Second Thoughts

installing windows phone developers tools on windows server 2008 R2

2011-07-24T16:50:00.000+06:00

Many of us using Windows Server 2008 R2 as development workstations. But if you want to develop for windows phone 7 then you are out of luck as Windows Phone Developer tools does not allow you to install it on Windows Server 2008 or later. It stops while bootstrapping. Luckily you can bypass the bootstrap error. Thanks to Aaron Stebner for his blog post about this here. Follow this steps to install it:

Download the developers tools in ISO format from this location and mount it using your favorite virtual CD/DVD image loader
Now copy all the contents from the mounted drive to any folder you want say C:\wpd
Now edit the baseline.dat file using any text editing tool
Go to the [gencomp7788] section
Under this section find out InstallOnLHS and change the value from 1 to 0
Again find out InstallOnWin7Server within the same section and change the value from 1 to 0
Save the baseline.dat file and close it
Now run setup.exe

Now it won't check for the server edition and will be installed successfully...

Install mysql2 gem on windows

2011-07-24T16:21:00.000+06:00

If you are trying out the Rails 3 and you are stuck at not being able to install mysql2 gem on your windows pc. Just follow this steps to install it successfully (I used MySQL 5.5.9 version):

Install MySQL 5.5.9
Copy libmysql.dll from C:\Program Files (x86)\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.5\lib [Mine was 64 bit windows, in 32 bit it must be Program Files only] to bin directory of your Ruby installation
Now open command prompt and run the following command: gem install mysql2 -- '--with-mysql-include="C:\Program Files (x86)\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.5\include" --with-mysql-lib="C:\Program Files (x86)\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.5\lib"'

Now its installed on windows...it was only about the extra config options and a bit of string escaping issue on windows command prompt...happy coding... :)

Netbeans support for Ruby on rails is discontinued from Netbeans 7

2011-02-09T20:50:00.000+06:00

Recently Netbeans team announced that going forward from its IDE version 7 it will discontinue its support for Ruby on rails. That's disappointing news for all the existing users of Netbeans IDE. Here is the announcement: http://netbeans.org/community/news/show/1507.html

Rubymine 3.0 ships with ruby 1.9.2+ debugging support on windows

2010-12-01T12:38:00.002+06:00

On 29 November Jetbrain's latest Ruby on Rails IDE Rubymine 3.0 version shipped. I downloaded the trial version and installed it on my windows 7 and it was a nice experience.

To say really I have been a fan of Netbeans IDE for my Rails application development. But I think this time Rubymine 3.0 will give a tough fight for Netbeans in terms of Rails IDE choice as Netbeans is more and more geared towards development of PHP and Java and very view updates are coming through for Ruby development in recent months. As of Ruby 1.9+ debugging has been a pain on Netbeans on windows platforms. Rubymine has taken the initiative to solve the bugs of ruby-debug-ide gem and the recent 3.0 version is working great without any trouble debugging Rails applications.

However, I hope that similar improvements will be coming through from Netbeans in near future as the progress in ruby world has a leap in recent times and if netbeans plans to hold the developers using netbeans as their Rails IDE then it's better to hurry!!! :)

The contents of the feature's solution requires the Solution Sandbox service to be running

2010-10-07T18:27:00.000+06:00

If you are developing any Sandbox solution for Sharepoint 2010, then you may have faced an error while deploying any solution to your development server. The error in Visual Studio 2010 output window looks like this generally:
Error occurred in deployment step 'Activate Features': This feature cannot be activated at this time. The contents of the feature's solution requires the Solution Sandbox service to be running.

The fix is simple. You must make sure that your "Sharepoint 2010 User Code Host" service is running. It is disabled by default installation. So, you have enable and run it. If you want to deploy the solution, then again you see the same error output. Actually, you have to make sure that this service's status is active in Central Administration Site. To see the status go to your Sharepoint 2010 Central Administration Application. Under System Settings > Manage services on server make sure that "Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sandboxed Code Service" service is started. If it is stop start it. Now, you can package and deploy sandbox solutions right from Visual Studio.

A first look at Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta

2010-10-07T17:23:00.004+06:00

First beta version of Microsoft ASP.NET MVC framework 3 is ready to be downloaded from here and announcement from Scott Guthrie's blog. Significant changes have already been made to this version. You can go through the release documentation to have detail information on the new changes that are available with this release.

