Reflections From a Techie

Intro to the Bing Map API Simpler Than it Looks

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 02:30:39 GMT

Working with a map on a website, or any other application platform for that matter, may seem like a daunting task, but after working with it for a little bit, it is actually not all that difficult. The documentation for the API is a bit sparse, in my opinion, so I thought I would document what I did to get simple map functionality up and running so that others who might wanting to add a map to a webpage might find this article useful.

I am using the Bing API for this demonstration but you could use Google or Yahoo and not have to do too much different.

Get Your Key

First things first. You will need to go to the Map Account Center and create an account and obtain an application key. You can get development keys and production keys or use one key for both environments. The portal also has your usage stats, SDKs, a blog and other useful information.

The HTML

Once you have your key, your in business and can start configuring your web page to use the Bing Map API.

The only markup you need for your web page is a div tag.

   1: <div id="map_div" class="map">

   2: </div>

My style for this div looks like this.

   1: #search_main_conent .map

   2: {

   3:     position: absolute;

   4:     top: 20; left: 10;

   5:     width: 400px;

   6:     height: 400px;

   7:     border:#555555 2px solid;

   8: }

The JavaScript

What I want to do for this particular map, as far as functionality, is load the map, and when the user clicks on the map and changes the view by moving it around or zooming in or out, is when the views finishes changing, fire an event that will populate two text boxes with the longitude and latitude.

Here is the JavaScript code to make that all work.

   1: $(document).ready(function () {

   2:     twitterMap.LoadMap();

   3: });

4:

   5: function twitterMap() { }

   6: twitterMap._map = null;

7:

   8: twitterMap.LoadMap = function () {

   9:     var $maps = $('#search_main_conent .map');

  10:     $maps.each(function (index) {

  11:         if (index === 0) {

  12:             twitterMap._map = new Microsoft.Maps.Map(

  13:                 this, {

  14:                     credentials: "Your Key",

  15:                     center: new Microsoft.Maps.Location(

  16:                         26.225948,

  17:                         -80.188093),

  18:                     mapTypeId: Microsoft.Maps.MapTypeId.road,

  19:                     zoom: 7

  20:                 });

21:

  22:             Microsoft.Maps.Events.addHandler(

  23:                 twitterMap._map,

  24:                 "viewchangeend",

  25:                 twitterMap.onViewChangeEnd);

  26:         }

  27:     });

  28: };

29:

  30: twitterMap.onViewChangeEnd = function () {

  31:     var location = twitterMap._map.getCenter();

  32:     var longitude = location.longitude;

  33:     var latitude = location.latitude;

  34:     if (longitude) {

  35:         $('#search_main_conent #Longitude').val(longitude);

  36:     }

  37:     if (latitude) {

  38:         $('#search_main_conent #Latitude').val(latitude);

  39:     }

40:

41:

  42: };

First off, you will notice that I was a good boy and namespaced my JavaScript code. Actually, if you check out the Nerd Dinner project, you will see where I got that inspiration from. They are using an older version of the API, but their JavaScript is very clean and easy to read. Kudos for a job well done.

Now back to this map. So what I am doing here is using a jQuery selector to get a reference to the div tag in the HTML shown above passing that reference into a new Microsoft Maps Map object. Notice, that here is where I pass in my key that I got from the portal. At this point you can also customize your map so that it displays the way you want it to. In my example, I am setting the location to somewhere near where I live, and I am also setting the map type to show roads and not the satellite.

As I stated, I want to also capture the longitude and latitude when the view changes, so to do that I am defining an event. The event that I want to use is “viewchangedend” which fires when the map view has changed and has completed its changing.

My event handler then calls the map’s getCenter function to get the center coordinates of the center of the map in its current state. That functions returns a location object that contains the longitude and latitude properties that I want to use to fill the corresponding textboxes.

Once its completed my web page looks like this

See, not that difficult. When I move the map around, the longitude and latitude on the right hand side updates.

Hope that helps.

Changing Your Website Theme based on the Users Language or Culture

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 17:49:08 GMT

Currently I am working on pretty interesting project where if the user is not from the United States but speaks English, I need to present to them an entirely different themed experienced while still providing the same website functionality.

