- Rails Deployment: Engine Yard or Heroku?
As I’m thinking about beta launching my first Rails app, I need to decide how to do the deploy. Heroku and Engine Yard stand out as the most popular hosts, from what I see. Heroku also has a free option, which appeals to me. Is one much better than the other?
Long-term, I will probably host the app myself at my colo, but to keep things simple at first I don’t want to learn the intricacies of Rails hosting right now…
- Quickie: Learning Ruby on Rails Series
I’ve started a series about learning Ruby on Rails (quick jump to: Day One, Day Two) while building a web app called Whirlfood. It’s not instructional, but rather is reflective of the process of learning the language and my thoughts about the language and framework as I attempt to use it for the first time for a real project I intend to release to the public soon.
- Learning Rails – Day II
Well, I spent the second half of today (and >4 hours at Farmer Boys) working on my Whirlfood project in Rails and made a surprising amount of progress. Took some time to start to get used to the Rails methodology and the Ruby language syntax, but I think I’m in pretty good shape now.
Got to admit, I’m starting to like Rails for rapid development. After 2 days, I feel like I can build a simple web app almost as quickly as I can using C#. Which completely amazes me. Of course, there are lots of complex things and specialized functions that I still don’t know how to do in Rails, but still, I’m pretty stunned. In a good way.
- Learning Rails – Day I
I’ve been reading up a bit on Ruby and think I have a passable handle on the syntax. Also studied the structure of Rails apps. So now it’s time to actually build something to actually learn it. And because I have no patience for more Hello World examples, I’m going to build something actually useful.
Only problem is that I don’t have any tiny project ideas right now. So I’m going to re-work an existing idea and build a social restaurant recommendation site, based on my previous (poorly-named) Edahh project. If it turns out well, it might just be the basis for a re-launch of that service.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First things first:
$ rails whirlfood -d mysql
And the adventure begins.
- Why Ruby on Rails vs C#?
I’ve been spending a fair amount of time lately trying out a variety of development technologies and one of those is Ruby on Rails. I haven’t yet figured out exactly why people are so excited about it. Perhaps it’s because the convention-over-configuration methodology hides quite a bit of complexity from the developer. But my issue with it is simple – I like to be in control of my software and I like more explicit design.
- HOWTO: Export IIS7 Configuration to Another Webserver
IIS7 has this great new feature called Shared Configuration. Except that it has a tendency to do horrible things which usually result in all the websites and application pools being removed from your server and your production website starting to serve 503 Service Unavailable errors.
For an innexplicable reason, Microsoft decided to kill the Export function from IIS7 in favor of this new feature. But for those of us who don’t trust technology, we like to do things manually and to get a repeatable result that doesn’t update automatically when we least expect it. Yes, I am the sort of person who wonders why the default Windows Update on servers is to Install and Reboot Automatically at 2am…
In any case, in a simple 3 step process you too can export and import your Internet Information Server 7 websites and app pools. (more…)
- PDFLib .NET Deploy Tip (specified module could not be found)
We’re using the ASP.NET C# version of PDFLib at work to generate loads of reports and cool pdf files. Everything was peachy on our development systems until we deployed to staging servers and started getting a strange error.
All of the sudden we started getting the following exception on the site:
The specified module could not be found.
(Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007007E)
Not one of Microsoft’s more useful error messages, to be true and googling for that error returns so many diverse topics that they were completely useless.So after a bit of troubleshooting, we came to the following solution tips. These should work for both C# and VB and any other .NET language. Tested on Windows 2003 and Windows Server 2008. (more…)
- Sphinx Search C# .NET Client API
Need a C# native client API for Sphinx Search to use in your C# or VB ASP.NET projects? So did I, so I wrote one.
Yesterday, I found Sphinx Search and decided to try implementing it in place of the (horrid) MySql Fulltext searching for my Photocore project. After downloading the binaries and indexing a couple million rows of metadata, I was amazed at how well it performs. It indexed all my data in less than a minute (compared to the 30 minutes required by MySql Fulltext) and I haven’t come up with a search that takes longer than 0.005 seconds. I was hooked immediately. So I needed a .NET API because I didn’t want to patch my database server to use the Sphinx plugin.
Source download after the jump.
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- Build your own modded System.Web.Extensions.dll
Earlier today Microsoft released the source code to the AJAX 1.0 release System.Web.Extensions library. I was in the apparently unique position of needing to modify parts of the code for a special case application, so I downloaded the source right away ready to modify, compile and deploy.
I guess I was pretty naive to think that it would be that easy. The distribution doesn’t include some pretty important parts. A .csproj file for one. The entire Resources class for another.
So I had to work my way through the process of getting a compile-able version of the library ready to replace the official System.Web.Extensions binary in my project. The server code Reference License prevents me from simply providing the project to you, but here are the high points if you need to do the same.
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