One of the newest edition is the "NuPack Package Manager". If you are a ruby developer, then it will not be a real ground-breaking idea as you are already using RubyGem from the first day of your ruby development career. For .NET platform it's comparatively newer concept. There are few other open source project already available for the same purpose. But there is always a better expectation associated with something from Microsoft itself from developers point of view. To read more on NuPack refere to the this article from Scott Hanselman. With this release Microsoft is going to make integration of third party libraries with .NET easier.

The new view engine "Razor" is really cool!! Syntax is much cleaner now for view. Though the C# syntax was available from first preview version, now VB support is also in built. However, previously it was possible to use VB code but had to activate it manually. I am pretty excited with this view engine. But unfortunately the intellisense support is not yet ready for "Razor". Waiting for it...:) If you want to read more on this I will recommend Scott Guthrie's blog post on Razor.

There is an interesting new support for running code before views run for any particular view folder. If you want to set something default to all views, its extremely useful. The file that will be used for this purpose is named _viewstart.cshtml (C# code) or _viewstart.vbhtml (VB code). For example if you want to set the default layout for all views for a particular directory and its sub-directories you can set the layout code here. And it will run before running any view file within that directory.

There are bunch of other improvements including new helper methods, better dependency injection support, unobtrusive javascript support and many more.

Microsoft developer guidance maps published

2010-09-27T11:08:00.002+06:00

At work or even as a starter of any new technology we frequently try to search for the articles published for a particular portion of that technology, right? Specially if you are a Microsoft development platform enthusiast, then it gets really big in terms of documentation or tutorials. Microsoft recently published a new project about centralizing all the links and resources grouped by technologies. Its not huge, but it surely helps if you want to search for best articles for any particular technology. Its called Microsoft Developer Guidance Maps. You can read more on this on J. D. Meier's blog.

J.D. Meier's Blog

Windows Phone Developer Tools RTW is ready to be downloaded!

2010-09-18T21:38:00.000+06:00

Windows phone developer tools finally ships. You can download this from here. If you don't like the web installer, you can download directly using this link.

A funny release video of Microsoft Office for mac 2011 RTM!!

2010-09-17T17:14:00.001+06:00

Microsoft Office for mac 2011 hits RTM!! Here is an interesting funny video on releasing this version. Check this out here.

Internet Explorer 9 beta is out!!

2010-09-17T16:41:00.001+06:00

Its been so many talks about IE9 platform preview and the examples of HTML 5 out there. But finally the first beta of Internet Explorer 9 is out to try from here. However, extra caution should be taken not to install it on a production environment as it will not reside side by side as the platform preview version rather replace the existing one. So, you better not to install it on your office pc. Finally I got it installed and really I was impressed with the rendering. And anyone seeking some real life examples of future HTML 5 native supports you should visit www.beautyoftheweb.com definitely and the site links it provides to experience some of the best HTML 5 based web sites available until now. The web is going beautiful!!! Check this out and who knows you might be next one to produce another beautiful site based on HTML 5 specifications implemented until now....have fun...

Can not install Devise gem with Ruby 1.9.2 on windows

2010-08-31T14:41:00.007+06:00

I was having a try out of devise gem with one of my Rails 3 pet project just yesterday. I installed Ruby 1.9.2 with the one-click installer from rubyinstaller.org and the latest Rails 3.0. But I faced installation problem as usual on windows. The problem was that it was not being able to build its native extensions.

After some research I found out the solution at http://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller/wiki/development-kit. What I was missing is development kit. I just followed the instruction and it was solved and installed devise with my Ruby 1.9.2 correctly.

But I am not sure whether it will work with Rails 3's bundle install command or not. I installed the gem from command line using the command gem install devise --platform=ruby before installing all the required gems with bundle install command . The last parameter platform is a must as it will temporarily use the DevKit to build native extensions. That's it.

Finally Rails 3.0 ships!!!

2010-08-30T11:35:00.002+06:00

Its been few busy months and did not get chance to blog during this time. But I was following the rails 3.0 builds and now finally Rails 3.0 is released. Here is the release announcement:

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2010/8/29/rails-3-0-it-s-done

It has been the biggest and greatest release of all Rails versions. Looking forward to have a bite on this one eagerly...

Two new draft preview of visual studio 2010 and programming windows phone 7 series ebooks now downloadable!!

2010-03-27T10:49:00.001+06:00

There are two new ebook of visual studio 2010 and programming windows phone 7 series are in draft preview and you can download it from the following links:

http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_press/archive/2010/03/26/free-ebook-moving-to-microsoft-visual-studio-2010-draft-preview.aspx

Have fun!!!

