Inacom Tech Blog

The ASP.NET MVC Framework is a new option for web development from Microsoft.  ASP.NET MVC takes advantage of the Model-View-Controller organization pattern adapted by so many other frameworks for web development such as Ruby on Rails and CakePHP.

After using the ASP.NET MVC Framework I am quite pleased with the direction it is heading in.  I really applaud the MVC team and their frequent code releases on CodePlex and their responsiveness to community feedback.

Recently I was able to give an Introduction talk to the Black Hole .Net User Group in Marshfield.  A few questions were brought up that I will have to do some research into to answer.  I will try to get that information together and get another blog post up soon.

As promised to the Black Hole .Net Group, I would post the materials from the presentation.

While working on a presentation for the upcoming Twin Cities Code Camp. For the presentation I am using the Northwind database provided from Microsoft.  I have found a unique situation where they are using a 5 character string as the primary key.  Since the goal of this presentation is to develop a rails site around an existing database I took on this challenge to overcome rails standards.

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Recently Inacom had the privelage of hosting the Madison Web Design & Development Meetup. The topic for this meeting was Advanced CSS. I put together a slideshow to try to keep the presentaiton more guided, but because of the depth of the topic we wound up going quite a bit over our loose 1 hour timeslot. I just wanted to thank everyone for sticking around and seeming quite interested! I had a great time presenting and I hope that you all enjoyed our discussions. If you're looking for the demo files and the presentation check them out in the full article.

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Javascript libraries like prototype, it's friend scriptaculous, and the newcomer jQuery have been making web developer's lives easier for a few years now. With a javascript library you can turn a verbose DOM selection like:

document.getElementById('products')

into something a little shorter and sweeter:

$('products')

They allow for so much more including animations, but that is the subject of another blog post entirely.

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So I recently needed to implement a site wide search and happened to find this ruby gem at the right time (http://github.com/jpignata/bossman-gem/tree/master). However I was required to set a few things.  I also had to figure out the string needed to pass to the search, if you want to search only one domain. Below are the steps I took to implement this into a rails application.

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The restful_authentication plugin by Rick Olson is THE defacto standard for authentication in rails apps. Nearly all mid-sized and small rails apps use it. It works right out of the box with MySQL is REST compliant, and has some really nice code and test cases (specs now acutally) to make sure everything is working. Rick does a good job of keeping it up to date as well and addresses security concerns of the community as they are brough up.

But what happens when you want to customize this plugin? I've made it work with rails version of "forms" authenticaiton with a SQL 05 server, that wasn't too hard. I've changed it to have personal questions per user account and require correct answers to those questions before sending an email to reset a user's password. All of these kinds of modifications are expected. The plugins is just there to get you started. So what do we do when we cant to take Rick's code and authenticate agains our internal user database stored in Active Directory? We extend his code yet again!

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The first website that I built for Inacom using ruby on rails was deployed to Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server and I hand rolled my own install for everything (it was painful). We had MySQL on the same 256 MB VM as the rails code was running from, and we setup a proxy with Apache and Mongrel. Deploying from Capistrano 1.4 made things a bit easier once everything was setup, but the initial build was not an easy task. It was also my first time doing what some would consider fairly heavy Linux command line system administration, so that didn't speed up the process either.

Fast forward 2 years and now I'm deploying servers in a mater of minutes, not days thanks to the deprec gem (using mongrel and nginx) and VMWare Virtual Center which allows us to store templates of our production rails servers. But VMWare VC isn't the only Enterprise product that we've integrated with our rails development, we can deploy to Windows with IIS (though it still isn't highly recommended because of performance concerns), OS X Server, and our de-facto favorite Linux Ubuntu.

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