April 16, 2008
Code Trip Review
The Code Trip made it's next to last stop in Olympia Monday night (4/14). A small but appreciative group was on hand to greet Jason Mauer and Woody Pewitt. Adam Kinney was unable to bring the Silverlight, but Jason and Woody filled up the three hour event nicely. Sadly, the bus didn't make it to Olympia either, it was already parked in Redmond, at Microsoft, for the MVP summit.
Jason started things by giving us a Code Trip overview but initially ran into technical difficulties with the CodeTrip.com site... "This never happens", he said. Yeah, not until the last stop of the trip, eh? Their site at TheCodeTrip.com has a section called Under The Hood, with great information on all the tech used to keep the website going and keep everyone connected and happy on the bus. Much of what was used on the website will eventually be available on CodePlex.
Woody took over and showed us how the BusCams worked. He talked about the difficulty of finding software for processing the pictures taken by the bus cams, 4 in all. Eventually, he used an open source DirectShow API wrapper, called DirectShow.net. The BusCam software will eventually be uploaded to CodePlex.
By the time Woody was done rapping about BusCams, Jason was ready to roll on Loggo, the blogging engine he wrote and which he uses on his site, JasonMauer.com . He told us that he'd compared and contrasted various existing blogging engines over the years before deciding to write his own. He started out in the database, which was an interesting way to introduce blogging software, but Jason explained that a blog can be looked at as a set of relationships. Information on pages, and the relationships between pages, is held in the database, along with other information about users, permissions, etc. From the database, he took us to the code and eventually to the website. Very cool, and available on CodePlexat some point. Most of the guts are in the database, so there isn't much to the code, built on ASP.NET. Loggo emits XHTML and the websites can be viewed with an XML parser.
Jason is very big on location and geo-tagging. Basically, he's a geo-geek All the blog entries on the Code Trip site are geo-tagged with the location the bus was in when the blog entry was posted. His assertion is that blogging has inherent location. And, did you know you could drop an RSS feed URL into Google Maps and see the location .. except I just tried it and it didn't work, so I'll have to work on that. But believe me it was cool, really.
We weren't done with geodata just yet. GPS played a huge role on the website, most noticeably on the Virtual Earth tour map, with up-to-the-moment tour bus location. They used a QSTARZ BT-Q818 GPS unit on the bus. This particular unit comes highly recommended by Jason and Woody as affordable and accurate. The GPS unit hooked into a Winforms application called PositionUpdate, supplying location information to any application needing it via a webservice, running on the tour bus. On the tour map, this location info was used to show where the bus was at any given time. The blog entries got their location information from the webservice as did the display on the masthead of the website.
Next we toured TwitterSync, another project destined to be on CodePlex, which features a Windows Workflow Foundation state machine at its heart. Very cool to see a WF workflow in action (sorry you missed it, Paul).
What I really loved about Jason's CodePlex">Under the Hood presentation was the natural use of Linq, anonymous methods and types and lambda expressions -- all new stuff we've seen in presentations before, but presented in the context of very interesting applications -- not dry demo code. Makes me itch for the time to play with that stuff.
Jason showed us a slide with the 'Levels of Code Quality' on it: Crap --> Hack --> Spaghetti --> Readable --> Elegant. The code for PositionUpdate is between Hack and Spaghetti, TwitterSync is Spaghetti and Loggo is between that and Readable. I'm wondering if Jason is one of those perfectionist types who won't ever consider his code elegant.
Next, Woody led us on a magical mystery tour of Internet Explorer 8.0 Beta 1, with special emphasis on developer tools. He asked for a show of hands, who had already downloaded it? I don't think anyone raised their hand, to which Woody exclaimed,"Man up and download people! Don't be wimps!"
The IE8 team is actively seeking feedback from developers. He cruised over the new security features, and spent more time talking about webslices, activities (like add-ins) and embedded Javascript debugging tools. He emphasized that the look and feel aren't updated yet, so it still looks like IE7. It uses a completely different parsing engine, however, so pages formatted for IE7 won't necessarily render the right way. There's a ton of info on the Internet Explorer Developer Center site if you want to start playing with it now.
In the end, everyone went home with a foam Code Trip Tour Bus replica and some software or a laptop sleeve with the Code Trip logo. Jason promised us that not only would there be another west coast Code Trip in the future, that there would be a central and eastern branch of the Code Trip family. They'll build on the lessons learned during this inaugural voyage and certainly more fun code and technical wizardry will result and eventually make its way to the community.