ASP.Net MVC does a very nice thing by encapsulating the view engine code so that is pluggable. As a matter of fact, you can actually use more than one view engine for your website if you wanted, as seen in Scott Hanselman’s post.

In my case, I still want to use the Razor View Engine but I just want to add functionality to dynamically change the paths to the views so that when user hits the web site and their current thread’s UI Culture is say United Kingdom English, I want to point them to an entirely different view engine location where the markup is very different but uses the same model.

Overriding the Razor View Engine

The way to do this is to override the RazorViewEngine class modifying its functions to dynamically change the path based on the current culture.

 1: using System.Web.Mvc;

 2: using Infrastructure.Http;

 3: using Infrastructure.Theming.Context;

 4: using StructureMap;

5:

 6: namespace Infrastructure.Theming.ViewEngines

 7: {

 8:     public class ThemingRazorViewEngine : RazorViewEngine

 9:     {

 10:         private readonly IThemingContext _themingContext;

 11:         public ThemingRazorViewEngine()

 12:         {

 13:             _themingContext = ObjectFactory.GetInstance<IThemingContext>();

 14:             LoadFormats();

 15:         }

16:

 17:         public ThemingRazorViewEngine(IThemingContext themingContext)

 18:         {

 19:             _themingContext = themingContext;

 20:             LoadFormats();

 21:         }

22:

 23:         private void LoadFormats()

 24:         {

 25:             AreaViewLocationFormats =

 26:                 new[]

 27:                     {

 28:                         "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%G/{1}/{0}.cshtml",

 29:                         "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%G/{1}/{0}.vbhtml",

 30:                         "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%G/Shared/{0}.cshtml",

 31:                         "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%G/Shared/{0}.vbhtml"

 32:                     };

 33:             AreaMasterLocationFormats =

 34:                 new[]

 35:                     {

 36:                         "~/Views/%G/{1}/{0}.cshtml",

 37:                         "~/Views/%G/Shared/{0}.cshtml",

 38:                         "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%G/{1}/{0}.cshtml",

 39:                         "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%G/Shared/{0}.cshtml"

 40:                     };

41:

 42:             AreaPartialViewLocationFormats =

 43:                 new[]

 44:                     {

 45:                         "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%G/{1}/{0}.cshtml",

 46:                         "~/Areas/{2}/Views/%G/Shared/{0}.cshtml"

 47:                     };

48:

 49:             ViewLocationFormats =

 50:                 new[]

 51:                     {

 52:                         "~/Views/%G/{1}/{0}.cshtml",

 53:                         "~/Views/%G/Shared/{0}.cshtml"

 54:                     };

55:

 56:             MasterLocationFormats =

 57:                 new[]

 58:                     {

 59:                         "~/Views/%G/{1}/{0}.cshtml",

 60:                         "~/Views/%G/Shared/{0}.cshtml"

 61:                     };

62:

 63:             PartialViewLocationFormats =

 64:                 new[]

 65:                     {

 66:                         "~/Views/%G/{1}/{0}.cshtml",

 67:                         "~/Views/%G/Shared/{0}.cshtml"

 68:                     };

 69:         }

70:

71:

72:

 73:         protected override IView CreatePartialView

 74: (ControllerContext controllerContext, string partialPath)

 75:         {

 76:             var compCulture = GetCompCulture();

 77:             string replacedPath = partialPath.Replace("%G", compCulture);

 78:             return base.CreatePartialView(controllerContext, replacedPath);

 79:         }

80:

 81:         protected override IView CreateView

 82: (ControllerContext controllerContext, string viewPath, string masterPath)

 83:         {

 84:             var compCulture = GetCompCulture();

 85:             string replacedMasterPath = masterPath.Replace("%G", compCulture);

 86:             string replaceViewPath = viewPath.Replace("%G", compCulture);

 87:             return base.CreateView(controllerContext, replaceViewPath, replacedMasterPath);

 88:         }

89:

 90:         protected override bool FileExists

 91: (ControllerContext controllerContext, string virtualPath)

 92:         {

 93:             var compCulture = GetCompCulture();

 94:             string replaceVirtualPath = virtualPath.Replace("%G", compCulture);

