XKCD is awesome ...

My brother once introduced me to XKCD - this guy draws awesome cartoons. I think you need to be an engineer to get most of them though. The latest one is SO applicable to my current situation in which I'm the appointed person to fix all my relatives computers:

Using Teamcity + ANT to deploy Yii website

Over the last couple of weeks, I've deferred a bit from my normal .NET stuff and I'm working on some PHP projects within the company. I set up a website that offers an API to our partners and I've decided to go with Yii, because it seems quite popular at the moment.

Getting into Yii is very easy - there are great 'hello world' tutorials out there and after that it's really simple to get a hang of. Anyway - I set up deployment using our Teamcity server using an ANT script. 

Here's the steps of the ANT script:

1. Overwrite the main.config file by my custom main.live.config file - containing db connection to the production DB etc. 
2. Update the main.php configuration file and replacing some version and build numbers, so that I can display rev. ####, build ### at the bottom.
3. Zip the checkout folder
4. Upload the zipped file over ssh
5. Remote unzip the file

Deployment takes 30 seconds here . Check it out:

I see that the code formatter is messing up the XML code - so just copy pasting won't work I'm affraid. Echo is an empty XML node of couse - like <echo .... /> .
Anyway - for us this is a great way of deploying our Yii site quickly, with updated version numbers and custom production configuration.

Resharper

I've introduced ReSharper at the office, and honestly, I cannot picture developing without it anymore. It boosts productivity, improves quality and consistency of your code. I'm assuming you're all familiar with it, if not - it's a Visual Studio plugin.

Anyway - I had planned to blog about it somewhere in the future, but this guy beat me to it: Dzone article: How Resharper rocks my day.

Sublime Text - great PHP editor

This week I'm doing some PHP work since we're setting up an API and we want to run it on a linux server. Since it's been a while for me since I worked with PHP, I needed to set up my environment. I started out using Visual Studio with the PHP plugin. It's fine - but most of the nice stuff ( debugging + IntelliSense ) is in the PRO version. Moved on to NetBeans. Great stuff: IntelliSense - debugging, PHP Unit integration + many many more things. That's going to be the one I'll using. But - when looking for some PHPUnit stuff, I came across this video:

   

First of all - this guy ( Jeffrey Way I believe ) is BLAZING fast and never seems to make any mistakes. Secondly - I was intrigued by the editor he's using. It's Sublime Text. Get it here. It's not free, but doesn't cost a lot either. I downloaded it and it's SO quick. There's is the 'find everything' button CTRL-P. Use '@' as a first character to look for members. You'll probably want some plugins - get them from here and follow the instructions. I got zen-coding and PhpDoc plugins to play around a little, and recorded it.

   

Since I'm not a PHP expert - I like to get a lot of IDE support, therefore I will still be using netbeans. However - this editor is gorgeous, really intuitive and amazingly fast.

HTML productivity booster: zen-coding

Over the last week I've written an API for my business and needed to created some documentation for it. Using Twitter bootrap, some of it looks like this:

Which looks like this in HTML:

subscription_startdate
Startdate of the subscription
subscription_enddate
Enddate of the subscription ( nullable )
subscription_typeid
Type ID of the subscription
subscription_type
Subscription type. Typically 'Business' or 'Compleet'
profile_id
The Business Compleet User ID
profile_initials
Profile initials
...

Which is formatted by Twitter Bootstrap. What I did was copy-paste a bunch of

and filled those out. What I should have done was get a zen-coding plugin for my environment ( NetBeans at the time, but it's also available for Visual Studio and Sublime text ) and use that. Zen-coding allows you to quickly generate HTML in your favorite IDE. With the plugin installed in Sublime, I type:

dl.dl-horizontal>(dt+dd)*5

Hit TAB and it results in:

BOOM! Done.

So you start out by defining you element type ('dl' in my case). The '.horizonal' sets the class very intuitively ( for id - use '#' ... obviously ). The '>' denotes the child elements. The I want a 'dt' with a 'dd' sibling - hence the '+', and that 5 times.

