The Iron Foundry Team are big advocates of open source software. We write code across all sorts of languages, just like many of the development shops out there do. Sometimes we’re heavy on the .NET, other times we’re all up in some Java, Ruby on Rails, spooling up a Node.js Application or something else. So keeping with our love of open source and our polyglot nature we’ve created the Thor Project with three distinct apps.

Before jumping into the applications though, a little context for what and where Thor is in the grand scheme of things. We need to roll back to the Cloud Foundry Project to get into that. The Cloud Foundry Project is an open source project built around software for PaaS (Platform as a Service) which can be used to build your own PaaS internally or externally, in a cloud provider or directly on hardware. It’s your choice how, when and where you want to use it. For more context on PaaS check out my previous entry “The Confusions of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS“.

Thor Project

Cocoa for OS-X

Thor Odinson, God of Thunder

You know who Thor is right? He’s this mythic Norse God, also known as the God of Thunder. Since we’re all about bringing the hamma we welcomed Thor into our team’s stable of applications. So starting immediately we’ve released Thor into the realms for contributions and fighting the good open source software battle! If you’d like to join the effort, check out the github project and feel free to join us!

Technically, what is the Thor Application? This is a Cocoa Application built for OS-X that is used for managing, deploying and publishing applications to Cloud Foundry enabled and or Iron Foundry extended PaaS Environments.

.NET for Windows 7

The .NET Metro version of the Thor Application is also released via github with a provided installer. We’ve almost taken the same path, except of course for the very different UX and UI queues with Windows 7 and the Metro UX design guidelines.

WinRT for Windows 8

I wasn’t really sure what to call this version. Is it Metro or WinRT or Windows 8 or something else? Anyway, there is a project, it is albeit empty at this point, but it is the project where the Windows 8 version of Thor will go! For now get the Windows 7 version and install it on Windows 8, it won’t have touch interface support and things, but should work just like a regular application on Windows 8.

The Code

• Thor OS-X (Cocoa)
• Thor .NET
• Thor WinRT
• Thor Design – This is all the design collateral created by Nathan Young (@nathanyoung) for each of the versions.

To get started with these, generally you’d just clone the repo and do a build, then get started checking out the code. There is one catch, for the OS-X version you’ll want to pull down the sub-modules with the following command.

git clone git@github.com:YourForkHere/Thor.git
git submodule update --init --recursive

Once you do that in XCode just make sure to then select the right project as the starting build project.

…then when the application is launched…

Thor Running in OS-X

I’ll have more in the coming days and weeks about Thor & Iron Foundry. For now, check out the blog entry on the Iron Foundry Blog and subscribe there for more information.

NOTE: All of this code is available at my Github Project “Remembering” (https://github.com/Adron/Remembering). Feel free to fork it, share it, or send me corrections or pull requests.

While working on the Thor Project there have been numerous situations where I need to fire off an asynchronous callback in C# while maintaining good responsiveness in the actual user interface. Benjamin (@bvanderveen) has been using Reactive Extensions with subscriptions to do this in the Objective-C code for the Cocoa based OS-X Thor user interface. See my previous blog entry for an example of what he’s doing.

For a good example of asynchronous calls against Cloud Foundry I setup the following project using the Iron Foundry Project VCAP Client Library. The first thing I setup was a static class with a few constants to use across the examples for the URI, username and password for the Cloud Foundry Account.

public static class YourSecrets
{
    public const string Username = "youremail@someplace.com";
    public const string Password = "AnAwesom3HardPassw0rd!";
    public const string Uri = "http://api.yourpaas.com";
}

Next step was to setup the delegate and method I’d use for calling out to the Cloud Foundry environment and retrieving data in parallel to my active console or user interface. That code snippet looked like this. I also added a private variable _finished for use in tracking when the request was completed in the begin and end invoke example below.

private bool _finished;

IEnumerable TheMethodToConnectThatWillTakeLongTime(string uri)
{
    var client = new VcapClient(uri);
    client.Login(TheSecretBits.YourSecrets.Username, TheSecretBits.YourSecrets.Password);

    _finished = false;

    return client.GetApplications();
}

delegate IEnumerable MethodDelegate(string uri);

Once I had that setup I was ready to create my baseline method that would make a synchronous call. A synchronous call is one that makes the call as if it just called the method directly. There’s no real reason to create one like I’ve done here, but I was just using it to provide a basic example of calling the delegate.

public void SynchronousCall()
{
    var starting = DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString();

    var delegateMethod = new MethodDelegate(TheMethodToConnectThatWillTakeLongTime);
    var returnedBits = delegateMethod(TheSecretBits.YourSecrets.Uri);

    var ending = DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString();

    Console.WriteLine(string.Format("The delegate call returned \n\n{0}\n\nstarting at {1} and

ending at {2} which takes a while of waiting.",
        returnedBits, starting, ending));

    _finished = false;
}

That gets us a baseline. If you run a synchronous call against anything with a console application or a windows app, WPF or whatever it will lock up the calling thread while it is waiting for a response. In any type of user interface that is unacceptable. One of the best options is to fire of an asynchronous callback. The way I did this, which is an ideal way to make calls with the Iron Foundry Client Library against a Cloud Foundry Environment, is shown below.

