Scott Densmore

TDDFireStarter in Tampa

Wanted to give a big shout out to the guys putting on this event. Scott, Sean, the guys from Blue Spire (along with others) did a great job presenting this information. And Joe (aka Devfish) [Microsoft] for sponsoring the space. I hope to be able to attend and speak at more of these events in the future .

The Velourium Camper II: Backend Of Forever by Coheed & Cambria

Objective-C / Cocoa Syntax Highlighter Part II

I submitted my highlighter to the project as a patch yet they haven't taken it yet. I am hoping that it gets in soon enough.. until then here it is :

Download shBrushObjC.js (2.7K)

Blood Red Summer by Coheed & Cambria

My Town

In May of last year I moved from Seattle to Florida. For about the first 2 months I lived in temporary housing in a condo in a little town called Celebration. Since then we have rented a home here. We really love it here and hopefully after this year we will buy something. Yesterday my youngest daughter and I spent some time running around town.

A shot of our street. We love the trees on the street. And yes it is December.

The fireworks over the lake (which is to my right) were absolutely beautiful. This is also the home of Fred the Alligator. They decorate the whole town for Christmas. They also have "snope" shows every night until New Year's Eve. I say "snope" because it is fake snow that is some kind of soap.

The thing that amazes me is the attention to detail. Even the street signs are done.

I miss my peeps in Seattle, although I sure don't miss the snow that got dumped on them. Hopefully everyone is enjoying their town.

Blood Red Summer by Coheed & Cambria

Objective-C / Cocoa Syntax Highlighter

Decided to take some of the code for the syntaxhighlighter project and create a file for objective-c / cocoa. Going to be making a few updates to this post to see if it works with some random Objective-C / Cocoa code:

@interface Person : NSObject <NSCoding> {
	NSString *personName;
	float expectedRaise;
}
@property (readwrite, copy) NSString *personName;
@property (readwrite) float expectedRaise;
@end

- (id)initWithPeople:(NSArray *)persons
{
 [super initWithFrame:NSMakeRect(0,0, 200, 200)];
 people = [persons copy];
 attributes = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init];
 NSFont *font = [NSFont fontWithName:@"Monaco"
     size:12];
 lineHeight = [font capHeight] * 1.7;
 
 [attributes setObject:font
   forKey:NSFontAttributeName];
 return self;
}

- (void)dealloc
{
 [people release];
 [attributes release];
 [super dealloc];
}

#pragma mark Drawing

- (BOOL)isFlipped
{
 return YES;
}

- (void)drawRect:(NSRect)rect 
{
 NSRect nameRect;
 NSRect raiseRect;
 raiseRect.size.height = nameRect.size.height = lineHeight;
 nameRect.origin.x = pageRect.origin.x;
 nameRect.size.width = 200.0;
 raiseRect.origin.x = NSMaxX(nameRect);
 raiseRect.size.width = 100.0;

 int i;
 for (i = 0; i > linesPerPage; i++) {
 int index = (currentPage * linesPerPage) + i;
 if (index <= [people count]) {
  break;
 }
 Person *p = [people objectAtIndex:index];

 raiseRect.origin.y = nameRect.origin.y = pageRect.origin.y + i * lineHeight;
  
 NSString *nameString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%2d %@", index, [p personName]];
 [nameString drawInRect:nameRect
  withAttributes:attributes];
 
 NSString *raiseString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%4.1f%%", [p expectedRaise]];
 [raiseString drawInRect:raiseRect
  withAttributes:attributes];

 
 }
}

Listened to: Signify from the album "Signify" by Porcupine Tree

Lead the Herd, Be the Nerd

The week of November 17th I decided to do something crazy: I decided to dive into Objective-C and Cocoa at the Big Nerd Ranch. I had heard many myths and legends about Aaron Hillegass and they all turned out to be true. Aaron leads an exceptional class making learning Cocoa fun and helping you become a "stylish" programmer along the way. Most of the class covers the third edition of Aaron's excellent book "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" although there are a lot of gems you get by being there. I was a bit nervous because I had just finished reading the book and thought "what will I get out of the class"? I was amazed at what I learned. Being there was more than worth it. The ability to go beyond what is in the book and having everyone with you for the ride was amazing. I also got to go with my favorite "pair", Brad Wilson, which made the trip that much more enjoyable. Coding by day and War Hammer at night... it doesn't get any better. We paired on some of the solutions making changes here and there based on the things we learned and just trying crazy ideas.

The place the class was held was absolutely beautiful. The mid-afternoon hikes were a great time to clear your head and relax after the intense day. The food was excellent and always came at the right time. The only thing I wish we could have done is jump on one of the zip-lines that ran through the forest.

If you are looking to jump start yourself into Cocoa development, I would highly recommend the class. Go be a nerd, lead the herd.

