Category: programming

more fun with Ruby

I’ve been making good progress through The Book of Ruby this week. I’ve continued to use the simple Ruby install on my ThinkPad, since it’s working fine, and I don’t yet need any of the fancy stuff; I’m still just working my way through language basics.

But I stumbled across an interesting class on Coursera that was just starting up, called Web Application Architectures, which covers Ruby on Rails. Initially, I resisted the urge to sign up for it, since I don’t think I’m really ready to start messing with Rails yet, but my curiosity got the best of me, and I went ahead and registered for it.

So now I’m messing with the somewhat arcane process of setting up Rails. Initially, I looked at trying to get Rails to work with my existing Ruby install on the ThinkPad, but (to make a long story short) that didn’t work out. So I looked at a couple of other options for installing a Rails dev environment on Windows, including RailsInstaller and RailsFTW, but I had some problems with both of them and decided to go a different way, rather than try to resolve the issues. (Finding pages like this and this on Reddit pretty much convinced me that setting up Rails on a Windows machine was a bad idea.)

So I went ahead and installed Ubuntu 14.04 under VirtualBox and followed the instructions found here to set up Rails. That seems to have gone smoothly, but I won’t really know for sure until I’ve done some meaningful work. I’m still not entirely sure if I’m going to stick with it, or punt on the course for now and avoid the messy complications of Rails until I have a better grounding in basic Ruby, but I’m going to spend some more time on it this weekend and see how it goes.

Oh, and as a side note, it’s fun to be messing with Linux again. I haven’t really touched Linux in a while. Ubuntu was fairly easy to set up under VirtualBox, and it seems to be running fine. The desktop UI is attractive and reasonably fast, even in a VM with only 1.5 GB of RAM allocated to it. (I’ll probably have to bump that up to 2 GB if I get serious about the Rails stuff.)

Learning Ruby

I’ve always been curious about Ruby, but never got around to learning it. I was inspired to actually dive in and start learning it recently, after listening to a Hanselminutes podcast where Scott Hanselman interviewed the creator of Ruby, Yukihiro Matsumoto, aka “Matz”. After messing around with SharePoint recently, I was in the mood to work on something as different as possible from that. Something where I could just install a nice little interpreter, and start working, without having to worry about spending a whole day setting up a VM first. Ruby sounded pretty good, on that front. The community seems to be pretty friendly, and there’s lot’s of good training material out there.

After looking around for a good place to start, I settled on The Book of Ruby. The publisher had a Pi Day sale this weekend, so I got the book/ebook combo for a good price. For a development environment, I’m using Komodo IDE. which I bought some time ago, for PHP work. It works OK for Ruby too, though I think there are probably better options. (But it’s good enough for now.) For Ruby itself, I installed it on my ThinkPad using the Ruby Installer for Windows, which was simple and straightforward. I also have Ruby installed on my Mac, apparently by default, since I don’t remember ever installing it myself. But I’ve decided to use the ThinkPad for my Ruby work for now, for a few reasons (bigger screen and keyboard, mostly).

I’m finding that The Book of Ruby is pretty well-written and organized, with good sample programs, at least so far, where the material is pretty basic. (I’m about 20% of the way through the book.) One slight annoyance though is that the sample code, as downloaded from the web site, is not formatted according to the usual Ruby standards. There are actual tab characters in the files rather than spaces, and the indentation isn’t always consistent. That might not seem like a big thing, but it bothers me a bit. So that set me off on a search to find a good code formatter for Ruby. Komodo doesn’t have one built in, but their web page on how to set up a new formatter links to a specific tool that looked like it work work well. Unfortunately, I found that it would always delete the last line of any code file I fed through it. This is probably due to some specific weirdness with the sample code from this book, and not a general problem, but regardless, I can’t really use that formatter. So that set me off on a search that led me to Rubocop, which is a static code analyzer that happens to also include a code formatter. That works great, though I haven’t tried to integrate it with Komodo yet.

TFS query PowerShell script

It’s been a while since I posted any PowerShell code here, so here’s a quickie script that I’m using to help with my workflow for checking in Dynamics AX changes.

