Month: May 2011

About that rapture thing

Posted on by Scott

It’s May 21, and we’re all still here. Not that I expected a different outcome, but there’d been a lot of buzz in the press lately about the latest prediction of the end of the world.

The rapture was even a topic at work on Friday–in jest at first, but more and more serious as the conversation went on. A few of us (two of us Christian, one a sort of agnostic) talked about the crucifixion, the resurrection, the last supper, even Christ in the garden of Gethsemane.

Today at church, our pastor spoke at length on the reactions he’d heard to those who believed the world was ending today–most of them negative. He didn’t agree with their theology, but respected their willingness and seriousness in acting on their faith and sharing it with others. As Seventh-day Adventists (a denomination that came out of a movement that believed Christ would return in 1844), he reminded us that we should be more sympathetic to those with beliefs different than ours.

Introducing NuGet

Posted on by Scott

Today at work, I gave a presentation on NuGet.  I’ve suggested they consider it as an option to ease management of the open source dependencies of our major application, so it was natural that I present the pros and cons.

NuGet is a system for managing .NET packages.  It’s not unlike RubyGems or CPAN (for Ruby and Perl respectively), and while it has some work to do to be on par with those alternatives, they’re off to a very good start.  Today’s presentation focused on just a few the capabilities of NuGet, and I’ll recap a few from my presentation in this post.

The primary use case for NuGet is the management of open source dependencies in a .NET application.  There are a number of key open source libraries that .NET developers like me have been using in projects for years.  Upgrades were always a pain because of having to manage their dependencies manually.  Many of these tools (NHibernate, NUnit, log4net, and more) are already available as NuGet packages at the NuGet Gallery.  I used NHibernate and NUnit in my examples today.  Another tool that proved quite useful in my demo was the NuGet Package Explorer.  Some of its features include:

  • Opening and downloading packages from remote feeds
  • Opening local packages to view and change their metadata and contents
  • Creating new packages (instead of fiddling with XML manually)

In addition to getting packages from Microsoft’s official feed, it’s possible to create your own feed of NuGet packages.  Phil Haack has a post on how to do this.  My demo for work only included a local folder feed source, but I tried Haack’s instructions at home and they worked quite well.

I wrapped up my presentation with two different examples of building NuGet packages without a manually-created .nuspec file as a starting point.  The documentation provides examples of how to generate a .nuspec file from an existing DLL, and how to generate a NuGet package from a .csproj or .vbproj file.  I published the rules engine (which I found in an answer to a stackoverflow.com question), and a test assembly I created to the NuGet Gallery earlier this evening.  If you want to check them out, just search for Arpc.RulesEngine in the NuGet Gallery.  I still need to publish the rules engine source as a package and/or  push it to a symbol server.  Once the enterprise story for NuGet becomes a bit clearer, I hope I have an opportunity to present on that as well.

Practical MVVM

Posted on by Scott

Last Wednesday night, I attended a talk at RockNUG on MVVM by Joel Cochran.  It’s the best explanation of the Model-View-ViewModel design pattern that I’ve seen so far.  I found his talk particularly useful because he focused on the fundamentals of the design pattern instead of a specific framework (of which there are many).

Cochran’s talk was good for second and completely unexpected reason–his use of Mercurial for his code demos.  I’ve been to my share of conferences and user groups and seen a lot of demos, but before that talk, I’d never seen a speaker eliminate the inevitable typos and otherwise speed up his presentation that way.  When there was some code he wanted to show that exhibited an aspect of his Practical MVVM Manifesto, he simply grabbed a commit from his local Mercurial repository and updated the code in place.  The next time I give a talk or do any demos, I hope I can make good use of that trick too.