Scott Densmore

MonoTouch Comparison with Apple Tools

I have been playing around with MonoTouch trying to figure out if I liked the new approach to building Cocoa Touch apps. I decided to take a couple of the samples built using MonoTouch and build them for the Cocoa Touch using Apple's toolset.

HelloWorld

I decided to start out with the easiest thing first: building HelloWorld based on this article. I read through the article and built the Apple version first. Open XCode and choose a new Window-based application. This is the closest to the iPhone application from MonoTouch. The first thing I noticed is that I do things opposite of how they are done in MonoTouch. When I am going to create outlets for connecting objects from Interface Builder, I do that in code then go to Interface Builder. This is how "stylish" programmers do things. At least that is what I learned at the Big Nerd Ranch. So I opened up the header file and updated it to look like this:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>

@interface HelloWorldObjCAppDelegate : NSObject <UIApplicationDelegate> {
    UIWindow *window;
    UIButton *button;
    UILabel *label;
}

@property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UIWindow *window;
@property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UIButton *button;
@property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UILabel *label;

- (IBAction)sampleTap:(id)sender;

@end

I added two properties for the button and label. I use custom Text Macros for doing this so I don't have to do a lot of typing [more on this later]. After this I opened up Interface Builder and setup the interface and made the connections. The connections are the same except they are already part of the UIApplicationDelegate.

Now for the fun part. Adding in the code for the actions. Unlike Cocoa on Snow Leopard, there is no support for blocks on the iPhone so I don't get similar delegate support. If you want to have it you can get plblocks. The code in the implementation file looks like this:

@implementation HelloWorldObjCAppDelegate

@synthesize window;
@synthesize button;
@synthesize label;

- (IBAction)sampleTap:(id)sender {
    [label setText:@"Second button clicked"];
}

- (void)buttonEvent:(id)sender {
    static int count = 0;
    [label setText:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"I have been tapped %d times.", count++]];
}

- (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(UIApplication *)application {
    [button addTarget:self action:@selector(buttonEvent:) forControlEvents:UIControlEventTouchDown];
    // Override point for customization after application launch
    [window makeKeyAndVisible];
}

- (void)dealloc {
    [window release];
    [button release];
    [label release];
    [super dealloc];
}
@end

The addTarget:action message is what happens under the covers when you connect your action and event in Interface Builder. I set the text for the label using NSString stringWithFormat:. This is just like string.Format with printf arguments. All in all, not much code except for the release calls and not much difference in the hello world.

Get code here.

RSS Reader

I moved to a little harder sample. I am using the RSS Reader tutorial. The first thing I needed to do is figure out the layout of the response from the rss. I use HTTP Client to view requests / response. In XCode I created a Navigation based application. I renamed a few files (RootViewController -> NewsArticleViewController) via the Rename refactoring support in XCode (yes XCode has some refactoring and also takes snapshots of your code before it makes the changes). I also added the News Article model class and a parser for the rss feed. The Cocoa framework doesn't have a built in XML Document, but instead uses SAX style NSXMLParser. I wanted to hide this and also do it in a background thread using an NSOperation. Here is what my project looks like:



I will not bore you with the gory details of the code in the parser. I could have used some third party library code to make it easier, yet I decided to stick with what comes in the box. Check out the touchcode project if you want something else. The key was to have it parse through the code and build up the models from the rss feed. Another difference is that I reference the DetailsViewController from the NewsArticleViewController. I dragged a UIViewController into the controller and set it's class to DetailsViewController in the identity inspector and NIB name to DetailsViewController in the attributes inspector.

I added an outlet in the NewsArticleViewController and hooked this up in Interface Builder. I added the title to the navigation controller and showed it so I could navigate back to the list. The UI needs a little love to spice it up. Given everything, not much more code than MonoTouch.

Get code here.

The Takeaways

MonoTouch is a great start. It comes down to language differences. If you want to learn more about them Matt Gallagher has an amazing post that you should read. It took me a while to get comfortable with Objective-C (a couple of months). The language itself is pretty easy. I really like it because of the dynamic nature. The IDE is lacking in functionality especially a debugger, which makes it hard to switch. I find the use of classes for delegate markers a little odd since they are protocols in Obj-C and more akin to interfaces. I understand the reason for not doing this is because in Obj-C, things can be optional. This is not possible in a strongly typed language like C# (see Matt's post). The Garbage Collection is nice yet I think as a platform, Cocoa Touch will get GC just like Cocoa for OS X. I am more of an XCode person, so I wish they would have invested in working with XCode. All in all, to really understand building Cocoa Touch apps, you will need to understand the underlying framework (Cocoa Touch). The abstraction is interesting to make it work with a static language like C#. I will keep my eye on this to see where it goes. I don't think it is worth the $500 US to switch for me right now.

