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

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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

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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.

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