Category Archives: Topics

Posts on technical topics. The sub-category provides the specific area of interest.

Books, Daily Blog, General Technical, Projects, Sandbox, Web Development

More Functional Programming and some MERN

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Functional and Haskell

I’ve been reading through the Haskell book I bought (the C# functional programming book isn’t here yet). So far, Haskell functional programming still looks like a gimmick more than a set of useful tools. I’ll keep reading through to the end and likely play with the language a little before I’m done.

I’m looking forward to the C# functional programming book as I’m hoping it will provide a more practical view of what functional methods bring to the table. Working in a hybrid environment should allow the best of both worlds to shine and allow any awkward spots on one side of the other to be worked around.

MERN and Bootstrap and Things…

I’ve also been rummaging through a book on using node with react rather than angular 2/4. Seems like an interesting option as react sounds less proscriptive than angular. As with angular 2 the react tool still needs a CSS library and also similarly this book suggests bootstrap.

I need to sit down and code up a simple sample program that self-hosts a web server (probably OWIN based) and presents a web UI and perhaps a handful of RESTful web methods as a trial. Not sure whether I’ll go with react or angular 2 for this. Stay tuned…

Oh…also picked up ‘Learning Bootstrap 4, Second Edition‘ to read a bit more about bootstrap along the way. The Amazon web UI framework was bootstrap derived I believe so I expect this to  be somewhat familiar…

I am looking at self-hosting partly because node doesn’t play as nicely with windows as it does with linux and I’m mostly windows based. It is also rather nice to have a one-stop simple web UI hosting option that can get access to native code as needed. The NSSM package seems as if it provides a reasonable way to host something like node as a boot time startup service…I’ll probably play with that at some point.

Interesting…there is a package manager for windows called ‘Chocolatey‘ that seems to be an option for deploying NSSM… 

Books, General Technical, Sandbox, Web Development

Continuing to read about functional programming

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Functional programming techniques are becoming more mainstream (and more generally useful) and I’ve been doing some reading to come up to speed.

I’ve just ordered a book on Haskell. Haskell seems to be the functional programming equivalent to SmallTalk for object oriented design…a pure functional language.

 

I’ve also ordered a book on functional programming in C#. While C# isn’t a purely functional language, I am far more likely to build things in C#. I’m expecting the combination of these two books to give me a decent combination of theory and useful practice.

Javascript is really where I first began running into functional approaches. I’m still working on getting my javascript up to where I’d like it to be. The javascript world is currently pretty hard to keep up with as things continue changing at a frantic rate. I’m expecting to spend a weekend soon adding a self hosted web UI to one of my ongoing sandbox projects…probably something Angular 2 with a C# back end, but we’ll see…

Continue reading Continuing to read about functional programming →

Daily Blog, General Technical, Ideas, Sandbox, Web Development

Hmm…and Kestrel in .NET Core

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Ok..and Kestrel seems to be the .NET Core alternative to the OWIN stuff under .NET classic.

Yet another option…in my case the OWIN side is likely more interesting as I’m almost certainly going to be doing things that need interop or similar windows-centric functionality. Interesting as a Linux facing option though. May also be lower overhead in cases where a particular micro-service doesn’t need access to native capabilities.

I am also expecting to need some sort of SSL certificate to enable TLS on these links (don’t need the full commercial cert probably as these are likely going to be expose by IP address and not on the open web). I need to understand what is needed to deploy TLS, ideally with cert verification on both ends using certs I’ve created myself and that don’t correspond to a particular URL.

In this case I’m looking to ensure no MITM attacks and to encrypt the traffic but not to ensure much more than that. I don’t want further authentication to leak and I want to protect the connection (for example for a web UI on a small ‘appliance’ that may at times be exposed to an open internet connection).

Mostly saving these to read/watch in more detail later. Options on top of options here…

Daily Blog, General Technical, Ideas, Sandbox, Web Development

C#: Self Hosting Web UI or WPF?

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I continue to bounce back and forth between self-hosted web UI and WPF UI for implementing simple user interactions.

WPF is likely to be easier to build the right sort of thing with but is a bit less flexible and more ‘backward looking’. Web interfaces require a self-hosting solution if they’re going to be stand-alone and cross more lines of language and environment.

On balance the web UI path is better as a learning experience and aside from a few corner-cases (OpenGL say) likely to  result in a better user experience in the long run.

I’m still looking for the right self-hosting solution and UI framework solution. I’m going to have to settle on one shortly so that I can being experimenting in the ninecrows sandbox and getting a feel for the technology.

Current links of interest on the self-hosting front:

There also seem to be some hard choices between versions of the framework…classic and core in particular.

More to learn as things move forward. I expect I’ll wind up doing things with both/all before I’m done as they have different strengths. The sorts of things a WPF/WinForms/MFC UI can do in terms of digging into the system and being screen real-estate aware along make them of great interest.

