I was chatting to a friend yesterday and he was interested in the podcasts that I listen to. This isn't the first time that I have introduced someone to programming podcasts, so I figured I would write up the ones that I listen to and what I think about them. I'll start with a list of the shows and links to their websites. Then I will go through each one in a bit more detail where I can.

I started off listening to the PWOP podcasts by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell

• DotNetRocks
• Hanselminutes
• RunAsRadio

• Deep Fried Bytes
• Alt.NET Podcast
• Herding Code
• Software Engineering Radio

• AgileToolKit
• Polymorphic Podcast
• Arcast/Arcast.TV
• The ASP.NET Podcast

• StackOverFlow
• Core Intuition
• Google Developer Podcast
• Lean Agile Straight Talk podcast
• Learning Rails
• NxtGenUG Podcast
• Pragmatic Podcasts
• Ruby on Rails Podcasts

• Battlestar Galactica Enhanced Podcast
• Fighting Talk
• Mondays
• Xbox 360 Fanboy
• Xbox Live's Major Nelson Radio
• 1UP Yours

This is somewhat amusing. I turned on Growl Sticky Notifications as I have become used to reading tweets as they are announced this way.

I then left my laptop turned on whilst I went to eat some food. I come back around 45 minutes later and this is what I see.

A Domain Model?

Background

I am intending on writing a small application over the next day or two that will help me understand, at a reasonable level, some interesting technologies.

Last week I posted about trying out Blogo, a blog authoring application for the Mac.

I contacted the support team at brainjuice explaining my problems, and mentioned that I missed the ability to have a link history/glossary.

A few hours later I received a reply. I found out that the issue I had with style on the

tags will be addressed in an upcoming release. They had added the inline styles to avoid float bugs on some weblog systems, when posting through Blogo.

The link typing problem is a known WebKit issue and is being worked on.
The auto-completion for links is on the list of features to be implemented.

They weren't too sure about the issue that I as having with editing my posts and I said that I would try and get DasBlog setup locally to try and debug it.
I tried running DasBlog on my VM whilst connecting to it using Blogo. There were various issues caused by settings that I have never touched and basically I gave up trying to get them talking after about 30 minutes.

I left it at that, then 6 days later I received another email from the Blogo team informing me that they were working on the same issues with another DasBlog user. At least that proves that it wasn't me doing something silly.

I look forward to seeing an update on this, as I have to say I love the interface of Blogo. It is clean and simple. Perfect for my not so often blogging on my little site here.

This is my first try at update with a new version of Blogo on 27th July.

• iCal - iCal link
• XML - Feed Link
• Web - Website Link

This first example is based on the code needed to drive my jQuery examples. When I reached the point of requiring server side data, I decided that I wanted to try out Ninject.

I wanted to load some data using an HttpHandler. I used a handler as I wanted to also save data using the same URL.
The handler has what might be a PageController, which will determine the action to take based on the request being an HTTP GET or POST.
The controller itself relies on an implementation of IDataLayer which handles the data access.

Currently I have only explored the basic binding techniques in Ninject. This involves creating a class that specifies the bindings, then registering it with the Kernel.

    using System;

using Ninject.Core;


namespace Core.NinjectModules{

public class PeopleModule : StandardModule{

public override void Load(){

Bind
().To
();

Bind
().ToSelf();

}

}

}

This is the binding module for specifying the dependancies of my People class.

    using System;

using System.Text;

using Ninject.Core;


namespace Core{

public class People{

IDataLayer _dataAccess;


[Inject]

public People(IDataLayer dataAccess){

_dataAccess = dataAccess;

}

...

}

}

This is the People class and with the single attribute needed to identify to ninject what to use for injection.

It is using the constructor injection feature. I have removed the rest of the implementation of the class to help with reading.

Ninject offers a set of features specifically for web applications. They can be found in the Ninject.Frameworks.Web namespace.

From this namespace I used the NinjectHttpApplication and HttpHandlerBase classes.