First, a little background: We have a slightly odd workflow set up in TFS for tracking the projects we do in Dynamics AX. For each project, we open a TFS work item. We then check in all changes for that project under that work item. So far, so good. But we also routinely close out a work item after the first deployment that contains a check-in for that work item. So bug fixes and enhancements after the initial deployment are technically being checked in against a closed work item.

The problem here is that the check-in dialog within AX shows a list of open work items assigned to the current user, and doesn’t provide a mechanism for searching for other work items. It does allow you to manually add a work item to the list, but it can only do that by ID. But we have our own project number, which is stored as part of the work item title, and we generally don’t use the TFS work item ID for anything, so I generally don’t know it off the top of my head. So I often have to go into Team Explorer in Visual Studio to look up the work item ID for a project before I can check it in. That’s not a huge inconvenience, but I thought it would be nice to have a little PowerShell script that could look up the work item ID for me, given an AX project number.

The script shown below isn’t terribly complicated, but it shows off a few interesting little things. I started with an example script taken from Julian Kay’s blog.

First, we’re using the TFPT command-line query capability. This is part of TFS Power Tools, and uses a query syntax called WIQL.

Second, we’re doing a little rudimentary parsing of the data returned from TFPT to pull out the first work item ID. Then, we’re copying it to the clipboard with the clip command. (Looking at this script, I’m pretty such there’s a better way for me to pull out the work item ID, but the way I’m doing it now works fine.)

And finally, we’re displaying the results to the screen, so if by chance more than one result is returned, I can see the list and decide which work item is the right one.

If I wanted to go a few steps further with this, I could probably integrate this into AX completely. The check-in dialog in AX is a regular AX form named “SysVersionControlCheckIn”, and there’s no reason I couldn’t customize it. (But that’s a problem for another rainy day.)


# Given AX project #, return ID.
param (
[string]$projno = $( Read-Host "Enter project # (e.g. 123.4)" )
)
[string]$tfpt = "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2012 Power Tools\TFPT.EXE"
[string]$svr = "http://myTfsServer:8080/tfs/defaultcollection"
[string]$projname = "myProjName"
[string]$query = "SELECT [System.Id], [System.Title] FROM WorkItems " +
"WHERE [System.TeamProject] = '$projname' " +
"AND [System.Title] CONTAINS '$projno' " +
"ORDER BY [System.Id] asc"
$data = & $tfpt query /collection:$svr /wiql:$query /include:data
if ($data -ne $null) {
$line = ($data | select -first 1)
$taskid = $line.split("`t")[0]
$taskid | clip
}
$data
Write-Host "Press any key to continue …"
$x = $host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey("NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown")

view raw

tfpt_ex1.ps1

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

 

Beginning SharePoint 2013 development

Beginning SharePoint 2013 DevelopmentBeginning SharePoint 2013 Development by Steve Fox
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m supposed to be getting involved in some SharePoint development at work soon. But I have no details on the specific project that I’ll be working on yet. So I’ve been doing some general background reading on SharePoint, in the hopes that some of it proves useful.

This book is structured so that each chapter gives you a quick introduction to one aspect of developing for SharePoint. A lot of stuff can be considered under the general heading of “SharePoint development”, and the book tries to cover as much as it can. I think it does a good job of covering the basics, and giving a new SharePoint developer a good overview of the various ways in which a developer can interact with SharePoint.

If, like me, you really have no idea where to start with SharePoint, this is a good book to pick up and read through. It covers enough of the basics that it should get you pointed in the right direction. But it’s not going to take you very far, once you’re actually off and running.

View all my reviews

SharePoint and more

Just a quick follow-up on Saturday’s adventures with SharePoint: On Sunday morning, after letting my VM chug through 100+ Windows updates, and increasing the amount of RAM allocated to it from 1 GB to 2 GB, I eventually found myself with a barely-operational SharePoint install.

But I decided I didn’t want to spend the whole day staring at my laptop, alone in my apartment, so I turned it off and hopped on the train into New York, and spent some time at the Metropolitan Museum. Overall, I think that was a better use of my time than banging away at my SharePoint VM all day.

