to do. Now, instead of having to resize the image, upload it and finally and link it, I just paste it right into my post and set a couple of properties. It’s made my blog much more attractive, much less time consuming. In fact, a number of my blogging coworkers have taken notice and have made the switch too. They also have found that it makes their lives much easier.

This new release fixes a number of problems. Most notably, the memory footprint has gotten much smaller and the periodic freezing issue has gotten much better! A huge improvement all around.

Software: Executor

I discovered this little app over at lifehacker and it’s greatly increased the speed at which I can perform many of my every day simple tasks. Executor binds to Win-Z and brings up a “Run..” type interface. It indexes your installed applications and makes them easy to access. What makes it really fantastic is that you can define custom actions with parameters.

Previously to access our Bug Tracker I would have to launch a web browser, click my Fogbugz favorite, click on the search box, type in the case number and finally hitting enter to submit that query. Now with Executor I simply hit Win-Z and type “fb 8732” and get immediately taken to that case. We also use Salesforce for which I have a similar binding set. Over the last week of use, it’s been an amazing time saver. Best of all, it has a tiny 10mb footprint and uses almost no CPU time; so having it running in the background is completely unnoticeable.

It’s not often that I find a piece of software that changes how I use my desktop. However, Executor has really changed the way I think about launching programs.

Software: IronPython 2.0

IronPython 2.0 comes with the ability to run completely on top of the DLR. This makes available a whole set of compilation services specifically designed to make dynamic languages fast and flexible. Not to mention the performance improvements, bug fixes and some Silverlight tools. With all the buzz it seems like IronPython is quickly becoming the DLR language of choice for many. Although, some seem to still be having quite a bit of trouble with WPF integration.

Blog Post: Saving DotNetKicks

I used to be an avid user of DotNetKicks. However, lately it seems to have really gone downhill. I’m not sure if it’s due to the launch of StackOverflow or if it simply has becoming inundated with spam posts. I hope the community can come together and save this site. It’s always been nice that .NET users have had a community site to call their own.

Blog Post: The Real World Haskell Book Club

Matthew Podwysocki (a very active F# blogger) has started a Google Groups book club for the release of “Real World Haskell”. Two of the book’s authors, Bryan O’Sullivan and Don Stewart, will be sitting in on the group and so it’s a fantastic opportunity to get experience building real applications using a functional style. The action isn't scheduled to start until January 5th but the groups is already seeing a lot of activity.

Haskell was designed from the ground up to enforce functional programming technique. For this reason, it’s a great language to use if you want to jump head first into functional programming as none of the traditional object oriented or procedural structures are available to fall back on. It’s the functional way or the highway.

I’ve already gotten my copy of the book and can’t wait to start working through it with the rest of the group.

Windows Live Writer Makes Blogging Less of a Hassle

RickM — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:23:00 GMT

The blog CMS we use is great in a lot of ways but it’s built in editor is really, really bad. Initially, I had used Microsoft Word to fill the gap, with disastrous results. Since then I have moved to using our blog software’s horribly antiquated text editing system but that has limited my formatting options quite considerably. Now, after a recommendation from a friend, I am giving Windows Live Writer a shot. This blog post is a recursive review of my experience writing this blog post in Windows Live Writer.

Full Featured Editing

Here is a screenshot of Windows Live Writer:

Windows live writer has everything you would expect from a html based text editor. This includes font formatting and paragraph formatting, colors, block quotes and alignment.

For comparison, this is what the Community Server 2.0 interface I have been using looks like:

It is not resizable and it has no undo between saves. Also, it has a feature set right out of the HTML 1.1 spec:

Bold, Italics, Underline, Strikeout,
Indenting and Outdenting
Linking
Pictures
Tables
What, no blink?

It lacks such basic 1990s era formatting as text size and alignment. This can make creating blog posts with any kind of real formatting really time consuming.

It’s a huge difference.

Content Made Easy

While I came for the the easy text editing interface, I stayed for the slick client-server integration and simple content management. Windows Live Writer has a number of wizards each of which take the hassle out of adding a type of content to your blog. For example, here is a screenshot of its GIS integration:

As Windows Live Writer completely manages the process for you, inserting non-text content is extremely easy. For images, you can just add them your post using the insert picture wizard and it will handle the thumbnailing, uploading and linking for you. It has native youtube and sopebox support as well as the ability to add your own local video via a wizard. As shown in the screenshot, it has out of the box integration with windows live maps for quickly inserting interactive maps into your post.

It also has a plugin interface so other types of content integration can be added. When you click on “Add a Plug-in” Windows Live Writer will actually take you to a list which currently contains 105 different live plugins. I haven't yet tried to implement my own content integration but if 105 different plugins already exist, it can’t be too difficult.

The One Downside: High Resource Demands and Sluggishness

This seems to me to be the biggest problem with Windows Live messenger:

That’s about 253 Megabytes of peak memory usage for what is essentially a text editor. Maybe it’s just that I once had a functional computer with 64 kilobytes of ram but I find this kind of memory usage from a blog editor to be absurd. That amounts to about 15% of your ram if you have 4 gigs in your box.

On my Intel Core 2 6600 @ 2.4 Ghz with 2 gigabytes of ram I have found Windows Live Writer to often be sluggish. When I click to move my cursor or highlight text it can take what seems like a whole second to respond. When typing or deleing text it sometimes will lag slightly behind my input.

Performance issues are forgivable considering that it is still a beta software package. I do hope that the development team is able to take some time to try and work through these issues.

Conclusion

Although it has some problems, Windows Live Writer is by far the easiest and most convenient blog editor I have ever had the pleasure to use. The tight client-server integration means that in the future I will be able to avoid all of the tedious resizing, uploading and pasting of html snippets and instead be able to concentrate on content. I can only hope that by the time it gets out of beta some of the memory issues and sluggishness will be worked out as otherwise this is an amazing piece of software.

I’m not the only one who thinks so. If you want to read some other opinions, you should check out a Phil Wainewright article entitled “Writer is Microsoft’s first Live Killer app” and Paul Stamatiou’s Review.

Edit: After I posted this blog I noticed that its formatting looked remarkably similar in both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.0.

Pros:

Slick looking.
Everything would expect in terms of text editing features.
Direct Community Server integration.
Conveniently manages inserted content for you.
Its output looks great in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Cons:

Keyboard input can be sluggish.
Huge memory footprint.
Beta software.