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		<div class="left">
 			<h2 class="silver">
				&quot;Working on the complexity that is always indirectly implied by simpilicity.&quot;
			</h2>
		

                  
			<h2 class="blog-title"><a name="1099928894407582088"></a>
				
				 Simple Log in Amplify 
				
				<span class="blog-byline">
				by: michael herndon, at: 11/02/2008 11:54:00 PM
				</span>
				
			 </h2>
			 <div class="blog-content">
				<p>As many people know rails has a simple logger inside the framework which really only outputs to the console. This comes in handy to see SQL output of your models, benchmarks and other cool little things inside the rails framework.&#160; </p>  <p>Of course people in the .Net realm tend to want things that scale and yet simplified for them.&#160; So output only to the console won't fly in larger projects.&#160; There is log4net, but you don't want to have it tightly coupled to the system, this caused an issue to one project that I worked on while still working for <a href="http://www.vivussoftware.com">Vivus Software</a> before I came <a href="http://www.opensourceconnections.com">OSC</a>. Where the framework and project both expected a certain version of Log4Net and there was no wrapper to put something else in place if need be.&#160; </p>   <span id="more-0"></span>    <p>So the solution was to Build small static Log class, that takes a list of an interface ILog (different than log4net's) and then use that interface to build a wrapper around using the root Logger for log4net. This way people can still build their own loggers for amplify or build their own Appenders for Log4Net and amplify will still be able to leverage this. Of course there is also conditional symbol LOG4NET in amplify if you wish to build the amplify framework without any dependency on the log4net library.&#160;&#160; </p>  <p>To me this is more like the Console.WriteLine that is needed for a class library vs what log4net is typically used for in an application where it also spits out the type information of a class. To help with the testing using mock object is the <a href="http://code.google.com/p/moq/" rel="tag">Moq (Mock You)</a> which uses the Lambda expression and gets rid of all that crazy record/playback junk to which I loathe.&#160; </p>   <pre class="code csharp">		public void Test()
		{
			var id = 0;
			Log.Sql(&quot;SELECT * FROM test&quot;);
			Log.Debug(&quot;The id is  {0} &quot;, id);
		}		


		[It(Order = 2), Should(&quot;have a debug method that logs debug statements&quot;)]
		public void Debug()
		{
			var calls = new List&lt;string&gt;();
			var log = CreateMockLog();

			log.Expect(o =&gt; o.Debug(Moq.It.IsAny&lt;string&gt;(), null))
				.Callback((string s, object[] args) =&gt; { calls.Add(s); });

			calls.Count.ShouldBe(0);

			// simple and easily called from anywhere... and lets you 
			// format messages like 
			// Log.Debug(&quot;item id: {0} could not be saved&quot;, id);
			Log.Debug(&quot;debug&quot;, null);
			calls.Count.ShouldBe(1);
			calls.Contains(&quot;debug&quot;).ShouldBeTrue();

			Log.IsDebug = false;

			// its turned off so it won't output anything
			Log.Debug(&quot;debug&quot;, null);
			calls.Count.ShouldBe(1);

			Log.IsDebug = true;
		}

		private static Mock&lt;ILog&gt; CreateMockLog()
		{
			var log = new Mock&lt;ILog&gt;();
			Log.Loggers.Clear();
			Log.Loggers.Add(log.Object);
			return log;
		}
</pre>

<p>Though keep in mind, one of the more trickier things to mock is the use of a method with the &quot;params&quot; keyword. I had to used a callback that you pass in an object array (object[] args) and I passed in null, otherwise the callback would not fire, and Lambdas don't allow the &quot;params&quot; keyword. Once that was figured out, I was able to use moq successfully to test the Log class successfully. </p>  <p class="blogger-labels">Labels: <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Amplify.aspx">Amplify</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/BHAG.aspx">BHAG</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/C#.aspx">C#</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Code.aspx">Code</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/CSharp.aspx">CSharp</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Mock Objects.aspx">Mock Objects</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Moq.aspx">Moq</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Unit Testing.aspx">Unit Testing</a></p>
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			<h2 class="blog-title"><a name="3448672103322818552"></a>
				
				 Gallio and Mb-Unit release v3.0.4
				
				<span class="blog-byline">
				by: michael herndon, at: 10/29/2008 02:11:00 AM
				</span>
				
