Sasha Sydoruk

SapphireSteel Software today formally announced Ruby In Steel Developer – the only professional Ruby programming environment for Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005.

Ruby In Steel Developer provides a full suite of editing and debugging tools for Ruby and Ruby On Rails (‘Rails’) developers. Product highlights include:

Editing
 Ruby and Rails (RHTML) code coloring
 Ruby and Rails code folding/collapsing
 Smart Indenting and code formatting
 Ruby auto-expand snippets

Debugging
 Ultra-fast integrated debugger
 Step-Into/Step-Over/Step-Out tracing
 ‘Drill-down’ watch variables
 Interactive ‘run and debug’ console

IntelliSense
 Accurate (by class and scope) member completion
 Parameter completion tooltips
 Class and method documentation in tooltips
 Code navigation drop-down combos over the editor

Ruby On Rails
 Import Existing Ruby On Rails Projects
 Rails Toolbar and script-runner dialogs
 RHTML / HTML switchable editor
 One-click Rails Debugger

A complete feature list can be found on the SapphireSteel web site:
Feature List

So, just as I was about to complain about how Scott Hanselman got me hooked on his I-can-stop-listening-to-this-podcast-any-time-I-want-I-just-don’t-want-to-right-now aka Hanselminutes and then left for his vacation and left me high and dry, desperately craving the sweet embrace of the new Hanselminutes, I noticed the new entry on my RSS reader in uTorrent.

There is no way – I thought to myself. He just came back from Africa. He did have enough time to come up with a new podcast. Must be something not very good…

But good it was. In fact, it was awesome. In his new podcast “Language Extensibility”, Scott talks about the future of IronPython and ASP.NET. This subject interested for quite a long time now. My interest was initially sparked by this white paper and this blog post. I tried to look for more information but came up with nothing.

Before you start with the “Language Extensibility”, I would strongly recommend listening to “Dynamic vs Compiled Languages” first, because it provides a lot of useful information that feeds nicely into the following podcast.

Once again, Scott proved that he knows his stuff and if you want to know what is happening in .Net world, his podcast is the podcast to listen to.

Thank you Scott!

This is just great. You can now hack websites with XSS in PDF files. Adobe Reader will executed any JavaScript passed to it through a query string. Here is a working example:

http://www.example.com/document.pdf#whatever_name_you_want=javascript:alert(document.cookie);

If you replace www.example.com and document.pdf with valid samples and click on the link, the browser will pop up, load the specified file from the specified site and show you your cookies for that site.

Adobe Reader v8.0 is not affected. Also, this does not work on some Win XP SP2 + IE 7.0 systems.

Found via Alek Levin.

Just to vent some of my frustration. Infragistics is a real piece of crap. If you even think about using it for your web project please stop right now. Get yourself Telerik controls and meet your deadlines, go home happy and proud of your work, kiss your wife and hug your kids.

But, if you enjoy debugging weird errors in somebody else’s code, horrible documentation, emailing to a non-existent support and reading support forums devoid of any helpful answers, go ahead and get Infragistics. And you know, while you are at it, sign up for an AOL account as well.

Just to make sure my message is clear – I hate Infragistics with passion. Infragistics is the Visual Source Safe of web controls for asp.net.

UPDATE:

Downgraded the ranting level to YELLOW.

If you have a Windows Mobile device, please do yourself a favor and throw away the piece of junk that Pocket IE is and get a real mobile browser instead.

Here it is – Opera Mobile

I have been using it for a couple of weeks now and cannot be happier. In my before-Opera-Mobile days, I didn’t see much point in mobile browsing because the experience was pretty bad. But everything is different now with OM. Even the sites that were not designed for mobile browsing, still look great. I can read my blog and my friends’ Live Spaces as well; none of this was possible with Pocket PC IE.

On a somewhat related note – Mobile Live (http://mobile.live.com) is awesome. Mobile Live Local is my favorite.

If you have a Windows Mobile device, please get a copy of Opera Mobile and you will not regret it.

New Year is coming and it is time to make new plans. Here is the list of the things I would like to learn more about in 2007.

1. 70-528: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0—Web-Based Client Development
2. Ruby On Rails
3. ASP.NET AJAX
4. JavaScript
5. Scrum

Here is a really good write up of the changes in SP1 for a web developer - Visual Studio 2005 SP1 released - details about changes in “web tools” area.

Here is a really good article on creating cross browser graphics with dojo.gfx.

I really like how they do charting; something like this might be quite helpful sometime.

Type.IsSubclassOf does not work with generic types because the generics are not inheritence.

Here is what worked for me:

genericMonkey.GetType().GetGenericTypeDefinition()

Here is more info on this topic:

• Reflecting Generics
• Generics FAQ: Best Practices

Well, it looks like the journey is over.

Mike Gunderloy of Larkware fame is trying to remove Microsoft and everything Microsoft related from his life.

Choosing to use Microsoft software as the basis for my work, whatever else it may do, contributes to the growth and health of Microsoft. It supplies funds for Microsoft’s continued initiatives in the area of intellectual property and DRM. And it seems to me that the ultimate consequence of these initiatives will be to limit my own freedom of action, both as a software user and a software developer.

This is taken from A Fresh Cup - Mike’s new blog that details his exploration of non-Microsoft technologies as a way to earn a living. So far it looks very intriguing and I am already subscribed to the feed. Currently Mike is evaluating Ubuntu and Ruby on Rails.

This reminds me somewhat of Softies On Rails. The guys from Softies On Rails were originally ASP.NET developers that later completely switched to Ruby On Rails and never looked back. Here is the post - Rails is (officially) life-changing. And here is some more - Why Rails? Part 1: Microsoft pisses me off, Why Rails? Part 2: All the Cool Kids Are Doing It, Why Rails? Part 3: Ruby, Why Rails? Part 4: Because It’s Free and Why Rails? Part 5: Because I Can Test It.

A Fresh Cup looks like it is going to be a great blog and I can’t wait for more posts. Good luck Mike on your journey and make sure you blog the details.