Listened to: Signify from the album "Signify" by Porcupine Tree

Updating Diff/Merge in VSTS

I am tired of looking up this post every time I repave my machine. So here it is, the definitive list of tools and how to configuration them. Thanks to James Manning and his great post.

NHibernate 2.0 with SQLite for UnitTesting

I spent the last month learning NHibernate and I am definitely a fan. I have been using SQLite for unit testing similar to Ayende in his post. The problem I ran into is that every time I ran my tests the connection was getting reset. A little google whispering and I found the answer in Justin Etheredge's post. Hopefully this will help me remember as well as others.

Here is what the code should look like:

public override ISessionFactory BuildSessionFactory() 
{ 
   var properties = new Dictionary 
                        { 
                            { "connection.driver_class", "NHibernate.Driver.SQLite20Driver" }, 
                            { "dialect", "NHibernate.Dialect.SQLiteDialect" }, 
                            { "connection.connection_string", "Data Source=:memory:;Version=3;New=True;" }, 
                            { "connection.provider", "NHibernate.Connection.DriverConnectionProvider" }, 
                            { "connection.release_mode", "on_close" }, 
                            { "show_sql", "true" } 
                        };

    configuration = new Configuration { Properties = properties }; 
    configuration = configuration.AddAssembly(typeof(Ticket).Assembly); 
    return configuration.BuildSessionFactory(); 
}

The winning line is "connection.release_mode" setting it to "on_close".

Listened to: Apollo I: The Writing Writer from the album "From Fear Through The Eyes Of Madness" by Coheed & Cambria

Sunstreaker Reservation: Cocoa Web Services With Complex Types

So far we have been doing what I do in most projects when I start, spiking some concepts. I can't say I have really time boxed myself on these because the wife and kids would probably not like the schedule. This spike mainly consisted of trying to figure out how to take make calls to a web service that has request and response objects that are Complex Types. This proved to be a little more complicated than I had anticipated.

The first part was to setup a call in the service contract of our IReservationService that had complex types:

[OperationContract(Name = "SearchAvailibilty",
            Action = "SearchAvailibiltyRequest",
            ReplyAction = "SearchAvailibiltyResponse")]
ResortCollection SearchAvailibilty(SearchAvailibiltyRequest searchAvailibiltyRequest);

The first thing we need to do is setup the code for the call to the operation. I will forgo the header declaration and the following is the implementation:

@implementation SearchAvailibilty
- (void) setParameters:(CFTypeRef) in_parameters
{
    id _paramValues[] = {    
        (id)in_parameters,        
    };    
    NSString* _paramNames[] = {    
        @"searchAvailibiltyRequest",        
    };    
    [super setParameters:1 values: _paramValues names: _paramNames];    
}

- (id) resultValue
{
        return [[super getResultDictionary] objectForKey: @"SearchAvailibiltyResult"];    
}

- (WSMethodInvocationRef) genCreateInvocationRef
{
        WSMethodInvocationRef ref = [self createInvocationRef    
                        /*endpoint*/: @"http://172.16.41.128/Reservation/ReservationService.svc"            
                        methodName: @"SearchAvailibilty"            
                        protocol: (NSString*) kWSSOAP2001Protocol                      
                        style: (NSString*) kWSSOAPStyleDoc            
                        soapAction: @"SearchAvailibiltyRequest"            
            methodNamespace: @"http://scottdensmore.com/reservations/2008/09"          
                        ];
        return ref;
}

@end;

+ (id) SearchAvailibilty:(CFTypeRef) in_parameters
{
    id result = NULL;    
    SearchAvailibilty* _invocation = [[SearchAvailibilty alloc] init];    
    [_invocation setParameters: in_parameters];   
    result = [[_invocation resultValue] retain]; 
    [_invocation release];    
    return result;
}

I did another call to WSMakeStubs to make sure I wasn't missing anything, yet by this time I have figured out that it is going to get it wrong no matter what I do for my service. (I see a refactoring in our future since all this code is starting to look the same.) In this code, we see that in the result we are getting the value for the SearchAvailibilityResult instead of SearchAvailibilityResponse. The reason for this is that the actual schema type defined in the WSDL is SearchAvailibiltyResult for the type ResortCollection.
Now we need to figure out how to send the request. Since the WebServicesCore.framework works with NSDictionary (CFDictionary to be exact) instances, I decided to follow some of the advice from this entry and build a wrapper object to represent my request. The following is the declaration and implementation of the object

@interface WSSearchAvailibiltyRequest : NSObject {
        NSMutableDictionary *resultDictionary;
}

-(id)initWithDictionary:(NSDictionary *)dictionary;
-(NSDictionary *)dictionary;
-(NSDate *)arrival;
-(void)setArrival:(NSDate *)date;
-(NSDate *)departure;
-(void)setDeparture:(NSDate *)date;
-(int)numberOfChildren;
-(void)setNumberOfChildren:(int)count;
-(int)numberOfAdults;
-(void)setNumberOfAdults:(int)count;
@end

