What I need is something hosted through IIS and is RESTFul for simplicity.

Three things you need.

• 1. Any web application.
• 2. WebGetAttribute found in System.ServiceModel.Web.
• Used as follows
  [OperationContract]
[WebGet(UriTemplate="*")]
string CheckStatus();
• So basically in the case where you simply access http://…/Service.svc, it would access CheckStatus()
• Using the WebInvoke method you can access post requests as well.
• UriTemplate is also very important as that allows you do define more descriptive routes or requests.
• Consider the following piece code.[WebGet(UriTemplate="/User/{userName}")]
string GetUserInfo(string userName)
• Now accessing the following resource http://…/Service.svc/User/Evan will route to GetUserInfo passing in “Evan” as userName
• Now so assuming that you can just have httpWebBinding and its hosted through IIS you can skip the web.config changes access the markup in Service.svc and add the attribute Factory=”System.ServiceModel.Activation.WebServiceHostFactory” into node in there. (Note .NET 3.5 intellisense doesn’t appear to acknowledge this attribute)
• One other note is if you are adding this service into an MVC web application, you’ll might want to tell your app to ignore routes which access your service.svc. public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.svc/{*pathInfo}");


I started buying a $20 USB Logictech Microphone. This would be in future useful for Skype purposes anyways. Downloaded the recent Microsoft Speech SAPI5. I sat on moving forward and learning whats in these assemblies and perusing code examples. This was kind of a mistake. I instead started from the service side in WCF, my idea was to expose the WCF as a web service thus allowing xml requests from several sources/clients. I can have one particular client make a voice to xml request whereas another client can have a web interface to send an xml request to this service This was a good idea in point however until I discovered the voice recognition and how the functionality worked I had to modify the request and make subtle design changes as well.

My idea for the WCF service was to be able to inspect an incoming request and verify it again against every single rule involved. The rule most likely to be called would be returned and then subsequently invoked its execute command. The rules are very simple and basically just verify a certain type of phrase or semantics in the request and then dispatch the rule which would actually call a library to do something. The libraries are the part which will be invoked by the rule and would the major groundwork. Reason for this is, I intend these rules to do a whole lot of different things so I need the library to be simple to ensure scalability with ease. I also need a central point of intelligence to control this verification of the rules. So I went with a singleton object.

This how WCF is correctly listening…

[ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode=InstanceContextMode.Single)]
public class CommunicateAIVE : ICommunicateAIVE
{
public string GetData(string value)
{
ICommandEngine engine = CommandEngine.Instance;
CommandEngineRuleReturn result = engine.FindRequestType(value);
return result.Response;
}
...


This is how I’m currently handling the Command Engine… I’ll probably should make it thread safe.

public class CommandEngine : ICommandEngine
{
static List ruleSet = new List();
static CommandEngine()
{

return _instance;
}
}


InitializeRuleSet is where I actually load in all the rule based on loading a dll and invoking all the ctor’s via reflection. With this approach I thought it would be cool to branch off and have these rules/library in their own solution and use them as a support library.


private static void InitializeRuleSet()
{

Also here’s a sample command rule which doesn’t use a library since the functionality just returns something in the response.


public class SayHelloRule : BaseCommandRule
{
public SayHelloRule(ICommandEngine commandEngine) : base(commandEngine) { }

public override CommandEngineRuleReturn PerformActualResponseQuery(string request)
{
if (request.ToUpper().IndexOf("HELLO") != -1)
{
this.CommandEngineRuleReturn.Heuristic = 100;
this.CommandEngineRuleReturn.CommandEngineRuleReturnType = CommandEngineRuleReturnType.RequestSufficient;
this.CommandEngineRuleReturn.Response = string.Format("Hello {0}", this.CommandEngine.StateInfo["CommanderChief"]);
}
return base.PerformActualResponseQuery(request);
}
public override void ExecuteCommand(string request)
{
base.ExecuteCommand(request);
}
}


Based on every request these rules will be traversed and executed based on the following code.


public CommandEngineRuleReturn FindRequestType(string request)
{
foreach (ICommandEngineRule rule in ruleSet)
{
rule.GetResponseInfo(request);
}

switch (bestRule.CommandEngineRuleReturn.CommandEngineRuleReturnType)
{
case CommandEngineRuleReturnType.RequestCausedError:
break;
case CommandEngineRuleReturnType.RequestInsufficient:
this.IncompleteRequest = string.Format("{0}!{1}", this.IncompleteRequest, request);
break;
case CommandEngineRuleReturnType.RequestSufficient:
CommandEngineMemoryStruct newMemory = new CommandEngineMemoryStruct();
newMemory.Request = request;
newMemory.Response = bestRule.CommandEngineRuleReturn.Response;
this.Memory.Add(newMemory);
break;
}


I realize now I haven’t yet talked about anything for voice recognition however the post is getting long. But there is one other thing I thought I should mention, so I’m making these a multiple part series. I’ll to the VR in the next part.