			 </h2>
			 <div class="blog-content">
				<p>You can find many of the new <a href="http://blog.bits-in-motion.com/2008/10/announcing-gallio-and-mbunit-v304.html ">features over at Jeff Brown's blog</a>.&#160; Some of the cooler features of note is the integration with the visual studio testing system, wrapping testing for exceptions into a delegate, and data store called Ambient, in which you can store state for your tests.&#160; I've integrated this into amplify which is again, now on <a href="http://github.com/michaelherndon/amplify/tree/master">GitHub</a>. I did run into a few lil issues when setting this up though....</p> <span id="more-1"></span>    <p>The biggest issue was finding out how to turn a project into a test project in order to get the visual studio integration working for Gallio. Basically you need to make modifications to the .csproj file and add an XML element of &lt;ProjectTypeGuids&gt; into the first &lt;PropertyGroup&gt; of the file.&#160; </p>  <pre class="code xml">&lt;ProjectTypeGuids&gt;{3AC096D0-A1C2-E12C-1390-A8335801FDAB};
{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC} 
&lt;/ProjectTypeGuids&gt;</pre>

<p>After this, I could get the Gallio tests showing up in visual studio. </p>

<p><a href="http://lh3.ggpht.com/amptools/SQf-bZnOv5I/AAAAAAAAABM/xPj4ncLlA3g/s1600-h/Gallio-Test-View%5B2%5D.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="212" alt="Gallio-Test-View" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/amptools/SQf-b1n8cMI/AAAAAAAAABU/f0_tzJSs_Lg/Gallio-Test-View_thumb.png?imgmax=800" width="244" border="0" /></a> </p>

<p>Now this coupled with <a href="http://testdriven.net/" rel="tag">Test Driven .Net</a> really helps with the testing process especially since with certain versions of Visual Studio, Test Driven .Net will let you run visual studio's code coverage with Gallio. </p>

<p><a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/amptools/SQf-cYepypI/AAAAAAAAABY/2DfBfKGZbZY/s1600-h/CodeCoverage%5B2%5D.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="207" alt="CodeCoverage" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/amptools/SQf-cwXSDSI/AAAAAAAAABc/i2MQj8jhAQU/CodeCoverage_thumb.png?imgmax=800" width="244" border="0" /></a> </p>

<p>Again, one of the cooler features was the improvements to Mb-Unit's Asserts (which did change the API, but its all good, cause I wrap the Asserts that I use in BDD style mixin Methods, so I just need to change them in one place). The one really change of note would be adding Assert.Throw and Assert.Throw&lt;T&gt;, to which you can wrap throwing an exception into a delegate.</p>

<p><a href="http://lh6.ggpht.com/amptools/SQf-di2keqI/AAAAAAAAABg/KCLE5wy_nU4/s1600-h/WrappingExceptions%5B2%5D.png"><img style="border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px" height="178" alt="WrappingExceptions" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/amptools/SQf-eB-bggI/AAAAAAAAABk/Tl816nR7vkw/WrappingExceptions_thumb.png?imgmax=800" width="244" border="0" /></a> </p>

<p>All in all nice improvements to both Gallio and Mb-Unit, which are now incorporated into amplify. </p>  <p class="blogger-labels">Labels: <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Amplify.aspx">Amplify</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/BDD.aspx">BDD</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/BHAG.aspx">BHAG</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/C#.aspx">C#</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Code.aspx">Code</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/CSharp.aspx">CSharp</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Gallio.aspx">Gallio</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Mb-Unit.aspx">Mb-Unit</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Mixins.aspx">Mixins</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Unit Testing.aspx">Unit Testing</a></p>
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			<h2 class="blog-title"><a name="1045031666772907229"></a>
				
				 Getting the |DataDirectory| folder in C sharp
				
				<span class="blog-byline">
				by: michael herndon, at: 8/14/2008 02:19:00 PM
				</span>
				
			 </h2>
			 <div class="blog-content">
				<p>One of the cool things about sql server express's connection strings is the ability to relatively path database files for sql express databases. Often one might see something in the connection string that looks like " AttachDbFilename=|DataDirectory|\file.mdf ".  The pipes and DataDirectory is parsed to equate to a relative data directory file path that changes depending on the application type (i.e. an application deployed by click once, vs an application that is installed to a folder). </p>  

