musc@> $daniele.rant | Out-Blog

Some time ago I was reading www.caffeinatedcoder.com/book-review-the-c-programming-la…

[...] Since a good portion of the C# books are between the 500 and 1000 page range, it was refreshing to read a book that was less than 200 pages. Partly this is because when the book was published the surface area of the reusable API was a small fraction of what it is now. However, I also wonder if there was an expectation of disciplined conciseness in technical writing back in the late 80’s that simply no longer exists today. [...]

I think this is a very important point. But then, again, it was no secret – this was written in the Preface to the first edition of that book:

[...] is not a "very high level" language, nor a "big" one, and is not specialized to any particular area of application. But its absence of resrictions and its generality make it more convenient and effective for many tasks than supposedly more powerful languages. [...]

I think it all boils down to simplicity, as Glenn Scott says in glennsc.com/start-a-revolution-with-confident-simplicity

[...] To master this technique you need to adopt this mindset that your product is, say, simple and clean, and you just know this, and you are confident and assured of this. There is no urgent need to “prove” anything. [...]

Another similar book on a (different) programming language, is "Programming Ruby, the pragmatic programmer's guide" which starts with

[...] This book is a tutorial and reference for the Ruby programming language. Use Ruby, and you'll write better code, be more productive, and enjoy programming more. [...] As Pragmatic Programmers we've tried many, many languages in our search for tools to make our lives easier, for tools to help us do our jobs better. Until now, though, we'd always been frustrated by the languages we were using. [...]

Of course that language is simple and sweet, very expressive, and programmers are seen as having to be "pragmatic". No nonsensical, incredibly complex cathedrals (in the language itself and in the documentation) – but quick and dirty things that just WORK.

But way too often, the size of a book is considered a measure for its quality and depth.
I recently read on Twitter about an upcoming "Programming Windows Phone 7" book that would be more than a thousand pages in size: twitter.com/#!/MicrosoftPress/status/27374650771

I mean: I do understand that there are many API's to take a look at and the book wants to be comprehensive…but…. do they really think that the sheer *size* of a book (>1000 pages) is an advantage in itself? it might actually scare people away, for how I see things. But it must be me.

In the meantime the book has been released and can be dowloaded from here blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2010/10/28/free-…

I have not looked at it yet – when I will have time to take a look at it I'll be able to judge better…

for now I only incidentally noticed that a quick search for books about programming the iPhone/iPad returns books that are between 250 and 500 pages maximum…

And yet simplicity CAN be known to us, and some teams really "Get it": take Powershell, for example – it is a refreshing example of this: the official powershell blog has a subtitle of "changing the world, one line at the time" – that's a strong statement… but in line with the empowerment that simplicity enables. In fact, Bruce Payette's book "Powershell in Action" is also not huge.
I suppose it must be a coincidence. Or maybe not.

Blog works, all the plugin work too. I will *only* have to re-write a whole bunch on SQL queries for my .Net frontend that is now broken. I'll do that at one stage, now I can't be asked.

This CNet article about CodePlex has some VERY interesting points:

[...] Bayarsaikhan has posted the top 25 most active open-source projects on Microsoft's Codeplex site. Looking at the list, it looks like Microsoft developers spend their time doing much the same as the rest of the Java/other world: play games and make the Web world pretty with AJAX. You can see the top project interests below in the Codeplex tag cloud.

Codeplex is interesting to me for several reasons, but primarily because it demonstrates something that I've argued for many years now: open source on the Windows platform is a huge opportunity for Microsoft. It is something for the company to embrace, not despise.

And it does several things well (better than Sourceforge, in my opinion) [...]

Facebook mobile is not working from mobile operators not in the US, I suppose.
I can't even log on to m.facebook.com with my WIndows Mobile SmartPhone.
I can't send status updates through SMS.

I can't even send them by mail, or I get the following back:

So, now, I am updating Twitter.
Twitter can be updated with an SMS even from Europe. Or it can be updated with a bot running GTalk. Very easy, can do it from everywhere.

