I've been digging around IronRuby a bit lately, checking out the source, the specs, and writing very minimal code into rbx to see if it works as expected.  Over the next couple weeks I'm going to try and dig a little deeper into IronRuby in an attempt to get a better feel for where it is, what I might be able to use it for, as well as to experiment with some ideas I've had over the last couple months. 

When I first downloaded IronRuby I did so on my Mac in hopes that I'd be able to cruise around the source in TextMate, compile with Mono, and avoid having to fire up a VM whenever I wanted to experiment.  My initial attempts, albiet not very focused, were a failure.  Fortunately within the last week or two I came across Seo Sanghyeon's IronRuby on Mono How to.

The first step is to download and install Mono 1.9.  Once you have Mono installed you need checkout the IronRuby source from RubyForge and then download and apply this patch that Seo created.  Finally run: rake compile mono=1 and assuming everything goes well you'll be greeted with another command prompt which you can use to fire up rbx (aka IronRuby's irb) and begin experimenting.

svn co http://ironruby.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk ironruby
cd ironruby
patch -p0 < patch-mono-r93
rake compile mono=1
mono build/mono_debug/rbx.exe

A couple nights ago I was up reading blogs and browsing the web.  I had made my way through all my unread items and was contemplating hitting the sack when I decided to do one more "r" within google reader to see if anything new was available.  Surprisingly one new item appeared.  The one new item was from Jean-Paul Boodhoo, and was entitled "The Dream Giver".

After reading JP's post I figured I'd drop him a comment since I like reading, and I like free stuff.  As I went to bed I figured I had a strong chance of being one of the first three to contact him since I'm pretty sure I was reading his post while his mouse button was still pressed on the "post" button.  As I thought about it some more, I realized that I'd actually prefer NOT to win since I would have picked up the book anyway, and I figured there might be some others who responded who wouldn't purchase the book if they didn't win a copy from JP.  Not surprisingly the next day I received a Amazon Gift Certificate from JP to cover the cost of the book.

When I got home that night I mentioned the above to my wife, and told her that I felt bad accepting the gift certificate from JP given the circumstances.  She said I should accept his charity, so that's just what I did.

Over the last two days I made my way through The Dream Giver by Bruce Wilkinson.  The book starts with a parable about an Ordinary guy living in a Familiar place who realizes he has a Big Dream.  As this Ordinary guy thinks about his Big Dream he realizes that he doesn't want to ignore it any longer.  Thus begins his journey.  

As I read The Dream Giver I started to think a lot about my dreams.  As life goes by we often lose sight of our dreams, and get caught up in the comforts of life.  The Dream Giver has me thinking about my dreams again.  I found the story of Ordinary following his dream, as well as the encouraging words and advice offered by the author inspiring.  Life is full of obstacles, roadblocks, naysayers, and will provide you with endless reasons not to follow your dreams.  The Dream Giver offers hope, encouragement, and guidance.  Following a dream isn't easy. You can't do it alone.  However, the journey can make you stronger, happier, and more fulfilled.

Are you ready to begin your journey?

Following in JP's footsteps....the first 3 people to email me with interest in this book will receive an amazon gift certificate in the amount required to purchase the book.

Note: you can email me by clicking on the little envelope in the right hand navigation of my site.

Sorry they are all gone!

We've been using Rhino Mocks as our mocking framework for the last year and have had some good success with it.  Previously, we were writing our mocks by hand, which was a major pain in the ass.  While Rhino Mocks offers a lot of great features and has aided our testing efforts in many ways, it has also caused us some pain.  I've recently been hearing a lot of "buzz" about Moq, a new mocking framework developed by kzu.  This morning I read Daniel's "Why do we need another .NET mocking framework" post and I'm convinced that I need to give Moq a try.  A lot of the points in his article ring true to me, and make me wonder if I would prefer Moq over Rhino Mocks.  The interesting thing with trying a new mocking framework when you're involved in a large project that has already made a considerable investment in another mocking framework (Rhino Mocks) is how you go about trying it, and what you do if you prefer it to what we're currently using.  Ah the joys of software development.

I found the following links on the Moq google code homepage interesting:

• Why you will love Moq (with screenshots!)
• New Moq features for mock verification and creation
• Mocks: by-the-book vs practical
• What's wrong with the Record/Reply/Verify model for mocking frameworks
• State Testing vs Interaction Testing
• Mocks, Stubs and Fakes: it's a continuum

Tonight I was...well....I actually don't remember what I was doing, but somehow I ended up on 22books.com.  For those of you unfamiliar with 22books.com here's a little snippet from the homepage:

22books is dedicated to the creating, sharing, and viewing of book lists. Start out by browsing some of the featured lists to the left and then open a free account and start creating lists of your own.

I created a couple books lists on 22books that contain many of my favorite books on software development.  The lists have a lot of overlap but I broke them up as follows:


All time Favorite Software books

Agile Books

.NET Books

Architecture / Design

Ruby and Rails
I think 22books.com has the potential to become a really great place to share books lists.  I really enjoy reading and have relied on many of the books in the above lists to help me progress as a software developer.  I'll probably spend a little more time refining the above lists and adding books that I didn't think of during my first pass. 

Tonight I was chatting a bit with a co-worker about IronPython and IronRuby and decided to have a look at IronRuby.  Getting started is supposed to be pretty easy.

