This time on a mac

There’s been less activity than normal around here. Looking back, I missed last year completely. That’s more than a blip, that’s a complete year. Not sure what happened, I think it was a perfect storm...

Those that know me know that I started practicing Karate in 2015 and my facebook feed has been filled with belt exams and karate videos. I’m highly motivated to obtain my first degree in under three years, so three times a week in evening classes and weekends makes it difficult to find a few extra cycles to experiment and blog. On the plus side, I’m probably the most fit I’ve ever been, I've dropped nearly twenty pounds, toned up and dangerous.

The other major shift for me was professionally work wasn’t selling the projects that suited my skills. I kinda had a crisis of faith of sorts, where I felt I had to choose a new religion. I switched into managing more people, bought a mac and learned Swift, and explored leveraging my .net and WPF strengths in Xamarin. Work would eventually pick up later in the year, but in true agency fashion it involved dusting off my Unity3D skills, learning how to rock a HoloLens and learn Python and Ruby while I was at it. There’s loads to blog about it.

I want to touch on the macbook reference above. I feel like I’ve made a career out of bashing apple. (I ended many arguments in the 90s with apple fanboys with my favourite argument killer: “...but it’s a mac…”) Buying a mac for me was huge slice of humble pie. I still use a PC at work, but my mac is now my playground and go to device when I want to do something that isn’t “work”. I’m writing this on a mac, trying out blogo today.

One last thing, to accompany my macbook I switched to an iPhone and parted ways with my Windows Phone. I’m no stranger to iOS as I’ve had an iPad and iPhone in the past, but I was on Windows Phone for years with three different devices. I loved the platform, and still do, but I got tired of waiting for apps that the rest of the planet had. Apply Pay and wallet are awesome. I may still buy a lumina to play with UWP with Xamarin.

So what should you expect this year around here? Well, hopefully I can make good on promises to blog more, but expect to see a combination of development and agile delivery practices. You’ll likely see some Xamarin, some UI automation, maybe a HoloLens. From an agile delivery perspective, expect some tips and tricks to bring to your team as well as a focus on DevOps and Test Automation.

Plaintext + Dropbox = Ubiquitous Text

I am loving this. If you blog or like to jot down notes while on the go then I highly recommend the following setup.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a small cloud-based utility that synchronizes files between all your devices. It works on PC, Mac, iOS, Android and Blackberry.  It even has a web interface that you can browse from any computer, and even track previous versions of files. Best of all, it's free (for 2Gb of storage).

There are a number of applications that use Dropbox as their storage medium. My favorite so far is PlainText.

PlainText

PlainText is a bare bones text editor with a minimal UI that uses Dropbox as it's file system. Simply download to your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, login with your Dropbox account and your data magically syncs each time you touch the contents. Only limitation is that it doesn't have the ability to move files to different folders, but I can do that on my PC.

Now it's possible for me to sketch down an idea on my iPhone while riding the subway or streetcar, then pickup where I left off and flesh out the details on my iPad while watching TV. I can even switch between devices with almost no wait, so I can proof read or work through an idea whenever I have a free moment.

Getting started

Setup is easy.  On your PC or Mac, go to Dropbox and setup an account, the software will download on the next page.  Install the application and associate it to your user account. The free version gives you 2 GB of storage (more if you enlist your friends) and they offer more storage through paid upgrades.

On your iOS device, download PlainText.  In the settings, link it to your Dropbox account.

PlainText by default will create a folder in your Dropbox called “PlainText”.  This is helpful so that you’re only syncing small files.  Here’s a quick screen-capture of the available settings.

You can create files and folders on your iOS device.  Any changes will automatically sync to your PC/Mac.

Disclosure: This is not a paid advertisement, I just really like this configuration.  I should point out that the links to sign-up are to my referral page.  If you are vehemently opposed to this you can visit the site referral free here: https://www.dropbox.com/

An update

“The rumors of my death have been largely exaggerated." – Mark Twain.

It’s been forever and a day since my last post, largely due to the size and complexity of my current project, but for those wondering (and to clear the writers block in my head), here’s a quick update:

Selenium Toolkit for .NET

Although there hasn’t been a formal release on my open source project since last November, I have been covertly making minor commits here and there to keep the NUnit dependencies in sync with NUnit’s recent updates.  I may update the NUnit libraries to the latest release (2.5.7) this weekend.  I realize the irony here: the purpose of my project is to provide a simple installer for Selenium and my NUnit addin, forcing you to download the source and compile it is beyond excuse.  Here are some of the things that I have been tinkering with to include in a major release, but I haven’t fully sat down to finish:

• WiX-based Installation:  I’ve been meaning to drop the out of the box Visual Studio installer project in favor of a WiX-based installer.  The real intent is to install side-by-side versions of my NUnit addin for each version of NUnit installed locally.
• Resharper 5.0 integration:  The good folks at JetBrains, through their commitment to open source projects, have recognized my open source project and have donated a license of Resharper (read: YOU GUYS ROCK!).  To return the favor, I am looking to produce a custom runner for tests with my WebFixture attribute so that you can right click any fixture or test to launch the selenium process just like you would with NUnit or MSTest.
• Visual Studio 2008/2010 integration: Not to leave the rest of the development world without Resharper licenses in the cold, I have been playing with a custom version MSTest extension.  Unfortunately for me, the out-of-the-box functionality for MSTest isn’t enough for my needs – I would really like to control execution of the environment before and after the test as well as when all tests have finished execution – there doesn’t seem to be a good hook for this.  It appears that my best option is to implement my own test adapter and plumbing.  I’ll leave the details of my suffering and choking on this to your imagination or maybe another post.

