Jon Flanders'

If you are in LA for TechEd - also a Star Trek movie review

jon-flanders — Mon, 11 May 2009 17:49:50 GMT

Movie was just awesome. Maybe one of the best movies of all time. Really ever.

If you are in LA for TechEd you have a moral obligation to go see Star Trek - at the Arclight Cinerama Dome Hollywood -http://tinyurl.com/ca3b3o. The Arclight is really the best theater I've ever been too. Leather *assigned* seats, no talkers (well almost never any talkers) great projection and sound in every theater.

If you are into music - go next door to Ameoba - its an old school record store (and there aren't many of those left).

VSLive - Las Vegas!

jon-flanders — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:43:45 GMT

I'm super excited to be doing two talks at VSLive Vegas on Oslo. If you register with code S9V10 you can get and all-access Passport Package for just $1,295, a savings of $400.00 off the standard price of $1,695.

WCF "Champ"

jon-flanders — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:23:16 GMT

Funny video - http://www.microsoft.com/net/wcf/champ. I wonder if they will have a WCF REST vs SOAP version (you know who I'd be betting on :))

Got a very nice book review

jon-flanders — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:19:25 GMT

Thanks Nick - http://techfortesco.blogspot.com/2009/04/tescocom-api-to-become-more-restful.html

MUrl – a DSL and runtime for exercising HTTP

jon-flanders — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:39:25 GMT

Get it at the Oslo Dev center http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/oslo/default.aspx (link in the middle box). I just saw Chris and Doug do a talk using this at Mix09. I think its a very interesting example of how using a DSL can simplify developer tasks.

Problem with the ETag code in my book

jon-flanders — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:54:09 GMT

I just discovered that in Chapter 11 - my code for generating ETags has a bug. The code needs to wrap the ETag in a set of quotes:

string GenerateETag(User u)
{
    byte[] bytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(u.UserId + u.LastModified.ToString());
    byte[] hash = MD5.Create().ComputeHash(bytes);
    string etag = Convert.ToBase64String(hash);
    return string.Format("\"{0}\"", etag);
}

Sorry - as I always say "Hi - I'm Jon, I'm a developer, and I write code with bugs" ;)

New version of the REST starter kit

jon-flanders — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:17:57 GMT

Its available now on Codeplex - I showed off both the client and server pieces of the starter kit at my full-day REST seminar at SDWest this week. There are some very useful features in the kit like:

WebProtocolException and an IErrorHandler implementation that returns correct error codes
The HttpClient class and the "Paste as Xml Serializable" feature to help minimize the work necessary when building RESTful clients

Those are just two of my favorites but there are a lot more. I'll be using the HttpClient to help do Conditional GET when I do my Caching in REST talk next Friday at Mix! If you are going to be in Vegas - some by and say hello.

Programming against M

jon-flanders — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 01:23:42 GMT

Over on the Oslo forums there have been a few questions about how to interact with M (specifically MSchema) programmatically. I've been doing this quite a bit creating PluralSight's Oslo course, as well as working on various samples.

What I'm going to do is create an in-memory representation of one or more M files by using the M Compiler - which is clearly named as Compiler (it in the Microsoft.M namespace). I need to reference three assemblies to get this to work: System.Xaml.dll, System.DataFlow.dll, and Microsoft.M.Framework.dll. Compiler has a couple of methods, one is aptly named Compile, which I'm not going to use in this sample. Compile creates a CompilationResults object that not only has the in-memory parsed representation of the MSchema, it also has the in-memory representation of the Database that would be created if you used mx.exe to deploy the M to the database.

Instead I'm going to use Compiler.Parse, because I'm only interested in the M in-memory representations at the moment (not the database objects). To get Compiler to be happy, I have to pass it a CompilerOptions object which is essentially the arguments to the compiler. I'm going to actually parse the provided M sources in the SDK for the Repository itself (found in the OSLOInstallDir\Models directory as raw M files with a M project thrown in as well).

string dir = @"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Oslo SDK 1.0\Models";
CompilerOptions cops = new CompilerOptions();
cops.IncludeStandardLibrary = true;
foreach (string file in Directory.GetFiles(dir, "*.m", SearchOption.AllDirectories))
{
    CompilerInput cinput = new CompilerInput();
    cinput.Name = Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(file);
    cinput.Reader = new StreamReader(file, Encoding.UTF8, true);
    cops.Sources.Add(cinput);
}

CompilationResults cresults = Compiler.Parse(cops);

After I get the CompilationResults back, I can loop and party on the CompilationResults.ParsedSources.Modules collection. This will be the collection of MSchema modules found in the source directory.

To get at the actual M artifacts, for each Module I need to loop its Members property. Members is of type ICollection<IDeclaration>. IDeclaration is the interface that all Module members implement. If I use Reflector (such a handy tool) I can see all the types that implement this interface:

I put a red arrow next to the two really interesting implementations - ExtentDeclaration and TypeDeclaration. If I had the following M, I'd get one of each object:

module MFun
{
   type foo : {
    id : Integer32 = AutoNumber();
    data : Text;
} where identity id;

   foos : foo*;
}

In this case foo is a TypeDeclaration, and foos is an ExtentDeclaration. This example is pretty easy, but because MSchema is flexible, things can get ugly very quickly.