This is my asynchronous call.

public void DemoCall()
{
    Console.WriteLine("Callback:");
    var delegateMethod = new MethodDelegate(TheMethodToConnectThatWillTakeLongTime);

    var callbackDelegate = new AsyncCallback(MyAsyncCallback);

    Console.WriteLine(" starting...{0}", DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString());
    delegateMethod.BeginInvoke(TheSecretBits.YourSecrets.Uri, callbackDelegate, delegateMethod);
    Console.WriteLine(" ending...{0}", DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString());
}

Now the simple callback.

public void MyAsyncCallback(IAsyncResult ar)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Things happening, async state calling.");

    var delegateMethod = (MethodDelegate)ar.AsyncState;

    Console.WriteLine(" called...{0}", DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString());

    var returnedBits = delegateMethod.EndInvoke(ar);

    Console.WriteLine(" end invoked...{0}", DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString());

    foreach (Application application in returnedBits)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Application {0} is in {1} state...",
            application.Name, application.State);
        Console.WriteLine(" with {0} running instances, {1} memory per instance, {2} disk allocated...",
            application.RunningInstances, application.Resources.Memory, application.Resources.Disk);
        Console.Write(" hosted at ");
        foreach (var uri in application.Uris)
        {
            Console.Write(uri + " ");
        }
        Console.WriteLine(".");
    }
}

That’ll get the call running on a parallel thread and when it is wrapped up it returns the data.

The User Interface Interaction Issue

This is all fine and dandy for the command console. But if you want to give control back to the UI thread in a UI application and make sure that the background thread can actually update a control when fired off, do the same thing as I’ve discussed here except set the control up to invoke the dispatcher, so that the “threads don’t cross” when trying to return information to a control that needs updated. In order to do this take the control that needs updated and set the Dispatcher Invoke method as shown below.

private void Write(string updateText)
{
    UpdatingTextBlock.Dispatcher.Invoke(
    System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherPriority.Normal,
        new Action(delegate
    {
        UpdatingTextBlock.Text += updateText;
    }
    ));
}

For more on the Iron Foundry Project and the library I’ve used here, check out the Iron Foundry Blog & Site. For more information on Thor and to follow or get involved check out the Thor Project Site (Hosted with Cloud Foundry at Tier 3!).

All of this code is available in my Github Project “Remembering” (https://github.com/Adron/Remembering). Feel free to fork it, share it, or send me corrections or pull requests.

My CodeProject

It started like this.

string responseValue;

if (null == vcapResponse)
{
    responseValue = message;
}
else
{
    responseValue = vcapResponse.Description;
}

return responseValue;

…and after a few alt+enter hits…

return null == vcapResponse ? message : vcapResponse.Description;

I ended up with that beauty. Oh yeah. 🙂

…and for today, that’s it. Whew!

FINAL:  Nerd Lunch, Chipotle in downtown Seattle, we’ll meet at 11:30 and eat in the food court. Hope to see lots of people there!

On Friday of this week how about a Nerd Lunch in Seattle? The questions are what time and where should we go? What’s the thoughts, leave comment or three and we’ll all get something ironed out.

UPDATED: It’s starting to look like it’ll be Chipotle at 11:30 on Friday. If you don’t want to meet for nerd lunch then, get some votes in ASAP!

ALSO: Signed up for some ATDD Workshop fun this Thursday in Bellevue at 6pm. Anyone interested should sign up!

Take Our Poll Take Our Poll

That title sounds like a Dream Theater song or something. But alas, I’m going to try and answer the question for the next few weeks per my calendar of logistics.

• September 10th (Monday) – September 14th (Friday) I’ll be in Seattle for networking, work and a few rounds. Maybe a geek lunch or two too, who’s up for it?
• September 20th (Thursday) I’ll be in Seattle for the Software Craftsman’s Meetup at Getty Images.
• September 22nd (Saturday) I’ll be at the Portland Streetcar eastside Loop Party. Yeah yeah, it doesn’t really have anything to do with tech, but I’m a transit nerd, so gotta go see the new streetcar line.
• October 8th (Monday) – October 17th (Wednesday) I’ll be in San Francisco for the RICON (A Distributed System Conference for Developers) and the HTML 5 Dev Conf (js, html5 and all that developer conference).

Thor & Cloud Foundry Hackathon & Installfest

Curious if anyone is up for meeting and doing an installfest or hacking on Cloud Foundry, Iron Foundry or checking out Thor this coming week in Seattle? Any takers? Leave a comment and I’ll also ping the people of the Twitterverse and App.net. I’m up for meeting at a coffee shop or other space and would be happy to come to an office or other environment if anyone is interested.