November 02, 2007
Well, all this time ASP.NET has been forgotten for real. Ruby on Rails, Django, Symphony and many others implemented something developers just loved: MVC. As Django’s co-creator Adrian noticed in Snakes and Rubies (and RoR’s David agreed) is that the MVC pattern has the obvious advantage of having both webdesigners and developers working on the same project only on the stuff that matters to them.
When I tried to do something cool using ASP.NET, it just didn’t fit my needs. It wasn’t MVC nor had the AJAX support I could have from rails, for example. I wished Microsoft (or anyone) had this awesome MVC framework!
Well, they have answered my prays: Scott Guthrie announced in his blog that yet this year the ASP.NET MVC Framework will be released and in the first half of next years it will be launched as a ASP.NET feature. I can’t say I’m not happy about this (obvious) decision to move ASP.NET into the MVC pattern! But somehow I just feel like Microsoft is always a step behind in this new web2.0 age.
July 13, 2007
After Winamp, SongBird and MusikCube I am now using Windows Media Player. You may be thinking why do I use it when it’s so heavy and microsofty. Well, I use it to Sync with my TyTN and it’s one cent coin sized microSD card. But then again, this sync is not really a sync. WMP checks how much space is left and we can send musics there. They are copied even if they already are in the device. One-way sync sucks!
Next, I like to lie down a little lot in the sofa listening to music and watching morangos com açúcar tv. Well, due to my enormous playlist, most of the time I wanna skip songs (no I dont like to make different playlists) and I don’t like to take my wireless keyboard with me to the sofa.
So I’ve looked for WMP remote control programs for my TyTN, but I haven’t found any freeware and nice to use. These are the times I love to be a developer :) First I tried to control it from Python using this but it would only read things from WMP, not to perform actions.
Next, I thought about creating a webservice and then a PocketPC application to consume it. I did it (and can get you the code if you want), but it wouldn’t run in my IIS. Next try: did a ASP.NET website to control the WMP remotly, worked fine but when running on my IIS didn’t worked again. Damn IIS! I removed it and reinstalled, but no good. Looked for any hack or something, and no results. I tried to run ASMX without IIS but didn’t worked either. Next try: Mod_AspDotNet and this time the application was running, but not affecting WMP.
Finally I managed to have it running. How? I compiled a command-line executable (like remotecontrol.exe next/play/stop/previous) and I created a python web script to call it depending on the link clicked. It runs on my own Python CGI Server and I access it from the PDA using PocketIE. I hoped a WirelessLAN solution would be quicker but it takes almost 30 seconds to perform a page query. My webserver responds quickly, the wireless network is fast and PocketIE works fines with internet pages. Maybe one day I’ll find out more.
