For those of you that follow me on twitter (@gotwoods is my handle) you may have seen that I have been working on a new open source project called FluentBuild which I am happy to announce is in Beta. This project has kept me quite busy lately but the core of the app is now done.

FluentBuild is a .NET fluent language around builds. It makes doing builds way easier than in Nant, MsBuild, and (in my mind) other build languages. With it you can now write a build file in C# (other language support on the way) within visual studio which allows you to get intellisense, refactoring support, and you are even able to debug your build files.

The project site is http://code.google.com/p/fluent-build/

I just finished putting together a demo video. I recorded my screen at high resolution so full screen viewing is recommended and the volume recorded a bit loud so turn down your speakers to start.

One of my frustrations with Silverlight has been that the async model is rammed down your throat. I understand the reasoning that it is good to have the UI thread responsive while long running calls are happening. But to me that is something that I code and I control.

The thing that gets me is that there are times where several network operations may have to happen in sequence. Here is a simple contrived example:

var service = new VehicleRentalService();
if (service.AreVehiclesAvailableToRent())
  {
  txtNumberOfCars.Text = service.GetNumberOfCarsForRent();
  if (service.IsTheFlakyOnlineRentalServiceRunning())
      {
       btnBookOnline.Enabled = true;
      }
  }

Now for the above example I would run all this on 1 background thread (leaving the UI nice and responsive) and make sure that I properly delegate the control changes to the UI thread (as controls are not thread safe).

Silverlight forces us to async the calls which leads to a lot of functions that chain together. I find this makes the code a lot harder to read and a lot harder to understand. Here is a hand written rewrite of the above example:

public function Start()
{

}

public function VehiclesAvailableToRentResponseRecieved(object sender, VehiclesAvailableToRentCompletedEventArgs e)
{
   if (e.Result)
      {
      service.GetNumberOfCarsForRent();
      service.IsTheFlakyOnlineRentalServiceRunning();
     }
}

public function NumberOfCarsForRentResponseRecieved(object sender, NumberOfCarsForRentCompletedEventArgs e)
{
    Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(delegate { txtNumberOfCars.Text = e.Result });
}

public function IsTheFlakyOnlineRentalServiceRunningResponseRecieved(object sender, IsTheFlakyOnlineRentalServiceRunningResponseRecievedCompletedEventArgs e)
{
    Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(delegate { btnBookOnline.Enabled = e.Result });
}

(Some may argue that there should be a GetSystemStatus method on the service that returns all this info to which I would probably agree. For the sake of this post though I am going to run with it).

So the Silverlight code is longer, harder to read, and harder to maintain. It does have the benefit of getting the number of cars for rent and checking if the online booking system is running at the same time which is a nice plus.

For an example a log more complicated than this one I was using a WebRequest to converse with a server in a very back and forth fashion and found that the code quickly became very hard to read so I set about to change things. My idea was to create a class that uses async calls in the background but appear to be synchronous by blocking the caller. i.e.

string customerData = Request.GetResponse(“http://www.dummy.com/getcustomer.aspx”, “CustomerId=1″);
string customerAddress = Request.GetResponse(“http://www.dummy.com/getaddress.aspx”, ParseOutAddressId(customerData));

PLEASE DO NOT USE THIS CODE AS IT DOES NOT WORK (hence the post title):

    public class SyncRequestResponse
    {
        ManualResetEvent _requestCompleted;
        private WebRequest _request;
        private string _postData;
        private Uri _requestUrl;
        private static string _result;

        public string GetResponse(Uri requestUrl, string postData)
        {
            _requestCompleted=new ManualResetEvent(false);
            _requestCompleted.Reset();
            _postData = postData;
            _requestUrl = requestUrl;
            StartRequest();
            _requestCompleted.WaitOne(1000); //block current thread until the response is received or the timeout is reached
            return _result; //the result should be filled now
        }

        private void StartRequest()
        {
            _request = WebRequest.Create(_requestUrl);
            _request.ContentType = “application/x-www-form-urlencoded”;
            _request.Method = “POST”;
            _request.BeginGetRequestStream(GetRequestStreamCompleted, null);
        }

        private void GetRequestStreamCompleted(IAsyncResult result)
        {
                //request stream has returned so fill it
                var content = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(_postData);
                var stream = _request.EndGetRequestStream(result );
                stream.Write(content, 0, content.Length);
                stream.Close();
                _request.BeginGetResponse(GetResponseFromRequest, null);
        }

        private void GetResponseFromRequest(IAsyncResult ar)
        {
            var response = _request.EndGetResponse(ar);
            var sr = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
            _result = sr.ReadToEnd();
            _requestCompleted.Set();
        }
    }

What I quickly found was that the second my WaitOne() line ran was that the background methods would also hang. After a lot of mucking about and some research I found out one very important thing. The WebRequest and WebResponse methods call interacts with the browsers plugin API which runs on…. the UI thread. So by blocking the UI thread it also blocks any calls to the plugin API which blocks my WebRequest methods.