<p>However sometimes you might want to know where that data directory is, like in my case, I want to take a look at a connection string and attempt to create a database based off the connection string in order to speed up development using database migrations. This could also come in handy deploying small applications. </p>  

<p>So after some research via google, I found <a href="http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=702378&amp;SiteID=1">this gem on msdn about where the DataDirectory is</a>, though not guaranteed to be accurate. It basically follows 3 simple hierarchal rules.  If the AppDomain.SetData method has been used, then the directory is set there. Otherwise if the application is a click once application the data directory is set or its in the application root folder.  </p>  <p>So below is what the code might possibly look like in order to get the applications data directory no matter what type of application it is and it gives you ability to set the DataDirectory as well.  </p>  <p></p> 

<pre class="code csharp">namespace Amplify
{
 using System;
 using System.Configuration;
 using System.Collections.Generic;
 using System.Collections.Specialized;
 using System.Deployment;
 using System.Deployment.Application;
 using System.IO;
 using System.Text;
 using System.Reflection;
 using System.Web;

 public class ApplicationContext {

  private static NameValueContext s_properties;


  public static bool IsWebsite { get; internal set; }

  static ApplicationContext()
  {
   IsWebsite = (System.Web.HttpContext.Current != null);
   
  }

  public static string DataDirectory
  {
   get
   {
    string dataDirectory = GetProperty("DataDirectory") as string;

    if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(dataDirectory))
    {
     dataDirectory = AppDomain
      .CurrentDomain.GetData("DataDirectory") as string;

     if (dataDirectory == null)
     {
      if (ApplicationDeployment.IsNetworkDeployed)
       dataDirectory = ApplicationDeployment
        .CurrentDeployment.DataDirectory;
      else
       dataDirectory = Path.GetDirectoryName(
        Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly()
         .GetName().CodeBase);
     }
     dataDirectory = dataDirectory.Replace(@"file:\", "");
     SetProperty("DataDirectory", dataDirectory);
    }
    return dataDirectory;
   }
   set
   {
    string dataDirectory = GetProperty("DataDirectory") as string;
    value = value.Replace(@"file:\", value);

    if (!System.IO.Directory.Exists(dataDirectory))
     System.IO.Directory.CreateDirectory(dataDirectory);

    SetProperty("DataDirectory", value);
    AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetData("DataDirectory", value);
   }
  }


  public static object GetProperty(string propertyName)
  {
   if (IsWebsite)
    return HttpContext.Current.Application[propertyName];
   else
    return Context[propertyName];
  }

  
  public static void SetProperty(string propertyName, object value)
  {
   if (IsWebsite)
    HttpContext.Current.Application[propertyName] = value;
   else
    Context[propertyName] = value;
  }

  private static NameValueContext Context
  {
   get
   {
    if (s_properties == null)
     s_properties = new NameValueContext();
    return s_properties;
   }
  }
 }
}</pre><p class="blogger-labels">Labels: <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Amplify.aspx">Amplify</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/C#.aspx">C#</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Code.aspx">Code</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/CSharp.aspx">CSharp</a></p>
			 </div>
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			<h2 class="blog-title"><a name="458120713693871790"></a>
				
				 Amplify&#39;s WCF Twitter API Client Library v0.2
				
				<span class="blog-byline">
				by: michael herndon, at: 7/28/2008 12:33:00 AM
				</span>
				
			 </h2>
			 <div class="blog-content">
				<p>After some playing around with WCF and Flickr, I decided to move everything internally for the twitter library to use WCF with it's <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.servicemodel.servicecontractattribute.aspx">ServiceContract</a>.&#160; It was more of a pain that initially thought it would be. WCF is amazingly customizable but still has a couple of downfalls thanks to REST and people not writing their API for all technologies.&#160; </p>   <p>The biggest issue is that Twitter throws an Http 403 unknown exception when you call a page and something is incorrect in the url.&#160; Well with WCF, it throws a <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.servicemodel.security.messagesecurityexception.aspx">System.ServiceModel.Security.MessageSecurityException</a>, due to the url returning a status code other than 200, and it wraps the inner exceptions inside of that. </p>   <p>I'm sure there is a better way to get around this, but each proxy call is now wrapped by a try/catch in the client class methods in order to check for the <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.servicemodel.security.messagesecurityexception.aspx">MessageSecurityException</a>, then it checks the inner exception and determines if twitter sent back a response error message. If it does the library now throws a twitter exception with error information, otherwise you would only see the WCF exception that would mask the real issue.&#160; </p>   <p>Also I renamed the &quot;Service&quot; classes to &quot;Client&quot; seeing that is the proper term for them.&#160; The tests are now updated as well to reflect the changes.&#160; The tests are a good way of seeing of how to use the library. Last but not least, methods now return arrays instead of lists in order to be more REST friendly. </p>  <p></p>  <pre class="code csharp">using Amplify.Twitter;
using System.Security;

