Installing Ruby on Rails on Mac

Staring this series on my journey of learning Ruby on Rails has been challenging.  Why is it that as soon as you make a commitment to spend your "free time" doing something it seems all your "free time" is gone?  The good news is I have an amazing wife who is understanding and has helped me continue moving forward with my goal to learn Ruby on Rails.

The first thing I needed to do was install Ruby on my Macbook Pro.  Yes, even though I am a Microsoft developer by day I only own Macs.  I made the transition around 6 years ago after building my own PCs since I was in high school but that is another topic for another blog post.

All Macs come with Ruby installed and since I recently upgraded to OS X Mavericks Ruby version 2.0.0 was already installed.  So my first step was complete or so I thought.

Using this Ruby Mac Install video as my guide I started installing the following:

1. Install git v1.8.3.4
• I already had git installed and a nice prompt setup thanks to my good friend David Hudson.  Here is a picture of it:

• Feel free to go to my github repository and copy my prompt logic from the bash_profile that is checked in there if you would like a prompt like this.
2. Install curl v7.30.0
3. Install rvm v1.23.15
• Used this command: \curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash

• Next use this command to install requirements for rvm based on the rvm website's install instructions: rvm requirements

• Be sure that the [[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" is in your ~/.bash_profile file


4. Install ruby v2.0.0-p247 
• I thought since ruby was already installed on my Mac I could skip the step in the video to install ruby using rvm install 1.9.2.  So even though I didn't discover this until the step in the video to create a gemset I put this here so you knew you needed to install ruby using this command: rvm install ruby



5. Create a gemset in rvm for this tutorial



6. Install rails v4.0.1 - decided to use 4.0.1 based on the Ruby on Rails blog.
• Rails can be installed using this command:  gem install rails --version 4.0.1



• During rails install there were several ...unable to convert "\x89" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF8 for... error messages.  A quick google search found this stackoverflow question and answer.  This suggested that I needed to update my version of rdoc and then regenerate all my documents with the newer version of rdoc.  Here is the screenshot of the commands:

Now that I have ruby, rails, and a few other necessary tools installed I plan to spend some time over the next few weeks learning the ruby syntax and how to build a simple application in ruby on rails.

Until next time continue learning!

A .NET Developer Learns Ruby on Rails Series

I have been developing business applications using Microsoft technologies for over 12 years and really enjoy working with them.  However, learning a new language has been on my mind for some time and this weekend I decided to start that process.

This is the first in a series of posts that will capture my journey of learning Ruby on Rails as a C# .NET developer and setting up a development environment on my Macbook Pro.

Here is a list of resources that are being used to learn Ruby on Rails:

1. Installing Ruby On Rails On A Mac blog post by Bret McGowen
2. Ruby on Rails Tutorial installation video by rubyonrailstutorial
3. Ruby on Rails Tutorial book by Michael Hartl
4. Ruby on Rails - A Jumpstart for .NET Developers pluralsight video by Dustin Davis

As I continue to learn and develop, I will be adding to this list other resources and refer to in in the coming posts.

If you are currently learning a new language and have any tips please post a comment or send me an email with your advice to paul [dot] gower [at] gmail [dot] com.

My Code Kata Talk

I had a great time this past Thursday night (08/08/2013) at the Little Rock .NET User Group meeting.

Thanks to everyone who came out to watch my presentation on Code Kata.  Here is a link to my slides in case you missed it or wanted to view the slides again.

Also I wanted to give a big thanks to David Hudson for setting up this code kata website for us.  Starting Sunday, August 25, 2013 I will be publishing a code kata every two weeks and I look forward to seeing you there.

Web.config and IIS7 Woes

Today I spent the majority of my day trying to debug why our QA environment would not work to only figure out one of the two issues.

It was supposed to be a simple 30 minute x-copy deploy but it turned into an almost 7 hour deployment.

The first set of issues were basic server setup issues like ASP.NET and WCF not being registered properly into IIS.  Once I was able to finally get the website up and running against the QA database I discovered a major bug.  Of course I hadn't encountered it in my development environment and just like the old saying "It worked on my machine!"  Truth be told I don't like that saying very much but it is usually unfortunately true.  As most developers know the hardest type of bugs to find are the ones you can't reproduce easily.

Now I have a major bug that is going to cause QA some headaches but on top of that I discover that JavaScript code is not working.  The ASP.NET AJAX functionality was not working properly and was even causing the Infragistics controls to not function at all on some of my pages.  This was a bigger issue than the major one I found initially.  After spending way to long on this issue trying to determine if it was an Infragistincs control issue or if it was a server setup issue or an IIS configuration issue here is what I found to be the problem:

The <system.web> section is for IIS6 and below; whereas, the <system.webServer> section is for IIS7. The issue was I had the <httpHandlers> section in the  <system.web> section which I thought was enough; however, I did not have the <handlers> section in the <system.webServer> section.

Unfortunately this code was in my web.config in the version that is checked into TFS but some how it was removed which caused me to waste over half my day debugging issues.  So hopefully this blog post will help someone else not waste a half day like I did or if I come across this issue again I can hopefully remember to search my blog before wasting too much time!