Chillisoft Blog
 

Imagine its 1938.  You’re taking your girlfriend out to the cinema, where the film beams out in badly rendered black and white, with the sound squawking through sub-rate speakers.  The acting is … dated, and the excitement is … sparse.  Of course, you didn’t know better back then, but having watched Dark Knight in 2008, the whole trip down pre-technology alley is humorous.  Then you decide to take your girlfriend out to see the latest installment of 007, and the only cinema available is the one they’ve kept going from 1938.  Oh no!

That, my friends, was my experience this afternoon trying to create a Ruby script with Notepad (well, Crimson Editor to be exact).  I can hear you saying: use an IDE!  Very well, but when you haven’t needed to install an IDE, and you know it will take you an hour just to download, install, configure, learn, etc, then you think that the trouble is not worth it in the here and now.  I was just going to write a quick script and everything would be dandy.
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mm/dd/yy, dd/mm/yyyy, dd mmmm yy, yyyy/dd/mm, yyyy mmmm dd… you don’t have to develop for very long to know that everyone has their preference, including the boss.  In South Africa, however, we have a different kind of problem.

Over here we follow the British convention of day, month, year, contrary to the American model of month, day, year.  (It reminds me of those whacky Aussies putting the wickets before the runs).  Now here’s the challenge: when you install a new copy of Windows XP, if you don’t specify otherwise, you’ll get regional settings for America.  So we ran into the surprise result that one of our customers used m/d/y - how is that possible?  Do they have an American working there?  My suspicion is that they never changed the regional settings on their PC and got used to doing it the *wrong* way round.
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Habanero’s 2.0.1b release includes a sample project with the full download, illustrating one application developed for both desktop and web.

Habanero’s approach to enterprise application development provides streamlined design from the backend data layer through to the user interface. Supporting Visual WebGUI’s Forms-like controls, Habanero’s unique angle on designing common user interfaces can now be taken to the web.

Key to this release is support for a manager pattern (business creational pattern) that provides for one library to generate the user interfaces for both release environments. IControlManager stores the control internally rather than requiring inheritance, so that a developer need only pass through the correct ControlFactory and have the correct controls and behaviours generated for the release environment.

There has been considerable interest in Habanero 2, including requests for more sample code, and we look forward to hearing feedback from you.

Perhaps I am missing something, but I couldn’t find a method on MembershipUser to set a user’s password to a custom one that I choose.  For instance, a common administrative practice when a user complains that they can’t remember their password is to set it to something like 12345 and get them to change it to something custom immediately after they log in.
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Let’s not beat about the bush - Visual WebGui has helped to usher in a new era of web development.  Of course we should be giving credit to the advances offered by AJAX, Silverlight and the other Web 2 technologies, but perhaps VWG has managed to encapsulate these advancements into a package that is useful to .Net developers.  The unfortunate reality right now is that VWG is a relatively new technology and we’re still in a position of gauging how well it works in the real world, rather than the safety of our development offices.
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If you are needing to see more than 255 characters for any particular field in the display grid of Query Analyzer once you have run a sql query, the option to extend the length is found in Tools > Options > Results > “Maximum characters per column”.

To be honest, I don’t have a full understanding of how FastCGI and Passenger work, but I provide this information given the possibility that someone might experience similar problems.  We have a Ruby on Rails based site hosted on Dreamhost, and we recently froze Rails to version 1.2.5 after having trouble with 2.1.1.  In order to make the process of restarting the application easier, I selected the option to use Passenger (mod_rails), which allows you to touch the restart.txt file in the tmp folder in order to restart the application (which is useful when you frequently make changes to the core code/controller files).
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When you explore best-practice version control structures, such as the trunk/branch/tag structure used in subversion, you’ll understand that there is value in nailing down your application to a specific version of its dependencies when you launch live.  We experienced exactly that when we launched our company homepage using Ruby on Rails.  Having designed it with Rails 1.2.5, all was well.  One day the credit crunch hit us too … our site went down, but Wall Street was not to blame.
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