1. Checkout the IronRuby source from RubyForge

svn co svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/ironruby

2. Install Ruby via the Ruby 1-click installer: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyinstaller/
3. Open a Visual Studio Command Prompt
4. Install the pathname2 gem by running the following from the command line:

gem install pathname2

5. Compile IronRuby by running:

rake compile

Unfortunately when running "rake compile" I get the following errors.

C:\Development\ironruby\trunk>rake compile
(in C:/Development/ironruby/trunk)
Read in 17 resources from "C:\Development\ironruby\trunk\src\microsoft.scripting
\Math\MathResources.resx"
Writing resource file...  Done.
Read in 49 resources from "C:\Development\ironruby\trunk\src\microsoft.scripting
\Resources.resx"
Writing resource file...  Done.
rake aborted!
Command failed with status (0): [csc /nologo /noconfig /nowarn:1591,1701,17...]
C:/Development/ironruby/trunk/rakefile:197:in `exec'
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

I did a little digging around to see if I could find out what was causing the above problem but didn't uncover anything.  In hopes of making some progress and seeing ruby running on top of the CLR, I decided to try and compile using the IronRuby VS.NET solution file. Compiling IronRuby using the VS.NET solution file built everything into the \bin\debug folder.  Once that was done I was able to run rbx.exe and do a little experimentation.  rbx didn't behave like I expected and seemed to be acting pretty flaky but I was able to put in some simple Ruby expressions and see the results I expected.  Now that I have the source downloaded and compiled I'm going to dig into things a bit more to see where things stand. 

Some resources that I came across that might be useful to others include:

• http://ironruby.rubyforge.org/
• http://rubyforge.org/projects/ironruby
• http://www.ruby-forum.com/forum/34
• http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/ironruby-core/

Well it turns out Twitter just turned off allowing anyone from accessing their site via cross domain requests because of a security hole that was found.  It sounds like they're going to be doing some good things to enable access to their api through cross domain requests but it's going to take a little while.  For the time being I'll probably add a proxy to my own site so I can continue to play around with Silverlight.  It is pretty amazing that literally the day that I try and use Twitter's api via Silverlight they turned off outside access.  For those interested they're going to be doing the following within the next month:

1. Move the Twitter API to api.twitter.com.  Use the completely permissive crossdomain.xml on api.twitter.com.

2. Stop supporting HTTP Basic auth. on api.twitter.com.  Implement OAuth or some other kind of auth. token system.

3. Require non-public API requests to include a valid user auth. token.

All three items were recommended by some chap named Dossy on the Twitter Development Google Talk Group.  On a side note OAuth seems to be gaining some traction and definitely needs some more of my attention.

Last week I started having a bunch of problems when visiting some of my favorite sites.  Certain sites would freeze up both Firefox and Safari when I visited.  Since I hadn't had any problems with these sites for as long as I could remember and hadn't updated my browsers lately I was confused about what migh tbe going wrong.  After a couple days of getting annoyed and having to restart my browsers I had a revelation.  I had recently installed Silverlight 2 Beta 1, and all the sites I was visiting had flash on their homepage.  It turns out that something with Silverlight 2 made it so flash broke.  I ended up manually uninstalling Silverlight, restarting, and all was good again.

Tonight I decided that it was time that I checkout the Silverlight 2 beta release.  There are a number of things that I want to try with Silverlight, unfortunately, a bunch of other work has been keeping me.

I decided that the best way to get started would be with a real simple client.  Creating a simple silverlight control for showing recent tweets from Twitter seemed like it would be a fun experiment.  To get started I wanted to download some tweets from Twitter and show them in a ListBox.  Since LINQ to XML can be used with Silverlight 2, I figured the process would be pretty painless.  Of course I forgot about the fact that everyone had to go and try and make everything on the web secure.  From what I can tell, the fact that Twitter doesn't have, or has recently botched, their cross domain policy file is preventing me from being able to make any progress on my little silverlight project. 

Hopefully I'll figure out what the deal is with Twitters cross domain policy file.  It might be that I have something botched since when I run ScottGu's Digg sample I get the same "Download failure" that I get when attempting to download XML from Twitter.

UPDATE: Well it looks like the problem is that Twitter's cross domain policy file only allows *.twitter.com and *.discoveringradiance.com.  That sucks.  I guess accessing the XML directly from Twitter is out of the question.

For all the ranting and raving I do about agile and how it's the best thing since sliced bread, you might think that I am of the belief that in order to create great software you HAVE to be doing agile.  After re-reading my post yesterday about the sloppiness of Agile, I realized that the post, and likely many others I've written, could lead people to think that I believe the only way to create great software is by pair programming, having weekly iterations, having retrospectives, and doing everything else that the agile guide book tells you.

Not so.  While I do believe that the agile principles and practices that many of us follow greatly increase our chances of success, they are by no means a silver bullet, and they are by no means a prerequisite for great software.  If you're doing waterfall, RUP, scrummerfall, or whatever else and creating software that your customers love, then keep rockin the process you're using.

My experiences give me a bias towards agile, and the many practices that it recommends.  I've seen it work well in ways I don't think waterfall would have.  I also really believe in many of the core coding practices that agile recommends.  Most especially: test driven development (TDD), continuous design, refactoring, YAGNI, and keeping it simple.

I think agile gives me a better chance at creating great software and that's why I use it.