Using Ninject to inject session variables into controller properties

According to our JAVA developer, JAVA spring can inject session variables into controller properties. So - I was triggered to see if I could hack something together that resembles this behavior in C#, using Ninject. So here's a quick thing that I put together:

    internal class StandardKernelWithSessionResolution : StandardKernel
    {
        public override IEnumerable Resolve(Ninject.Activation.IRequest request)
        {
            if (request.Target != null && HttpContext.Current != null && HttpContext.Current.Session != null && HttpContext.Current.Session[request.Target.Name] != null)
            {
                Log.Debug("Property {0} is being injected from session", request.Target.Name);
                return new List() { HttpContext.Current.Session[request.Target.Name] };
            }
            return base.Resolve(request);
        }
    }

In your MVC application, you will need to use StandardKernelWithSessionResolution() as opposed to the StandardKernel() call. Also, you will need to instantiate the session variable once, but after that you're good:

    public class HomeController : Controller
    {
        [Inject]
        public Person SessionInjectedPerson { get; set; }

        public ActionResult Index()
        {
            this.SessionInjectedPerson = new Person();
            return View(this.SessionInjectedPerson);
        }

        public ActionResult UpdatePerson()
        {
            this.SessionInjectedPerson.Name = this.SessionInjectedPerson.Name + " > ";
            return this.View("Index",this.SessionInjectedPerson);
        }

It's not very well tested and you it works on the fact that the session entry name is the same as the property, however - it might save you some time.

Zero implementation PHP API Wrapper in C#

The MoneyMedic API wrapper NuGet package that I wrote in December doesn't actually implement the methods of the API. All the methods actually look something like this:

    internal class MoneyMedicAPI : IMoneyMedicApi
    {
        ...
        public get_invoices_response get_invoices(string api_key, 
                                                  MoneyMedicEnum.SortInvoicesBy sortby, 
                                                  MoneyMedicEnum.SortDir sortdir)
        {
            throw new NotImplementedException();
        }
    }

When figuring out how to implement the wrapper I obseved:

• All API calls result in a URL call with a query string that holds the method parameters and values. Like https://www.moneymedic.eu/api/[METHOD_NAME/?[PARAMETER_NAME]=[PARAMETER_VALUE]&....etc....
• The JSON or XML response will need to be parsed into an instance of some response class

Therefore I decided to use the following setup:

• A method call on the IMoneyMedicAPI interface is being intercepted
• The intercepted method name matches the actual method name, the parameter names match the actual parameter names ( although StyleCop doesn't like this too much ).
• The interceptor creates the MoneyMedic URL from intercepted method name + creates the query string from the parameter names and their corresponding values.
• Using JSON.NET, the result is parsed to a result object, that corresponds to the information in the documentation and returns this to the caller.

And thus the actual implementation is never used or called - hence the NotImplementedExceptions that will never be thrown

Here's the interceptor:

// -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// 
//   2012 Jochen van Wylick
// 
// -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

namespace MoneyMedicAPI
{
    using Ninject.Extensions.Interception;

    /// 

    /// The money medic API interceptor.
    /// Intercepts calls to the MoneyMedicAPI.
    /// 
    public class MoneyMedicApiInterceptor : IInterceptor
    {
        #region IMethodInterceptor Members

        /// 

        /// The MoneyMedic interceptor.
        /// 
        /// 
        /// The invocation.
        /// 
        public void Intercept(IInvocation invocation)
        {
            // Get the parameter collection
            var parameters = invocation.Request.Method.GetParameters();

            // Get the argument collection
            var arguments = invocation.Request.Arguments;

            // Invoke the API call and return the value
            invocation.ReturnValue = MoneyMedicApiHelper.InvokeApiCall(
                invocation.Request.Method.Name, parameters, arguments, invocation.Request.Method.ReturnType);
        }

        #endregion
    }
}

This made the wrapper very easy to implement. Furthermore I could use it for other wrappers if I wanted but still provide IntelliSense to the caller.