// ... stuff

public void Test() 
{
	try {
		string temp = &quot;password&quot;;
	
		Twitter.SetCredentials(&quot;Username&quot;, temp);

		StatusClient client = Twitter.CreateStatusClient();
 		// or StatusClient client = new StatusClient(&quot;Username&quot;, temp);

        	Status[] tweets = service.GetUserTimeline();
	} catch (TwitterException ex) {
		Log.Write(ex.ToString()); // write the twitter rest error. 
	}

}</pre>  <p class="blogger-labels">Labels: <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Amplify.aspx">Amplify</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/BHAG.aspx">BHAG</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/C#.aspx">C#</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Code.aspx">Code</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/CSharp.aspx">CSharp</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/JSON.aspx">JSON</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/REST.aspx">REST</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Twitter.aspx">Twitter</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/WCF.aspx">WCF</a></p>
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			<h2 class="blog-title"><a name="6391037880199004989"></a>
				
				 Use C# to determine where and what version of java is installed
				
				<span class="blog-byline">
				by: michael herndon, at: 7/22/2008 08:56:00 AM
				</span>
				
			 </h2>
			 <div class="blog-content">
				<p>While writing an MsBuild Task that is calling a jar file, there was a need to find out information on the java runtime on the local machine, otherwise when I do publish the task, the developer would be required to install a specific version of java in a specific location.&#160; That kind of thing just doesn't fly if you're writing on a 64 bit machine due to having dual &quot;Program Files&quot; folders, one for 64 bit programs, the other for x86.&#160; Not only that, it really increases complexity to the end user/developer who might want to use the MsBuild Task. </p>  <p>So after poking around in the registry, I found out there was information about the Java Runtime, including which version is currently the default, and where the file path is. I wrote a singleton class that looks at the registry and grabs that information.&#160; Though usually singleton generally only checks to see if the instance is null and then instantiates it, the code below checks the registry during the &quot;Get&quot; method. </p>  <pre class="code csharp">namespace Amplify.Tasks
{
	using System;
	using System.Collections.Generic;
	using System.Linq;
	using System.Text;

	using Microsoft.Win32;

	public class JavaInfo
	{
		private static JavaInfo instance = null;

		protected JavaInfo()
		{
			this.CurrentVersion = &quot;&quot;;
			this.Installed = false;
			this.Path = &quot;&quot;;
		}

		public string CurrentVersion { get; set; }
		
		public bool Installed { get; set; }
		
		public string Path { get; set; }


		public static JavaInfo Get()
		{
			if (instance == null)
			{
				RegistryKey key = Registry.LocalMachine;
				JavaInfo info = new JavaInfo();

				string location = @&quot;Software\JavaSoft\Java Runtime Environment&quot;;
				RegistryKey environment = key.OpenSubKey(location);
				if (environment != null)
				{

					info.Installed = true;
					object value = environment.GetValue(&quot;CurrentVersion&quot;);
					if (value != null)
					{
						info.CurrentVersion = value.ToString();
						RegistryKey currentVersion = environment.OpenSubKey(info.CurrentVersion);
						if (currentVersion != null)
						{
							value = currentVersion.GetValue(&quot;JavaHome&quot;);

							if (value != null)
								info.Path = value.ToString();
						}
					}
				}

				instance = info;
			}

			return instance;
		}
	}
}</pre>  <p class="blogger-labels">Labels: <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/C#.aspx">C#</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Code.aspx">Code</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/CSharp.aspx">CSharp</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Java.aspx">Java</a></p>
			 </div>
			 <div class="blog-footer">
				<a class="comment-link" href="https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7043853799247804655&postID=6391037880199004989"location.href=https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7043853799247804655&postID=6391037880199004989;><span style="text-transform:lowercase">0 Comments</span></a>
				
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			<h2 class="blog-title"><a name="8164722880411458481"></a>
				