So to solve this I could probably place my sync wrapper onto a background thread to implement the back and forth conversations and then raise an event when it is done but after mucking around it just makes things too complex to read, follow, and maintain. It may still have its uses one day… but it was not as clean as I would like

Solution?
My main issue is when you have async methods that change so for WebRequest calls I decided to inline the callback methods it used. Again it is ugly but I find it simpler to follow a linear action:

public string GetCustomerDataAndBindItToTextBox(Uri requestUrl, string postData)
            {
                var request = WebRequest.Create(requestUrl);
                request.ContentType = “application/x-www-form-urlencoded”;
                request.Method = “POST”;
                request.BeginGetRequestStream(delegate(IAsyncResult result)
                                                   {
                                                       byte[] content = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(postData);
                                                       Stream stream = request.EndGetRequestStream(result);
                                                       stream.Write(content, 0, content.Length);
                                                       stream.Close();
                                                       request.BeginGetResponse(delegate (IAsyncResult result2)
                                                                                     {
                                                                                         WebResponse response = request.EndGetResponse(result2);
                                                                                         var sr = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
                                                                                         this.txtCustomer.Text = sr.ReadToEnd();
                                                                                     }, null);
                                                   }, null);

            }

Over the last week I have been playing around with Silverlight and the Model View View Model (MVVM) pattern that I have heard such great things about. So far it is a really nice way to separate the UI logic from the UI and make it easily testable.

One of the things I loved in Silverlight was the support for design time data. Design time data allowed you to specify dummy data that would appear in VS/Blend so that you could work with the UI with sample data. This saves so much time as now you don’t have to open the app, (possibly login), navigate to the area you are working on, and then see if you have it the way you want.

The challenge was now to combine MVVM and this dummy design time data. It is a lot simpler than I thought. I simply created a dummy View Model that inherited from my runtime VM and loaded it with sample data.

Runtime ViewModel:
public class SummaryViewModel : BaseViewModel
    {
        public int MoviesOwned { get; set; }
        public int MoviesCurrentlyRentedOut { get; set; }
        public ObservableCollection<Category> Categories { get; set; }

        private readonly MovieServiceClient _service;
        public SummaryViewModel()
        {
            _service = new MovieServiceClient();
            _service.GetAllCategoriesCompleted += GetAllCategoriesCompleted;
            if (!System.ComponentModel.DesignerProperties.IsInDesignTool)            
                _service.GetAllCategoriesAsync();
        }

        private void GetAllCategoriesCompleted(object sender, GetAllCategoriesCompletedEventArgs e)
        {
            Categories = e.Result;
            InvokePropertyChanged(“Categories”);
        }
    }

Design Time View Model:
  public class DesignTimeSummaryViewModelViewModel : SummaryViewModel
    {
        public DesignTimeSummaryViewModelViewModel()
        {
            Categories = new ObservableCollection<Category>();
            Categories.Add(new Category() { Name = “Design Time Test” }); ;
            Categories.Add(new Category() { Name = “Design Time Test 2″ }); ;
            Categories.Add(new Category() { Name = “Design Time Test 3″ }); ;
            MoviesOwned = 10;
            MoviesCurrentlyRentedOut = 5;
        }
    }

Summary.xaml view (designer info in orange, runtime in blue):
<UserControl x:Class=”MovieRental.UI.MainPage”
    xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation”
    xmlns:x=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml”
    xmlns:d=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008″
    xmlns:mc=”http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006″
    xmlns:local=”clr-namespace:MovieRental.UI.ViewModels”
    mc:Ignorable=”d”
    d:DesignHeight=”300″ d:DesignWidth=”400″
    d:DataContext=”{d:DesignInstance Type=local:DesignTimeSummaryViewModelViewModel,IsDesignTimeCreatable=True}”

