My Developer Story

This is my story, my developer story. My name is Joakim Rosendahl and work with the .net platform. I both love working with user interfaces and software architecture.

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Configuring WCF on IIS 8

I'm not really into configuring IIS. Well, today I had to make a WCF service work on IIS 8 in our office dev environment. Luckily I found this post.

From the server Home page: 1: Mime Types -> Add... Provide .svc as the File name extensions and application/octet-stream as Mime Type.

2: Handler Mappings -> Add Managed Handler... Provide *.svc as the Requested path, System.ServiceModel.Activation.HttpHandler as Type and lastly svc-Integrated as Name (can probably be anything). Now you can host WCF services in IIS 8 (as far as I know).

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Explicit back buttons?

I've always argued that an explicit back button is unnecessary, because every browser already has one. Why need both?

However, yesterday I convinced our testers to do a "blind test". When we asked him to go back to the previous page and he started to look for an explicit back button.  Maybe we need explicit back buttons?

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Looking into release management in Mercurial

It's about time we took a look at how release mangement works in Mercurial. Here's a couple of posts that got me started:

http://petevidler.com/2010/03/mercurial-release-management/

http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-mercurial/

I followed Pete Vidlers example and created a Release 2.0 branch with a tag v2.0. As far as I can see, each minor version will have a tag. Let's see how it goes.

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Extending constructor functions

I have to say it, I'm pretty new to JavaScript. Only been working with it the last few months, mixed with some .net-development. It's a bit hard to write structured code in JavaScript, most of the code I've seen so far has been very imperative, globals and bunch of functions scattered around all over the place. WIth the introduction of Knockout, the structure has improved but still feels a bit imperative time to time. Knockout promotes using Constructor Functions to encapsulate functionality (with the self variable). One thing I still struggle with is reusing and extending my JavaScript components, more specificly my Knockout view models. I was looking for something resembling class inheritance. At first I tried do to some prototype inheritence, but I didn't managed it to work as expected (probably because of lack of JavaScript experience).

Anyway, yesterday I tried another solution and it worked out pretty well (at least for my scenario). I just needed to embrace how objects work in javascript. Say that we have this GenericCaseViewModel constructor function, like this:

function GenericCaseViewModel(state) { var self = this; // some generic piece of code }

Extending the generic view model would look something like this:

function SpecificViewModel(state) { var self = new GenericCaseViewModel({...}); // more specific code return self; }

Instead of setting self = this (as at least is promoted by Knockoutjs) I'm setting this to an instance from GenericCaseViewModel. Don't forget to explicitly return self at the end of the specific view model constructor function (as the default implicit return value is this). 

I makes sense. All I needed to do was embracing JavaScripts object and forgetting about object orientation.