Tatham Oddie

A few weeks ago I spoke at Web Directions’ What Do You Know event. The event consisted of 10 speakers each doing a 5 minute presentation about some technique or idea that they find useful in web development.

Here’s my talk:

Ros Hodgekis won the night with her awesome email-related talk (all delivered with champagne glass still in hand):

I spoke to Carl + Richard on .NET Rocks! last week about using HTML5 and Silverlight together. We also covered a bit of Azure toward the end.

The episode is now live here:

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=687

JT – Sorry, I referred to you as “the other guy I presented with” and never intro-ed you.

Everyone else – JT is awesome.

Here.

Thanks to Sharkie’s ongoing organisation efforts, SydJS is a thriving monthly JavaScript meeting here in Sydney. This evening they welcomed me along to talk about Node.js on Windows. Afraid of a mostly non-Microsoft crowd I rocked up with all the anti-Unix jokes I had but they turned out to be all quite friendly and it was a fun little talk.

Here’s what I ran through…

Update 18th July 2011: The latest official builds of node.js now come with a Windows executable. This is thanks to support from Microsoft.

Cygwin

Cygwin gives you a full POSIX environment on Windows. It’s great for running apps designed for Unix, but it’s pretty heavy and not very … Windows-ey. It’d be like creating a “My Documents” folder on Ubuntu.

All that being said, it’s the simplest and most reliable way of getting node running on Windows.

Works for 0.2.6 -> 0.3.1 and 0.4.0+. Anything between 0.3.1 and 0.4.0 won’t compile.

The steps (and common pitfalls) are well documented at https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Building-node.js-on-Cygwin-(Windows)

Once you’ve got it running in Cygwin, if you jump out to a standard Windows command prompt and run c:\Cygwin\usr\local\bin\node.exe you’ll get a nice big error. More on this later.

MinGW

The next step up from Cygwin is to compile it under MinGW. MinGW (Minimal GNU for Windows) provides the bare minimum set of libraries required to make it possible to compile Unix-y apps on Windows, avoiding the full POSIX strangehold environment that Cygwin provides.

Works for 0.3.6+.

Again, there are well documented steps for this: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Building-node.js-on-mingw

Once you’ve got it running in MinGW, jump out to a standard Windows command prompt again and run c:\wherever-you-put-your-git-clone\node.exe you’ll get a nice big error.

Standalone

Now that we’ve compiled it with MinGW (you did that in the last step, right?) we’re ready to run it on Windows natively.

From a native Windows command prompt:

1. Create a new folder (mkdir node-standalone)
2. Copy in the node.exe you compiled in MinGW (xcopy c:\wherever-you-put-your-git-clone\node.exe node-standalone)
3. Copy in the MinGW helper libraries (xcopy c:\mingw\bin\lib*.dll node-standalone)
4. Run node-standalone\node
5. Voila! It works!

Running as a Service

Next up, I wanted to host node as a service, just like IIS. This way it’d start up with my machine, run in the background, restart automatically if it crashes and so forth.

This is where nssm, the non-sucking service manager, enters the picture. This tool lets you host a normal .exe as a Windows service.

Here are the commands I used to setup an instance of the SydJS website as a service:

nssm.exe install sydjs-node c:\where-i-put-node-standalone\node.exe c:\code\SydJS\server.js
net start sydjs-node

What We Achieved

We now have node.js, running natively on Windows, as a service. Enjoy!

(Just please don’t use this in production – it’s really not ready for that yet.)

Last REMIX AU I talked about geolocation and people loved it.

Now I want to take the talk to MIX in Vegas.

Please help: http://l.tath.am/gJuCTD

(Update: Session voting has closed and Microsoft have removed the page)

This weekend, off the back of Web Directions South, the awesome conference team also organised the Amped hack day. Sponsored by Adobe, Microsoft, PayPal, the Powerhouse Museum and Yahoo, there were a number of coding challenges throughout the day.

Aaron Powell (@slace), Brendan Forster (@shiftkey) and I attended in the capacity of mentors for the Windows Phone 7 track. In the end though, the ratio of mentors to participants and one awesome idea threw us down the path of competing instead.

Here’s what we built:

I was talking at a mile a minute because we only had 3 minutes to pitch in the final. (You might notice me glancing at the stopwatch in my left hand.)

Lucky we decided to compete, because in the end we won the whole day! That means we’re off to Web Directions East in Tokyo next month.

We’ll progressively release resources once we polish it up a bit more, take the mirrors down and let the smoke clear out. In the mean time, start with http://openconferenceprotocol.org.

At REMIX10, TechEd AU 2010 and TechEd NZ 2010 I’ve been showing some of what’s new in Internet Explorer 9 for developers.

Here are the slides and code: http://db.tt/JvEUu3o

The recording from TechEd New Zealand (the third and best version!) is available here: http://www.msteched.com/2010/NewZealand/WEB304

The recording from TechEd Australia (version 2 of the talk) is available here: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Australia/WEB204

And finally, here’s a recording from REMIX10 Australia (version 1 of the talk): http://www.microsoft.com/australia/remix/videos/default.aspx

If you’ve attended any of these talks, thank you for your feedback! The session evals at conferences are like crack for speakers. We read every single one, and then we read them again.

– Tats

At both the REMIX10 conference in Melbourne, Australia and more recently TechEd New Zealand I presented on geolocation for developers.

This was the abstract:

It’s pretty obvious by now that geolocation is a heavy player in the next wave of applications and APIs. Now is the time to learn how to take advantage of this information and add context to your own applications. In this session we’ll look at geolocation at every layer of the stack – from open protocols to operating system APIs, from the browser to Windows Phone 7. Building a compelling geo-enabled experience takes more than simple coordinates. In this session Tatham will introduce the basics of determining a user’s location and then delve into some of the opportunities and restrictions that are specific to mobile devices and their interfaces.

The talk was filmed at TechEd New Zealand, and is available for download here: http://www.msteched.com/2010/NewZealand/WEB205

(Note: this version has a Windows Phone 7 demo in it too.)

The first version of the talk was also filmed at REMIX10, and is available for download here: http://www.microsoft.com/australia/remix/videos/default.aspx

Here are some links to the code and resources (but you really want to watch the talk first):

• My demo code
  http://gist.github.com/423252
• The W3C Geolocation API spec
  http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html
• The Flickr findByLatLon WOEID API
  http://www.flickr.com/services/api/explore/?method=flickr.places.findByLatLon
• The core WOEID API
  http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/
• My recent locations
  http://tath.am/where
• The code that generates my personal location map
  http://github.com/tathamoddie/longitude/blob/master/longitude.rb

(Post last updated 7th Sep 2010 with new links and videos)

Over the last few months Damian Edwards and myself have been spending quite a bit of time building out a Model-View-Presenter framework for ASP.NET Web Forms.

Until now we’ve been pretty quiet about it all on our blogs because we were busy polishing off v1 and trying to get all the documentation in order. Nevertheless, the word has definitely started to spread as Scott Hanselman interviewed me about the library on this week’s Hanselminutes episode.

Listen to the podcast

Learn more about the library

Following up from my last post about the ASP.NET MVC vs ASP.NET WebForms debate, we’ve had a second TechTalk posted, also from TechEd Australia. In this video, Michael Kordahi, Damian Edwards and I sat down to discuss building fast, public websites. It was a bit of a teaser for our breakout session at the conference, which will be available online as a screencast in the next week or two.

If you’re interested in learning more about building large public websites on ASP.NET, remember that the full video from our recent REMIX session is still available online too.

Watch Online or Download