Published by panesofglass on 15th December 2009
Join us for the first HDLUG, a group for discussing the dynamic languages available for the .NET platform. Ben Scheirman will be presenting Ruby on Rails for .NET developers, and pizza will be provided courtesy of Catapult Systems. The meeting will be held at the Microsoft office in Houston, TX: 2000 W Sam Houston Pkwy S Ste 350, Houston, TX 77042.
Abstract: This session will cover an intro to the Ruby language, and an introduction to the popular web framework, Ruby on Rails. We’ll talk about how concepts relate to folks who understand .NET as well as dip into how to bridge that gap with IronRuby. This presentation will be heavily code-focused.
About Ben Scheirman: Ben Scheirman is a software developer specializing in .NET. He has worked extensively on the web on various platforms and languages. At home, he enjoys a fair amount of iPhone programming, as well as Ruby on Rails. Ben is a Microsoft MVP, Microsoft ASP Insider, and Certified ScrumMaster. When not programming, Ben enjoys speaking, blogging, spending time with his wife and five wonderful children or voiding warranties on his latest gadgets. Ben is a Principal Consultant with Sogeti in Houston, TX. Read his blog online at http://flux88.com. Be sure to check out Ben’s iPhone app, Pocket Tabs, at http://pockettabs.com.
Published by panesofglass on 10th November 2008
I’ve been spending some time lately reading and listening to talks on Framework Design and Language Design. In particular, I’ve found Krzysztof Cwalina’s blog and PDC talk very enlightening. I also rather enjoyed the PDC panel discussion on the Future of Programming Languages. I find this all very fascinating, but in a recent desire to apply pragmatism, I wondered how any of this could really help me in my day-to-day development tasks. Except to program to the framework’s design for efficiency and consistency, I had a hard time with that question.
However, with regard to my new hobby of extracting reusable patterns from apps I’m building, I really appreciate the idea of extracting these patterns into small, reusable and interoperable parts. In the Future of Programming panel, Jeremy Siek noted the importance of libraries working with other libraries (e.g., ASP.NET with ASP.NET MVC or ASP.NET AJAX with many Javascript libraries). Some libraries, however, implement their patterns too tightly around certain patterns to the exclusion of others. This can increase speed—Ruby on Rails comes to mind—but removes the ability to use other patterns or pluggable libraries–such as with Merb or Ramaze–to keep to the Ruby frameworks.
JB and I are attempting to extract patterns from our current project to enable faster development in future WPF/Silverlight projects. The current plan is to build our library around Composite WPF, an excellent library from Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices group for building rich client applications in WPF, and soon in Silverlight. We’re planning to build a business layer framework with service interfaces to the Composite WPF library and use the Repository pattern to allow for various data access methodologies.
That’s a loose description of our plan. What do you think? Do you see any flaws? For instance, we are currently not thinking about interchangeable UI libraries, even though a few, such as Silverlight.FX, have started to appear. Are we missing any existing business layer libraries? (I am not familiar with any myself, but I imagine someone has created one somewhere.) We are interested in your thoughts!