What about Selenium 2.0, aka WebDriver?  I’m still sitting on the fence on how to adapt the toolkit to the new API but haven’t had a lot of time to play with it since my current project is a very thick client (no web).  I am interested to hear your thoughts, but my immediate reaction is to use a parameterized approach:

[WebTest]
public void UsingDefaultBrowser(WebDriver browser)
{
}

Other Ramblings

I won’t bore you to death with the details of the last few months – my twitter stream can do that – but expect to hear me spout more on WPF / Prism / Unity, TDD, Context/Specification soon.

In the meantime, happy coding.

Add Syntax Highlighter to Live Writer Templates

Been tweaking my blog template slowly over the past year, and while I’ve got plans to switch to 960.gs format, my most recent change has been how I highlight my code snippets: like everyone else on the planet, I’m now using Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter in combination with Anthony Bouch’s PreCode.

Up to this point, I’ve been using CSharpFormat with Omar Shahine’s Insert Code plugin.  This solution has worked well for me up to this point, but it’s the features of SyntaxHighlighter (line numbers, collapsible blocks, etc) and the quality of PreCode’s editing features that have made me switch.

The key difference between the two solutions is that CSharpFormat adornes your code with HTML blocks that are immediately visible in Live Writer (and my RSS feed); SyntaxHighlighter highlights your code at runtime using JavaScript.

While I can live without the RSS feed highlighting, I really miss seeing my code highlighted in Live Writer.  After updating my blogger template, I noticed that Live Writer ignores your JavaScript when it updates your editing template.

Fortunately, Live Writer’s editing template is stored locally as HTML, here:

C:\Users\bcook\AppData\Roaming\Windows Live Writer\blogtemplates\<guid>\index.html

Simply open the file in your editor, and paste in your JavaScript:

<!-- syntax highlighter --> 
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shCore.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushCSharp.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushCss.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushJScript.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 
<script src='http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/shBrushXml.js' type='text/javascript'></script> 
<script type='text/javascript'> 
  SyntaxHighlighter.config.bloggerMode = true;
  SyntaxHighlighter.config.clipboardSwf = 'http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.0.320/scripts/clipboard.swf';
  SyntaxHighlighter.all();
</script>

Switching to LiveWriter

Up to this point, I've crafted the HTML markup for my posts this year using Notepad++.  While working with a local editor is far superior to using Blogger's editor window, I've found stylizing elements and adding hyperlinks to be somewhat time consuming, not to mention difficult to read/review/write content with all the HTML markup in the way.   Despite having better control over the markup, the largest problem with this approach is you really can't see what your post will look like until you publish, and even then, I usually follow a nervous publish/review/tweak/publish dance number to sort out all the display issues.

Recently, I downloaded LiveWriter and w.bloggar to test drive alternatives.  (Actually, I was interested in w.blogger's ability to edit Blogger Templates -- but it turns out that they don't work on blogger's new layout templates.  Drat.)   So far, I'm pleasantly surprised with LiveWriter.

Although I'm pretty excited that the tool is written in .NET with support for managed addins, I am most impressed with the feature that can simulate a live preview of your post.  LiveWriter is able to pull this off by creating a temporary post against your blog and analyzing it to extract your CSS and HTML Layout.  You can toggle between editing (F11), preview (F12) and HTML (Shift + F11) really easily.

The biggest snag I've encountered thus far is that the HTML markup produced by LiveWriter is cleaned up with lots of extra line-feeds for readability.  While this makes reading the HTML a simple pleasure, it wreaks havoc with my current Blogger settings.

Blogger's default setting converts carriage-returns into <br /> tags.  So all the extra line breaks inserted by LiveWriter are transformed into ugly whitespace in your posts.  This feature is configurable within Blogger: Posts -> Formatting -> Convert line breaks.

Unfortunately for me, this is a breaking change for most of my posts (dating back to 2004).  To fix, I have to add the appropriate <p></p> tags around my content -- fortunately, LiveWriter will automatically correct markup for paragraphs that I touch with additional whitespace.  So while the good news is my posts will have proper markup in the editor, the bad news is I have to manually edit each one.

Updated Template

Along with Blogger's version upgrades are some new templates. Enjoy the new look. I chose this template because the width of the posts expands with the browser window. Maybe now I'll consider posting code examples :D

VS.NET Blogging help

Stumbled across this great post over at Stephen Chu's blog, which points to an open source Visual Studio Add-in. The Add-in allows you to copy any code snippet into the clipboard as properly formatted HTML. A great tool for blogging!

Props to Blogger

Blogspot has finally rolled out their new version. Good job. Better administration, tagging, faster publishing. Only suggestion: spellcheck. I've upgraded my template to take advantage of these new features, and I've even tagged most of my posts. I'll update Cameron's blog soon. I've been posting more to my blog internal to our company, but hopefully this new year I'll find the time to blog more. More pictures too. If you find yourself reading this, leave comments -- they're encouraging and a good prod in the butt to write more. Incidentally, I've got lots of posts I've started but haven't finished. I should get those out, shake off the dust and post 'em.... even if they are several years old.