Strong as an Ox

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I have moved my blog over from http://ianoxley.wordpress.com to here and thought I would celebrate with a blog post

YAGNI – short for “You Aren’t Going to Need It” – is the acronym given to not writing code until you are sure you are actually going to need it. While reading Google’s paper on BigTable the other day it was interesting to read that this was one of the lessons learned during its development:

Another lesson we learned is that it is important to delay adding new features until it is clear how the new features will be used. For example, we initially planned to support general-purpose transactions in our API. Because we did not have an immediate use for them, however,
we did not implement them.

If, like me, you fancied playing around with IronPython and Silverlight on Apache, here’s how I got mine set-up:

1. Download and unpack DLRConsole.zip from http://silverlight.net/Samples/1.1/DLR-Console/DLRConsole.zip
2. Added the following to my Apache httpd.conf file:

    <VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
            ServerName DLRConsole
            DocumentRoot "C:/dev/DLRConsole"
            AddType text/python .py
            AddType text/jscript .jsx
   
            DirectoryIndex index.htm index.html
   </VirtualHost>
   
   <Directory "C:/dev/DLRConsole">
            Options Indexes MultiViews
            AllowOverride None
            Order allow,deny
            Allow from all
   
            DirectoryIndex index.htm index.html
   </Directory>
   

3. I also set up the following in my hosts file (typically located on Windows at C:WINDOWSSYSTEM32DRIVERSETCHOSTS):
   127.0.0.1 dlrconsole
4. Re-start Apache and point your browser to http://dlrconsole

You may need to comment out any other Python handlers in you httpd.conf file and add them on a per <Directory> basis, but obviously if you’ve got loads of Python-based sites on your Apache installation then your mileage may vary. Fortunately this wasn’t an issue for me so the following was sufficient:

AddHandler cgi-script .pl
#AddHandler cgi-script .py

For more on the DLRConsole see this article from MSDN Magazine.