Error while starting ASP.net Web Site Administration Tool

2010-03-23T17:05:00.000+06:00

Have you ever run into problem like when you want to start your ASP.NET configuration application (WAT) on a browser and it shows something like the figure on the right side?

The solution is simple...:-) Just don't get bothered about the error message. Why in the world Microsoft does not support any white space...it will remain a bit foolish mystery!! However folks just keep the project folder in a location which does not have any white space on its path. That's it!

Some links for starting off Rails 3 beta application development

2010-02-09T18:14:00.000+06:00

Last 5 Feb, 2010 the rails 3 first public beta release was out. It is the most anticipated version from the view of developers as performance improvement will be significant. Refer to the release notes here at http://guides.rails.info/3_0_release_notes.html

Ryan has given a starting screencast at http://railscasts.com/episodes/200-rails-3-beta-and-rvm.
Here at http://www.rubyinside.com/rails-3-0-beta-links-2966.html you will find some starting materials.

An useful method for date formatting in rails

2010-02-03T17:59:00.000+06:00

In our everyday developer life, we often need the date formatting in our web application. In rails there are some useful methods available. One of them strftime(). You can see the documentation here at http://www.ruby.ch/ProgrammingRuby/htmlC/ref_c_time.html#strftime

Some useful resources for HTML 5 and CSS 3

2010-01-30T12:55:00.001+06:00

I am feeling a kind of restlessness to try out some of the HTML 5 and CSS 3 features. I found couple of good links that I would like to share with you if you are starting to try out those features. I think some of tutorials are great for having a fine start. Happy coding guys....:-)

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/08/04/designing-a-html-5-layout-from-scratch/

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/html-5-and-css-3-the-techniques-youll-soon-be-using/

http://html5tutorial.net/news/websites-using-html-5.html

Searchable offline version of rdoc for Ruby 1.9 and Rails 2.3.5

2010-01-30T12:35:00.001+06:00

If you are searching for an offline version of searchable rdoc for ruby on rails, then you can download it from here at http://railsapi.com. Though it's on its beta period, but still it's kind of cool. Whenever I want to search anything I can do this instantly without waiting for the page to load specially in this part of the world where internet speed is not that fast... :-( Also, here is another offline version at http://www.railsbrain.com. Choose what suits your needs.

A basic scaffolding in your rails application

2010-01-12T14:13:00.000+06:00

Hello folks, I am starting to build my own personal website. In the process, I have to build an application from scratch. I am choosing ruby 1.9.1 p243 and rails 2.3.5 as a starter. This is starting point for the application. I will be sharing my learning with you all as I go along. In this post I am starting off with creating basic scaffolding. Many of you have already done this I guess. I know there are some better approaches, but building from scratch will help me a lot and also some of you who are new to rails framework. So, let us begin.

Scaffolding

Scaffolding is a nice approach if you are trying to get a grip on ROR projects. It creates all the basic pieces of model, controller, views and migration scripts for you. It will create basic set of functionalities for CRUD operations. If you are trying to introduce a new model Post with two fields title and body to your project, you then just have to run the script like this:

ruby {YOUR_RAILS_APP_DIR}/script/generate scaffold post title:string body:text

One thing to remember that when you are trying to use scaffolding, the migration script automatically generated will include the timestamp with it. If you don’t want that, you can turn it off. You can do this by adding

config.active_record.timestamped_migrations = false

to your config/environment.rb file. This will add incremental number instead of timestamp.

What if you want to delete the files automatically generated with scaffolding and regenerate for some reason? You can do that just by running the following command:

ruby {YOUR_RAILS_APP_DIR}/script/destroy scaffold post

Now, migrate your database using rake db:migrate command and start the server. Now type on the address bar http://localhost:3000/posts. Yah!! you guessed it right. It now supports all the CRUD operation on this model. That’s pretty easy, right? Though in real life application you will hardly use the view created by scaffolding, yet you can start off with it and change it the way you need.