 95:             return base.FileExists(controllerContext, replaceVirtualPath);

 96:         }

97:

 98:         private string GetCompCulture()

 99:         {

 100:             string folder = _themingContext.GetFolderName();

 101:             if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(folder))

 102:             {

 103:                 folder ="enUS";

 104:             }

 105:

 106:             return folder;

 107:         }

 108:

 109:

 110:     }

 111: }

On every request this request for the view path will first to check to see if the file exists using the FileExists functionion and then if does Exists depending on what type of view request it is, the CreateView, or CreatePartialView will be called. As you can see, I have added functionality to replace the “%G” in the path with what ever the culture is returned from the GetCompCulture function.

All my GetCompCulture function is doing is injection a business object that is getting the users current culture from current thread and then stripping out the “-“ so that “en-US” is “enUS”. It is also defaulting any language culture that we have not set up to also be “enUS”.

Once I have a custom view engine, I just need to tell the MVC framework to only use it instead of the default Razor view engine. I can do that in the application startup event in the Global.cs file.

 1: ViewEngines.Engines.Clear();

 2: ViewEngines.Engines.Add(new ThemingRazorViewEngine());

The Folder Structure

Once my view engine is setup, I then need to setup my folder structure to match. Note, that if you are using a _viewStart.cshtml file, you will need to change the path of the _Layout file in that file.

 1: @{

 2:     Layout = "~/Views/enUS/Shared/_Layout.cshtml";

 3: }

The folder structure looks something like this.

And that’s it. Your views can now be totally separate and totally different markup based on your language criteria, or any criteria you want to provide for that matter.

Hope that helps.

How I moved my blog to the Orchard Project

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 01:29:18 GMT

For the past several years have been using BlogEngine.net to host my blog. I really like the blogging engine and I would have been okay with staying with that platform except that I wanted to get familiar with the Orchard Project and I figured the best way to do that was to use that platform for my blog.

You should know that as I write this, I am not an expert with Orchard platform. As a matter of fact, I am pretty much a newbie, with the exception that it, like the sites that I build, use the ASP.Net MVC 3 platform. However, to that fact, I haven’t needed to know anything about MVC to actually use Orchard.

Initial Setup

To set up Orchard, the first thing I did was to backup my existing blog site and then download and try and get it working locally since it wasn’t working on my remote, hosting site.

Once up the next thing to do was to create an export file so I could transfer my current posts to the new site. Fortunately both BlogEngine.Net and Orchard both have blogML import and export functionality. BlogML is standard blogging xml format that allows you to import from one blog platform to another blog platform.

Basically all I had to do was click the export button and allow the site to create an XML file that I could later use to import into the new site.

Initial Setup of Orchard and WebMatrix

One of the new nice things that Microsoft has done is provide a small website engine to help setup websites really easily. I used the “Install Web Components”, and selected the Orchard project.

The first time I downloaded, I tried to set it up locally, first, but after doing that and then uploading the application it didn’t work. So I abandoned that application and deleted it from my hosting site and decided to install a new Orchard site again.

This time I downloaded and immediately uploaded to my remote site using the deployment features in WebMatrix.

Once the site was uploaded I tried to access it again and immediately it came up and asked what type of database I wanted to use.

I selected the SQL Server compact edition and then seamlessly the site came up and it worked! Yes, after three months of being down my site was up! Well sort of. My posts were not there and the site basically just said welcome.

The great thing about Orchard is it has very good extensibility modules that you can plug into your site and add functionality. You can go to the Gallery and pick the modules you would like to add to your site. To import my saved blogML xml file, I needed to add the BlogML module. Once install, I imported my posts and just like that my new site had my old posts. How easy was that?

The categories that were on my old site were not loaded, but I had my tags so that was good enough for me. I also noticed that the links to my old images were now invalid so that will need to be fixed.

In a later post I’ll share some of the modules I added to the site to give it more functionality than just that ability to display my posts.

Moving on to Orchard and Maybe Even Writing Some More

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 13:44:04 GMT

Some of you (it was probably just me) may have notices that my site has been down for about three months. Actually I didn’t care too much at the time as I was head deep in a project that really pretty much kept me awfully busy.

