N Rao Lakkakula’s Blog

1.  You have IIS and ASP.NET 1.1 running OK. Now you want to run ASP.NET 2.0 for one webfolder with 1.1 running remaining site. You started getting “Failed to access IIS metabase”.

Solution :  Run aspnet_regiis in asp.net 2.0 folder

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727> aspnet_regiis -ga ASPNET

Then reset IIS

(more to be added soon….)

Community Technology Preview Release of MVC Framework is released. Go get it from  http://asp.net/downloads/3.5-extensions/

Some documentation is available at http://quickstarts.asp.net/3-5-extensions/mvc/default.aspx

For Help or See what others thinking  see forums at http://forums.asp.net/1146.aspx

I am thinking of posting a tutorial pretty soon …..comparsing side by side of Rails and ASP.NET MVC….. stay tuned.

I been still surviving on IE6 until recently (as I use most of the time Opera or Firefox, I never bother to upgrade IE). But as I was playing with Silverlight, I need another browser to test my silverlight applications other than Firefox2. Upgrade is painless (you need to restart though at the end).

 After that, any links from my  Yahoo messenger were not working… same the case with Visual Studio 2005/2008…. I guess infact any attempt to launch a webpage from outside the browser was unsuccessful….. 

How to fix it….. my first guess was may be IE7 deleted or moved IE6 executable (Not replaced….as it wont be problem)…… and all these applications keep trying to lookup IE6 ………..  

Well…. I was wrong……  what happend was … IE6 was set as default browser at the time IE7 was installed and IE7 is not set automatically as default browser…….may be it asked me….I dont remember….. so all these applications are trying to launch default browser app…….without much success………..

So to Fix, simply launch IE7…. go to Tools –> Internet Options —> Programs  and Make IE7 as default browser……. that should fix all these broken links…………

I haved tried Yahoo Pipes sometime back when it was beta.  Popfly is Microsoft’s stab at creating mashups. Mashups allows you to connect multiple data sources to display units visually without any coding.

Popfly requires Microsoft SilverLight runtime ( Microsoft version of Adobe brought Macromedia’s Flash Player) to be installed to create mashup and also to view it. You also need windows live account.

My first test using IE 6 was not pleasant with blurry ghosty images whenever you move over any of the controls.  Also I didnt see any output when clicked on Preview.  You could see a popup warning saying “you are not using  IE7 or Firefox 2.0. ..your expereince may vary”. My second attempt with Firefox 2 is lot better. It worked smoothly (though I had trouble installing silverlight on Firefox. It ended up the problem is not with silverlight but NoScript addon… NoScript has a setting to forbid Silverlight for untrusted sites and some reason popfly is considered as untrusted site).

Also note that Opera wont work as silverlight is not supported on Opera browser. I use opera for most of the dialy browsing so it would be nice if silverlight support comes for opera in future.

Overall experience with Popfly is good and is bit faster than Yahoo Pipes (atleast when Pipes was beta). Popfly also makes creating template based webpage easier and quick and add as many as mashups embedded in that page.

Look at a simple mashup and webpage I did at http://www.popfly.ms/users/siri/myhomepage

Some of the new features in VS 2008 that makes you happy are

(List taken from wonderful Blogs of ScottGu and Brad Adams)

• Support for .NET 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 runtimes
• JavaScript intellisense
• Much richer JavaScript debugging
• Nested ASP.NET master page support at design-time
• Rich CSS editing and layout support within the WYSIWYG designer
• Split-view designer support for having both source and design views open on a page at the same time
• A much faster ASP.NET page designer - with dramatic perf improvements in view-switches between source/design mode
• Automated .SQL script generation and hosting deployment support for databases on remote servers
• LINQ support

Go check it out!

Recently there is some news about Microsoft building a MVC framework to go with ASP.NET and run on NET 3.5 framework. You could see the first detailed blog entry about it in ScottGu’s blog today. Looks promising with no postback & viewstate baggage.  I will be updating my impression on this one soon.

You could create classes inside another classes in Ruby.  In Ruby, classes defined are stored as constants with same name as class. And as you know Ruby class definitions are executable code and it execute in the context of that class as the current object.   That means any classes (say B,C) defined  inside another class (A) would act like constants of that outer class ( as A::B, A::C).

 Lets look at some code

See how we accessed Class B as A::B

Step1 : Install Ruby

Download Source ruby-1.8.5.tar.gz

$ tar -xvfz ruby-1.8.5.tar.gz

$ cd ruby-1.8.5

$ configure

$ make

$ make install

Step 2: Install Ruby gems

Download rubygems-0.9.4.tgz

$ tar -xvfz rubygems-0.9.4.tgz

$ cd rubygems-0.9.4

$ ruby setup.rb

Step 3: Install Practical Query Analysis

Download pga gem

$ gem install pqa-1.6.gem

Step 4: Configure PostgreSQL 

In postgresql.conf file, makesure these settings are on

log_statement  true

log_duration   true

log_pid        true

Restart PostgreSQL to make these changes in effect.In my case postgresql is setup as a service to start at boot. so restarting is easy.

service postgresql restart

Step 5:   Use PQA to anlayze log

pqa -file /path/to/your/logfile -normalize -top 5

To generate a HTML Report

pqa -file /path/to/your/logfile -normalize -top 5 -format html > /tmp/myReport.html

Thats it!. You could find slowest queires, most run queries and other cool stuff from this great tool.  you could out details and detailed documentation at http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pqa/

I tried using Aptana and JEdit as IDEs for Rails development (to some success but not fully happy) before and recently tested CodeGear’s 3rdRail. I could see that 3rdRails is also designed based on Eclipse platform (same as case for Aptana Radrails).  But what makes 3rdRail different from Aptana (other than $299 price tag) is couple of cool features like Logical representation of folders/files in project explorer. Controllers, Views are nicely tucked together. Models and Helpers are visible at top level makes it easy for you instead of grilling down the folders to get them.

Another neat feature is Console (they call it Project Commander), not only it shows output you could directly type and run all rails commands here (like rake tasks or installing plugins etc.)

Finally there is “Refactoring support”. For example, if you choose to rename an action, it will figure out all the files that action is referred and changes for you.

Go check it out at http://www.codegear.com/products/3rdrail. At least try for 3o days and see if you like it.

Merb is another MVC framework written in Ruby by Ezra Zygmuntowicz. Phil Misiowiec  did some peformance comparsion for Rails and Merb when deploying with Mongrel, Swiftify and Nginx.  You could look at full article at http://www.webficient.com/2007/08/testing-various-configurations-of-rails.html

 For making it visually interesting, I created a simple Flex Chart based on those results. I kind of  interpolated the same data in 2 different perspectives:

Chart 1 :  Comparing Various Deployments for Rail & Merb

Chart 2 : Comparing Rails & Merb for Various Deployments

You could clearly see that Merb perfomed better than Rails but it is more evident when used with Evented Mongrel and less with simple Mongrel deployment.  Also it showing storing sessions in MemCache is better than ActiveRecord store.  

  **** Note that I am not responsible for these results and full credit should go to Phil Misiowiec and I just try to represent the data visually here  (while trying to play with Flex Charting) ******