Our friends over at Softies on Rails have put a book out that will help any .NET developer looking to work with Ruby on Rails.  The Softies crew was an early inspiration for me to try out Ruby and Mac development, and I am really happy for them that they were able to put this tome together.

The book will help new Rails developers coming from a Microsoft/closed-source world avoid pitfalls and get up to speed quickly.

My favorite:

“Viewstate is back. Now new and improved on top of Rails. acts_as_aspdotnet overrides form_tag to put a hidden variable that contains loads of crucial processing data on every postback that will fill your server pipes with more glorious bandwidth.”

First of all, there is a drum beating in the media for an epic battle between Mister Softie and Google. The article this weekend in the New York Times ( Google Gets Ready to Rumble ) has been the subject of much discussion on the Interwebs.

From the article:

[...] Google introduced a package of online software offerings, called Google Apps, that includes e-mail, instant messaging, calendars, word processing and spreadsheets. They are simpler versions of the pricey programs that make up Microsoft’s lucrative Office business, and Google is offering them free to consumers.

Second, we work with Google Apps everyday – our firm, LTech Consulting, is a Google Enterprise Partner. The pace that we have seen requests for migrations from Exchange to Google Apps has accellerated to the point that we are now opening new offices, hiring more people, and otherwise busier than we’ve been in a long time. Our experience is just one small slice – mere anecdotal evidence that Google is truly disrupting Microsoft. We also work with Microsoft tools like Sharepoint and the Office suite. For every 10 projects that we see that are Apps related, we see 1 Microsoft Office specific project. Does that reflect the reality of the entire marketplace? No. But it has to mean something.

Third, Google is not merely attacking Microsoft with Apps. It is attacking IE with its support of Firefox. It is attacking the server platform with its nascent, yet powerful, GData APIs. Along with Amazon, APIs and Web Services are become the foundation of the next-web – not Web 3.0, but a whole other beast altogether. And on the platform front, Apple is helping to erode market share of Windows.

But what does it all mean? In what way will Microsoft be disrupted other than a slowdown in revenue growth over a long period of time? What is the answer for Microsoft? Well, I have a sweet spot in my heart for Gates & Co. and I want to see them succeed. I owe the formative years of my career to the powerful, easy to use, and well-supported development environment of Visual Studio. Here is what I think (hope) will happen.
Microsoft will split into 5 companies that can openly work with or compete with one another.

If Billy G is still involved, it might look like this:

Microsoft will organize itself into 5 openly competitive business units.

Here is how it might look:

1. OS Company: Sells operating systems for devices, workstations, home computers, and servers
2. Development Tools Company: Sells IDE’s, development tools, development platforms. .NET becomes truly multi-OS compatible (absorbs Mono project)
3. Productivity and Collaboration Tools Company: Office, web office, SharePoint, etc. Develops full featured collaboration tools for any platform, including Web.
4. Web Services Company: MSN, Search, Live, etc. Starts incubating new ideas again (see Expedia)
5. Gaming Company: Let’s face it – save for XBox, Microsoft really hasn’t had any hits lately. The next generation of XBox services get decoupled from the mothership and continue to provide innovative online play and adult-oriented gaming.

What do you think?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ruby vs. .NET Video

Before we go forward, I assume that you have a basic understanding of Ruby and Rails. If not, read _why’s poignant guide to Ruby and buy Agile Development with Rails and run through at least the first couple of chapters.

One of the biggest challenges I had initially when starting with Rails was understanding the relationships between the web framework concepts I knew well from ASP.NET, and these new Rails concepts.

I discovered these key concepts from ASP.NET translate well into Rails:

• Master Pages
• User Web Controls
• The ASP.NET Web Control / PostBack Event Model
• The use and arrangement of .aspx, .ascx, and code-behind (.cs or .vb)

Table 1: ASP.NET Concepts and their Rails counterparts

These concepts are not exact, as these are two completely different frameworks. Let’s take a look at each of these concepts in more detail.

Master Pages and Layouts

A Master Page gives you a canvas from which you can build other pages on without having to worry about all of the common elements like headers, footers, HTML directives, etc. Rails layouts are designed for a similar purpose and as such translate very well to ASP.NET Master Pages. As you will see in the next chapter in this series, I was able to convert an ASP.NET Master Page (site.master) to a Rails layout (application.rhtml) very quickly. ASP.NET Master Pages allow for multiple discreet content replacement zones, called ContentPlaceHolders. Rails does not have a preset “tag” for zones, rather you can use variables and a single “yield” statement to render discreet sections. It is best to reserve the “yield” for the main content body, and use variables for supplementary content like headers and titles that might be replaced.

This ASP.NET Master Page:

<@Page Title="Page Title">

Lorem ipsum blah blah blah

<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="headerContentPlaceHolder" runat="server"></asp:ContentPlaceHolder>

Ipsum lorem blah blah blah

<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="bodyContentPlaceHolder" runat="server"></asp:ContentPlaceHolder>

is functionally equivalent to this Rails layout:

<title><%=@title || "Default Title"%></title>
Ipsum lorem blah blah blah

<%=@header_content %>

Ipsum lorem blah blah blah

<%=yield%>

User Web Controls and Partials

In ASP.NET, User Web Controls (.ascx files), give you a nice way to encapsulate common web presentation elements. They can be included on any page or template, and have their own event model that custom code can be added to, much like ASP.NET Pages. An excellent example of a User Web Control would be a “contact us” widget that allows a user to fill out and submit a contact form in a consistent way across many pages of a website.

Rails partials serve a similar purpose. They allow a developer to encapsulate HTML with the intent of reusing across many pages or layouts. The “contact us” widget example above also fits well with partials.

From the excellent overview at the Rails Diary:

Partials let you break out a chunk of RHTML that is going to be used across multiple views in a controller or even across multiple controllers.

For more information, partials API Documentation can be found here.

In the next part of the series we’ll wrap up the ASP.NET concept comparison and start to look at implementing real-world ASP.NET to Rails conversion.

I had a simple missing tag on a Master page (I think VS2005 conveniently erased my form tag because I was trying to actually do something nifty), and it blew up our company web page.

I am going to convert http://www.ltech.com to Ruby on Rails from ASP.NET 2.0 / C#.

Ltech.com is a simple site, nothing too dynamic, and with a limited number of web forms. This should provide a good case study.

Once I figure out how to post nice “code snippets” in Blogger ( or move to Mephisto or WordPress ), I’ll start posting here.

Anyway, we need to log the hostname of the web server that logs an event. This should be easy. It is not.

To save you, my reader, the trouble that I went through, here is what I did to achieve this:

Add this to your AdoNetAppender in your configuration file:

/> value=”@hostname”/ /> value=”String” / /> value=”255″ / /> type=”log4net.Layout.PatternLayout” /> value=”%P{log4net:HostName}” / /> /> />

%P{log4net:HostName}: This is the parameter that log4net has built in. It will print the computer that logged the error into the database.

Add a hostname variable to your log4net logging table. I used varchar(100).

Add the hostname column and variable into the commandText of the logger:

value=”INSERT INTO Log4Net ([Date], [Thread], [Level], [Logger], [Message], [Exception],[Hostname] ) VALUES (@log_date, @thread, @log_level, @logger, @message, @exception, @hostname)” / />

Your full AdoNetAppender should look something like this:

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