				 Using WCF to access the Flickr JSON API
				
				<span class="blog-byline">
				by: michael herndon, at: 7/17/2008 06:40:00 AM
				</span>
				
			 </h2>
			 <div class="blog-content">
				<p>Even though there are quite a few opensource .Net libraries REST API out there, and a really impressive one for Flickr, they tend to never evolve or fork to use the newer framework technologies.&#160; I think its great that they support 1.0, 2.0, and mono, but why not fork and support WCF?&#160; I think part of the problem that .Net 3.5 use is not wide spread as it should be is not only information overload and bad naming for extension libraries, but also lack of opensource support to provide libraries and basis for current technology.&#160; </p>  <p>Flickr tends to be a little more tricky to use when calling it than some other REST APIs. WCF is a cool technology, but needs to be massaged when using it with Flickr due to a couple of gotchas and not so obvious things about WCF. In order to use Flickr, you need to register for an api_key and a shared secret code which is used to create an MD5 hash. You also need to create that MD5 each time you call a method, using the url parameters in a certain way. </p>  <p>There are also a few not so obvious factors about using the JSON part of Flickr. All of the .Net libraries I've seen so far, use XML. While C# is king of parsing&#160; XML, JSON tends to be more compact, which means less expense over the wire, though it might mean more time parsing once on the developers end point. So there are tradeoffs to using it. </p>  <p>When I created the classes needed to use WCF to call Flickr, I have the actual &quot;DataContract&quot; object (DTO, Data Transfer Object), A Hash (Dictionary&lt;string, object&gt;) for adding the parameters to create the MD5 signature, A base class for creating the WCF proxy, a custom &quot;WebContentTypeMapper&quot;, The &quot;ServiceContract&quot; interface, the actual &quot;Client class&quot;, and a mixins class for creating the MD5. </p>  <p>Here are some of the gotchas that I ran into while getting WCF to work with Flickr. </p>  <p></p>  <ol>   <li>Flickr makes you create a md5 hash to send with every call for ALL parameters in alphabetical order using your &quot;Shared Secret&quot; Code as part of the md5.&#160;&#160; </li>    <li>Flickr's Json response &quot;Content-Type&quot; header is sent not as &quot;application/json&quot; but as &quot;text/plain&quot; which equates to &quot;Raw&quot; in WCF lingo.&#160; </li>    <li>The response object is wrapped and not obvious when it comes to json how the DataContract object should be formed.&#160; </li>    <li>Flickr will wrap the json response in a javascript function unless you pass in the parameter &quot;nojsoncallback=1&quot; </li> </ol>  <p>To get around number one, I created an extension method that takes a Hash (Dictionary&lt;string, object&gt;) and adds method that converts the parameters into a MD5 string. </p>  <pre class="code csharp">namespace Amplify.Linq
{
	using System;
	using System.Collections.Generic;
	using System.Linq;
	using System.Text;

#if STANDALONE
	public class Hash : Dictionary&lt;string, object&gt;
	{

		


	}
#endif 
}
// different file
	
namespace Amplify.Linq
{
	using System;
	using System.Collections.Generic;
	using System.Linq;
	using System.Security.Cryptography;
	using System.Text;

	using Amplify.Linq;

	public static class Mixins
	{

	

		public static string ToMD5(this Hash obj, string secret)
		{
			var query = from item in obj
						orderby item.Key ascending
						select item.Key + item.Value.ToString(); 

			StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder(secret, 2048);

			foreach (string item in query)
				builder.Append(item);

			MD5CryptoServiceProvider crypto = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider();
			byte[] bytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(builder.ToString());
			byte[] hashedBytes = crypto.ComputeHash(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
			return BitConverter.ToString(hashedBytes).Replace(&quot;-&quot;, &quot;&quot;).ToLower();
		}

	}
}</pre>

<p>Well Gotcha number two, took a bit of research to figure it out. The error I got was that it was looking for Json or XML but could not do anything with &quot;Raw&quot;. So the solution is to create a custom binding with a custom WebContentTypeManager. </p>

<pre class="code csharp">namespace Amplify.Flickr
{
	using System.ServiceModel;
	using System.ServiceModel.Channels;
	using System.Runtime.Serialization;
	using System.ServiceModel.Web;

	public class JsonContentMapper : WebContentTypeMapper
	{
		public override WebContentFormat GetMessageFormatForContentType(string contentType)
		{
			return WebContentFormat.Json;
		}
	}
}