I spent some time this morning reading various blog posts about SharePoint development environments, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll never be able to get a useful one up and running on my current hardware. With only 4 GB of RAM on my ThinkPad, there’s no way I can allocate enough to the VM. Most of the advice I’ve seen recommends 8 GB minimum for the VM, so I’d really need a laptop with at least 12 GB of actual RAM. (And some blogs indicate that 24 GB is really the reasonable minimum for SharePoint development.)

I’ve also looked at a few options for running a VM in the cloud. The one no-cost option is to sign up for a free Azure trial, and set up a VM in Azure. That might be interesting, but I don’t think the trial would be long enough to be really useful.

So I think I’m going to have to give up on the idea of setting up a SharePoint environment on my own, and wait for my new project at work to firm up a bit more. At that point, I’ll know enough about exactly what I need to do that I can make specific requests related to a specific project, and hopefully get the software/hardware I need to get up and running. Until then, I’m just going to have to settle for reading books and using my imagination!

SharePoint development

My boss told me this week that I may need to do some SharePoint development work for my next project. I don’t have any details on what exactly I might need to do, but I think it’s likely to be creating a Web Part that will interface with Dynamics AX in some way, probably through a web service. I’m well-versed at this point on the Dynamics AX side of things, but I know almost nothing about SharePoint development. So, being the proactive kind of guy that I am, I’m starting to flounder around, trying to figure out what I can about SharePoint development.

It’s not easy to get started. At work, I asked one of the other developers for some pointers, since she’s done some SharePoint work before, but since I don’t really have any details about what I’m supposed to be doing, she wasn’t much help. I don’t want to waste her time, so I’m going to hold off on asking her any more questions until I have a better idea of what I need. And, on the IT end, I had one of the SharePoint admins set up a site that I can apparently use for testing, once I’m at the point where I actually have something to deploy. But there’s not much I can do with it right now.

I have Visual Studio 2012 installed on my AX VM, so I went ahead and installed the SharePoint tools on that VM. That worked, and I now have the templates needed to create a new SharePoint web part project in VS. But, it seems that you can’t actually create a SharePoint web part project on a machine that doesn’t have SharePoint itself installed on it. Looking into it a bit further, it seems like it might be possible to do so, but it’s not obvious or simple. And that’s about as far as I got in work on Friday.

Today, I decided to see how far I could get in setting up a full SharePoint 2013 VM on my ThinkPad. I’m using VirtualBox on the ThinkPad, and I have plenty of hard drive space, so I decided to give it a go. I loosely followed the instructions in this blog post by Bill Baer, though I simplified things as much as I could. I downloaded the 180-day trial of Windows Server 2012 as a VHD. Then, I got that up and running in VirtualBox. I had to mess around with the settings a bit to get it to work, but it seems to work fine under VirtualBox, once you get the settings right. Then, I downloaded the 180-day trial of SharePoint 2013 and installed that. I hit a few snags, but nothing that I couldn’t get past with a little Google-fu. All of that downloading and installing killed most of the day. Now, the sun is about ready to go down, and I’ve got a VM that probably has a working SharePoint 2013 install on it. I say “probably” because I haven’t been about to bring it up in a browser yet. I think that’s just because the VM is running slow, and it’s taking a while to get past all the background stuff that needs to happen on a new Windows Server 2012 and SharePoint 2013 install. So, for now, I’m patiently letting it chop away at 100% CPU, hoping that eventually, it’ll settle down and become usable. There may be a few more things to straighten out though. If so, I guess I’ll be spelunking through some log files and doing some more Google-fu.

Once I’m sure I’ve got a working SharePoint 2013 install, then I’m going to have to install Visual Studio 2013. I’m hoping I can just use the free version of VS 2013, but I’m not sure. If I can’t, then I guess I have to check and see if there’s an eval version of VS 2013 Pro, or whichever version I need for SharePoint dev.

I’m not sure if the end result of all this is going to be a usable VM. The ThinkPad is a few years old. Though I did replace the hard drive with an SSD recently, it’s still only got 4 GB of RAM, and a mediocre CPU. That’s all fine for doing normal work, but it’s a little thin for powering a VM that’s got a full SharePoint install on it. So I may have to give up on this thing entirely.

I found a good blog post on how to set up an “awesome VM” for SharePoint development, but it looks like I’d need a much more powerful laptop to follow those instructions, and probably a lot more free time too. So, if the fairly basic VM that I’m trying to set up now doesn’t work out, I’ll probably give up on it for now.