I then wrote a small command line application (based on the same "hack" as the one described before) that runs every five minutes from the scheduler on my server and keeps the two in sync.

I wrote it in C# as a Console application because that's usually what I do when I want it to run it both on my windows machines and/or on my Linux server (with MONO). I already used this approach in the past and I found it to be successful. As long as you keep the application simple enough and check out the documentation for the implemented classes on mono, it runs without modification both on windows on the "real" .Net framework and on Mono on Linux. i just copy the executable and I am ready to go.
Not this time, though.
I am hitting what seems to be a bug in mono. I might be able to find a workaround, but I haven't had the time to dig in the issue yet.
I posted some info about this on this forum.

Check this out:

Windows Live ID Team has published on the web the SDK that lets you liveID (or "passport")-enable your applications!

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb676633.aspx

There are even code samples in six different languages: C#, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby e Perl! You can download them from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=91761

Wow! Having time, it would be cool to write a WordPress plugin using Passport authentication to authenticate/identify users that want to comment… mumble mumble…..

Interoperability. Wow.

More info at the Live ID starting Page: http://dev.live.com/blogs/liveid/archive/2006/05/18/8.aspx

I know this is a very common issue.

I keep finding way too many software that claim to interact with Web 2.0 sites or services, and connect here or there…. still forgetting one basic simple rule, that is: letting people use a proxy.

Most programmers for some reasons just assume that since they are directly connected to the internet, everybody is. Which isn't always the case. Most companies have proxies and will only let you out to port 80 – by using their proxy.

…which in turn is one of the reasons why most applications now "talk" and tunnel whatever application protocol on top of HTTP… still a lot of softwares simply "forget" or don't care proving a simple checkbox "use proxy", which will translate in two or three extra lines of code… three lines which I personally usually include in my projects, when I am not even a *developer*!! (but that might explain why I *think* of it… I come from a security and networking background )

I thought of writing this post after having read this post by Saqib Ullah.

Anyway. I keep finding this thing over and over again. Both in simple, hobbyist, sample and/or in complex, big, expensive enterprise software. Last time I got pissed off about a piece of code missing this feature was some days ago when testing http://www.codeplex.com/FacebookToolkit. The previous time was during Windows Vista beta-testing (I had found a similar issue in beta2, and had it fixed for RC1.)

Actually, I am being polite saying it is "missing a feature". To be honest I think missing this "feature" would have to be considered a bug: every piece of software using HTTP *should* include the possibility to pass thorugh proxy (also, don't forget about  AUTHENTICATED proxies), or the purpose of using HTTP in the first place is defeated!!

Developers!!! You have to remember people ARE behind proxies !!!!!

Facebook StateTray, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

This is a Screenshot of the small application I first described in my previous blog post.

It is a simple Windows Form that lets you change your status on Facebook without having to browse to the site. It does not rely on Facebook's API (as they won't let you change your status, at least to date) but is really uses a hack on the Facebook mobile pages. It is based on PHP code posted by Christian Flickinger, ported to C# (.Net 2.0) by me.

When you pull down the form you get to see the settings:

Those can be stored in an XML file, that gets loaded automatically every time the program starts.
Beware that password ARE displayed and stored in clear text.

The idea so far is that you run it on your PC and you just keep it resized so it does not show the "dangerous" bits.
You can keep it minimized on the tray in windows, pop it up when you need to update your status, write your new status and click "change" – it will freeze for a couple of seconds while updates your status, since it uses synchronous calls – then you can minimize it again.

UPDATED –  September 1st 2007: I have been asked by Facebook to pull down the source code from the Net, as it violates their terms of service (I had not realized that). Apologies to all.

While testing with the Facebook API, I started creating a WinForm using the Facebook Toolkit.