// different file

namespace Amplify.Flickr
{
	using System;
	using System.Collections.Generic;
	using System.Linq;
	using System.Text;
	using System.ServiceModel;
	using System.ServiceModel.Channels;
	using System.ServiceModel.Description;
	using System.ServiceModel.Web;

	using Amplify.Linq;

	public class FlickrClient&lt;T&gt; 
	{
		protected string Secret { get; set; }

		protected string Key { get; set; }

		protected string Token { get; set; }

		protected string Url { get; set; }

		protected T Proxy { get; set; }


		public FlickrClient(string key, string secret)
		{
			this.Key = key;
			this.Secret = secret;
			this.Url = &quot;http://api.flickr.com/services/rest&quot;;
			this.Proxy = this.InitializeProxy();
		}

		public FlickrClient(string key, string secret, string token)
			:this(key, secret)
		{
			this.Token = token;
		}

		protected virtual T InitializeProxy()
		{
			// using custom wrapper
			CustomBinding binding = new CustomBinding(new WebHttpBinding());
			WebMessageEncodingBindingElement property =	binding.Elements.Find&lt;WebMessageEncodingBindingElement&gt;();
			property.ContentTypeMapper = new JsonContentMapper();
			

			ChannelFactory&lt;T&gt; channel = new ChannelFactory&lt;T&gt;(
				binding, this.Url);

			channel.Endpoint.Behaviors.Add( new WebHttpBehavior());
			return channel.CreateChannel();
		}

	}
}</pre>

<p>The 3rd issue, to know that all objects are wrapped in a &quot;Response&quot; object. To create a DataContract for the getFrob method on flickr, it took looking at the json to see what it was returning. The object below is the basic form of the Json object that is returned, it also includes the properties in case an error object is returned. </p>

<pre class="code csharp">	using System;
	using System.Collections.Generic;
	using System.Linq;
	using System.Text;
	using System.Runtime.Serialization;

	[DataContract]
	public class FrobResponse 
	{
		[DataMember(Name = &quot;frob&quot;)]
		public JsonObject Frob { get; set; }

		[DataContract(Name = &quot;frob&quot;)]
		public class JsonObject
		{
			[DataMember(Name = &quot;_content&quot;)]
			public string Content { get; set; }

		}

		[DataMember(Name = &quot;stat&quot;)]
		public string Status { get; set; }

		[DataMember(Name = &quot;code&quot;)]
		public int Code { get; set; }

		[DataMember(Name = &quot;message&quot;)]
		public string Message { get; set; }
	}

	// different file


	using System;
	using System.Collections.Generic;
	using System.Linq;
	using System.Text;
	using System.ServiceModel;
	using System.ServiceModel.Web;

	[ServiceContract]
	public interface IAuthClient
	{
		[OperationContract,
			WebInvoke(
				UriTemplate = &quot;/?method=flickr.auth.getFrob&amp;format=json&amp;nojsoncallback=1&amp;api_key={key}&amp;api_sig={signature}&quot;,
				ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json,
				BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Bare)]
		FrobResponse GetFrob(string signature, string key);

		[OperationContract,
			WebInvoke(
				UriTemplate = &quot;/?method=flickr.auth.getToken&amp;format=json&amp;nojsoncallback=1&amp;api_key={key}&amp;frob={frob}&amp;api_sig={signature}&quot;,
				ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json,
				BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedResponse)]
		Auth GetToken(string signature, string key, string frob);
	}


	// the actual client class.  

	using System;
	using System.Collections.Generic;
	using System.Linq;
	using System.Text;

	using Amplify.Linq;


	public class AuthClient : FlickrClient&lt;IAuthClient&gt;
	{

		public AuthClient(string key, string secret)
			:base(key, secret)
		{ }

		public AuthClient(string key, string secret, string token)
			:base(key, secret, token)
		{ }

		public string GetFrob()
		{
			string md5 = new Hash() {
				{&quot;api_key&quot;, this.Key},
				{&quot;format&quot;, &quot;json&quot;},
				{&quot;method&quot;, &quot;flickr.auth.getFrob&quot;},
				{&quot;nojsoncallback&quot;, 1}
			}.ToMD5(this.Secret);

