Tag: c#

Thrashing Code Twitch Schedule September 19th-October 2nd

I’ve got everything queued back up with some extra Thrashing Code Sessions and will have some on the rails travel streams. Here’s what the schedule looks like so far.

Today at 3pm PST (UPDATED: Sep 19th 2018)

thrashing-code-terraformUPDATED: Video available https://youtu.be/NmlzGKUnln4

I’m going to get back into the roll of things this session after the travels last week. In this session I’m aiming to do several things:

  1. Complete next steps toward getting a DataStax Enterprise Apache Cassandra cluster up and running via Terraform in Google Cloud Platform. My estimate is I’ll get to the point that I’ll have three instances that launch and will automate the installation of Cassandra on the three instances. Later I’ll aim to expand this, but for now I’m just going to deploy 3 nodes and then take it from there. Another future option is to bake the installation into a Packer deployed image and use it for the Terraform execution. Tune in to find out the steps and what I decide to go with.
  2. I’m going to pull up the InteroperabilityBlackBox and start to flesh out some objects for our model. The idea, is based around something I stumbled into last week during travels, the thread on that is here.

Friday (Today) @ 3pm PST

thrashing-code-gopherThis Friday I’m aiming to cover some Go basics before moving further into the Colligere CLI  app. Here are the highlights of the plan.

  1.  I’m going to cover some of the topics around program structure including: type declarations, tuple assignment, variable lifetime, pointers, and other variables.
  2.  I’m going to cover some basics on packages, initialization of packages, imports, and scope. This is an important aspect of ongoing development with Colligere since we’ll be pulling in a number of packages for generation of the data.
  3. Setting up configuration and schema for the Colligere application using Viper and related tooling.

Tuesday, October 2nd @ 3pm PST

thrashing-code-terraformThis session I’m aiming to get some more Terraform work done around the spin up and shutdown of the cluster. I’ll dig into some more specific points depending on where I progress to in sessions previous to this one. But it’s on the schedule, so I’ll update this one in the coming days.

 

Wrap Up for August of 2018

Thrashing Code Sessions via Twitch & Kick Ass Dis-Sys Meetup

Got some excellent coding and systems setup coming up in the next few days. Also a meetup on the 28th with Tim Kellogg and Alena Hall presenting on some interesting topics around distributed database data working on Kubernetes and WebAssembly of the hot temperament type. A new surprise guest addition on my Twitch channel that is scheduled to swing into Valhalla and help build out a cluster and respective needed DHCP, DNS, and related configuration for a setup on the metal!

Schedule

 

DSE6 + .NET v?

Project Repo: Interoperability Black Box

First steps. Let’s get .NET installed and setup. I’m running Ubuntu 18.04 for this setup and start of project. To install .NET on Ubuntu one needs to go through a multi-command process of keys and some other stuff, fortunately Microsoft’s teams have made this almost easy by providing the commands for the various Linux distributions here. The commands I ran are as follows to get all this initial setup done.

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
wget -qO- https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | gpg –dearmor > microsoft.asc.gpg
sudo mv microsoft.asc.gpg /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/
wget -q https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/18.04/prod.list
sudo mv prod.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/microsoft-prod.list
sudo chown root:root /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/microsoft.asc.gpg
sudo chown root:root /etc/apt/sources.list.d/microsoft-prod.list
[/sourcecode]

After all this I could then install the .NET SDK. It’s been so long since I actually installed .NET on anything that I wasn’t sure if I just needed the runtime, the SDK, or what I’d actually need. I just assumed it would be safe to install the SDK and then install the runtime too.

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install dotnet-sdk-2.1
[/sourcecode]

Then the runtime.

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
sudo apt-get install aspnetcore-runtime-2.1
[/sourcecode]

logoAlright. Now with this installed, I wanted to also see if Jetbrains Rider would detect – or at least what would I have to do – to have the IDE detect that .NET is now installed. So I opened up the IDE to see what the results would be. Over the left hand side of the new solution dialog, if anything isn’t installed Rider usually will display a message that X whatever needs installed. But it looked like everything is showing up as installed, “yay for things working (at this point)!”

rider-01

Next up is to get a solution started with the pertinent projects for what I want to build.

dse2

Kazam_screenshot_00001

For the next stage I created three projects.

