Rob Herbst

I’m going to begin a series of posts on my journey to learn Ruby On Rails. My professional experience has been primarily as a C++, Java, and C# programmer. I’m totally new to Ruby the language, and the Rails framework.
I have read and created the sample application described in the following tutorials by Curt Hibbs on Oreilly’s OnLamp site:

• Rolling with Ruby on Rails
• Rolling with Ruby on Rails, Part 2

Very nice job with these tutorials Curt, I think they are a great introduction to Ruby on Rails!
I really enjoyed the book The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by the Pragmatic Programmers, so I went ahead and ordered the following

• Agile Web Development with Rails
• Programming Ruby

I’ve found that I don’t really learn a programming language or new framework until I try and apply it to a real world problem. So, what I’ll be doing is creating a simple public web application that will be modified in sync with my blog posts.

What I was thinking of creating would ultimately be an AJAX style web application that would allow users to enter in url’s to Ruby or Rails tutorials, tag and rate them.
The web application probably won’t be useful for anything else except as a complement to this blog post series, but I think it would be very useful for someone else with a similar background to me to be able to read through my posts, and follow along and see the web application develop.
A good friend of mine, Pete, had a cool idea; he suggested that along with the public web application, I should publish a page with the results of the rake stats output, so the total lines of code in the application are available at a published url.
What I’m looking for help with right now is any Ruby or Rails tips or links to good tutorials that people would be able to share by commenting on this post. What I think would be cool as the application develops would be to review any comments posted for suggestions as to better ways to approach what I’m doing in the application or what new features we could add to the application to show off Ruby On Rails.

If you write code, you have to check out Krugle! It’s a search engine for code. Let’s take it for a test drive.

1. Go to http://www.krugle.com/
2. In the Search box enter Activator.CreateInstance
3. Select C# as the language
4. Click the search button.

Pretty cool. But wait, there’s more!

1. Click on the ActivatorFactory.cs from the Apache ibatis project. This came up as the first result when I searched.
2. You’ll see a tab open, that contains the source file, and a tree view of all the files in the project on the right. It would be even better if the code was syntax highlighted.
3. From there you can save the file locally, or browse the project in the tree view.

Fiddler is my favorite HTTP debugging tool. It shows you performance statistics, multiple views of the HTTP request and responses, and even an HTTP request builder.

This MSDN article will help you get started.

The NotImplementedException is a very simple, but useful class. It’s intent is to indicate, obviously, that a method is not implemented yet. This is very simple to search for while editing code and also something you can’t miss at runtime.

Lutz Roeder’s Reflector for .NET is a tool that I think every .NET developer should have in their toolbox.

Reflector also support an Add-In model. There are a bunch of Add-In’s available - everything from code metrics, to code coverage to dependency graphs.

Wouldn’t it be great if you had the ability to make all the other code in the text editor disappear, so that you could just focus on the one method you are working on?

Move to line 23 (CTRL + G, then enter 23). You should be on the “Windows Form Designer generated code.”

A WeakReference allows you to hold a reference to an object while allowing the garbage collector to reclaim it.

This article Using Weak References provides details on the difference between a long and short weak reference.

The ReaderWriterLock class is a great alternative to other sychronization methods when you have situations where you have infrequent short duration writes, and a high frequency of reads.

The msdn help article provides a good example to demonstrate how it can be used.

Microsoft released Consolas which is now my coding font of choice. It’s very clear and easy to read.

I found that I had to increase the font size to 11 which I didn’t have to do with other fonts. Overall, it’s a great coding font.

If you code ASP.NET websites, you need to read Scott Guthrie’s Blog.

In this post Scott demonstrates a great feature of the HTML editor in Visual Studio. When you switch from design to source view the editor keeps the same position.

This feature can help save lots of scanning around an html file.