NorthWest Miscellanea

I remember when the term Ajax was already about 8 months old or so, and I had no idea what it was, aside from the household cleaner. I asked someone on a forum, how Yahoo did this particular thing on their site, and someone answered: “it’s Ajax”, and then to my surprise found out that books were being written about it already.

Just found out that there is a term coined for certain web based apps, called “Mashups”. They’re basically a mixture of services - possibly Google maps mixed in with Amazon API - to accomplish a certain outcome, a certain type of result.

In this case, with Google maps and Amazon, you could combine the two to provide a way for users on their cell phone, let’s say, to find a third party seller’s location who is selling something you found.

OK, probably a bad example.

If you use an RSS reader, and you want to be notified about new mashups, use this feed link:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/programmableweb/mashup

A book on Amazon Mashups

http://www.programmableweb.com/

After reading most of Head First Object Oriented Analysis, I figured I’d temporarily return to Code Complete, which I haven’t picked up in a while, just to re-read what Steve McConnell wrote about planning/designing OO code. But got slightly distracted by his excellent chapter on debugging.

Here are some general tips, in outline format, which he provides. He spends a lot of time on each tip, so this isn’t all there is.

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I took a break for now, from Kent Beck’s Test-Driven Development by Example, when I received my copy of Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design.

It is outstanding. I personally couldn’t see how they could top this particular Head First title, though this is only the second one for me in this series. ( I also have their Head First Design Patterns) . So I don’t know how it compares with the majority of their H.F. series.

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I can’t count how many different “code snippets” that I discovered I needed yet again for a program, but that I had already used in some other project or web page, or script file, but not sure where.
So I have to pull down menus (such as the project menu in UltraEdit) to jog my memory on where the heck I would have most likely used this code snippet.

For instance, it could be just a simple Javascript utility function that I always use, to pop up a new html window. The one I wrote allows you to give it just the window.open parameters that you want to control and defaults to the rest that you don’t care about, or always want the same.

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This doesn’t bode well. This Dotnet thing is snowballing for me. Now Microsoft has come up with the next generation of the command line shell, called: PowerShell Batch.

Now I have to spend time picking this up. Being a command line person, it’s kind of a given. It’s a huge, kind of complicated, but very powerful replacement of DOS and CMD.exe .

The link above is an excellent introduction to what it can do for you , and it gives you the most important command examples, so that you can at least start using it for the primary usages of the command line that are common among many users.

Where this ties in with DOTNET:

Everything is based on objects with this PowerShell. You can iterate through a structure, for example, that was in itself returned from a previous command, and save results into objects, and then read a value via object properties. In fact, some or all of the commands return .Net objects, such as the DateTime type. So the more you know about the dotnet framework, the more power you can get out of it.

A quote from the article, and my last sentence in this entry, since I need some java right about now.

The .NET framework is the foundation on which PowerShell runs. The more you know about .NET, the better your PowerShell experience will be.