			FrobResponse response = this.Proxy.GetFrob(md5, this.Key);
			if (response.Code &gt; 0)
				throw new Exception(response.Message);

			return response.Frob.Content;
		}
	}</pre>  <p class="blogger-labels">Labels: <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Amplify.aspx">Amplify</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/C#.aspx">C#</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Code.aspx">Code</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/CSharp.aspx">CSharp</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Flickr.aspx">Flickr</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/JSON.aspx">JSON</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/REST.aspx">REST</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/WCF.aspx">WCF</a></p>
			 </div>
			 <div class="blog-footer">
				<a class="comment-link" href="https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7043853799247804655&postID=8164722880411458481"location.href=https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7043853799247804655&postID=8164722880411458481;><span style="text-transform:lowercase">0 Comments</span></a>
				
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			<h2 class="blog-title"><a name="1989566401714559482"></a>
				
				 Sample Mixins for HttpRequestBase to use with Asp.Net MVC
				
				<span class="blog-byline">
				by: michael herndon, at: 7/16/2008 12:40:00 AM
				</span>
				
			 </h2>
			 <div class="blog-content">
				<p>Being a semi avid user of rails for my day job, you tend to miss a couple of things that rails has that is not in Asp.Net's MVC framework. It is a great start and the control over the html (minus laziness of whoever ever developed their &quot;Html.DropDownList&quot; extension method, grrr INDENT YOUR NEW LINES!!), is much greater than what webforms gives you. One of the missing things that I miss is the request.xhr?, request.post?, etc methods that end to be helpful when deciding if this is an AJAX call or an actual action call to return the correct page. </p>  <p>So how do you determine if the request is an ajax request or just a regular page request. What about enforcing that a page is SSL?&#160; What about doing different things depending if the request is a GET or POST?&#160; </p>  <p>So after some googling about headers, rails, and such: here are the first go around of extension methods for HttpRequestBase that should come in handy. </p>  <pre class="code csharp">public static class ControllerMixins
{

		public static bool IsPost(this HttpRequestBase obj)
		{
			return obj.Headers[&quot;REQUEST_METHOD&quot;].ToLower() == &quot;post&quot;;
		}

		public static bool IsGet(this HttpRequestBase obj)
		{
			return obj.Headers[&quot;REQUEST_METHOD&quot;].ToLower() == &quot;get&quot;;
		}

		public static bool IsXhr(this HttpRequestBase obj)
		{
			string value = obj.Headers[&quot;HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH&quot;];
			return (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(value) &amp;&amp; value.ToLower() == &quot;xmlhttprequest&quot;);
		}

		public static bool IsSSL(this HttpRequestBase obj)
		{
			return obj.Headers[&quot;HTTPS&quot;] == &quot;on&quot; ||
				obj.Headers[&quot;'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO'&quot;] == &quot;https&quot;;
		}
}</pre>  <p class="blogger-labels">Labels: <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Asp.Net.aspx">Asp.Net</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Asp.Net Mvc.aspx">Asp.Net Mvc</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/C#.aspx">C#</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Code.aspx">Code</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/CSharp.aspx">CSharp</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Mixins.aspx">Mixins</a></p>
			 </div>
			 <div class="blog-footer">
				<a class="comment-link" href="https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7043853799247804655&postID=1989566401714559482"location.href=https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7043853799247804655&postID=1989566401714559482;><span style="text-transform:lowercase">0 Comments</span></a>
				
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			<h2 class="blog-title"><a name="3907268195622759157"></a>
				
				 Amplify&#39;s TwitterN, Yet Another C# Twitter REST API Library
				
				<span class="blog-byline">
				by: michael herndon, at: 7/13/2008 03:08:00 PM
				</span>
				
