Where’s Lou

There are far too many things to do! The rate things are being created can be overwhelming sometimes.

After reading Hansleman’s post about Web Platform Installer now supports XP - And the Master Plan continues I downloaded it and was very impressed. I also notices something called Application Request Routing which is added to my things-to-learn list.

If it is what I think it is and works as well as I hope it does it should fill a huge gap in the Microsoft web server platform. Lots of features/scenarios which Apache and Nginx servers have baked in. As much as I enjoy ISA Server and have seen it used successfully as a Layer-7 router for development environments, it’s always been trapped between two things it’s not. It’s not a web server (though it runs Windows) and it isn’t a network appliance, so it’s doesn’t fit traditional network design that won’t expose the Windows operating system to the internet without a firewall and load balancing appliance.

What else… Oh yes, holidays coming up so I’m only able to work one day this week. Hmm… It’s odd when you realize you’ve just typed “only able to work one day this week” as a problem. :)

The other thing to do is install Windows 2008 R2 Server Core and experiment with it’s support for Asp.Net. I’m hoping to check out PowerShell 2.0 while I’m doing that.

Seems like every time you turn around you’re faced with a dozen new things leaving you with that feeling you barely know anything about what the latest tools can do.

I also haven’t had time to blog about is support for IronRuby added to Spark. It’ll be old news I’m sure by the time I get to it.

Update wasted a few hours trying to install 2008 R2 in a virtual guest. Under both VMWare and Virtual PC the Windows setup complained a 64-bit process could not be started. Internet wisdom states a bios settings must be changed to allow hardware assisted virtualization - no such setting exists - tried to update bios - Dell firmware flashing app won’t run on my host o/s which is 64-bit. Do I really need to make a cmd prompt boot disk here? What year is it?

Based on some mixed feedback Where’s Lou has returned to the light side. I liked the dark theme but after returned to it with fresh eyes it was pretty intense. Plus the amber color palette is kind of “not done” on the internet, so when in Rome…

The theme on deck is Deliciously Blue - so tasty it hurts. :) The two things I was looking for were clean lines and lots of width for the text. Adjusting the css from 760 to 960 overall gave plenty of space in the content area.

Something interesting coming down the line in dotnet is a newly enhanced support for dynamic languages. Those are all build on a dynamic language runtime (DLR) that’s a fast and self-optimizing execution engine build on the CLR. Specific scripting languages are parsed and realized as DLR expressions - first on the list are IronPython and IronRuby. I’m pretty sure DLR support for javascript is in the mix also. Yep, dynamic language runtime will include Managed JScript as well as Visual Basic .NET version 10.

To see what was involved in hosting a dynamic language I integrated Python as a language option in the Spark view engine. It’s not bad at all - in fact you can use IronPython in Spark now if you prefer that language. The hard part was figuring out what sort of angle to take presenting the view’s context to the language. With the default C# all of the helpers, viewdata, context variables, and current TextWriter Output are implemented as public members of the base class. That could be done in IronPython, but in that language it would mean “self.” would need to be in front of every reference to those members. Not really optimal.

In the end, after spending a little time trying to get inside Python’s head, it looked like the Tao of Python approach to a view would be to skip the object-oriented mechanisms altogether and instead create the view as flat procedural code that relies on global variables.
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Now that the dust has settled I’m happy to point out another place Spark is being used in the field - on the front page of of the MarketWatch financial news site. I do work as an architect at the company which provides this site, but in this case I specifically stepped back from making the decision to use Spark. A while ago I did offer a proof of concept to the team and lead developers responsible for the decision, and went through a few deep-dive sessions with the tech leads.

In the end it was a safe decision to make. Because view engine compiles down to a class which simply blasts output to the text writer there aren’t really any moving parts which can cause problems. If your view works once it’ll work a million times concurrently.
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