Where things get ugly is when you want to follow the trail further than just the top level object. What if for example I wanted to find out the definition for each ExtentDeclaration. Let me take another example:

module Models1
{
    Model : 
    {
        Id : Integer64 = AutoNumber();
        Name : Text;
    }* where identity Id;   
}
module Models2
{
    Model :( 
    {
        Id : Integer64 = AutoNumber();
        Name : Text;
    } where identity Id)*; 
}

In this sample I'd have two Modules - each with a single ExtentDeclaration. But the first ExtentDeclaration's Type property is a ParamaterizedExpression. A ParameterizedExpression has an Arguments collection, and that's where you can get back to the actual definition. In this case its ParameterizedExpression is made up of two arguments: one is a CollectionType that shows me the {Id, Name} structure, and the other is another ParamaterizedExpression that is the definition of the where statement. The second Module (Models2) has a single ExtentDeclaration, but its Type is Collection (because of the parenthesis and the way the MSchema is parsed). At the end of the day these two extents really are the *same* semantically - but because of the slightly different syntax - the object model ends up looking different.

If I where to parse my "foo" example, I'd end up with one Module with two members, and if I wanted to figure out where the definition of the ExtentDeclaration came from, I'd have to go down the object model until I found the type declaration for the collection type that foos is made up of.

Here is some code (included in the project you can download at the end) that finds the type name for every ExtentDeclaration in a Module, at least using all the various M sources I have :) (That is - it works on my machine).

public static string FindExtentTypeName(ExtentDeclaration extent)
     {
         string name = "Not Found";
         var et = extent.Type as Microsoft.M.CollectionType;
         if (et != null)
         {
             if (et.ElementType is ParameterizedExpression)
             {
                 var theExpression = et.ElementType as ParameterizedExpression;
                 //check to see if expression refers to a type
                 var results = (from arg in theExpression.Arguments
                                where arg.GetType() == typeof(DeclarationReference)
                                select arg);
                 if (results != null && results.Count() > 0)//we have an extent
                 {
                     var dr = results.First() as DeclarationReference;
                     if (dr != null)
                     {
                         name = dr.Name;

                     }
                 }
                 else
                 {

                     name= extent.Name.Value;
                    
                 }
             }//direct extent
             if (et.ElementType is DeclarationReference)
             {

                 name = ((DeclarationReference)et.ElementType).Name;
                 
             }
         }
         else
         {
             var parm = extent.Type as ParameterizedExpression;
             if (parm != null)
             {
                 CollectionType collectionType = (from ex in parm.Arguments
                                                  where ex.GetType() == typeof(CollectionType)
                                                  select ex).First() as CollectionType;
                 if (collectionType.ElementType is EntityType)
                 {
                     name = extent.Name.Value;

                 }
                 if (collectionType.ElementType is DeclarationReference)
                 {
                     name = ((DeclarationReference)collectionType.ElementType).Name;

                 }
             }
         }
         return name;
     }
  
 }

So the output looks like this:

Happy M parsing.

ProgrammingM.zip (16.12 KB)

Google removes SOAP API

jon-flanders — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 01:15:09 GMT

Google, in an unsurprising move is retiring its SOAP API. Just like Microsoft and Azure (although I have to think the people at Google knew this before the people at Microsoft as a general proposition) things are moving the REST way.

Demos from VSLive SF

jon-flanders — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 21:28:15 GMT

Had two great groups of attendees for my talks on Oslo and REST.

Thanks a lot - and please fill out the evals, they do help shape who speaks and on what. Of course if you didn’t like my session, you can feel free not to fill out the eval ;-)

Demos for the talks:

Oslo

REST

Geek Speak Web Cast on Oslo

jon-flanders — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:35:00 GMT

I did a fun web cast yesterday with Lynn and Glenn, had a bunch of great questions and did I think a cool demo with a language for ASP.NET MVC routing. Enjoy here. If you are looking for the code that I'll post the code after my talk on Oslo/M next week at VSLive (and probably a little more exposition on the code as well)

My first sighting of my book in the wild for analog purchase

jon-flanders — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 05:36:00 GMT

Found at the Barnes and Noble in downtown Seattle. Although still found for digital based purchase at Amazon ;-)

If you are interested in learning more – also check out my REST course – May 4th in New York nothing like spring in New York learning cool technology.

New Oslo SDK is live

jon-flanders — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:24:03 GMT

Get it here. One note of caution – delete your Repository database first. I didn’t and had to completely uninstall and re-install again – YMMV but at least you are warned :)

Received another nice review of my book on REST...

jon-flanders — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:56:30 GMT

... at blog critics magazine; and at Amazon I'm up to 5 reviews (avg 5 stars). Thanks to everyone who has bought the book and special thanks to those that reviewed it! Good reviews at Amazon are as important as getting good evaluation scores at conferences these days - so double thanks to everyone. Nice way to wake up on a Monday morning :)

Speaking part two

jon-flanders — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:52:25 GMT

Whoops - I forgot one!

http://www.socalcodecamp.com/

I’ll be doing a session on Oslo on Sunday (mostly on M), and right after a talk on REST.