How do you tell a good code?

Agreed with Ayende:
"... most good code bases are actually fairly boring. That is pretty much the definition of a good codebase..."


Source.


Good luck!

Speed up rails3 rspec2

If you've eventually fell asleep while waiting for your test suits to run, here's a good description on how to speed it up.


PS One little nitpick: all of the spork commands should be executed in bundle exec context as long we use bundler insted of rubygems.


Good luck!

Calculate LOC with one line of code

Found a very useful tip on how to quickly estimate the size of a project with only one line of powershell script.
Navigate to the root directory of your project and in powershell type the following:
(dir -include *.cs,*.xaml -recurse | select-string .).Count


Thats it. 
Good luck!

Execute Caliburn coroutine in action pipeline without UI trigger

Seems rather easy, isn't it?

Just put it into Presenter's Execute method and the did is done. Well, should it be like that I wouldn't wake up in the night and write this stuff!
Let's see what's there in Execute:

So, it just packs every single coroutine it has in SequentialResult and execute 'em. No filters pipeline used, no routedMessage. None of your neat filters applied to these coroutines.

You might ask what is the difference with executing coroutines as a result of some UI action, be it a routed event or a command. The answer is in the Caliburn.PresentationFramework.Actions namespace.
To be prrecise it is an Action Execute overloaded method that in simple case of SynchronousAction does the following:

namely calls preprocessor filters, delegates a call to method that might be returning coroutine, handles errors with rescue filters, calls postprocessor filters. That is a filter pipeline I am talking about.
Well, seems that Caliburn has everything I need. And all I have to do is just use it.

As header states there is no UI trigger, i.e. I want to execute a coroutine when nobody clicked a button, but rather on some external trigger. As an example, consider model update with call to any data storage during Presenter initialization stage.

Enter DegenerateMessage. This intellectual piece of code is a data container that is being handed to participants on courutine call pipeline in order to hint what was the original method name called.

Another intellectual piece of code is DegenerateMessageTrigger. It is so damn smart that it knows that in order to trigger an action it has to pass a message to message handler!

And yet another piece is a DegenerateMessageHandler. It really shouldn't be called that way as it performs really complicated things. Namely, it creates an ActionHost and when Process is called converts DegenerateMessage to an ActionMessage and put it into the standard Caliburn action pipeline.

If it seems like dancing on your head, then know that you are not alone. But wait, there is another part I forgot to mention. It is a simple interface IResultExecutor aimed to hide all that smart code under two methods accepting Expressions with lambdas calling methods that return coroutines.

Oh, and there is yet another thing. With Caliburn Micro you can accomplish the same with only one line of code.

Cheers!

The best explanation to ESB ever.

I've finally managed to reread some of old Udi's articles and suddenly realized that following few lines are the best explanation of what ESB is all about, ever.

I never want to miss it again that is why I repost it right here in my blog.

"it’s all in the message. Forget about remote method invocations and pub-subbing events—down on the wire it’s all just messages. The trick is to think of your system as passing messages at the application level as well.

Asynchronous message passing over queues. It’s really quite simple.

Once you’ve packaged everything into the message, that message can be dynamically routed anywhere, and so can its responses. The application doesn’t need to bind against any specific endpoint—it just drops a message addressed to some logical location. Infrastructure can make sure that messages get to the logical recipient, even if they change physical locations.

That infrastructure is what brings about the “Bus” architectural style between your distributed components."

As Udi says, you have to reread it several dozens of times, until it strikes to you.

Good luck!

Git ftp deploy

With tools like git, NServiceBus, RoR and the rest, life seams to be better then ever.

With git I've managed to setup deployment with a matter of minutes. Just like this: http://blog.wekeroad.com/2009/11/23/deploying-a-web-application-with-git-and-ftp

There are other ways, probably even simplier: http://ayende.com/blog/4836/primitive-git-auto-deploy

Good luck!

Django newby frustrations.

As you might already guessed, I am currently in a process of discovering two technologies I had no experience with before.

This time I met a strange error running a Django tutorial web application: UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe0...

The simplest solution to this can be found here: http://victor-k-development.blogspot.com/2010/07/unicodedecodeerror-django.html

But the roots of the problem and an ultimate solution are to be found here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4237898/unicodedecodeerror-ascii-codec-cant-decode-byte-0xe0-in-position-0-ordinal

Good luck!