Cool Project at Work

It’s not often that you get to do a cool project for work. Todays project? See if I could get our .net code working on mono/linux. I’ve dabbled a bit before with mono, mainly when I was doing technical review for the [http://www.bookpool.com/sm/1590594789 Begining Databases With PostgreSQL] book. Turns out some guys in the next department over had gotten some test code working on [http://fedora.redhat.com/ fedora core 3], so that’s what I went about using. I managed to get xsp (a c# based test server) working OK, but my attempt to get [http://www.apacheworld.org/modmono/ mod_mono] working on apache failed. I get some odd error message saying that my version of apache is too old, but after updating everything I realized that the magic number of my apache matches what the mod_mono rpm is looking for, so I guess it’s some type of rpm issue. (As an aside, thats pretty crappy really, cause I did everything as stright rpms via yum, so you’d like to think it would work out of the box.) I thought about trying to get everything compiled from source, but figured I would see how badly the code failed on the xsp server first before going into that. I grabbed an older copy of the code and configured the xsp server only to have it complain about ODBC missing. (The original code runs on IIS and uses odbc to connect to our pg servers). So a few yum commands later, and some dithering with the odbc.ini conf file, and I had odbc installed and was now getting a horrendous error message about incompatable data type or some such. I talked to the boss and explained the issue with odbc and pointed out we could try using the npgsql native data providor. He said to give it a swing so I busted out a quick command line script which worked right away. At this point he said “but we need it in a web app” so I spent some time whipping up a quick little form to pull info from our database. He checked it out and said “this is good but what we really need is a web app running odbc”. Argh… ok.. took a look around our code and didnt get far, so wrote up another command line script to make sure my odbc configuration was working. Yep…that seems ok. At this point it was pretty much time to go home, so I fiddle with our original app a little more and then called it a day. At this point I’m going to try and enlist the help of our .net guy and see if he can discern the error. Alternativly if he can swap the code to npgsql on windows I think that would be a bonus. Honestly I’m not optimistic that we will really switch, but it’s cool just the same to get to kick around the new stuff. I’m actually fairly impressed by mono and .net already. Not that I would ever want to use it over [http://www.php.net php], but I would use it over java. Oh well… we’ll see what tommorrow brings.