Beware, o ye who walks in the woods with me. For I cannot help myself: I must share. Look at this little fern over here. This is a nice soapberry tree. So many ant lion nests here! Did you hear the tsip sound? Do you think it's a Dark-eyed Junco or a Yellow-rumped Warbler?

I pray that it is not a subconscious showing-off, know-it-all thing. That accusation has stung me before, in the middle-school classroom. Consciously, I simply love drawing people's attention to that which fascinates me (and yes, please do return the favor). There is a wonder about the natural world, a wonder and a joy that is so great that it often cannot be contained. This joy is reason enough to share with friends and family.

Some folks grow up in households of privilege where trips to the family cabin / ranch / lake-house are common. We had the next best thing: a family friend generous enough to invite us along to The Ranch. Now, The Ranch has a more formal name, but its legend and personal history are best distinguished by turning the general, specific.

My earliest experiences of nature were of playing in the yard — and out back — as a child in a Houston suburb. As I recall it, our backyard had a pecan and some young oaks, along with multiple gardens. There was a red oak — or perhaps a maple? — planted out front, and a sweet gum tree whose seed casings would bring forth caution in even the most carefree of barefoot children. And of course there was the St. Augustine grass. This was all conducive to much play outside. But the best part was behind the fence: The Ditch.

Desiring to learn about both Node.js (particularly as an API server) and ASP.Net Web API, I decided to throw one more technology in the mix and see which one is faster at relaying messages to a service bus, namely, RabbitMQ.

• Part 1: Test Runner
• Part 2: Initial Node.js Code
• Part 3: Web API Code
• Part 4: Enhanced Node.js code

Time to turn that Node.js test green. In Part 2, I succeeded in publishing a message to RabbitMQ using Node.js. However, my automated test failed: the .Net test runner could not handle the generated message. Three key elements were missing, which are required for the MassTransit .Net library to interpret the message correctly:

Desiring to learn about both Node.js (particularly as an API server) and ASP.Net Web API, I decided to throw one more technology in the mix and see which one is faster at relaying messages to a service bus, namely, RabbitMQ.

• Part 1: Test Runner
• Part 2: Initial Node.js Code
• Part 3: Web API Code
• Part 4: Enhanced Node.js code

And now, I finally get back to blogging about the ASP.Net Web API code that I wrote for this head-to-head comparison of REST service and message bus integration. The official tutorials were my guide for Web API, and as with the test runner in part 1, I used MassTransit as a convenient library for publishing from .Net code to RabbitMQ. Owin was my solution for self-hosting the web application.

Thanks to recent mowing, I was able to access the west-side of the pond at Sam Houston Trail Park in Irving, TX this morning. The pond is drying up — creating a wonderful concentration of aquatic creatures for the the shorebirds to eat. These photos are as good as I can do. Positively identified:

• American Avocet
• Snowy Egret
• Least Sandpiper
• Stilt Sandpiper (pretty sure, not absolutely sure)
• Greater Yellowlegs
• Northern Shoveler
• Killdeer

I encountered a few more common birds, and just as I was leaving ran into a group of three Lark Sparrows to cap off the muddy morning.

A small group gathered at the Bahá'í­ Center of Irving last night in our second meeting on the discourses of society, reflecting on climate change. The first meeting in the series was too much of a slide-based lecture, so for this second one we chose two videos and facilitated an open discussion. The conversation was robust, heartfelt, and meaningful — yet in reflection, it raises some key questions about how to have a productive, spiritually-oriented conversation.

Many social websites, and web-based applications, have a notification process where the server sends a signal back to the browser, informing that particular user that there is a message. "You've got mail," as America On-Line used to say it. Consider the picture below, from Twitter, which shows that I have one new notification. That number increments automatically when a new notification arrives, without having to reload the full page. How does that work? Well, this blog post doesn't try to answer that directly. In fact, it is simply a collection of notes pointing out how to use Microsoft's SignalR technology to achieve this.

The Bahá'ís of Irving are trying out a concept: on the last Friday of each month, we'll talk about a theme related to the "discourses of society," motivated by passages such as this one, from the Universal House of Justice's 2010 Ridván Letter to the Bahá'í­s of the world (p10):

"... involvement in public discourse can range from an act as simple as introducing Bahá'í ideas into everyday conversation to more formal activities such as the preparation of articles and attendance at gatherings, dedicated to themes of social concern - climate change and the environment, governance and human rights, to mention a few. It entails, as well, meaningful interactions with civic groups and local organizations in villages and neighbourhoods."

The August event was the first in the series, and the concept itself was the subject of the evening's presentation...

Isolating code from dependencies is crucial for developing small, well-defined, easy-to-understand tests. And it is an absolute must when those dependencies call external resources, such as a database, filesystem, or heavy-duty component (e.g. for interacting with office docs). But how do you introduce isolation in new unit tests for legacy .Net code? Well, that depends... and I have a flow chart and brief notes to help you figure it out.