Well, I finally got around to fixing my site and in the process of doing that, I also upgraded the site to the Orchard Project.

I know, I am breaking the first rule blogging when I say this; but here it goes… I’m back!

No. No. I shouldn’t say that, so ignore that last sentence.

I do want to say this though. I plan to broaden my site to more than just posts about programming and Dot Net coding. This will give me more opportunities to write posts and more opportunities to share with you my experiences. I actually want to start out by writing a few posts about my experiences upgrading my site to Orchard. So you may see a few posts like that in the upcoming week.

I have also been in working in a SCRUM, Agile methodology for over a year now, so I think that now there is a lot to share, good and bad, in that area as well.

I want to write some about Social Media. You may have noticed that I am a big fan of Twitter. My wife is an even bigger fan. We have actually met quite a few people (some now are even quite close friends now) in person through that site and I think sharing our experiences with this would be fun to write about.

I still will be writing mostly about coding, since that is where my ultimate passion lies. I have learned a lot since my last post. I have since deployed two MVC 3 and Razor apps, written a few jQuery plugins and have learned some knew enterprise tools such as SiteCore for content management. I’ve even taken a stab writing some simple Windows Phone Apps, although I got say, still a lot to learn on that technology. There’s also HTML5 and CSS3 to write about and what this means to web developers; so I don’t think I’ll be running out of topics in programming any time soon.

So stay tuned and keep in touch, and happy coding.

Using the ASP.Net MVC & Jquery Template to repeat a HTML Fragment

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 10:21:23 GMT

I have been playing around with the new jQuery Template plugin and I’ve got to say that I am pretty impressed. I haven’t seen too many code samples so I thought I would share my approach as I had some somewhat sophisticated requirements that I haven’t really seen covered anywhere.

Approach

The repeating HTML is pretty busy so I wanted to isolate it because if it ever changes I could just publish an HTML file instead of doing a build or even republishing the view. (We use a CMS system that makes publishing content pretty easy to do.) I also wanted to reuse the fragment in different views while keeping things DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) at the same time.

To do this, I created an HTML Helper that reads the HTML fragment caches it and renders inside the JavaScript tag. So this is my HTML tag:

   1: <li>

   2:     <div style='float: left;'>

   3:         <img style='border: 0px none; width: 200px;' alt='${Name}' src='${TopImagePath}'>

   4:     </div>

   5:     <div style='margin-left: 210px;'>

   6:         <div style='padding: 5px;'>

   7:             <b>

   8:                 <a href='/Activities/Activity/Detail/${Code}/'>${Activities}</a>

   9:             </b>

  10:         </div>

  11:         {{html ShortDescription}}<br>

  12:         <b>Duration:</b> ${Duration}<br>

  13:         <b>Code:</b> ${Code}<br>

  14:         <b>Level:</b> ${Level} <br>

  15:         <b>Activity Types:</b> ${Types}<br>

  16:         <b>Activity Level:</b> ${Level}<br><b>Price:</b> $<br>

  17:     </div>

  18: </li>

I’m going to move the styles to a CSS file, but you get the idea. This HTML is sitting in a content folder off the root of the website, and the name of the file is ActivityItem.htm.

Notice that the placeholders are designated as ${fieldName}, and if I want to encode the HTML, I could use the placeholder {{html fieldName}}.

I then render the HTML in the JavaScript tag. The JavaScript tag has an id that will referred to by jQuery Template plugin and also uses the specific type “html/text” so it does not force a syntax check from the JavaScript engine or display it prematurely in the browser.

   1: <script id="activityItemsTemplate" type="text/html">

   2:     <%= Html.RenderPath("Controls/activityItem.html") %>

   3: </script>

The only thing the RenderPath HTMLhelper does is get the HTML content from cache, and if it is not there; it reads the content from the HTML file, and adds back to cache, and renders it. The caching is nothing fancy. Its just the common caching technique used forever it seems like.

When the HTML Helper renders the content from cache the the JavaScript tag looks like this.