ActionMailer invalid multibyte character error while starting WEBrick server

2010-01-12T11:36:00.001+06:00

If you are using Netbeans for your Rails application development and you are using ruby 1.9, then when you want to run the WEBrick server you may get this error:

C:/Ruby19/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/actionmailer-2.3.5/lib/action_mailer/vendor/tmail-1.2.3/tmail/utils.rb:117:in '': invalid multibyte character (ArgumentError)

Well this is not happening for your rails installation rather for a bug that exists in netbeans. The workaround is simple. You just have to add and set the variable J-Druby.no.kcode to true in your {Netbeans installation dir}/etc/netbeans.conf file just like this:

netbeans_default_options = "-J-client -J-Xss2m -J-Xms32m -J-XX:PermSize=32m -J-XX:MaxPermSize=200m -J-Xverify:none -J-Dapple.laf.useScreenMenuBar=true -J-Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true -J-Druby.no.kcode=true"

You have to restart your netbeans to see the effect.

Running ferret server with mongrel and shared index folder

2010-01-01T23:44:00.002+06:00

If you are using acts_as_ferret plugin for searching in your rails application then you must have faced some issues with indexing or running ferret server on your production server. In this post, I will share with you some tips about running and maintaining ferret server:

Running ferret server on production
Sharing your ferret index folder
Write a simple script to re-index all your data

Running your ferret server

If you have multiple instances of mongrel running in your production, then you must need to run the ferret server to handle situations when multiple processes are updating ferret index at the same time. If you want to run ferret server in your production server, then at first you have to open the port you set in ferret_server.yml of your config directory on the server you want to run it. acts_as_ferret comes with a built-in drb server which uses dRuby protocol. So, you should remember to open the port with other protocol (not http or something else). One very important thing is to change the following section of your /vendor/plugins/acts_as_ferret/lib/server_manager.rb as follows:

require(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '../../../../config/environment'))
#require(File.join(File.dirname(ENV['_']), '../config/environment'))

Make sure you run the ferret server before running mongrel or apache. Now you can start the ferret server with the following command:

ruby /{YOUR_APP_DIRECTORY}/script/ferret_server -e production start

Also, the you can stop your ferret server with the following command:

ruby /{YOUR_APP_DIRECTORY}/script/ferret_server -e production stop

After you have started you ferret server you can start your mongrel and apache server. When mongrel is being started it checks for index folder in your app directory. If it does not find one it creates one. So, it’s possible that you will have different index folder with each deployment which is costly and re-indexing every time after your deployment is not at all a good solution.

Sharing your ferret index folder

You can set a default index folder in your production server which will be shared. To do this create a folder with read/write permission and create symlink to this folder each time you deploy and before starting the server. If you are using Capistrano for your deployment then make sure to run the symlink creation script before starting mongrel/apache. Otherwise the index folder will be created with the start of mongrel. A sample script could be like this:

run "ln -s /mnt/app/shared/ferret/ /mnt/app/current/index"

A simple script for ferret re-indexing
Here is a sample rake task for re-indexing your application data:

desc "Updates the ferret index for the application."
task :ferret_index => [ :environment ] do | t |
Model1.rebuild_index
puts "Completed Index Rebuild of Model1 model"
Model2.rebuild_index
puts "Completed Index Rebuild of Model2 model"
Model3.rebuild_index
puts "Completed Index Rebuild of Model3 model"
end

To run rake task use the command:

rake ferret_index RAILS_ENV=environment

Make sure to restart your mongrel and apache server to point to the newer version of the index folder created within the directory you set after re-indexing is completed.

Free-text search using acts_as_ferret plugin in ROR - Part I

2009-06-20T20:44:00.002+07:00

Recently I had to implement free-text searching module in one of my rails application project. There are some plugins available on web for free-text searching in rails. Among them acts_as_ferret is recommended by most developers. I decided to give it a try. After I had got it running it was really a pleasant experience. Though you could also end up scratching your head if you don't get it up and running on your production server. I will share you my experiences during deployment in a production environment using Apache and Mongrel in follow up tutorials on ferret. In this tutorial I will give a little introduction to acts_as_ferret plugin and show you the power of ferret. There is a great tutorial for acts_as_ferret on rails envy tutorial.

What is acts_as_ferret?

Acts_as_ferret is a free-text search plugin for rails application. It is based on ferret(a high-performance ruby text search engine library based on Apache Lucene). This gives you the power of file based indexing cutting off the overhead of database hits during searching. You can implement model based searching on your application on the fly using this. Cutting off the introduction, let us start adding the functionality of ferret based search on our application. What say you??

Installing ferret and acts_as_ferret
Install gem of ferret using command:

gem install ferret

Install acts_as_ferret plugin using command:

script/plugin install svn://code.jkraemer.net/acts_as_ferret/tags/stable/acts_as_ferret

Update acts_as_ferret plugin using command:

gem update acts_as_ferret

How to enable ferret for indexing your model fields?