    >
    <UserControl.Resources>

        <local:SummaryViewModel x:Key=”vm” />

    </UserControl.Resources>

    <UserControl.DataContext>

        <Binding Source=”{StaticResource vm}” />

    </UserControl.DataContext>

    <Grid x:Name=”LayoutRoot” Background=”White”>
        <StackPanel>
            <StackPanel Orientation=”Horizontal”>
                <TextBlock Text=”Movies Owned” />
                <TextBlock Text=”{Binding MoviesOwned}” Padding=”7,0,0,0″/>
        </StackPanel>
        <StackPanel Orientation=”Horizontal”>
                <TextBlock Text=”Movies Rented”/>
                <TextBlock Text=”{Binding MoviesCurrentlyRentedOut}” Padding=”7,0,0,0″ />
        </StackPanel>
            <ListBox ItemsSource=”{Binding Categories}” DisplayMemberPath=”Name”>
            </ListBox>
        </StackPanel>
    </Grid>
</UserControl>

So far this is working pretty good. The thing that surprised me is that the designer still runs the runtime ViewModels constructor so I had to put a check in around my WCF call to make sure it did not run in the designer via the      System.ComponentModel.DesignerProperties.IsInDesignTool line of code.

I have taken the summer off to look after our kids, get caught up on my todo list (yes it is 2 months long), and do some learning. Now that I am mostly caught up I decided to update my resume but find it hard to remember how many years of experience I have in technologies on my skills matrix. I don’t like sending out a resume that shows what year I started with a technology as that does not accurately represent the number of years of experience. I figured that I could compamise on this and have a master document that has what year I started with a technology and have a vba macro that converts it into years of experience. Here is what I did

1. Created a new word document with a table in it with 3 columns (column #3 contains the year started) e.g.
   

   Category	Skill	Experience
   Languages	C#	2003
   	VB.NET	2003
   	VBA	2010
   Database	MSSQL	2000
   	MYSQL	1999
   	Oracle	1 year

2.  Open up the macro editor (Alt+F11) and added a new module to the project
3. Put in this code:

   Sub UpdateYears()

       Application.ScreenUpdating = False

       currentYear = Year(Date)

       For Each tbl In ActiveDocument.Tables

           For Each rw In tbl.Rows

               Dim experience As Integer

               If IsNumeric(StripJunk(rw.Cells(3))) Then

                   experience = currentYear - StripJunk(rw.Cells(3))

                   If (experience <= 1) Then

                       rw.Cells(3) = experience & " year"

                   Else

                       rw.Cells(3) = experience & " years"

                   End If

               End If

           Next

       Next

   End Sub

   Private Function StripJunk(ByVal s As String)

     StripJunk = Trim(Replace(s, vbCr & Chr(7), ""))

   End Function

4. Saved my word document as “Word macro-enabled document *.docm”
5. Ran the macro (in office 2010->click “view” on the ribbon. Then click the macro drop down. Then click “View Macros”. Run the UpdateYears macro
6. Save a copy of the document as a regular word doc without the macros and send it off.

Hopefully this saves you a few hours of VBA/Macro headaches!

The most painful and time consuming part of this project has been digitizing our DVD collection. I thought it would be as simple as downloading a program and rip it is done…. not so much in the end. Most mainstream companies are avoiding the area of DVD digitization due to potential issues of the legality of ripping DVDs. Another issue came down to encoding support in the software I tried (most were doing h.246) which would not play on some of my lower powered devices. The other issue is that there are SO many options and settings to tweak that it takes a long time to get them just right. I started ripping only one chapter of a movie and then watching that on different devices and then tweaking settings.

To start with there are many different ways to digitize your DVDs. The first thing I tried was using VLC media player which (unkown to me) has an option to save a DVD to disk. I found that most outputs it put out was distorted and had lots of green blocks all over. I also tried DVDFab which I could not get the quality I wanted and it was trial software. Handbrake is another popular software but it does not do decryption so you have to install other software (I triewantd AnyDVD which worked awesome) in combination with Handbrake. Handbrake only supported H.246 or MPEG4 and I found the MPEG4 quality was too low (and I could not seem to get it any better).

What I finally got to work is a two step process. The first step was to rip the contents of the DVD to a VOB file using DVDDecryptor which takes about 20 minutes. A VOB file is the raw video/audio/subtitiles from the disk which some programs can read in and convert. The next step was to feed the VOB into a program called MeGUI which is a UI wrapper around AviSynth that works quite well. I found it takes 2-3 hours to encode a video using MeGUI.