   1: <script id="activityItemsTemplate" type="text/html">   1:  
   2:     <li>
   3:     <div style='float: left;'>
   4:         <img style='border: 0px none; width: 200px;' alt='${Name}' src='${TopImagePath}'>
   5:     </div>
   6:     <div style='margin-left: 210px;'>
   7:         <div style='padding: 5px;'>
   8:             <b>
   9:                 <a href='/Activities/Activity/Detail/${Code}/'>${Activities}</a>
  10:             </b>
  11:         </div>
  12:         {{html ShortDescription}}<br>
  13:         <b>Duration:</b> ${Duration}<br>
  14:         <b>Code:</b> ${Code}<br>
  15:         <b>Level:</b> ${Level} <br>
  16:         <b>Activity Types:</b> ${Types}<br>
  17:         <b>Activity Level:</b> ${Level}<br><b>Price:</b> $<br>
  18:     </div>
  19: </li>
</script>

Now all I have to do is make an AJAX call to get the JSON collection object and map it to the template.

   1: $.getJSON(url, { Prices: prices, Levels: levels, Experiences: experiences, currentPage: currentPage, pageSize: pageSize }, function (data) {

2:

   3:     var list = data.ActivityList;

4:

   5:     var markup = $("#activityItemsTemplate").html();

6:

   7:     $.template("activityItemsTemplate", markup);

   8:     $.tmpl("activityItemsTemplate", list).appendTo("#activityItemsContainer");

   9:     }

  10: });

The Container is just the ID of the UL tag.

   1: <ul id="activityItemsContainer">

   2: </ul>

Hope that helps

How to Set an Identity Column Using Code First for Entity Framework In the DbContext

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 04:26:36 GMT

I did not see this in any documentation any where so I thought I would just do a quick post about it.

If you want to set a column as an Identity in code and then create the database schema from that code, you can annotate your entity as the Entity Framework Team has shown in their post about Data Annotations. The attribute to do this is the StoreGeneratedAttribute.

I don’t want to have any attributes on my entities so I would rather do it my Repository class which is derived from DbContext as Scott Hanselman shows how to do in his post about the Magical Unicorns.

In this quick example I am going to set my Role Entity’s RileId property as an identity column.

Here is my Role Entity

   1: using System.Collections.Generic;

2:

   3: namespace AviBlog.Core.Entities

   4: {

   5:     public class Role

   6:     {

   7:         public int RoleId { get; set; }

   8:         public string RoleName { get; set; }

9:

  10:         public virtual ICollection<User> Users { get; set; }

  11:     }

  12: }

Notice, no attributes on my Entity.

Here is my Repository Class which is derived from the DbContext base class.

       1: using System.Data.Entity;

       2: using System.Data.Metadata.Edm;

       3: using AviBlog.Core.Entities;

       4:  

       5: namespace AviBlog.Core.Repositories

       6: {

       7:     public class PostRepository : DbContext

       8:     {

       9:         public DbSet<Category> Categoryies { get; set; }

        public DbSet<Comment> Comments { get; set; }

        public DbSet<Post> Posts { get; set; }

        public DbSet<Profile> Profiles { get; set; }

        public DbSet<Rating> Ratings { get; set; }

        public DbSet<Tag> Tags { get; set; }

        public DbSet<User> Users { get; set; }

        public DbSet<Role> Roles { get; set; }

  

        public PostRepository() : base("aviBlog")

        {

        }

  

        protected override void OnModelCreating(System.Data.Entity.ModelConfiguration.ModelBuilder modelBuilder)

        {

            modelBuilder.Entity<Role>().Property(x => x.RoleId).StoreGeneratedPattern = StoreGeneratedPattern.Identity;

            base.OnModelCreating(modelBuilder);

        }

  

        

    }

}

In the OnModelCreating method, that I am overriding, I am setting the property of the Role entity using Property extension, and that is the magic that will set the identity for the database column.

So at this point, I can reset the database schema by using the Database object like below:

   1: Database.SetInitializer(new RecreateDatabaseIfModelChanges<PostRepository>());

Hope that helps!

Teched 2010 - Internet Explorer 9

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 18:17:59 GMT

Intro

The first session of interest I went to for the second day was a session on the new features in Internet Explorer 9. Firsts message in this session was: STOP USING IE 6!

Yes! Even Microsoft wants you to stop using IE 6. Of course, they will point out that when IE 6 was released, it was more standards compliant than the major player at the time, Netscape 4, but admittedly they also point out that they dropped the ball after that and let other competitors pass them.