			 </h2>
			 <div class="blog-content">
				<p><a href="http://code.google.com/p/twittern">http://code.google.com/p/twittern</a></p>  <p>I put together a C# twitter library that uses WCF's <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.serialization.datacontractattribute.aspx">DataContract</a> &amp; <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.serialization.datamemberattribute.aspx">DataMembers</a> and .Net 3.5's <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.serialization.json.datacontractjsonserializer.aspx">DataContractJsonSerializer</a>.&#160; Its currently in alpha stage, as I need to finish writing the tests, documentation and make a simple WPF client for twitter.&#160; I needed a twitter library for a personal &quot;secret&quot; project of mine and found that most twitter libraries do not keep up with the twitter API and break when using them. Plus they tend to go to great lengths when parsing the xml.&#160; Unfortunately I do not know if this will work on mono yet. It seems that they have &quot;<a href="http://www.mono-project.com/WCF">Olive</a>&quot;, which is mono's version of WCF and I've seen where they have a path for the &quot;DataContractJsonSerializer&quot;.&#160; If there are any one familiar enough with mono, please by all means use the code, join the project.&#160; </p>  <p>One design decision that I made was to use Json rather than xml as its more compact and less data to transfer.&#160; I used WCF because with DataContract &amp; DataMembers you can parse Json and you can name your properties the property way with Pascal Case properties and then tell wcf what attributes of json they represent. This way you don't have properties that look like ruby like &quot;screen_name&quot; or&#160; &quot;profile_sidebar_border_color&quot; in your <a href="http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/dataTransferObject.html">Data Transfer Object</a> in order to deserialize the Json response from twitter. </p>  <p>&#160;</p>  <p>A basic sample of how to use the library is below. </p>  <pre class="code csharp">

using Amplify.Twitter;
using System.Security;

// ... stuff

public void Test() 
{
	SecureString password = new SecureString();
	string temp = "password";
	for (var i = 0; i &lt; temp.Length; i++)
		password.AppendChar(temp[i]);
	
	password.MakeReadOnly();
	Twitter.SetCredentials("Username", password);

	StatusService service = Twitter.CreateStatusService();
 	// or StatusService service = new StatusService("Username", password);

        List&lt;Status&gt; tweets = service.GetUserTimeline("MichaelHerndon");
}

</pre>  <p class="blogger-labels">Labels: <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Amplify.aspx">Amplify</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/C#.aspx">C#</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/CSharp.aspx">CSharp</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/DataContractJsonSerializer.aspx">DataContractJsonSerializer</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/JSON.aspx">JSON</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/REST.aspx">REST</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Twitter.aspx">Twitter</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/WCF.aspx">WCF</a></p>
			 </div>
			 <div class="blog-footer">
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			<h2 class="blog-title"><a name="7486419527659460638"></a>
				
				 Pursuit of Rails like Active Record for C#
				
				<span class="blog-byline">
				by: michael herndon, at: 6/12/2008 05:25:00 PM
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				<p>After trying <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb425822.aspx" rel="tag">linq to sql</a>, <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa697427(VS.80).aspx" rel="tag">the ado.net entity framework</a>, php's <a href="http://codeigniter.com/">code igniter</a> framework, php's <a href="http://www.cakephp.org/" rel="rel">cake framework</a>; I'm realizing how much of rails really depends on the inner workings of ruby itself to do what it is able to do.&#160; I've looked and poked around <a href="http://www.cakephp.org/" rel="rel">Castle's Active Record</a> and it does some heavy lifting, but it still seems to deviate too much from rails's version of active record.&#160; One of the key things of porting a concept, is to keep it as close as possible so that developers can rely more on the same convention without having to relearn the concept in a different domain specific language.&#160; Plus, I cringe a little when it leans too much on using <a href="http://www.hibernate.org/343.html" rel="tag">NHibernate</a>. </p>  <p>It goes back to the whole &quot;Don't make me think principle&quot;, that developers often to have to keep in mind when developing for an end user.&#160; At first, I was thinking about creating a port would be simpler using linq with either &quot;linq to sql&quot; or the currently released &quot;ado.net entity framework&quot;. After investigating, it would take a ton of invested time to either write a code generator for visual studio that would changed the way the pocos (plain old c# objects) are generated in order in corporate the changes. Also not to mention that these frameworks heavily rely on a repository pattern, that would probably cause too much pain to change for just one developer.&#160; </p>  <p>Square one?&#160; Well close enough. C# and ruby have different strengths and weaknesses. However with enough thought and using C#3.0, I think its completely possible to get something that closely resembles rails enough to give anyone who has worked with rails, something that would be familiar if they needed to work on a project in .Net.&#160; </p>  <p class="blogger-labels">Labels: <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Active Record.aspx">Active Record</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/BHAG.aspx">BHAG</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/C#.aspx">C#</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/CSharp.aspx">CSharp</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Linq To Sql.aspx">Linq To Sql</a>, <a rel='tag' href="http://www.amptools.net/labels/Rails.aspx">Rails</a></p>
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