I’ll cover these prerequisites in brief, but for this tip I’m going to assume a few things:

• You are running Windows and have PowerShell installed.
• You are familiar enough with PowerShell to care about your $PROFILE.

What is PowerShell?

In short, PowerShell is a new scripting language from Microsoft designed to replace the use of batch files and VBScript for administrating and automating Windows machines. The language leverages the .NET Framework such that anything you can do with .NET you can do with PowerShell. Typically you will be using PowerShell from the command line but there are lots of other ways to use it.

Here’s my recipe for a painfree installation of Ruby on Windows.

1. Use the RubyInstaller from www.ruby-lang.org. I used Ruby 1.9.2-p0.
2. Install the Ruby DevKit by following the instructions in the Installation Overview. I used version DevKit-4.5.0-20100819-1536-sfx.

The DevKit is needed so that you can install gems that need to build native extensions. Without it when you try to gem install jekyll you will see an error like this:

ERROR: Error installing jekyll:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

'make' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

After installing DevKit gem install jekyll will work like a champ.

Recently my company has been working on a rewrite of one of our line-of-business applications. We have decided to leverage RIA Services in the new application. At the moment we are also using Entity Framework; that may or may not change.

Here are a few lessons I’ve learned so far when working with RIA Services.

Potentially massive (in terms of lines of code & logic) domain services

RIA doesn’t handle multiple domain services well. What I mean by this is that an entity cannot be shared between multiple services. This means that in most cases you are going to have domain services with lots of methods. Worst case, think having an insert, update and delete method for each entity in your domain.

Update on June 9th, 2012

It is now the year 2012. All of the previous love I had for Silverlight has long since moved on to web standards, specifically HTML5. I don’t miss Silverlight, even a little bit. Even so. I will leave this post around for fun.

…

Silverlight is at the top of my “to learn” list this year. I’m already pretty familiar with the basics but now I need to dig in and write some real apps using it.

While I was updating this blog to use Jekyll, I wanted to enable some nice syntax highlighting for any code snippets I may post. Jekyll provides support for this through Pygments which is a pretty mature and widely used syntax highlighter built on Python.

I find it a little ironic that I need to install Python to enable a feature in a Ruby program. Though it is nice to see that the Jekyll team isn’t afraid to leverage great tools even if they aren’t written in Ruby.

The other night I received a recommendation to try out Dropbox. If you don’t know what Dropbox is, here’s the short of it. Post-install, you’ll see a “My Dropbox” folder on your desktop (or wherever you chose to place it) and anything you put in there gets automagically sync’d with every other computer you have Dropbox installed on.

From random documents and OneNote Notebooks to my Keepass Database and books I’m reading, I have quite a few files that I like to have access to no matter which computer I’m on. I could use a thumb drive for this… and I have in the past, but the convenience of having everything synchronized automatically for me and not having to remember to carry around the thumb drive is too much to pass up.

So out of all the things I don’t know, PowerShell is the one thing that made it to the top of my To Learn stack. Last week I ordered PowerShell In Action, it hasn’t arrived yet but I’ve already read about 100 pages out of the PDF (don’t ask). The book is very well written and describes the core concepts of PowerShell very well.

Having (almost) never written a batch file in my life it is taking a bit for me to wrap my head around the basics but so far I love it. Compiling C# apps to do simple tasks like iterate directory structures and process files has always annoyed me. There is just too much overhead in having to compile and manage both the source code an executable when you only need the code once (until tomorrow comes).