The good thing is Microsoft is trying to make a mends, and I must say that I was impressed with direction they are going with IE 9.

If you are interested in seeing for your self you can visit their web site at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/.

Performance

During the first part of the session, a bar chart was presented comparing all of the major browser players JavaScript engine. The first bar on the chart represented IE 8, and I was really surprised to see how slow IE 8 was. It must have been at least four or five time slower than the fastest browser JavaScript Engine, Chrome. However, the latest release of the IE 9, is very close and is in fact faster than the latest Firefox JavaScript engine and even its beta release too.

Where IE 9 really shines in performance is its graphics accelerator engine. There was a demo of moving graphics on a web page and IE 9 was able to processed it seamlessly and when the same demo was done in Chrome it was much slower and very choppy.

HTML 5

IE 9 will have full support of HTML 5 with features such as: SVG1.1 video, and audio. If you want to learn more about SVG there is a very good open source graphic editor you can play with called Inkscape.

Other things HTML 5 has is a new function called DOMContentloaded which allows you specify that some images should not be loaded until the DOM is completely loaded. For example, this is a good approach for websites that want to show third party ads, but do not want those ads to hinder the time it takes to load the web page. By forcing those ads to load at the end the webpage will appear to load faster.

CSS3

Turning to CSS3, a neat feature is that you will be able filter styles based on what client is accessing the site and other criteria such as what screen size the client has. Called media queries , this feature provides the flexibility to choose what styles to load based on media types.

For example you can conditionally load a style sheet based on whether the client is a browser or a printer:

CSS3 also allows provides more ways for you to select elements. For example input:not(enabled) will only style an input element that is not enabled.

CSS3 provides more granular control over colors allowing you to control things like opacity and even making the opacity increase in value as the color progresses through an element.

Debug Tools

IE 9 has added some new functionality to their debug tool. The main feature being the Network tab. Similar to Fiddler, except now incorporated in the browser, this tab will allow you to watch what is being requested and the response that is coming back, including what is contained in the header.

Conclusion

Thats all I have for not but check back and I will update the site with other sessions I have attended.

Off to Microsoft TechEd

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 18:21:06 GMT

Next week is TechEd and I am fortunate that my work will be sending me there with the expectation that I come back with a lot of notes.

With that in mind, I am going to try and update my blog with a summary of that days sessions, so if you are not going and would like to read about what's going on, come on back and take gander this blog and check my summaries of each the sessions I plan on attending.

Below is what I am planning on attending:

Monday, June 7

Hall F
KEY01 Tech·Ed North America Keynote Presentation 11:00 AM1:00 PM

Rm 383
DEV324 Data Development GPS: Guidance for Choosing the Right Data Access Technology for Your Application Today
2:15 PM
Rm 356
WEB316 What’s New in Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 2 2:45 PM4:00 PM
Rm 388
WEB308 My Web Site Is So Slow...and I Don’t Know What to Do about It! 4:30 PM5:45 PM
Rm 272
WEB204 Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 for Web Deployment
5:45 PM
Rm 287
WEB309 Practical Strategies for Debugging Cross-Browser Display Issues 5:45 PM9:00 PM

Tuesday, June 8

WEB302 A Lap around Windows Internet Explorer 9 for Developers
11:15 AM
Auditorium B
KEY02 Business Intelligence Conference Keynote Presentation
11:00 AM
Rm 355
BOF06-DV Microsoft ASP.NET MVC: Share Your Stories from the Trenches 11:00 AM1:30 PM

Rm 387
WEB202 Building Web Sites Using the Orchard Content Management System (CMS) 3:15 PM4:30 PM
Rm 391
WEB206 Microsoft ASP.NET MVC for Web Form Programmers
4:30 PM
Rm 398
ASI204 Windows Azure AppFabric Overview 5:00 PM6:15 PM
Rm 281
COS305 Microsoft SQL Azure Development Best Practices 6:00 PM9:00 PM

Wednesday, June 9

WEB307 Effective RIA: Tips and Tricks for Building Effective Rich Internet Applications
11:00 AM
Rm 398
ASI313 Windows Server AppFabric Caching: What It Is and When You Should Use It 11:00 AM1:30 PM