  1. InteroperationalBlackBox – A basic class library that will be used by a console application or whatever other application or service that may need access to the specific business logic or what not.
  2. InteroperationalBlackBox.Tests – An xunit testing project for testing anything that might need some good ole’ testing.
  3. InteroperationalBlackBox.Cli – A console application (CLI) that I’ll use to interact with the class library and add capabilities going forward.

Alright, now that all the basic projects are setup in the solution, I’ll go out and see about the .NET DataStax Enterprise driver. Inside Jetbrains Rider I can right click on a particular project that I want to add or manage dependencies for. I did that and then put “dse” in the search box. The dialog pops up from the bottom of the IDE and you can add it by clicking on the bottom right plus sign in the description box to the right. Once you click the plus sign, once installed, it becomes a little red x.

dse-adding-package

Alright. Now it’s almost time to get some code working. We need ourselves a database first however. I’m going to setup a cluster in Google Cloud Platform (GCP), but feel free to use whatever cluster you’ve got. These instructions will basically be reusable across wherever you’ve got your cluster setup. I wrote up a walk through and instructions for the GCP Marketplace a few weeks ago. I used the same offering to get this example cluster up and running to use. So, now back to getting the first snippets of code working.

Let’s write a test first.

[sourcecode language=”csharp”]
[Fact]
public void ConfirmDatabase_Connects_False()
{
var box = new BlackBox();
Assert.Equal(false, box.ConfirmConnection());
}
[/sourcecode]

In this test, I named the class called BlackBox and am planning to have a parameterless constructor. But as things go tests are very fluid, or ought to be, and I may change it in the next iteration. I’m thinking, at least to get started, that I’ll have a method to test and confirm a connection for the CLI. I’ve named it ConfirmConnection for that purpose. Initially I’m going to test for false, but that’s primarily just to get started. Now, time to implement.

[sourcecode language=”csharp”]
namespace InteroperabilityBlackBox
using System;
using Dse;
using Dse.Auth;

namespace InteroperabilityBlackBox
{
public class BlackBox
{
public BlackBox()
{}

public bool ConfirmConnection()
{
return false;
}
}
}
[/sourcecode]

That gives a passing test and I move forward. For more of the run through of moving from this first step to the finished code session check out this

By the end of the coding session I had a few tests.

[sourcecode language=”csharp”]
using Xunit;

namespace InteroperabilityBlackBox.Tests
{
public class MakingSureItWorksIntegrationTests
{
[Fact]
public void ConfirmDatabase_Connects_False()
{
var box = new BlackBox();
Assert.Equal(false, box.ConfirmConnection());
}

[Fact]
public void ConfirmDatabase_PassedValuesConnects_True()
{
var box = new BlackBox(“cassandra”, “”, “”);
Assert.Equal(false, box.ConfirmConnection());
}

[Fact]
public void ConfirmDatabase_PassedValuesConnects_False()
{
var box = new BlackBox(“cassandra”, “notThePassword”, “”);
Assert.Equal(false, box.ConfirmConnection());
}
}
}
[/sourcecode]

The respective code for connecting to the database cluster, per the walk through I wrote about here, at session end looked like this.

[sourcecode language=”csharp”]
using System;
using Dse;
using Dse.Auth;

namespace InteroperabilityBlackBox
{
public class BlackBox : IBoxConnection
{
public BlackBox(string username, string password, string contactPoint)
{
UserName = username;
Password = password;
ContactPoint = contactPoint;
}

public BlackBox()
{
UserName = “ConfigValueFromSecretsVault”;
Password = “ConfigValueFromSecretsVault”;
ContactPoint = “ConfigValue”;
}

public string ContactPoint { get; set; }
public string UserName { get; set; }
public string Password { get; set; }

public bool ConfirmConnection()
{
IDseCluster cluster = DseCluster.Builder()
.AddContactPoint(ContactPoint)
.WithAuthProvider(new DsePlainTextAuthProvider(UserName, Password))
.Build();

try
{
cluster.Connect();
return true;
}
catch (Exception e)
{
Console.WriteLine(e);
return false;
}

}
}
}
[/sourcecode]

With my interface providing the contract to meet.

