It has been interesting reading Derek Lowe’s articles about machine planned synthesis and the pharma research space.
Much of this sounds like what software went through as compilers came on the scene and became progressively better. For a long time people would argue that human generated machine code would always be better than compiler generated code and that compilers were essentially a crutch for those unwilling to do the hard stuff. Continue reading Machines and MedChem
I’ve used WiX for the installer for a small sandbox project or two. I’m now looking to use it for something bigger. Getting back to the could of WiX ebooks I’ve got (WiX 3.6: A Developer’s Guide to Windows Installer XML and WiX Cookbook). One conclusion so far is that a project with tens of files involved is going to make for a long WiX configuration file…
I’ve read one of these to support my previous WiX work (service installation which for C# based services pretty much requires an installer). Non-sandbox work needs a somewhat deeper view though.
I’ve been wrapping up the program that I have been software lead on for the last year and a bit. I’ve also been doing some sandbox coding in C# with a focus on C# to C++/CLI interop as I’ve got a few software tools that need to cross over to from WPF to native code.
I’m wrapping up work on my current program at work and it looks as if I’ll be heading from C# to Java for my next stretch.
My previous Java experience was in the all encompassing world of Amazon’s systems. I’ve loaded up the latest version of Idea and Eclipse to do a little refresher and play with some free-standing java code again.
I expect that my home projects will likely stay more on the C#/Javascript side of things (with a little C++ and PHP mixed in) as those tools are better suited to my sandbox project needs.
I’ve used runtime loaded DLLs as plug-ins in native code for a long time. I’m now looking at some work that would benefit from C# based plug-ins…ideally ones that can be unloaded as needed.
By default, in C#, assemblies are largely ‘load only’ and cannot be unloaded from a process. AppDomains allow one process to be partitioned in a way that acts a little like process boundaries.
I’m going to put together some sandbox code to gain familiarity with this mechanism. I’ll post the samples on my github account as I go.
If the weekend goes smoothly I may also build out some more of the code needed to manage file archiving and duplicate removal that I’ve been planning on implementing for some time. I’m starting in on some of the C++/CLI code needed to provide access to the native APIs that return unique volume and file ID information. Most of these are not currently exposed in the CLR world and this information is very useful if you’re trying to manage files and filesystems.
I’ve found that by uninstalling node completely and then reinstalling with windows NVM things seem to be working on my main development machine here now. I’m also running both my command line and visual studio 2017 in admin mode. Not certain that is required, but it did seem to resolve an ‘EPERM’ issue with npm install.
Tonight I’ll try to move forward with some actual coding on top of the sample code from visual studio.
Continue reading Small Steps on the .NET Core with Angular Front
A bit of a frustrating day today, finding everything that could possibly be mis-configured on my system here for building Angular/ASP.NET Core applications. Node wasn’t setup right, paths had spaces where tools didn’t like them. Network connections get flaky at inappropriate times.
Looking like I’m past that now. Feels a bit like a waste of a day, but hoping for smoother next steps.
Found instructions on stack overflow here.
Created data folder and symlink to the mongodb bin folder for version 3.4.
Added the bin folder for mongodb to my system path.
Created a new config file initially containing:
systemLog: destination: file path: c:\data\log\mongod.log storage: dbPath: c:\data\db\
Started the service and so far all looks ok.
Need to create an SSL cert and set up authentication soon. On my local network only, but there are anough machines here that I’d rather not get burned by a compromised raspberry pi eating my database.
Verified that mongo.exe does see the database.
Temporarily adding ‘bindIp’ instead to force only 127.0.0.1 to be accepted.
Created a local PEM key to use to secure the link. Probably need to delve deeper here…I have the feeling that before I’m done I’ll want to create a local CA and install its root certs into my local certificate stores as trusted.
Found a page that looks reasonable here.
Basics are in place. Still need to sign the secondary certs and test.
Looking to get my Linux NUC fully configured before Monday. I’ve got samba, RDP and VNC installed but not set up. I need to get at least one remote desktop protocol working for me and SSH set up with keys deployed.
I’ve started playing with MongoDB in C#. Much more to do there…need to pick a machine to host the server, get the server configured with a password and then start experimenting. The book I have uses Ruby as the language to drive MongoDB from. I’m currently working in C# and so I expect to start there.
Pulling together things for our upcoming short vacation at Disney with our Daughter. Lots of CF cards to be archived and cleared before we leave. I continued to be surprised by the performance gap between CF and SD cards.
I have my new PFSense based router loaded with its OS but not configured. Not sure that is going to make it this weekend. Hoping to get it in place relatively soon though. The existing router doesn’t seem to deal with the streaming we’re doing all that well and I expect the performance of the Core-i5 base machine that’s running this one to be vastly better.
My Functional C# book is here finally (took weeks and I’m spoiled by Amazon prime’s two day delivery). Reading through it at the moment. There are some interesting techniques in there, but I’m still not sold on full functional as a model for building real systems. Once I finish reading though it I’ll reflect some more.
Last weekend I finally finished getting my resume updated. I hasn’t been a terribly high priority, but I try to keep it ready for use at need.
Finished updating it and the power and internet goes out 🙂 It is posted on the site (under resume) now. I’m not actively looking as I’m happy where I’m at, but its always nice to have things in order in case something should come up unexpectedly.
Hopefully the internet will be back up today or tomorrow. It is disturbingly hard doing code development (even for sandbox stuff) without google and stack overflow on tap.