Books, Daily Blog, General Technical

C++/CLI

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Recently bought a couple of used books on C++/CLI to read. This looks like the most seamless and high performance approach to .NET/Native interop.

and

Both a little old (though there isn’t much newer really). I’m a bit concerned that Microsoft might move away from supporting this language as it must  be a bit involved to keep up as new releases happen. I’m going to look at adding some interop samples using this technology to my github in the near future.

General Technical, Sandbox

Did a Little More Research on Interop During Lunch

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I did a bit more research on interop topics during lunch today. I’m going to try to write up some samples using interop to work with the file information and volume information APIs that aren’t available in C# tonight.

If all goes well, I should have something to push up to github as a set of code samples. I don’t expect this to be a finished product, but should be interesting in any case.

I also want to fix the Wix issues with my service sample and get that pushed with a working installer. Probably won’t get the guts finished but should be able to install and uninstall the thing without dev tools.

Ideas, Sandbox, Web Development

Windows services with single page web apps

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I’m getting things going on some sandbox software projects that have been sitting on the shelf for some time. Perhaps a bit spread out but should be interesting.

I want to be able to put together free-standing service applications that expose both RESTful programmatic control and single page interactive GUIs without involving an external web server.

Looking like C# and either OWIN or .NET core as the sweet spot here. Need to choose a javascript library for the client side bits…Angular2 seems interesting but may be more involved for first attempts than I want.

I’ve also signed up for several of the sale Udemy courses…started out with an impulse buy of the Unreal Engine Programming course and an associated Blender course. Added in some Angular, Node and web programming stuff. Probably more in there than I’ll have time to get to,  but at $10 each I can deal.

Definitely need to come up to speed more on the various web programming environments and tools as they’re looking like the right way to do UI at this point. Leaves me with ASP.NET, Node and Apache with PHP, Javascript, C# and Typescript on the plate 🙂 Each of these shows up somewhere in my environments of interest. Should be fun…

Daily Blog, Ideas, Projects, Sandbox, Site, Web Development

Web Implementation Options for SandBox Projects

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Looking at some sandbox projects that need web interfaces.

Winding up with a big split here

  • PHP/Apache (LAMP) for real site work.
    Anything that needs to run up here on my hosting will be something LAMP-like. Code needs to be PHP (at least locally) with back end persistence in MySQL.
    Front end should be more flexible. As long as the back ends can provide what the browser side code needs all should be good.
  • IIS/ASP.NET looks like the easiest choice (with .net core MVC as the tool set) for windows integrated work. I have a few things that want to run locally on a system but present a web interface externally. These tools should provide lots of ‘traction’ with close windows integration. Probably an Angular front end and perhaps a full service on the back-end.
  • Node.js shows up in many places. It provides a fast to deploy web server that is flexible and easy to code for. It is on my list in part because it has been showing up in places that are interesting and it part because it promises to support light-weight tasks where IIS would seem like over-kill.

For the front ends there are a huge number of choices out there. Of the ones I’ve seen

  • Angular 2 seems to be pretty capable and well respected. I expect to do at least some work with Angular and if it proves easy to work with I may focus on it.
  • Bootstrap is older (I think) but appears to provide a similar set of tools and infrastructure. If I run into issues with Angular, I may give this a try for something small and see how well it works.

I am also looking at free-standing, light weight web server options that run in C#. This is primarily aimed at RESTful interfaces to back-end code. OWIN and Katana seem to promise something like this while on the C++ side (and I expect C++ will show up now and then) microhttpd looks promising (with GPL restrictions, but these are sandbox projects).

Currently doing quite a bit of reading. Soon I’ve got to kick off from reading and get to some doing. Not sure what I’ll tackle first but I will probably try to list the things I’d like to kick around before I pick one…stay tuned.

 

Daily Blog, General Technical, Sandbox, Web Development

JSON options in C#…too many options

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I’m getting back to sandbox projects on the home front (plenty that got shelved when things got busy) and have been looking at JSON handling in C#.

So far a quick scan of what is out there leaves me with the impression that there are many choices and no clearly dominant one.

So far the open source http://www.newtonsoft.com/json seems to be the best choice. I think I’m going that way for the time being and will look into other options down the road.

Thinking that MongoDB may be a good back end for the data storage I need for the current work at hand. JSON-centric as well so likely a good overall match.

 

3D Programming, Daily Blog, Ideas

Interesting Mashable share discussing stop motion to CGI transition

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Cool rundown of some of the transition from stop motion to CGI. In particular I had never considered that motion blur would be an issue with the believability of stop motion sequences. Makes sense after hearing the description though.

Mashable page here video here.

It is pretty amazing how far and fast this technology has moved. I’m wondering what will happen now with VR/AR as they seem to have the potential to follow the same curves. Back end them through something like AWS or a direct peer to peer link and you should be able to look at building multi-person immersive environments. Add in voice recognition to replace keyboard entry. Use either multiple camera views of the participants or limb sensors and you should be able to make it amazingly real.