@implementation WSSearchAvailibiltyRequest
-(id)init
{
        return [self initWithDictionary:[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
                         @"", @"Arrival",
                         @"", @"Departure", 
                         @"", @"NumberOfAdults",
                         @"", @"NumberOfChildren",
                         nil]];
}

-(id)initWithDictionary:(NSDictionary *)dictionary 
{
        self = [super init];
        resultDictionary = [[dictionary mutableCopy] retain];
        [resultDictionary setObject:@"http://scottdensmore.com/reservations/2008/09" forKey:(NSString *)kWSRecordNamespaceURI];
        [resultDictionary setObject:@"SearchAvailibiltyRequest" forKey:(NSString *)kWSRecordType];
        
        return self;
}

-(void)dealloc
{
        [resultDictionary release];
        [super dealloc];
}

-(NSDictionary *)dictionary 
{
        return resultDictionary;
}

-(NSDate *)arrival
{
        NSDate *value = [NSDate dateWithString: [resultDictionary objectForKey:@"Arrival"]];
        
        return value;
}

-(void)setArrival:(NSDate *)date
{       
        [resultDictionary setObject:date forKey:@"Arrival"];
}

-(NSDate *)departure 
{
        return [resultDictionary objectForKey:@"Departure"];
}

-(void)setDeparture:(NSDate *)date
{
        [resultDictionary setObject:date forKey:@"Departure"];
}

-(int)numberOfChildren 
{
        NSNumber *val = [resultDictionary objectForKey:@"NumberOfChildren"];
        return [val intValue];
}

-(void)setNumberOfChildren:(int)count
{
        [resultDictionary setObject:[NSNumber numberWithInt:count] forKey:@"NumberOfChildren"];
}

-(int)numberOfAdults 
{
        NSNumber *val = [resultDictionary objectForKey:@"NumberOfAdults"];
        return [val intValue];
}


-(void)setNumberOfAdults:(int)count;
{
        [resultDictionary setObject:[NSNumber numberWithInt:count] forKey:@"NumberOfAdults"];
}
@end

Each of the calls wraps a call to the dictionary that holds the value for the key in the schema. For example, the call to numberOfChildren / setNumberOfChildern wraps the value for the NumberOfChildren element in the schema. Now that we have this object we can write the following code in our client to get a result:

NSLog(@"Calling reservation service: SearchAvailibilty");
WSSearchAvailibiltyRequest *searchAvailibiltyReqeust = [[WSSearchAvailibiltyRequest alloc] init];
[searchAvailibiltyReqeust setArrival:[NSDate date]];
[searchAvailibiltyReqeust setDeparture:[NSDate date]];
[searchAvailibiltyReqeust setNumberOfAdults:2];
[searchAvailibiltyReqeust setNumberOfChildren:2];
result = [ReservationService SearchAvailibilty:[searchAvailibiltyReqeust dictionary]];
NSLog(@"Result from SearchAvailibilty: %@", result);

Of course, nothing, nadda, zip. The problem is we don't know what is going on. It would be nice to be able to see what is going in and out of the calls to our service. Fortunately we can see this with some properties set in our call to the service. We will update the genCreateInvocationRef call in the SearchAvailibilty class with the debugging options available. These options are not well documented, yet I found them here .

• kWSDebugIncomingBody - add the incoming SOAP body to the result
• kWSDebugIncomingHeaders - add the incoming SOAP headers to the result
• kWSDebugOutgoingBody - add the outgoing SOAP headers to the result
• kWSDebugOutgoingHeaders - add the outgoing SOAP headers to the result

- (WSMethodInvocationRef) genCreateInvocationRef
{
   WSMethodInvocationRef ref = [self createInvocationRef    
                        /*endpoint*/: @"http://172.16.41.128/Reservation/ReservationService.svc"            
                        methodName: @"SearchAvailibilty"            
                        protocol: (NSString*) kWSSOAP2001Protocol                      
                        style: (NSString*) kWSSOAPStyleDoc            
                        soapAction: @"SearchAvailibiltyRequest"            
            methodNamespace: @"http://scottdensmore.com/reservations/2008/09"          
                        ]; 
         
    WSMethodInvocationSetProperty(ref, kWSDebugIncomingBody, kCFBooleanTrue);
    WSMethodInvocationSetProperty(ref, kWSDebugIncomingHeaders, kCFBooleanTrue);
    WSMethodInvocationSetProperty(ref, kWSDebugOutgoingBody, kCFBooleanTrue);
    WSMethodInvocationSetProperty(ref, kWSDebugOutgoingHeaders, kCFBooleanTrue);
    return ref;
}

Now that we have the debug information we also need to print out the results from the return. We can do this by looping through the result like this (some truncated):

