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Visual Studio and SubSonic

17 Jun

If you aren’t using SubSonic yet, you should be. You can find out more at subsonicproject.com. Here’s the easiest way to get SubSonic working smoothly from within Visual Studio.

Download the SubSonic source from http://subsonicproject.googlecode.com/files/SubSonic_2.1_Final_Source.zip and extract it. I chose to create a folder for SubSonic in “C:\Program Files\”.

SubSonic Folder

SubSonic Folder

Next, in Visual Studio click the “External Tools…” menu item from the “Tools” menu. A dialog box will pop up allowing you to manage the external tools. Click “Add” and enter the following:

External Tools Dialog

External Tools Dialog

Title: SubSonic (or whatever you want really)
Command: C:\YOUR_SUBSONIC_PATH\SubSonic2.2\SubCommander\sonic.exe
Arguments: generate /out $(ProjectDir)/Generated
Initial directory: $(ProjectDir)

I check “User Output window”. If you don’t a console window will popup every time you run the command.

Now you will have a “SubSonic” menu item in your “Tools” menu which will generate all your subsonic classes.

Tools Menu

Tools Menu

Of course, you need to have your app.config/web.config setup with SubSonic for the classes to generate. You can find more information about doing that here: http://subsonicproject.com/setup/gettingstarted/.

DotNetNuke web services

16 Jun

I recently had to write a web service to interact with the DNN database. Some of the things I wanted to do worked best with the DotNetNuke binary. When I finally got to testing out the methods that used the DNN library, it blew up. After much deliberation, I figured out the minimum requirements for using DotNetNuke.dll in your project. This zip file contains everything you’ll need…

Minimal DNN Project (123)

Skateboarding geocache site using Django

28 Oct

I’ve been working on a personal project in Python using the Django MVC. When I was younger me and my buddies were really into skateboarding. One of the things I remembered about it was that we soon got bored of parks, and would skate around downtown searching for good spots to skate. This was part of the fun of skating, but I wish I could have known where some cools spots were without having to lug around town. I got the idea to use the Google Maps API to cache these spots. I looked around and found lots of other sites that were directories of parks and such, but they were all pretty lame. I decided it needed to have a clever interface, so hopefully that has been achieved. The project is not complete, but pretty close. You can add spots and comments. One thing that came in handy was some knowledge of SEO (search engine optimization) which I learned from Web Ascender. Using that knowledge I have some pretty good organic search engine results linking to my site. Check it out: www.streetskatespots.com

Update: I abandoned this project, sorry.

My first Android application

28 Oct

My colleague at Web Ascender, Jeff McWherter, suggested an idea for an Android application one day. The concept was a caller id service that would retrieve information for unknown numbers when the phone rang. The next day I had a proof of concept and since then I have developed the app into a working version. The application uses the WhitePages API, and was effectively bought by them. Here’s a video.

Update:

Here are reviews and sightings of the app from around the interwebs:

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