Friday, March 18, 2016
Thursday, October 08, 2015
Running twurl on Windows
This post will sound ridiculous to some people, "what's so hard about running twurl on Windows"? Actually nothing, once you know what to do.
Twurl (OAuth-enabled curl for the Twitter API) is a very helpful command line utility used to reach out to the Twitter API. If you're familiar with the twitter API and basically any OAuth API, handling the signing of every request can be painful, at least until you get it right the first time.
I use twurl to see what an actual good request to the API looks like, so after I get the good sample I use fiddler to debug my shelltwit requests and compare the two of them.
So, how do I use twurl? There are many ways, being one of them getting the source files and building the project yourself out of Github.
But probably the easiest way is to use the "compiled binary" (actually, it is not a binary nor compiled).
Twurl can be installed as a Ruby Gem. What does that mean? I have no idea. Well, I do have an idea but a really good way of explaining since I'm not a Ruby wiz.
Cut the crap already!!! okay, okay, I'll assume you're familiar with Chocolately, if you're a Windows "power user" you really need to get to know it.
So, first things first... you need to install the Ruby environment on your machine, so, open your favorite command line shell as Administrator and type
choco install ruby
There, ruby is now installed. Now you need to install twurl and since it's a Ruby gem this is what you you need to do
gem install twurl
And that's it, that will install the twurl gem and now you can use twurl from your command line to, for instance, upload an image to twitter like the following
twurl -H upload.twitter.com -X POST "/1.1/media/upload.json" --file "/path/to/media.jpg" --file-field "media"
Cool uh! Let me know if you found this post useful
Labels: chocolately, ruby, twurl, vault, windows 6 comments
Sunday, March 01, 2015
Building mobile apps for the modern enterprise or consumer
I recently came across an interesting “article” on building mobile apps, actually is more of a Visual Studio brochure. It had some interesting facts that easily explain why you should choose for either building native smart devices apps or go for a common features/language scenario where you get the apps fast in the market.
Interesting enough they even have a chart that shows the choices you have:
Let’s see what this chart tell us. On the far left you have great quality, high costs, great apps. I don’t want to start a fight over colors again, but I see that balloon in a redish/pink background. Then you have Xamarin, where you have a little less quality but gain a little in productivity. Then it goes down to Cordova, where you loose a lot of quality but gain a good chunk of productivity. And the lowest point in productivity comes mobile web, where you obviously gain productivity because you basically write one single HTML app and show it in every platform.
But the funny thing about the chart is that it has an “ideal spot” that reads “Great quality on all devices, agile development”.
Guess who’s in that spot? that’s right… I am, I work with a tool that generates great quality native apps in an agile and productive way. I bet you do too :)
What’s my point with this? I’m not trying to sell Genexus, I’m a terrible sales person, my point is that those of us who use Genexus are in the right path. Maybe some day there will be only one platform and it’ll be easier to start device development, but right now, where there are clearly 3 major players, having a tool that can help us with cross-platform development is a must, and of course, we want the best experience in each platform.
On a side note, keep in mind I’m not even talking about model driven development, which for me is must. I had a teacher at the university that more than 10 years ago said to us, “if you start a new project writing public class you’re obviously doing something wrong”.
Those of us who use a tool for cross-platform agile development have clearly and advantage over the rest, either by app quality or time to market, and when I say time to market I mean time to the 3 major markets. So start your great ideas today.
(great ideas not included)
Source to the original article and chart: http://www.visualstudio.com/explore/modern-mobile-apps-vs
Labels: development, GeneXus, programming, Smart Devices 11 comments
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Where’s Create GUID in VS2013?
Is not there, is not where it used to be, but thankfully it’s easy to put it back where it belongs.
Just go to TOOLS –> External Tools and add it. It is located under the Tools directory of your Visual Studio 2013 installation.
Saturday, November 29, 2014
Deploy to Azure button, WOW!
Every now and then some technology, technique, product or whatever comes along that makes you open your eyes wide open and drop your jaw.
A few days ago Microsoft released the Deploy to Azure button, you can read the original post here, but TL;DR it’s a button you put in the README.md file of your GitHub repository and it would “automagically” deploy your repository to an Azure Web Site.
At first I thought, cool, but I’m sure there’s something they’re not telling you, like what’s the structure I need to have in my repository? do I also need to add my binaries, will they build my solution and deploy the assemblies?
So today I gave it a try. I do have a repository on GitHub which output also run on an Azure WebSite so I thought this would be the perfect test. The project is Azure Storage Explorer, and if you take a look the structure of the repository looks it is just a solution file (.sln) with two folders that are a web site project and a helper library.
So I added the button to my README.md file which in my case that meant adding this line to the file:
[![Deploy to Azure](http://azuredeploy.net/deploybutton.png)](https://azuredeploy.net/?repository=https://github.com/sebagomez/azurestorageexplorer)
And that’s it. After I pushed it to GitHub I clicked on the button and this site called azuredeploy.net showed up telling me that my repository was going to published to an Azure Web Site. It let me pick a few config settings like the name of the web site AND THAT WAS IT!
What happened in between? I don’t know, I guess something cloned my repo, found and .sln file and built the solution and then moved everything (?) to a web site? I don’t know what they did, I’m just glad it worked the way it did. I’m not saying it is rocket science, it’s just that it’s nice when you find such a simple solution for a much complicated task to do manually.
Kudos to whoever thought having that button was a good idea!
p.s: I wish we had something like that in Genexus Server. I guess we could…
Labels: Azure, deployment, dev, Genexus Server, GitHub 0 comments