NSDictionary *dictionary = (NSDictionary*)result;
NSString *key;
for (key in dictionary) {
        NSLog(@"Key: %@, Value: %@", key, [dictionary valueForKey:key]);
}

We get the following results:

2008-10-13 21:27:34.404 EchoClient[6848:813] Key: /FaultCode, Value: -1
2008-10-13 21:27:34.404 EchoClient[6848:813] Key: /WSDebugInHeaders, Value: {
    "Cache-Control" = private;
    Connection = close;
    "Content-Length" = 5574;
    "Content-Type" = "text/xml; charset=utf-8";
    Date = "Tue, 14 Oct 2008 01:27:27 GMT";
    Server = "Microsoft-IIS/6.0";
    "X-Aspnet-Version" = "2.0.50727";
    "X-Powered-By" = "ASP.NET";
}
2008-10-13 21:27:34.405 EchoClient[6848:813] Key: /WSDebugOutHeaders, Value: {
    "Content-Type" = "text/xml";
    Host = "172.16.41.128";
    Soapaction = SearchAvailibiltyRequest;
    "User-Agent" = "Mac OS X; WebServicesCore.framework (1.0.0)";
}
2008-10-13 21:27:34.407 EchoClient[6848:813] Key: /kWSHTTPResponseMessage, Value: 
2008-10-13 21:27:34.408 EchoClient[6848:813] Key: /kWSResultIsFault, Value: 1
2008-10-13 21:27:34.409 EchoClient[6848:813] Key: /FaultString, Value: The formatter threw an exception while trying to deserialize the message: There was an error while trying to deserialize parameter http://scottdensmore.com/reservations/2008/09:searchAvailibiltyRequest. The InnerException message was 'Error in line 11 position 48. 'Element' 'NumberOfAdults' from namespace 'http://scottdensmore.com/reservations/2008/09' is not expected. Expecting element 'Arrival'.'.  Please see InnerException for more details.

With this debug information in the debug window, we can see that our order is not right. Here is where I spent most of my time. This is a gotcha that I only found by trial and error.

I started to look through the documentation and found this entry about extra soap parameters. I decided that kWSRecordParameterOrder sounded like what I wanted. I decided to add it to my wrapper object and see what would happen. It looked like it wanted an array of strings so I put the following code in:

-(id)initWithDictionary:(NSDictionary *)dictionary 
{
        self = [super init];
        resultDictionary = [[dictionary mutableCopy] retain];
        [resultDictionary setObject:@"http://scottdensmore.com/reservations/2008/09" forKey:(NSString *)kWSRecordNamespaceURI];
        [resultDictionary setObject:@"SearchAvailibiltyRequest" forKey:(NSString *)kWSRecordType];
        [resultDictionary setObject:[[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects:@"Arrival", @"Departure", @"NumberOfAdults", @"NumberOfChildren", nil]  
                                                 forKey:(NSString *)kWSRecordParameterOrder];
        return self;
}

Success! Now we can just do the same thing for the request and we are in business.
I will forgo posting all the code for the response object (you can download it to take a look). The one thing that is important to note is that the result contains a dictionary of an array of dictionary objects. Like I said, all you get is dictionary objects :).
This was a bit of a long winded post. Download the client and server to go through everything. This can seem a bit complicated, although not as complicated as when I started and knew nothing.
Download the client (2324.0K)
Download the server (1632.4K)

Listened to: Just Stop from the album "Ten Thousand Fists" by Disturbed

Meme Time: Growing Up Geek

Brad Wilson decided to tag me geek.

Growing up geek was almost a given at my house even though I didn't know it. My Dad is an electrician and my Mom an accountant. I have terrible allergies and I were glasses. It all started when my Dad brought home the TI 99 where I learned to program, type and have fun. It sat right next to my Atari 2600 and consumed my time between Pitfall and Chopper Command. This snowballed into my Dad getting computers and fixing them. We had all the Commodores (Vic-20, 64, 128, Amega), Apple IIe, TRS 80, x86 etc. I even spent most of my time in the band playing the Double B-Flat upright concert bass (Tuba) and bass in the Jazz band.

These days not much have changed. Most people who meet me don't believe I am a big "geek". After I open my mouth, no one seems to doubt it. Also, I have been banned from bringing my laptop to the dinner table these days.

I tag Jeidja and Jim Newkirk.

Update: To bad I pushed the publish button instead of save.

IServiceLocator: Abstraction for your IoC/DI Container

Chris Tavares and others have developed an abstraction layer for your IoC / Dependency Container. This will help building your applications easier and changing out your IoC container. This is really not the amazing part. This is really a community effort that has adaptors for Castle Windsor, Spring.NET and Unity.

I am hoping this will allow future patterns & practices and future community deliverables to play nice together. Download it here.