Ant's Blog

Symfony

2009-04-02T05:20:00.000-07:00

I've been playing with the Symfony MVC (model view controller) PHP framework over the past few weeks and I must say I like it! Similar to rails in a lot of ways it promotes rapid application development (RAD), REST (representational state transfer) and DRY (do not repeat yourself) and has many useful features such as scaffolding.

I've been using version 1.2 and following this excellent tutorial: http://www.symfony-project.org/jobeet/1_2/Propel/en/

BashMash a success!

2009-02-24T06:51:00.000-08:00

Well, we did it! 9 people, one Saturday, 15 hours! Thanks to everyone involved (especially Jag for organising the thing!) for making the first BashMash an enjoyable and rewarding experience! Here's what we created: http://archerproject.org.uk. It consists of a Wordpress site with custom widgets, twitter integration via RSS and a Facebook application. You can check out my Facebook app here (at the time of writing the RSS feed it is reading is a little messed up, hopefully fixed soon!).

C#.NET - BackgroundWorker

2009-02-13T07:09:00.000-08:00

Recently I've been working on a couple of Windows apps using C#.NET when I came across the need to use multithreading. I had done a bit of thread stuff in Java a few years previously, but hadn't tackled it in C#, but a pleasant surprise was in store: the BackgroundWorker control.

Introduced in .NET version 2.0, the BackgroundWorker control makes multithreading much simpler - here's a quick example (I'm using Visual Studio 2008):

Drag and drop a BackgroundWorker control from the Toolbox onto your Windows Form.
Go to the properties of the control and add event handlers for the DoWork and RunWorkerCompleted events.
Put any code you wish to run in another thread into the DoWork handler and anything you may want to be done on completion in RunWorkerCompleted.
To begin executing the code in the DoWork handler simply call backgroundWorker.RunWorkerAsync().

There you've got a quick, easy way of running some code in another thread! There's much more you can do with the BackgroundWorker control (such as progress reporting, cancelling execution etc.), but I'll not go into it her, see MSDN for that ;-)

Spotify

2009-02-11T17:25:00.000-08:00

After seeing a tweet by @JonnyHaynes about Spotify - free music streaming software - I thought I'd give it a whirl and I'm very impressed! There are absolutely loads of tracks available to listen to (I listened to the entire In Flames back catalogue earlier), the quality's great and the audio ads on the ad-supported free version aren't too long (a short one every couple of songs or so). I'll definitely be using it to check out new bands before I buy their albums!

BashMash

2009-02-11T16:36:00.000-08:00

BashMash is "...a series of voluntary collaboration days focussed on delivering practical resources for selected local charities and third sector organisations that don’t normally have access to the resources or skills required to take advantage of social technology." organised by BarCamp Sheffield. I've signed myself up for the first one which will take place on Saturday 21st of this month - we'll be working on a website for the Cathedral Archer Project, which is a not for profit project based out of Sheffield cathedral who offer food and a base for the homeless in Sheffield. There have been some good ideas put forward for the site (including a Facebook app) - I'm looking forward to the challenge! Hopefully it will help them to raise awareness, reach more people and gain more support for the project. Fingers crossed!