What I had in mind was a simple program that would run on my PC, maybe minimized in the system tray, that would let me update my status in a click, thorugh the day, without having to log on to the website. Most of the day I am busy working, and I don't really have time to go surf and check Facebook… but I like the possibility for people to hear how I am doing. Changing the status would keep them up to date, and would keep my profile current.

As I figured out afterwards, their API does not yet let you change your status yet.

There are other people asking for this possibility… but then I went further searching on the Internet, and I found this blog: http://www.nexdot.net/blog/2007/04/20/updating-facebook-status-using-php/. 

I just hacked together a small WinForm written in C# that reimplements this idea.

I indeed would like to thank Christian for the idea, and my friend and colleague Pierluigi for his precious help with the regular expressions

At the moment it has terrible things such as hardcoded passwords in it, but as soon as I will have time to polish the code a bit, I will post it.

One more thing I would like to do with it is turning it from a standalone application into a Live Messenger Add-In, so that it synchronizes my messenger status with the one of Facebook. When I will have time for that.

I have been busy trying to write a new frontend for this blog that uses .Net. I already blogged about it here. In the last couple of weeks I have been adding stuff – permalinks using mod_rewrite, I finally show the comments properly, I have added categories and category archives (as in http://www.muscetta.net/dotnet/tag/coding). There is even an RSS Feed.

The layout is still crap, but I sort of like it being so light weight, so that is not on my priority list so far. Moreover, I am a crap designer.

Before that, tough, I still have to add important functionalities like the possibility to POST comments (which needs a new CAPTCHA, etc, so it will take me a while), and I am having issues with text encoding (it does not show the accented characters properly, yet).

But I am having fun doing it.

[Edit of December 2009 - I killed the above experiment. I had fun doing it, but there is not time for all, it needs a lot of work to keep it running/update it with every wordpress update, and mod_mono is wasting too many resources on the server.]

WordPress.Net, uploaded by Daniele Muscetta on Flickr.

It has been quite a while that I wanted to experiment a bit more with ASP.Net but I don't have a windows machine on the internet. Not one that performs enough anyway. My server runs linux. I have had mono running on it for a while, but its support was not complete with the old release of Debian, so part of my mono and mod_mono installation were a custom compile and they were breaking from time to time, each time some library got updated. So I did run a "Hello World" page with it, but nothing more, because it was a bit of a mess to mantain and, moreover, because I had not yet figured out how to have it connect with mysql instead than with MS SQL Server.
Also, I did not have any real project or idea to implement in my mind.

Now that I have upgraded to Debian Etch, mono support seems to be much more out-of-the-box and stable on this release. I also got an idea of what to do with it, so I finally gave it a try.

As a starter, I am trying to re-publish my blog, historically running at www.muscetta.com, on my other muscetta.NET domain (it makes sense to use a .NET domain, right?). But this is not a new site, it is a republish of the same content, but done using C# – just pointing at the same wordpress' mysql database. Connection to MySQL is done with MySql.Data (the ADO.Net driver for MySQL).

I still need to implement a lot of things/features, such as comment posting (you can only read them now), some layout/styling/framing to make it look nicer, some sidebar/blogroll, feeds, and a many other things. I am not aiming at a complete rewrite (for example I won't do an administrative interface or a webservice so far), but just a republish/frontend to the visitors.
I don't know when I will have time to continue writing it, but all in all I am glad it works so far, and I had fun doing it.

Writing ASP.Net for mono on linux in the absence of Frontpage server extentions and WebDAV and the remote debugger is proving slightly more challenging than just dragging and dropping controls in Visual Studio and let it do a lot of work with you. You have to write the code, upload it, and see if it works. No debugging, no intellisense. Just the hard old way of trial and error, which makes development slower, but you learn a hell of a lot more that way. Of course you need to keep the MSDN library handly

[Edit of December 2009 - I killed the above experiment. I had fun doing it, but there is not time for all, it needs a lot of work to keep it running/update it with every wordpress update, and mod_mono is wasting too many resources on the server.]