The first thing that you need to do is to decide which models and corresponding fields that you want to index for searching. Say, you have a model named Book and you want to search for books according to title, author_name or publisher_name attributes. You need to index those three fields to enable you to do just that. You can do that by just adding the following line to your model's source code:

acts_as_ferret({:fields => {
:title => {:store => :yes, :boost => 5},
:author_name => {:store => :yes, :boost => 2},
:publisher_name => {:store => :yes, :boost => 2}
},:store_class_name => true },:remote => true )

I will let you understand all the attributes of acts_as_ferret definition. As you can see that :fields holds all the field names needed to be indexed. During searching only these fields will be searched and returned. Also for each of the fields I have defined two values for :store and :boost attributes.

The :store attribute is needed if you want to store the field value to the index files. You might be wondering why?? The beauty of storing any field value is that you don't need to hit the database if you want something like highlighting search keywords in your field value. It will not generate any new query against database as the action will be performed on the stored value.

The :boost attribute is for giving boost to the score value for a indexed field which will enable the field to get higher priority in search results. Say, you might want to see the books with the title matches first and then with the author_name or publisher_name.

The :store_class_name attribute is needed for enabling multi-model searching if you want to search in more than one model. To enable multi-model searching you have to define acts_as_ferret on each of the models you want to search for as above.

The :remote attribute is needed if you want to use DRb server. You can find information about DRb server here.

How to do a basic search?
To search within a single model you need to call find_with_ferret() method like this:

search_result = Book.find_with_ferret(query_string, ferret_options_hash, ar_options_hash)

Here, search_result will hold the result returned by the find_with_ferret which is an array of objects. This is of type ActsAsFerret::SearchResults. query_string is the string to search for, ferret_options_hash is the ferret search options and finally ar_options_hash is the option hash for active record filter option.

An example of single model searching could be like this:

result = Book.find_with_ferret('adventure', {:page => 1, :per_page => 25}, {:conditions => ['library_id = ?', library.id]})

Here in this example, the search keyword is 'adventure' and the ferret options are :page which is indicating the first page and :per_page which is indicating the search result items per page is 25. And the active record condition is used for filtering the result returned by ferret to get more specific results needed.

An example multi-model searching could be like this:

result = Book.find_with_ferret('adventure', {:page => 1, :per_page => 25, :multi => [Library]}, {:conditions => ['library_id = ?', library.id]})

To enable multi-model searching we need to add :multi attribute to the ferret_options_hash which will contain an array of model names separated by comma. The result will hold an array of objects returned by the search method. We can manipulate the result using index as we do for arrays.

Sorting
The default sorting option is ferret_score which is returned as part of the result. But in real world often we need to sort result according to some other attributes. Say, we need to sort result according to date of publication. To do that we need to convert the publication_date to integer. We can do that by writing a method in model and add that method to be indexed. We are not only able to add fields to be indexed, we can add methods to be indexed as well. For example,

acts_as_ferret({:fields => { :title => {:store => :yes, :boost => 5},
:author_name => {:store => :yes, :boost => 2},
:publisher_name => {:store => :yes, :boost => 2},
:publication_date_for_sort => {:index => :untokenized_omit_norms},
},:store_class_name => true },:remote => true )

def publication_date_for_sort
return publication_date.to_i
end

Now we can write something like this which will return the results sorted by publication date:

@sort_field = Ferret::Search::SortField.new(
:publication_date_for_sort, :reverse => true)
result = Book.find_with_ferret('adventure', {:page => 1, :per_page => 25, :sort => @sort_field}, {:conditions => ['library_id = ?', library.id]})

The :reverse attribute is used to specify whether you want your result in ASC or DESC order.

Mysql::Error: BLOB/TEXT column 'any_column_name' can't have a default value

2009-05-24T12:00:00.000+06:00

Recently I downgraded my mysql version from 5.1.30 to 5.0.27. But while running database migrations for my rails application it was showing message like 'Mysql::Error: BLOB/TEXT column 'any_column_name' can't have a default value' which was not showing previously. After searching through mysql community blogs finally I got the solution for it. It was not a bug rather it was a feature for type BLOB/TEXT not to have any default value in strict mode, not even empty string. So, the workaround was to just change my my.ini file a little. It should be located in your mysql installation directory. You just need to comment out the line
sql-mode="STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION"
This solved my problem. Hopefully this will fix your problem too.