The NinjectHttpApplication provides the implementation required to attach a ninject Kernel to your HttpApplication.

It is an abstract class that requires the user to implement a CreateKernel() method, in which the user initialises the Kernel.

    using System;

using Ninject.Framework.Web;

using Ninject.Core;


namespace jQueryExamples

{

public class Global : NinjectHttpApplication{

protected override Ninject.Core.IKernel CreateKernel(){

IKernel kernel = new StandardKernel(new Core.NinjectModules.People());

return kernel;

}

}

}

This is all that I needed to register my People module with the ninject Kernel.

I then needed the People controller to be injected into my handler. This is where the HttpHandlerBase comes into it.

using System;

using System.Web;

using System.Web.Services;

using Core;

using Ninject.Core;


namespace jQueryExamples.handlers{


[WebService(Namespace = "http://tempuri.org/")]

[WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)]

public class people : Ninject.Framework.Web.HttpHandlerBase{

private People _people;


[Inject]

public People PeopleController{

get { return _people; }

set { _people = value; }

}


protected override void DoProcessRequest(HttpContext context){

_people.RequestType = context.Request.RequestType;

string responseText = _people.Process();

context.Response.Clear();

context.Response.Write(responseText);

context.Response.ContentType = "text/xml";

context.Response.StatusCode = 200;

}


public override bool IsReusable{

get { return false; }

}

}

}

This is the entire implimentation of my handler. The People class will be injected into the handler when it is needed.

That is it for now for ninject. I can do the basics, next I need to learn about the context specific bindings etc

The engine running this blog is DasBlog which does not appear on the list of supported systems for Blogo (FAQ), so I was expecting a few things not to work.

I am making a second third test post from Blogo. The first time I posted it seemed that there was a style added to the initial paragraph which caused my blog to look strange. This second third post is to confirm that it was in the markup sent from Blogo.

I was tempted not to post this as I could see from the preview that it was going to do the same thing. I decided to go ahead anyway, so that I had an example of the markup that it is sending and so that I could figure out how I can save drafts.

This part of the post was written after saving as a draft. Drafts are posted to DasBlog without publishing them. This is perfect for me, apart from one small problem when it comes to editing the saved draft. Well technically the editing of the draft is nice and simple. Blogo will let you list all of the posts on your blog and allow you to change the text. The intention is then of course to re-post to the blog and have the content altered.

On submitting the edited post I see this error.
I can only assume that something in the DasBlog editing system is not playing well with Blogo. I have emailed the authors of Blogo to let them know and to find out if there is any prospect of DasBlog support in the future.

Not being able to edit my posts from Blogo doesn't completely rule it out right now as the application seems very nice to work with. It is the first one that I have tried on the Mac, so I will see how it stands up to the others that I use.

The old saying "You only miss it when its gone" applies to a feature that I didn't realise I was using all that much in Windows Live Writer. Whilst trying to go back through this post and link up the various references that I could. I found that I was missing the way that Windows Live Writer handled links. Using the link glossary had obviously become something that I did without thought. So when trying to link up all instances of the word Blogo I found myself re-typing the informatin everytime, rather than selecting the information from a list, which is what I was used to.

A slight annoyance was that when trying to add links whilst going along, I found that I would select the word that I had just typed, add the details for the link, then carry on typing, it would still think that I was typing the link.

Something strange has just happened and I am not sure what the result of posting this is going to be now. I previewed my post to see what it would look like and it looks like it is not going to break the layout. Maybe it is because I have images in this post. More investigation is needed.

[edit:from DasBlog editor]Looks like there are no styles on the paragraphs this time. A little confusing. Also the images didn't quite upload correctly. I was expecting them to be thumbnails linking to the full images.

I am currently trying to find some blogging software for my Mac. Even though I had not used it very often, as you can tell from my lack of posts, I had found Windows Live Writer to be very nice to use.
I will be posting a number of test posts over the next couple of days, in preparation for my second attempt at blogging.