Starting With Another Clean Slate
Starting out with a sample from here, I wanted to build out some reusable libraries I could use with other projects if needed, but focus the focus of the libraries on a new application which can take advantage of Azure’s Media Services. I also learned a few things from my last application I built, and I want to incorporate those bits into the solution as well.
I love this dog!
Weekly Photo Challenge : Fleeting
In a few days, these aren’t going to be much… but for now, they’re fleeting.
From this to this…
Rode Black Beauty in this morning since the stormed moved out, a glorious ride for sure. We’ll still get a bit of rain in the afternoons, but nothing like yesterday.
From this…
to this…
Spinning Up Some Media Magic
I was looking over some old app designs I shelved last year, they needed some support from something like Windows Azure Media Services, but they weren’t baked last year; maybe the preview was out when I last looked, not sure. Recently, I’ve been toying with the idea of getting one of these applications stood up using WAMS now that they’re ready.
I used this chain of posts to get a small harness built and get an understanding of what this stuff does and how it works together to create assets, then encode and stream in various formats, or convert the formats. The sample code is a bit of a fire house, but the post(s) explain what’s going on with each chunk coming out of the fire-hose.
What I wanted to share is related to a post where I was fighting with a few assembly references and how they were mixed up and giving me a rash. I asked NuGet for the WAMS bits and here’s what installed:
I remember using some of the 1.7 assemblies, but not the 5.1 assemblies; not a huge thing, but if the other project I was working on last week got mingled with this one, there might be some challenges.
The WAMS stuff looks fun, and its something new for me, I’ve not done much of this stuff except for using OS apps to convert media files from one format to another; so the curve may be steep starting out but yesterday I flattened it a bit and have a working harness that’s using my WA dev account.
HTH / oFc
A Word A Week Challenge – Metallic
Weekly Photo Challenge: The Sign Says
Refactor and Review
I’ve started to bring this “spike” to a close since I’ve set out to figure out the stuff I needed to using a few Azure services and got to a point of refactoring. When I get to this point with a spike, I set out to do the following things listed in the task list you see here. I’ll step through the why for each of them.
- Refactoring for Interfaces – I tend to build up a few concrete types which don’t need to be added to an IoC container for injection, I try not to abuse Unity even though it’s pretty awesome. Until I find out that maybe a member needs to be injected to reduce a bit of coupling across the solution. So, I’ll look for these opportunities across the solution and extract an interface and either add it to the container or do some poor man’s injection w/o the container – it just depends on the context of the type’s usage. I agree, more interfaces are better, even marker interfaces serve a purpose but I try not to go crazy with anything, interfaces included.
- Logging – At this point, I know more than I did a few weeks ago and I’ve got a clearer idea of what I want to log. This time I just need to build up the event source class for the app based on what I learned. That’s it. No more, no less.
- Magic Strings and Numbers – This one is special. I litter the application with strings and sometimes numbers and this is the best time to go back over the entire solution to pull them out and into something like constants, that’s what worked for this exercise. I’m walking through all of the code to see if it makes sense, especially the bits that I’ve not seen in a few weeks. I forget sometimes what I was thinking, and clarifying with a better member or method name is always better than adding comments. And yes, I’ve got a small battery of tests to fire off after each changeset gets checked in.
- Plumbing for cross-cutting stuff – Now that the logging events are done, I need to plant them in the classes that are doing the work.
Not much here, just some habits I’ve been using over the years to keep solutions clean, readable, and hopefully maintainable.
HTH / oFc
British Lunch
My girlfriend’s nanny is so awesome when it comes to working with kids. She and her husband are from the UK and I thought it’d be a nice gesture to make her family a “British Lunch” this past Sunday. Her Dad and Mum are visiting from the UK as well and I thought I’d get some pretty good feedback from them on how well it turned out.
I found Jamie Oliver’s “Jamie’s Great Britain” cookbook (http://amzn.to/qFmHSo) and used that for inspiration and guidance. The measurement for each recipe are in American Standard which help with the metric conversions I thought I’d need to do. So, that gives the book a few stars to begin with.
The menu.
Empire Chicken, Superb Pork Loin, King of Mash : Irish Champ, Victoria Sponge, and Welsh Cakes
Everyone ate a lot, and although the desserts were chilled to keep them somewhat fresh, everyone appeared to enjoy the food and commented nicely. We finished up dessert with a nice tawny port, very delish!
I was really happy to do this for someone that gives so much on a daily basis, I’m looking forward to doing something like this again sometime soon too, maybe if it’s even to serve a Victoria Sponge moments after taking it out of the oven.
So much yum!
oFc
john@scale 
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