Now if you have a lot of movies then you need some automation to this process. What I did was gather up 5 spare DVD roms and combined them into a computer so I could backup 5 DVDs at a time. I then wrote a bit of code (I may publish it later) that starts DVDDecryptor on the command line, rips the disk, ejects the disk, then monitors for a new disk. This allowed me to just walk by and see the ejected trays and then insert new disks which worked well. My big issue was that the raw DVD is about 5 GB so you can fill up storage quick so I moved a lot of the raw files to other computers as the drive on my ripping computer filled up.

Once I had my movies ripped (or my hard drives filled) it was time to compress them down to save some space using MeGUI+Avisynth. When you install the software it asks if you want to download some presets which I did. In the end I used XVid-Balanced to do my encoding. Then I used the one click encoding tool in MeGUI and queued up all my VOB files. As this process takes 2-3 hours (depending on CPU power) I ran it on multiple computers. Many of my computers are multi-core and MeGUI has the option to spin up multiple worker threads but I found that it crashed so I just ran one worker (which still used multiple cores).

The next step in providing digital content is being able to share your existing media out to the home. There are several ways to do this.

The first thing I want to talk about though is the codec issue. Video and audio can get quite large and there are many different ways to encode media to shrink its size down. In order to play a video you need the proper codec installed (a codec is a bit of code that properly decodes encoded video). The #1 issue with video playback has typically been that you don’t have the right codec installed. Normally when you are missing a codec you go out and download the codec and install it on your computer. When you have a device connected to a T.V. though it may not be possible to add the codec you want (I ran into this with my XBOX 360 for instance).

Simple File Share
Most computers and devices can access file shares quite easily. On your media server just right click and goto sharing and then select the users. There are many tutorials out there on how to share a folder so I wont dig into the basics but there are a few key tricks to it.

Most shares require the user to authenticate upon attempting to access a shared folder so that it can grant or deny access to that share. Now unless you have setup a domain controller for your house, it will not know who you are and want a username and password that has been setup on the computer sharing files. A neat trick is that if you have the same username/password setup on both the client and the server then you will automatically be authenticated. Otherwise it will prompt you for credentials. If you have children then it is adviseable to have a folder for family movies that allows the kids credentials and then a higher rated folder that requires an adults credentials.

The other debate is what type of access the share should have. I typically have shared folders that are read only and one folder that allows write so that new content can be dropped in from any computer and then sorted into the proper readonly folder.

The cons with this is that you need credentials, not all devices work over a file share, not all devices can play all types of media (due to the codec issue). For instance my xbox 360 does not access fileshares so this technique does not work)

Windows Media Sharing
I believe that starting with Windows Media Player 10 is an included service that allows you to share media out that is added to your Media Player library. I think that this solution works pretty good for the scenario where a user has one computer running a client operating system (i.e. XP/Vista/Windows 7) with their media and share it out. I have not tried it as I have a hatred for the bloatware that is Windows Media Player but it may just work for you.

From my quick read it does appear to overcome the codec issue via transcoding. This means that the media player on your computer converts the video on the fly to a format the remote device knows how to play. Again I have not tried this but I leave it up to you to experiment.

Windows Media Center & Media Center Extenders
Media Center is a chunk of software that ships with some editions of Vista and Win7. It allows you to access all your media, photos, and more via a client. The XBOX 360 ships with just such a client so I tried it out. It was horrible. It could not play a lot of the videos I had (due to codec issues), it was slow to navigate, and I found the video was choppy a lot of the time. Granted, I tried this a few years ago and they have probably made improvements but I have moved on to other technologies. I also don’t believe that you can have Media Center on a computer running a server OS (but again, I could be wrong)

Transcoding Server
I have found the best thing for me has been using a transcoding server called TVersity. The app converts video on the fly and streams it out to my devices just fine. The really nice feature is that you can also add internet feeds to the TVersity library. What this means is that I can take a show that published a feed and have my computer download that data, transcode it, and stream it to my xbox 360. I can now watch internet TV… on my TV! There is a lot of neat stuff you can do in this area.

The biggest issue I have found with TVersity is that the service will not respond sometimes and requires me to restart the service. Friends of mine have had no problems but I have had the issue on two separate installs now.

Network Considerations
For all of these solutions you will need to have the appropriate exceptions in your firewall to allow the services that share media to be accessible. Bandwidth can also be an issue with wireless networks. I currently have my server connected  to the router via regular cat 5 cable but the devices I consume media on are wireless. This works fairly well but media sharing is a bandwidth intensive operation so the quality of wireless signal you get may have an effect on streaming. If you can use a hardwire connection then I would recommend it as it is much more reliable than wireless.