Lunch 11:45 AM1:00 PM
Rm 388
WEB301 10 Ways to Protect Users of Your Web Applications
1:00 PM
Rm 265
COS208 Building Engaging Apps with Data Using Microsoft Codename “Dallas”
1:00 PM
Rm 276
ASI312 What's New in Windows Communication Foundation in .NET Framework 4 1:30 PM2:45 PM
Rm 350
WEB02-INT Extending Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 2
2:45 PM
Rm 272
ARC303 How Frameworks Can Kill Your Projects, and Patterns Can Prevent You from Getting Killed
2:45 PM
Auditorium B
DEV205 Overview of the Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.0 3:15 PM4:30 PM
Rm 283
DEV303 Building RESTful Applications with the Open Data Protocol
4:30 PM
Rm 287
DPR306 Metrics That Matter: Real Measures to Improve Software Development 5:00 PM6:15 PM
Rm 288
DEV308 Heterogeneous Development with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server 6:00 PM9:00 PM

Thursday, June 10

Rm 293
DEV317 Profiling and Debugging Parallel Code with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 9:45 AM11:00 AM
Rm 398
WEB303 Administering Sites That Scale Using Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5, ARR and URL Rewrite 11:00 AM1:30 PM

Rm 356
DPR302 Behavior-Driven Development in the Real World
2:45 PM
Auditorium A
DEV305 Deep Dive into Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework 3:15 PM4:30 PM
Auditorium B
WSV401 Advanced Automation Using Windows PowerShell 2.0
4:30 PM
Rm 398
ASI308 Programming AppFabric: Moving Microsoft .NET to the Cloud 5:00 PM6:15 PM
Rm 291
DPR303 Branching and Merging Practices 6:30 PM11:00 PM

Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Its All About the Cloud

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 18:20:28 GMT

I had the chance to see the Microsoft Teched Keynote today mainly presented by Bob Muglia, and unlike previous TechEd keynotes I have attended--actually I have only attended one in 2007--it was all business and no fluff. No side celebrities to some lame skit this time around. There were no earth shattering announcements made today although today they made a major push to go to the cloud which I thought was pretty interesting.

The main drive of the keynote was all about cloud computing. It was the overall theme that pretty much drove the whole keynote address. Each topic that was presented somehow tied back to the cloud. As a matter of fact, one of the demos was of an application that allowed user to be authenticated and recognized by a website via Active Directory profiles without that user actually having to be on the premises where that website is hosted. This was done by hosting the Activity Directory profiles in the cloud via Azure. Seems a pretty scary thing to do, but Muglia emphases as one of his points that the emphasis of this drive was that it was secure.

Muglia announced today that Visual Studio 2010, will now have the capabilities to develop applications specifically for Azure. From within Visual Studio you can specify things like how big your virtual environment will be, and you will be able to deploy directly to Azure with tracing of the deployment provided.

Other announcements that were made that:

The AppFabric plug in for IIS 7 is now available in RTM. This will allow IT to better manage deployments, diagnose and monitor WCF services, and provide a more flexible and scalable caching alternative to the current ASP.Net caching.
Windows Server R2 SP1 and Windows 7 SP1 will be available in July.
A new version of Windows Communicator will be available which will provide better conferencing (including video) as well as a "big brother" function that will analyze a user mail and other data and determine what skill-sets they have so someone in the company can search on that skill-set and give you a ring if you have it. Sounds a bit scary to me.
Full development capability for the Windows 7 Phone will be able to be done in Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight. This is a good sign that Microsoft still wants to be in the phone market although I think they still have a ways to go if they want catch up to the iPhone. Seems they are going after the business phone market.
Windows 9 will have full support of HTML 5 and have graphics acceleration for faster graphics rendering of a web page.
The new version of Web Expressions was released to day and it includes a Super Preview to compare what you design pages in to different browser versions such as IE 6, 7, 8, Firefox, and new with this release is Safari on the Mac. Yes you can now test Mac versions of Safari with needing a Mac. By they way, you can also do it on Spoon.net. http://spoon.net/browsers/

There a few other announcement but those were the ones as a web developer that interested me. I will try and update the blog with other stuff I learn through out this week so stay in touched.

