With a little help from Mike Volodarksy's tutorial I'm up and running with RubyOnRails using a native FastCGI implementation. This is a big deal because it'll mean that Microsoft will provide a supported way of running Rails applications. In addition, PHP applications will be able to run with greater performance and reliability thanks to the work that Zend and other PHP devs have put into improving their Windows story.
This is a good job since I'm doing more work with these open source technologies at the moment since Microsoft have done little to improve the ASP.NET platform. For .NET developers, MonoRail is the only usable framework for development. Additions such as ASP.NET AJAX do little to make the platform better for the applications I am working on. The problem with AJAX is that it's not an end in itself. You need to have a reason to use it and a design to match, or you end up on the road to poor performance and usability.
Since everyone around here seems to be biking these days I decided to pony up some cash and get myself a new bike. In September, I was able to try out Sarah's cyclocross bike at the Jersey shore. It was comfy compared to 'Donkey'. However, the problem with that style of bike, for me anyway, is having my weight on my arms for hours on end. I needed something a little more upright with just as much style.
After a peek in the Trek and Cannondale catalogues it was lust at first sight when I saw the Cannondale Bad Boy Disc. This is a hybrid based off mountain bike technology, with fantastic styling. It's quite flexible so it can take road and offroad wheels (for a little extra). With a little help from the folks at Human Zoom in Ardmore, PA I parted with my cash.
It took them a little while to get the bike from Cannondale, but it arrived last Wednesday. Quite an impressive beast it is - the catalogue photos don't do it justice. After a few days riding I'm really impressed. I'll post an update when I have some proper mileage on it.
Relog.exe isn't some new fad amongst Bloggers - it's a tool from the Windows Resource Kit that helps you convert performance counter logs produced by Performance Monitor (perfmon.exe) into common text formats such as CSV. Earlier today I ran perfmon.exe and forgot to change the logging format from the default binary format to CSV. I searched the Web for a tool to convert to a format acceptable to LogParser and I found Relog. This utility saved me having to redo five hours of monitoring to get the data that I needed to analyse. Cheers to the Resource Kit team!
Syntax: relog input.blg -f CSV -o output.csv
Where can I get it? Download relog.exe for free from the Microsoft Download Center (requires a genuine Windows installation).
It's just over a week since I returned from the First International Rails Conference in Chicago and I've had some time to reflect on my experiences and put a few photos online. This was the first open source conference I have attended and it was a truly enlightening experience. I had the pleasure of meeting some very interesting people from Mike Bailey to Dave Thomas and Martin Fowler.
The crowd at RailsConf was very different from that at Microsoft events which I have regularly attended in recent years. This was refreshing but also a challenge as I'm not a UNIX guru by any means. It's clear that there is little interest in the community to actively support Windows and provide a bridge for .NET developers to migrate. This schism is something that the veterans like Dave Thomas are looking to cross as there is a lot of time and effort invested in other technologies. DHH's keynote address railed against support of XML Web Services and legacy database schemas. It will be interesting to see if ThoughtWorks, or another vendor, will step up and provide more support for working with enterprise technologies.
Deployment seemed to be a hot topic for all users at the conference and it was interesting to see the capabilities with Rails. Mike Clark's talk on Capistrano was wonderfully presented. The simplicity of being able to pull together a build system which integrates source control and remote deployment was amazing. This is something that is sorely missed in the .NET community and could probably be built on top of NAnt in a less elegant way than Capistrano.
Jan Kneschke provided an interesting insight into building a Web server to handle a massive number of connections. His Web server, LightTPD, was popular with the Rails community due to its FastCGI implementation but now has competition from Mongrel. He's planning on improving the mod_proxy support so that "Lighty" will work with Mongrel in a similar way to Apache.
On the final day of the conference, Stuart Holloway of Relevance, and former Java junkie at DevelopMentor, provides an insight into some of the Ruby techniques used by the Rails team. Stuart has spent a lot of time going through the Rails internals to figure out what the Rails core team has done to provide such cool functionality. Since I haven't spent too much time with Ruby a lot of this was very deep, but the explanation of analogues in the Java world helped a lot. This talk provided me with a lot of food for thought and is the reason I signed up for RailsConf.
If you are interested in other sessions I attended, I've posted my incomplete notes for download.
Regards the venue, facilities, and catering I think that the RailsConf organisers did a good job. Providing wireless internet access for 550 people is not an easy task, and the fact I could check mail from time to time was good enough for me.
Overall RailsConf was an excellent event, and I'm lucky to have attended the first conference. RailsConf II is likely to be a lot bigger next May, and the overall feeling will be different. It will be really interesting if Mike, Oliver and Dei come along and we can catch up on a year of Rails development.
Expat Coder