[sourcecode language=”csharp”]
namespace InteroperabilityBlackBox
{
public interface IBoxConnection
{
string ContactPoint { get; set; }
string UserName { get; set; }
string Password { get; set; }
bool ConfirmConnection();
}
}
[/sourcecode]

Conclusions & Next Steps

After I wrapped up the session two things stood out that needed fixed for the next session. I’ll be sure to add these as objectives for the next coding session at 3pm PST on Thursday.

  1. The tests really needed to more resiliently confirm the integrations that I was working to prove out. My plan at this point is to add some Docker images that would provide the development integration tests a point to work against. This would alleviate the need for something outside of the actual project in the repository to exist. Removing that fragility.
  2. The application, in its “Black Box”, should do something. For the next session we’ll write up some feature requests we’d want, or maybe someone has some suggestions of functionality they’d like to see implemented in a CLI using .NET Core working against a DataStax Enterprise Cassandra Database Cluster? Feel free to leave a comment or three about a feature, I’ll work on adding it during the next session.

Truly Excellent People and Coding Inspiration…

.NET Fringe took place this last week. It’s been a rather long time since my last actual conference that I actually got to really attend, meet people, and talk to people about all the different projects, aspirations, goals, and ideas about what’s next for the future. This conference was perfect to jump into, first and foremost, I knew it was an effort in being inclusive of the existing community and newcomers. We’d reached out to many brave souls to come and attend this conference about pushing technology into the future.

I met some truly excellent people. Smart, focused, intent, and a whole lot of great conversations followed meeting these people. Here’s a few people you’ll want to keep an eye on based on the technology they’re working on. I got to sit down and talk to every one of these coders and they’re in top form, smart, inventive, witty and full of great humor to boot!

Maria Naggaga @Twitter

I met Maria and one of the first things I saw was her crafty and most excellent art sketches around lifestyles, heroes, and more. I love art like this, and was really impressed with what Maria had done with her’s.

Maria giving us the info.
Maria giving us the info.

I was able to hang out with Maria a bit more and had some good conversation time talking about evangelism, tech fun and nonsense all around. I also was able to attend her talk on “Legacy… What?” which was excellent. The question she posed in the description states a common question posed, “When students think about .Net they think: legacy , enterprise , retired, and what is that?” which I too find to be a valid thought. Is .NET purely legacy these days? For many getting into the field it generally isn’ the landscape of greenfield applications and is far more commonly associated with legacy applications. Hearing her vantage point on this as an evangelist was eye opening. I gained more ideas, thoughts, and was pushed to really get that question answered for students in a different way…  which I’ll add to sometime in the future in another blog entry.

Kathleen Dollard @Twitter && @Github

I spoke to Kathleen while we took a break across the street from the conference at Grendal’s Coffee Shop. We talked a lot about education and what is effective training, diving heavily into what works around video, samples, and related things. You see, we’re both authors at Pluralsight too and spend a lot of time thinking about these things. It was great to be able to sit down and really discuss these topics face to face.

We also dived into a discussion about city livability and how Portland’s transit system works, what is and isn’t working in the city and what it’s like to live here. I was, of course, more than happy to provide as much information as I could.

We also discussed her interest in taking legacy shops (i.e. pre-C# even, maybe Delphi or whatever might exist) and helping them modernize their shop. I found this interesting, as it could be a lot of fun figuring out large gaps in technology like that and helping a company to step forward into the future.

Kathleen gave two presentations at the conference – excellent presentations. One was the “Your Code, Your Brain” presentation, talking about exactly the topic of legacy shops moving forward without disruption.

If you’re interested in Kathleen’s courses, give a look here.

Amy Palamountain @Twitter && @Github

Amy had a wicked great slides and samples that were probably the most flawless I’ve seen in a while. Matter of fact, a short while after the conference Amy put together a blog entry about those great slides and samples “Super Smooth Technical Demoes“.

An intent and listening audience.
An intent and listening audience.

An intent and listening audience.Amy’s talked at the conference was titled “Space, Time, and State“. It almost sounds like we could just turn that into an acronym. The talk was great, touched on the aspects of reactiveness and the battle of state that we developers fight every day while building solutions.

