PROGRAMMING

SEX!

Now that I’ve got your attention, lets talk about IronRuby and WPF. Allow me divert your attention to another guest post I wrote for Eric Nelson, an architect and platform evangelist here at Microsoft.

You may recall about a week ago I wrote a a brief introduction to IronRuby, introducing some of the concepts, addressing the advantages of building with the .NET Framework and briefly talking about running pre-existing code with it to demonstrate compatibility. This time, I’ve taken it a bit further and gone through writing an application from the ground up — this time using WPF, the .NET libraries responsible for drawing awesome graphics, UIs and animations. On top of this, I’ve elaborated a bit on interoperability with the CLR.

This sample app I’ve built is what I consider the ‘hello, world’ of WPF applications — well, perhaps simply printing “hello, world” on the screen would be more apt, maybe this is more of a “bonjour, tout le monde” — an analogue clock face. A very simple data visualisation we’re all very familiar with.

Anyway I hope you enjoy the article, and if you happen to be attending the Scottish Ruby Conference later this month, please go ahead and pay Eric and I a visit. We’ll be happy to talk further on the topics of IronRuby, .NET, Ruby in general and maybe even Azure — more on that hopefully in a later post.

That link again is:

• Using IronRuby and .NET to produce the ‘Hello World of WPF’

TECHNOLOGY It’s not like me to dedicate an entire blog post to the purpose of promoting a link to some other site – like so many other bloggers seem to do – but this one definitely needed some shout-outs.

As an ardent theoretical¹ futurist, and someone who reads quite a lot (especially during the commute to and from work), I’ve long been predicting the severe crippling, if not complete demise of printed media — with the exception of the odd sentimental item or work of historical importance.

Craig Mod has penned a fantastic essay about how the iPad, and I’m sure generations of future tablet computers, will finally give us the alternative to the cheap paperback. He also peppers his article with some great fundamentals of content design and information architecture theory which will appeal to the budding designers out there – some theory that will appeal to web designers too and is directly analogous to the presentation/data layer split in a web page’s architecture.

It’s great to see these points that I’ve been trying to make for so long be put forward so much eloquently than I have been able to.

Ironically, I really want to print it. Read it here:

Books in the Age of the iPad by Craig Mod.

¹ ‘Theoretical’ because I can’t afford everything I want to.

RUBY I recently wrote a guest post for the blog of Eric Nelson, one our architects here at Microsoft — whom, by the way, I will be accompanying at the Scottish Ruby Conference later this month, more on that later — briefly introducing IronRuby, the implementation of Ruby running atop the .NET framework. In this piece I also touch on how to get IronRuby powering your Rails applications, but it’s fairly compatible across the board so there wasn’t much to say about that. :-)

That post can be found here, and if you’re at all interested in Rails, .NET or Ruby on Windows I recommend giving it a read. I will be following it up with one or two more articles before the conference on the topics of WPF, the rich-media component of the .NET framework; perhaps IronRuby with the ASP.NET MVC Framework for those interested in expanding their Ruby-based web development repertoire beyond Rails; and of course some elaboration on how IronRuby works and how you can better interoperate with your .NET code and the framework as a whole.

If any of this sparks your interest (and why wouldn’t it?), and you’re heading to the Scottish Ruby Conference from the 26^th to the 27^th of March 2010 — or, indeed, going to either of the charity tutorials the day before (more info here) — and would like to talk about anything IronRuby, I’d be more than happy to have a chat.

It’s very possible that we will be running a small, informal session during the conference for those that would really like to learn more and discuss the project. If that does happen, we’d love to invite any interested people along. Watch this space for more information on that.

Keep an eye out for Eric and I at the conference!

That link again:

• What’s IronRuby, and how do I put it on Rails?

PROGRAMMING Just for fun, I’ve put together a nice UI for turning a typical VIDEO_TS folder into a disk image.

I had to convert a whole bunch of typical VIDEO_TS folders to watchable-on-a-DVD-player disk images for a family thing.

You know when you want to just write a quick script to speed-up a monotonous task you’re doing, but the developer in you makes you want to turn it into a full-blown application?

This is one of those applications.

It’s just a simple python application that will present a nice, Tkinter-powered UI for hdiutil. Some people may find just calling the utility from the commandline might be a bit more flexible but convenience is always fun. It’s also very easily convertible into a .app bundle for Macs (although the availability of the hdiutil tool is going to be a problem on Windows).

It’s over here at GitHub

ONLINE CULTURE If you ever want to know in what year someone was born, what their first name is, whether they smoke mad joints on a daily basis or what football team they support; you need look no further than their Xbox Live gamertag.

The answers to those questions are invariably 1997, Kyle, “yeah, mate” and Liverpool FC.

By the way, I’m totally a Whaleosaurus. Rawr!!!