Tools

TextMacros Article
XCode Article
Accessorizer - good code generator / helper / expander

Listened to: Octane Twisted from the album "The Incident" by Porcupine Tree

.NET, Mono

Singletons Are Evil Part 2

A while back I wrote a post about why singletons are evil. I still agree with that statement, yet after my comment on twitter today, I think I need to show how you can solve this problem differently.

The first problem we need to solve is creating the instance itself. This can become difficult if we have dependencies and we are trying to limit the creation. For example we have class Foo that is our singleton:

public static class Foo
{
	static Foo instance;
	
	public static Foo Current
	{
		if (instance == null)
		{
			instance = new Foo();
		}
		return instance;
	}
	
	public void SomeMethod()
	{}
	
	public void SomeOtherMethod(int x, int y)
	{}
}

Great! Easy enough and no big issues other than this is quite contrived and nothing in the real world is this easy. So lets go ahead and tackle the next big problem: Multithreading. We fix our class with a double check lock and end up with this:

public static class Foo
{
	static volatile Foo instance;
	static object syncObj = new object();
	
	public static Foo Current
	{
		if (instance == null)
		{
			lock (syncObj)
			{
				if (instance == null)
					instance = new Foo();
			}
		}
		return instance;
	}
	
	public void SomeMethod()
	{}
	
	public void SomeOtherMethod(int x, int y)
	{}
}

I am starting to feel a little dirty, but I can handle a little dirt. Now we are good except that Foo now has a dependency: Bar. Why the dependency? Well that is the object that we use to get some of the information we want in our singleton. Ok, lets see what this looks like:

public static class Foo
{
	readonly Bar bar;
	static volatile Foo instance;
	static object syncObj = new object();
	
	private Foo(Bar bar)
	{
		this.bar = bar;
	}
	
	public static Foo Current
	{
		if (instance == null)
		{
			lock (syncObj)
			{
				if (instance == null)
					instance = new Foo(new Bar(new Bar()));
			}
		}
		return instance;
	}
	
	public void SomeMethod()
	{}
	
	public void SomeOtherMethod(int x, int y)
	{}
}

At this point alarm bells should be going off and your brain should be going to DEFCON 1. We introduced Bar only to see that it needed a Baz. We have violated SRP and coupled all our classes together. Now imagine writing a test around any class that needed to use Foo. You get one Foo and all its dependencies that need to be cleared between tests. This causes you to write that clear method on your class that really is only needed to get rid of state you were trying to support anyway.

So hopefully by now, we agree that this is evil. Yet, I agree that singletons are something useful in the right scenario. So how can you avoid Global Thermonuclear War when using a singleton? Well fire up your trusty IoC container and let it manage it for you. Here is an example in Unity.

public class Baz{}
public class Bar
{
	readonly Baz baz;
	
	public Bar(Baz baz)
	{
		this.baz = baz;
	}
}

public class Foo
{
	readonly Bar bar;

	public Foo(Bar bar)
    {
		this.bar = bar;
	}
	
	public void SomeMethod()
	{}
	
	public void SomeOtherMethod(int x, int y)
	{}
}
...
IUnityContainer container = new UnityContainer();
container.RegisterType(typeof(Baz), typeof(Baz));
container.RegisterType(typeof(Bar), typeof(Bar));
container.RegisterType(typeof(Foo), typeof(Foo), new ContainerControlledLifetimeManager());

Now we have separated the creation of the object and it's life time from the object itself. This way we let the container handle the singletoness of the object and it's creation. You still have to deal with multithreaded access to the dependencies of Foo, but when you decide that is just way to evil and there are better ways to solve this problem, you can change the lifetime management and go on about your business. This also frees you up to easily test this object and perform refactorings (like the ones Sean is talking about this month).

Did I mention singletons are evil?

Deliverance by Opeth

This Code For Rent

Given the current economy and the housing market here in Florida, we have been talking a lot about renting versus owning a home. How does this have anything to do with code? Glad you asked. In the life of any given application, you are probably in it for only a short time (relatively). You might be on the team that builds the version 1.0 product or you might be on the team that is supporting version 6 of a product on version 8. Whatever the case may be, more often than not, you are just there renting the code.
I think this is an important fact to remember. My friend Brain Button taught me a long time that I am not my code and that I definitely do not own it. When I put myself in the mindset of a renter instead of an owner, the idea of The Broken Theory makes perfect sense. When you rent a home / apartment / car, you sign an agreement to take the best care of the thing you are renting the best that you can. Why should that not be any different for code? No matter how you decide to take care of the code you are renting, you should always feel good when you turn (check) it in.

Oblivion by Mastodon

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

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.