We also got to talk a little after the presentation, the horror of times zones, and a slew of good conversation.

Tomasz Janczuk @Twitter && @Github

AAAAAaggghhhhhh! I missed half of Tomasz’s talk! It always happens at every conference right! You get to talking to people, excited about this topic or that topic and BOOM, you’ve missed half of a talk that you fully intended to attend. But hey, the good part is I still got to see half the talk!

If you’re not familiar with Tomasz’ work and you do anything with Node.js you should pay close attention. Tomasz has been largely responsible for the great work behind Edge.js and influencing the effort to get Node.js running (and running damn well might I add) on Windows. For more on Edge.js check out Act I and Act II and the Github repository.

The Big Hit for Me, Distributed Systems

First some context. About 4 years ago I left the .NET Community almost entirely. Even though I was still doing a little work with C# I primarily switched stacks to other things to push forward with Riak, distributed systems usage, devops deployment of client apps, and a whole host of other things. At the time I basically had gotten real burned out on where the .NET Community had ended up worldwide, while some pushed onward with the technologies I loved to work with, I was tired of waiting and dived into some esoteric stuff and learned strange programming techniques in JavaScript, Ruby, Erlang and dived deeper into distributed technologies for use in application construction.

However some in the community didn’t stop moving the ball forward, and at this conference I got a great view into some of that progress! I’m stoked to see this technology and where it is now, because there is a LOT of potential for a number of things. Here’s the two talks and two more great people I got to see speak. One I knew already (great to see you again and hang out Aaron!) and one I had the privilege & honor to meet (it was most excellent hanging out and seeing your presentation Lena).

Aaron Stonnard @Twitter && @Github

Aaron I’d met back when Troy & I put together the first Node PDX. Aaron had swung into Portland to present on “Building Node.js Applications on Windows Azure“. At .NET Fringe however Aaron was diving into a topic that was super exciting to me. The first line of the description from the topic really says it all “Distributed computing in .NET isn’t something you often hear about, but it’s becoming an increasingly important area for growing .NET businesses around the globe. And frankly it’s an area where .NET has lagged behind other runtimes and platforms for years – but this is changing!“. Yup, that’s my exact pain point, it’s awesome to know Aaron & Petabridge are kicking ass in this space now.

Aaron’s presentation was solid, as to be expected. We also had some good conversations after and before the presentation about the state of distributed compute and systems within the Microsoft and Windows ecosystem. To check out more about Akka .NET that Aaron & Andrew Skotzko …  follow @AkkaDotNet, @aaronontheweb, @petabridge, and @askotzko.

Akka .NET

Alena Dzenisenka @Twitter && @Github

...
…

…Lena traveled all the way from Kiev in the Ukraine to provide the .NET Fringe crowd with some serious F# distributed and parallel compute knowledge in “Embracing the Cloud“!  (Slides here)

Here’s a short dive into F# here if you’re unfamiliar, which you can install on OS-X, Windows or whatever. So don’t use the “well, I don’t use windows” excuse to not give it a try! Here’s info about MBrace that  Lena also used in her demo. Also dive into brisk from elastacloud…

In addition to the excellent talk that Lena gave I also got to hang out with her, Phil Haack, Ryan Riley, and others over food at Biwa on the last day of the conference. After speaking with Lena about the Ukraine, computing, coding and other topics around hacking and the OSS Community she really inspired me to take a dive into these tools for some of the work that I’m working on now and what I’ll be doing in the near future.

All The Things

Now of course, there were a ton of other people I got to meet, people I got to catch up with I haven’t seen in ages and others I didn’t get to write about. It was a really great conference with great content. I’m looking forward to round 2 and spending more time with everybody in the future!

The whole bunch of us at the end of the conference!
The whole bunch of us at the end of the conference!

Cheers everybody!   \m/

An Aside of Blog Entries on .NET Fringe

Here are some additional blog entries that others wrote about the event. In addition to these blog entries I’ll be updating this entry with any additional entries that I see pop up – so if you post one let me know, and I’ll also update these talks above that I’ve discussed with videos when they’re posted live.