So anyways, I’m working on these unit tests when I’m coming up with extension methods and creating new classes and it occurs to me that I might have a better way to verify these request/response from big picture or from the user point of view. Say for instance you execute a dozen voice commands correctly, the application is working like a dream. You then get the idea to add more functionality you do so and it works, all of a sudden certain commands are no longer dispatching correctly? What happened? After scrambling clearly one of your command rules you added recently are picking up the request instead of the old one you intended. Most of your unit tests are written to catch coverage within the class and not based on integration. Also why not based the tests are real “production” data. So I thought to myself, create a Feedback and a FeedbackRegression. Feedback rule would check to see if the user politely said Thanks or Thank you to the WCF Voice Recognition (need a better name). This would take the last request and the response which is now assume to be correct. We would then log this into a data source. The FeedbackRegression would said the logged request/response from the data source and run it through the Command Engine as if it came in from the client and validate that the response is correct.

Thought that was a cool automated integration test, additionally kept the scope I was currently at with regular unit tests.

Next Part creating Voice Client using Speech SAPI5…
For info on WCF there are tons of information on it at Channel9.msdn.com.

http://www.simplynoise.com/

I’ve only been sidetracked at this time to writing this post.

In the meantime, I wrote a couple macros for VS2005 to help my testing workflow.  I like TestDriven.Net as an add-in to the VS IDE, I just don’t like constant checks to check on what needs to be rebuilt.  Generally, I know the dependencies myself and would like to go right into debugging oppose to these checks.  So I created a macro to automatically attach and debug to a current “nunit.exe” process.

Here’s the code below, I think a nice little enhancement would be a listbox asking which one to debug (assuming you have multiple projects currently with NUnit guis up).

Afterwards export the file to where you put all your macros and then you can add them to your IDE.

   1:  Imports System

   2:  Imports EnvDTE

   3:  Imports EnvDTE80

   4:  Imports System.Diagnostics

   5:   

   6:  Public Module AttachToNUnitGui

   7:      Sub AttachToNUnitGui()

   8:          Dim ps As EnvDTE.Processes = DTE.Debugger.LocalProcesses()

   9:          Dim process As EnvDTE.Process

  10:          Dim p As EnvDTE.Process

  11:          Dim found As Boolean = False

  12:   

  13:          For Each p In ps

  14:              If p.Name.EndsWith("nunit.exe") = True Then

  15:                  found = True

  16:                  process = p

  17:              End If

  18:          Next

  19:   

  20:   

  21:          If (found) Then

  22:              p.Attach()

  23:          Else

  24:              MsgBox("No nunit consoles running")

  25:          End If

  26:      End Sub

  27:  End Module

Currently listening to Tapes N' Tapes - Insistor

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The last time Jack made it near Cleveland was 2004 when he traveled with G love and Donovan at the Amphitheater. This wasn’t bad as Jack’s following didn’t hit its peak yet. This time around I was pretty much miserable the first hour. Reason because, Blossom sells too many tickets. Yesterday there were just too many people there who figured Jack was just trendy for the week. Alot of annoying uncontrollable underage alcohol-consuming kids having no idea who Jack was. Just kind of annoying. I’m happy for all the successs he has had, definitely well-deserved, however, I miss the grassroots feel to his music. Yesterday, everything around him just felt too commercialized. Also we were so high up the hill, the music wasn’t loud enough to drown out the sound of underage kids scheming on how to get alcohol. (Which I know was probably be 6 years ago)

Maybe I’ll have to travel elsewhere to really enjoy him live again, in the meantime I’ll continue to scour here for his live tapings.

Plus the cold rain sucked, sorry I’m bitter its only been a day.

Though even for personal usage I think source control can be a total advantage in other areas.  Namely prototyping ideas.  It reduces the risk and time to attempt some different design or attempted refactor on the current solution.  Without some type of source management, you run the risk to have a sort “safe” working solution with an opportunity to attempt a “ground-breaking, change the world” design.  Attempting this change is the risk paid in time and chance that you fubar your solution to where you can’t get it back to the glory it once was.

I had the idea of writing a plugin which wouldn’t be as full-blown as a real version control system, all I need is a little snapshot I can get back to.  I wanted to be able to take a specific solution as argument and parse through the projects and zip them with directory to a location, sounds useful?  Too useful that it has already been done? correct again… This plugin saves me weekly.

This really had nothing to do with the super bowl, but more to do with my thumb killing me the last week so I chose not to play in a vball tournament this week. Team Haeg-ah still won. But because of this I’ve been shelling out code to this project like crazy. Good code or bad code?… still in the air on that one.

Anyways, this screen shot is technically not “in-game” but more of a performance test of 24-26 guys on the field at once running in place and also swapping in and out sprites assembled into a particular sequence. Looking promising so far, I hit a performance issue when adding the actual field. Field texture was too large and added a large difference in fps. Put in a tiling engine which I found on here by Kurt Jaegers, pretty quality – straightforward. Anyways I’m working on refactoring this into the TecmoBowl solution and looking at the performance differences then, we’ll see this week..

Anyways continuing to focus some of the common library functionality for this XNA toy project, getting closer by the day. The design process has been a little backwards at this point (tons of refactoring err… rewriting). Lot of proof of concept projects, testing some ideas, trying to be creative, borrowing others code to see what I can leverage. Can kind of be expected with the concurrent refactoring done with the XNA framework as well. They changed things on their side which have all made great sense, causing me to refactor on my side because of the new way of thinking. I think I’ve ironed out most of the kinks at this point, and have a pretty good understanding for what I’ll be able to work with on the next level up. More to come soon.

Came across this from Carmack on Slashdot interesting read on the differences between the PS3 and 360 SDKs.

I think thats enough random stream of consciousness for one night.