Paul Lockwood's technical blog

MVC guru == PhD wannabe?

Jun 17th

This is a plea to anyone who blogs, writes or talks about ASP.Net MVC. This stuff is pretty simple, let’s not scare people away.

In the last four weeks of learning MVC I have:

Read the book ASP.Net MVC in Action (Work in Progress via MEAP)
Attended Microsoft’s Firestarter in NYC
Read a raft of blog posts
Used the Northwind and other code samples

All are guilty of requiring niche knowledge in some or all of:

Domain Drive Design
The Repository Pattern
JSON, REST etc
Automated Developer Testing
Mocking Frameworks
Active Record, NHibernate, LINQ to SQL – insert any other non mainstream data access technique here
Differences between MVC, MVP, Front Controller etc
Lamda expressions

Apparently every educator is trying to showcase their knowledge in a manner that is inaccessible to 95% of developers. The presenters I saw at NYC are great guys, but almost all the faces in the audience soon were blank as decks became PhD thesis material. We soon dwindled down to ~50% attendance. I chatted with several ‘regular guys’ over lunch and they were pretty annoyed – what they need to see are simple samples.

Missing Samples: Hopefully the Manning book will improve before publication – the first chapter got me going with the framework, but the rest was almost useless to me. People who care about DDD, MVC details etc already know about them. What we need to see is samples of Grid controls, binding data to controls, how we get data back from a postback etc. At work we soon had screens working with jQuery and ext; perhaps because we do not worry about DDD, strict patterns etc?

Of course there is the argument that MVC is not targeted to all developers and only super-intelligent ones will understand MVC. Poppycock, RoR has been a huge success due to its simplicity – how many RoR developers know they are using Active Record? Not many I would gamble; most RoR people just want to build something quick and don’t have a CS background. MVC is not that hard, let’s present it clearly and simply guys.
Oh yes, and I do think the ASP.Net Framework is heading in the right direction. There again I love NUnit and wrote my own MVC framework for WebForms back in 2003 as I did not know how else to test my ASP.Net screens.

DD-WRT on Linksys WRT54G v8

Apr 28th

Posted by Paul Lockwood in IPTV

11 comments

Update: Since writing this post om 2008 Linksys have produced v8.1 and v8.2 routers which may not be compatible with the instructions here. Luckily there are now an ‘official’ guided on the dd-wrt site for v8 routers:

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/How_To_Flash_the_WRT54Gv8

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Linksys_WRT54G_v8.0_%26_v8.2

Many sites say v8 of the WRT-54G routers cannot be flashed with DD-WRT. I have now done this twice and here are simple instructions – these are re-worked from bauer-power who’s post I came across when fearing my first attempt bricked the router. First try on a v8 took me over two hours mostly in Google/ Forums, second time about ten minutes with these steps:

Go to http://192.168.1.1 (default user/pass is admin/admin)
Click on Administration tab, then click on Firmware Upgrade. Upload vxworkskillerGv8-v3.bin
When you see ‘Update is successful, Rebooting….’ unplug the router for 120 seconds (some say to wait 120 secs BEFORE unplugging – do both to be safe)
Plug in router, ping 192.168.1.1 to verify it is still alive (you may have to hardcode static IP settings on your PC to have a gateway of 192.168.1.1, subnet 255.255.255.0 and IP 192.168.1.100 )
Run the Linksys Tftp Utility, uploading dd-wrt.v24_micro_wrt54gv8.bin with these settings:
Press Ugrade. When the upgrade GUI’s green dot appears press the router reset button
Browse to 192.168.1.1 and see the new firmware (default user/pass is root/admin)

If you are looking to flash another a non v8 router with DD-WRT I found these links to be the most helpful:
DD-WRT Installation wiki
Client Bridge Example (this is almost 100% correct for V24 firmware – you should have no problems following it)

Also be aware there are version specific firmwares on the dd-wrt website, but it may take you while to find them: Linksys is under the Broadcom (chipset) folder. More than likely a newer builder than I linked to will work with the v8, but I simply wanted another client bridge and have had one running with v24 for two months now.

Afraid to do this ‘hack’? Of the three Linksys routers I’ve flashed none became bricks. Heck they are only $40 now anyway, but if you do brick one it looks they are not too impossible to recover:
Recover from a bad-flash (unbrick a dead router) wiki

So Why did I do this?

This was left to last as the news that we can flash Linksys routers is years old. Still even me -a tech blog addict- was still not 100% sure what a wireless bridge is, and how to link to wireless networks into one seamless network. We need access points in many locations, but are renting so cannot run cat5 everywhere. Yes I could buy custom wireless adapters for the xbox (xbmc), HTPC, NAS drives, PCs and printers but they normally cost $80 or more each and are no where nearly as flexible as a DD-WRT flashed router which has 5 ports. Also the new V8 WRT54G router I bought for my theater room was losing the plot when the PS3 was turned on – I have no idea why but the voip phone etc would all lose their connection. Since being flashed it has been 100% stable.

This is a sample wireless bridge, to the machines it looks like one seamless network:

We now have three WRT54 routers with DD-WRT. One is a primary and two more are client bridges.. one for the xbmc and for my main PC in an office room. They seem to play fine together. The two client bridges have five Ethernet sockets as the wan port was reconfigured by DD-WRT. This is fantastic for many reasons, e.g. when moving large files I can plug a laptop or NAS drives into the same wired network. WiFi is fine for streaming media, but you trying moving a 10GB VirtualPC image or 4GB TV recording over WiFi and you’ll see how much faster/ reliable wired networks are.

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DDD6 UK Code Camp

Nov 25th

Posted by Paul Lockwood in Presentations

3 comments

For my slides and NAnt + Cruise Control config files click here. If you have any more questions please email me.

DDD6 was the 6th UK ‘code camp’ and I was luckily enough for my session to be voted in. Many people missed out attending because there were ~450 registrations in 24 hours!! Everyone I met was incredibly bright – most of the tough questions I asked in my Continuous Integration session were immediately answered, by sometimes what seemed half the room!

Comparison to with US Code Camps is pretty easy. The UK version is was excellent too. Classic cultural differences were there: a little less pizazz, and the average attendee weighing 20->30 lbs less. Note the cycle racks outside reception in the photos below, if US gas were $9/gallon I think we’d be slimmer too.

It pleases me greatly to report TDD/ Automated Testing is certainly gaining traction with the .Net community here. Many people told me Mike Hadlow did an excellent talk on using Inversion of Control (IoC) with TDD. Speaker of the day must go to Ben Hall who gave an overview of xUnit tools, including MBUnit which he contributes to. Apparently Ben is a fairly recent grad and this was his first presentation – watch this guy he will do well!

Ben, Mike, Richard Fennell and Michael Foord blogged this event. Barry Dorrans shares some photos. Update: even more was said about the day here, here, here, here, here, here and here!