Meanwhile, I’ve started reading Beginning SharePoint 2013 Development, via my company’s Books24x7 subscription. (And I ordered a used copy of the physical book from Amazon.) I haven’t gotten much useful information out of the book yet, but I haven’t gotten very far into it yet.

I went into this process knowing that I might hit some dead-ends, and knowing that I might not be able to get very far on my own. But I’m hoping that I’ll at least get far enough that I can ask the right questions when I start getting project details from my boss. I’m not sure if I’ll need to set up a new VM on my work PC with the full SharePoint install, or if I’ll be able to hook up my existing AX VM to the test SharePoint site that the admin guy set up for me. Or if I’m even going to need to do any of that at all. But, either way, I’m hoping to learn some new skills, and add “SharePoint developer” to the old resume!

The Humble Programmer

I ran across a reference to E. W. Dijkstra’s 1972 essay “The Humble Programmer” recently. I’d never read it before, but I like to think I already understood the concept. Any sort of serious programming job is going to reinforce a programmer’s humility on a fairly regular basis, unless the programmer in question is incredibly good, or incredibly deluded.

The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.

At my current job, for the ERP system I work on, we do production deployments once a week, usually. We may do a post-deployment fix or supplemental deployment occasionally, but usually only if a really show-stopping bug made it in. (The deployment process is apparently time-consuming and arcane. I don’t really know how it’s done, exactly, but I think it involves ritual animal sacrifice and long incantations from the Necronomicon.)

I managed to introduce two exciting bugs into the system in last week’s deployment. So this week’s deployments include:

  1. A fix to a problem that I knew would occur, under a certain set of circumstances, but which I thought would probably only occur once in a blue moon, if ever. Instead, it happens about 20 times a day. One user referred to it as “really really really frustrating” and “a horrible inconvenience” in a support ticket she opened.

  2. A fix to a problem that had never even once occurred in testing, and which I have still never been able to recreate in testing. In production, of course, it happens about 10 times a day. And since I still haven’t been able to recreate the issue in the test environment, I can’t really be sure if the “fix” actually fixes the problem.

So, basically, my errors have been annoying the heck out of our users for the last week, and I have once again been reminded that I am fallible, sometimes spectacularly so!

Code Complete

Code CompleteCode Complete by Steve McConnell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I started reading Code Complete years ago. (More than ten years ago, I think.) It’s a great book, but I kept putting it down in favor of more specific programming books, usually ones that I needed to read for something I had to learn for work; a new language or software package or whatever. And then I kind of forgot about it for awhile. But I finally got back to it in 2014, and just finished it up today. Near the end, I switched over from reading my hard copy of the first edition to reading the second edition on Safari.

Although the second edition is fairly old now too, and some of the specifics in it could be considered out of date, I’d say that almost everything in the book is still applicable.

The book, overall, is a solid introduction to the “best practices” for a professional software developer. It covers a lot of stuff that’s applicable for any professional programmer, regardless of the language you’re using or the environment you work in. McConnell has a lot of specific advice, and he backs it up with data; this isn’t one of those books that reads like a religious screed. It’s not just opinion.

If you’re making your living as a computer programmer, you should really read this book.

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Dynamics AX silliness

How’s this for a post title?

Compare Tool causing a failure, forcing an element restore which results in negating the changes made on the element

Yes, in Dynamics AX, the ERP system I work in every day, using the “compare” tool can destroy your code! Admittedly, it’s an edge case, and it’s not likely to happen terribly often. But still. Compare tools should not actually mess up your code! (Merge tools should, maybe, sometimes. But AX doesn’t even have a merge tool. Don’t get me started…)

Farewell, Dr. Dobb’s

Sad to see that Dr. Dobb’s is getting shut down. I had a subscription to the old print magazine for many years. They had some great, useful, well-written articles and columns, from people like Michael Swaine, Jeff Duntemann, and Al Stevens.

There are a lot of great programming resources out there on the internet, of course, from Q&A sites like Stack Overflow to podcasts like .NET Rocks. But I don’t think there’s anything else out there that’s quite like Dr. Dobb’s was, in its heyday.