Using Ruby Gems Behind Windows Proxy

I've been trying to get ruby gems installing on a Windows XP from behind our company proxy and finally got it to work using the HTTP_PROXY environment variable. (Why does configuration seem more like alchemy than science?) Although I usually have to supply a domain name, for some reason it was OK without it. YMMV.

SET HTTP_PROXY=http://myusername:mypassword@proxyname:80
gem install amazon-ecs
Successfully installed amazon-ecs-0.5.4
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for amazon-ecs-0.5.4...
Installing RDoc documentation for amazon-ecs-0.5.4...

Yesterday's Model View Controller Training in Austin

Yesterday Eric Hexter and Jimmy Bogard from Headspring gave an excellent free four hour overview class on the ModelViewController framework from Microsoft(see previous post). The framework is currently available in preview form, but the 1.0 version is rumored to be out this month. The MVC framework is Microsoft's answer to Ruby on Rails. (Why did Microsoft call it the MVC framework, the same name as it's concept? I guess to be consistent with their bad naming of other technologies. I guess "C# on Rails" would have been too obvious. Why not name F# "The Functional Language"?)
Anyway, I'm very excited about the new framework.

Whinning about Microsoft's Inept Naming Schemes

While searching on O'Reilly's code search site this morning, I was reminded how Microsoft chooses unfortunate names for products. My initial problem was searching for code in C# relating to the ICollection interface. I entered the category as "C#":

cat:c# icollection

and got returned a bunch of code snippets on C, C++, and C#. What I needed to say was,

cat:csharp icollection

The problem with "C#" is that it doesn't really play well with search. I can see the cute progression of C, C++, and the the musical incrementation with C#, but it's a pain in search. I can understand a non-technical marketing person (with a degree in music) selecting the name, but a technical company? Sun did a nice job selecting "java" as the final name for the language - it's a real word, but a little obscure. Why couldn't Microsoft select something like "jasper" or some obscure tea name?

And selecting ".Net" as the name of a framework? Isn't ".net" a top level domain? And how do you search for something with a dot in front of it? Don't search engines strip out obscure characters?

And while I'm at it, what sense does it make to name your operating systems, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, NT, XP, then Vista?
Please, use version numbers, or years, or code names, but don't mix them - it gives a sense of purposeless wandering.

Ok, I feel better now - back to ICollection.

Microsoft's MVC Framework

I'm very excited about Scott Gutherie's new ModelViewController framework. It's very similiar to RubyOnRails, Grails, and Monorails where the three logical concerns of Model, View, and Controller are separated. This separation makes Test Driven Development much easier. In the current ASP.NET world the ModelViewPresenter pattern is used to separate these concerns, but it's a pain.
Cool Features of Microsoft MVP:

1. xUnit friendly
   
2. Built-in mock objects
   
3. Very pluggable for Dependency Injection and other major components
   
4. Friendly REST-like URL generation
   
5. Separate directories for Model, View, Controller just like RoR
   

Scott's original blog entry is here.
A video from the Alt.Net conference in Silverlight is here and if you can't get Silverlight audio, the wmv file is currently here.
(Yeah, I know you're not suppose to do the "click here" links, but some studies show that using them doubles the clickthru rate).

After the success of Java in the late 1990s, Microsoft did some serious research on the strengths and flaws of Java (one of my fiends was in a Microsoft sponsored focus group about Java). C# was the result - a slight improvement on Java. I'm encouraged that Scott and his team have researched many MVC frameworks and have learned from each.
The MVC framework should be here in a month or so and we can play with it inside VS2008.

Create a virtual image from a physical machine

I was excited to read vmware's article about their software that converts physical machines to virtual ones - for free.
Here at innotech we are using virtuals for test environments and are soon to deploy them for production. The whole concept offers so much promise.
The march of virtualization is going to be pushing against the phalanxes of Microsoft Previously, in a license scheme that even our Microsoft rep said was brain-damaged, Microsoft required a license for each OS in a virtual whether it was being used actively or not. Which meant you couldn't store different test configurations of your product without paying a fee for each virtual in the 'freezer'. They changed the license so you only need licenses for the virtuals you are currently running which seems more reasonable.
If a company has a Microsoft OS running in five virtuals on a machine, they need to buy five copies of the operating system. With Linux or Solaris they don't need to buy any. The pressure will be to move away from the 'pay-per-virtual' operating systems to free ones.