ChrisNTR

Last week the new website for the Zion Arts Centre, based on Stretford Road, Manchester, went live. Let me know what you all think of it. Zion Arts

Chris

Recently Scott Guthrie mentioned what the ASP.NET MVC Road-map looked like and more importantly what features will be included in a special MIX 08 preview - which as you can guess - will be released around MIX 08, which is happening in the next few weeks in Las Vegas. Sadly, I cannot make the event; however, the preview will be available for everyone to download and use so that’s pretty good.

A few of the changes to the framework that stick out for me are the updated changes routing rules, which have always seemed a bit limiting (without having to customise it too much) so this will be a welcome addition. Something else which is nice to see is the removal of [ControllerAction] before the action in the controller to explicitly announce it as action method which will help with making the controller code look a little bit cleaner.

With all these ‘preview’ changes, I feel that this shows that the ASP.NET MVC team (Rob Conery, Phil Haack, etc) are really listening and are helping to build the best MVC framework they can. The framework feels very open-source to me. Although you can’t manually patch the core code (though you will be able to patch your own build soon), the framework will allow complete customisation to fit your needs as well as the MVC Contrib providing many different extensions to add to it.

I’m excited to see where this goes because I think it can only get better!

The website ASP.NET provides a whole host of information about ASP.NET including videos, podcasts and community forums. Recently, Joe Stagner kindly set me up a blog at weblogs.asp.net (along with a few others…) so I think it’s where I’m going to posting most of my asp.net/.net ramblings in the future. You can find my blog here: http://weblogs.asp.net/ChrisHardy. My first entry goes into a bit of detail about Monorail, MS MVC Framework and why you would use one or the other.

Hoping to get Windows Server 2008 installed on some kind of machine soon so I can play around with hosting a little bit more.

Chris

For those that don’t know, I recently received (for Christmas) Guitar Hero for the Wii! Oh, it’s brought many hours of fun just trying to get through the medium stage. I then recently found out that I could sync my game account with the online account at guitarhero.com ! Great! Now everyone can find my account and see how bad I really am at Guitar Hero.

One thing that I did notice was that in some of the URLs was this:

So, I checked the headers out and it turns out that it was running on nginx v. 0.5.26 and what I can only presume is Ruby on Rails from the query string. This comes quite a shock to me to see quite a main stream game site using the rails framework. Good work Guitar Hero. Shame it always seems to be slow when I go on it…

Scott Guthrie today blogged in quite some detail about the new asp.net MVC framework. It’s quite a long read but definitely is worth the read. I can’t wait for the CTP comes up so I can have a little play around with it myself and see how much easier or harder things are to do with this framework compared to others such as Rails. It’ll be nice to also try using this along side IronRuby and IronPython to see how it handles multiple languages. I’ll probably show some examples if I get round to do this.

The blog is over at this address: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/13/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-1.aspx

Chris

Google announced the other week the they were not releasing a gPhone but a Google operating system with the Open Handset Alliance. Android is the new OS for the mobile platform, which runs on the Linux 2.6 kernel. There’s already plenty of documentation for the OS including a few sample apps to view along with the Android SDK. These can be found on the link below.

Google Android

When the Bluetooth APIs get released I might even think about porting across my final year J2ME Bluejaw project. I think if Android really kicks off and gets picked up by many phone manufacturers then it might be a catalyst for Java to be used more effectively on mobile phones unlike current Java programs written with J2ME.

There’s also the fact that Google are willing to shell out a share of $10,000,000 (Ten Million US Dollars) to developers for their exceptional applications built upon Android.

ChrisNTR

So, I’ve had my laptop for coming up to two years now and never really cleaned the keyboard until now. However since I normally use my laptop when it’s dark or when I can’t clearly see the keyboard on the screen, I thought it’d be interesting to see how well my touch typing actually was so I decided to put the keys on in all the wrong places as you can see below…

Since I’m a coder by day and night, it’ll be interesting to see if it royally screws me over when trying to find that one key or something like that.

Let the experiment begin!

Chris.

Recently the Microsoft Permissive License, along with the Microsoft Community License were both submitted to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to allow them to be fully supported as ‘Open Source’ licenses however these were both turned down for approval, mainly due to the fact that the names of licenses were misleading.

On the 12th October, after renaming the Microsoft Permissive License to Microsoft Public License and the Microsoft Community License to Microsoft Reciprocal License, as well as a few other minor changes, the OSI approved both of the licenses. This means that projects, such as IronRuby and IronPython, are now under these licenses officially open source.

A full round up can be found over on the OSI website.

Chris

Last week sometime the videos of *most* of the sessions at Mix 07 UK went online. Which you can go and view over at the Mix site. Out of the sessions that I missed whilst I was down at the conference, one which has caught my eye was Michael Foord’s session called IronPython et al: Using Dynamic Languages in .Net and Silverlight. It’s great to see Silverlight working really well with other languages and hopefully it’s a sign of more things to come and also maybe what IronRuby might turn out to be like. Another video that I found interesting was the Building of next generation web apps using Windows Live Services. This featured a site called SportsDo which tracked a users run/cycle/walk/swim path using a mobile phone and a GPS tracker. It’ll certainly be interesting - privacy aside - to see what people come up with when GPS is much more ubiquitous along side with the internet.

Also watch out for the BasePlayer.js - Bad NPObject as private data! Javascript bug on the Mix site which is nicely clocking up over 5000 errors on firebug.

Goodnight,

Chris

For the last two or so weeks I have been working on donation section for a client at work. What they needed was a way to take online payments/donations through a Barclaycard merchant account. The MPI ePDQ is a way of seemlessly using the Barclays system without re-directing a user to their site at all. This gives an overall better user experience and can stop users from leaving the page after a successful payment. CPI is the other which is a paypal like integration of a payments system which allows custom colours and a custom image but is generic for all sites. Using MPI, originally, the only way to communicate with this system was to either use C (yup, C, not C++...) or Java. As we both know, C is an old old language and Java has not really taken off as well on the web as other technologies. Although it seems most financial websites seem to use Java Script Pages (jsp), most other small business don't which left them stuck.

Recently Barclaycard have opened up a XML API which really is just a way for a web developer to send a formed XML document over to Barclaycard for them to process on their side. The Barclaycard site does include some documents on what you can put into a XML document but doesn't really say what is required at all.

A way of implementing this within PHP was to use a custom ePDQ class created by Aqua Technologies Limited. What this does is basically take out all the fiddly bits which allows to concentrate on how you want to handle the transaction when it comes back. A few things to look out for if you use this path is that although the ePDQ class is very useful, it was not bug proof and still contained typos on variable names and broken logic checking on some passed in variables such as the post code. As side from this, the ePDQ is a useful class which creates an object with all your customer details and your merchant store details and creates the needed XML for you. So with a 600 line class you can cut down the amount of lines needed to validate and send credit card details off to Barclaycard.

As simple as that! And of course you can modify the class to you specific needs if you have some extra validation that you need to have or what not. I would be quite interested to see what asp.net has in the way of dealing with ePDQ transactions. I'm sure it would be rather simple to create, especially if you use linq but has it actually been done yet?

I will probably be covering payments using Paypal in the near future which is a different kettle of fish completely.
I hope this helps out someone needing some PHP ePDQ developer help and feel free to contact me for more information,

ChrisNTR