JQuery, Asp.Net MVC 2 Multi Project Areas and Other News Minutia

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 03:08:09 GMT

jQuery News

I know this nugget is a couple of weeks old now, but did anyone catch the news that Microsoft is throwing its support behind jQuery?

So it seems that if you have been using the Microsoft AJAX tools you are probably not going to be seeing much of an effort to improve those tools in the future. Not that it really matters, since it seems that most developers have abandon that toolset about a year ago, and with the emergance of MVC, they were becoming irrelevant anyway. Also, the earlier versions of the Microsoft AJax framework had performance problems under heavy load and although they have done a lot of work to make improvements, jQuery is still far and away much faster. Plus, when working with designers who are not Microsoft centric, jQuery built a bridge for the developer and designer to work together.

I have several examples on jQuery Ajax calls in case you are interested.

My first official large site using ASP.Net MVC 2

So this past month I started working on my first large MVC web application using MVC 2, and although I have been playing around with for more than a year now, I have learned a lot in the few months. The book that was really helpful was “Pro ASP.Net MVC” Framework by Steven Sanderson. I highly recommend it if you are getting started, but you might want to wait until the MVC 2 revision comes out. If you can't wait for the revision there is the eBook "Asp.Net MVC 2 In Action." This book is good in that it covers some more advanced topics like how to keep you controllers light. I think the two books together will get you well on the way to developing in ASP.Net MVC.

So far the only hang up I had was that I had set up my solution to incorporate multi project areas which was supported in the MVC 2 preview releases of Areas. However, when the RTM came out it was no longer supported. I searched and searched for solutions to my dilemma, but the only thing I could find was post by Jonathon who basically had the same experience I had, and a reference to an obscure message on a message board saying (by what appeared to be some one from the ASP Team) that it was not supported. To date, I haven't found any more formal post or article saying that was not the case.

I looked at trying the MvcContrib’s portable area alternative, and it’s a pretty nice approach, but I would like my views deployed to production as separate files and not as a resource file in a assembly, so I decided not go that route. I think for now, I am just going to include the areas in a single project and when the next version of MVC comes out—pull the different areas out into different projects then—if that is, they will have that feature in future releases.

TFS license for VS 2008

I heard this week, not from someone official, that once Visual Studio 2010 is released, they will also include Team Foundation Server for Visual Studio 2008 as a part of the MSDN license. That good news for me as I have been using the trial version for the past few weeks. I suppose the cool tool now is GIT so maybe I should take a look at that as well. At least for my VS 2010 stuff. My only thing is I am getting kind of tired of having to learn a new source control repository every year, there are other cooler things I could be learning, but I guess that is part of the job.

MVC 2 Strongly Typed HTML Helper and Enhanced Validation Sample

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 08:43:02 GMT

In lue of the off the official release of ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM, I decided I would put together a quick sample of the enhanced HTML.Helpers and validation controls.

I am going to use my sample event site where I will have a form so a user can search for information about a certain events. So when the Search page loads the Search action is fired return my strongly typed model. to the view.

[HttpGet]

public ViewResult Search(): public ViewResult Search()

{

    IList<EventsModel> result = _eventsService.GetEventList();

    var viewModel = new EventSearchModel

                        {

                            EventList = new SelectList(result, "EventCode","EventName","Select Event")

                        };

    return View(viewModel);

}

Nothing special here, although I did want to show how to load up a strongly typed drop down list because that hung me up for a little bit. So to that, I am going to pass back a SelectList to the view and my HTML helper should no how to load this.

So lets take a look at the mark up for the view.

<%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" 

Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<EventsSample.Models.EventSearchModel>" %>

  

<asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server">

    Search

</asp:Content>

  

<asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server">

  

    <h2>Search for Events</h2>

  

    <% using (Html.BeginForm("Search","Events")) {%>

        <%= Html.ValidationSummary(true) %>

        

        <fieldset>

            <legend>Fields</legend>

            

            <div class="editor-label">

                <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.EventNumber) %>

            </div>

            <div class="editor-field">

                <%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.EventNumber) %>

                <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.EventNumber) %>

            </div>

            

            <div class="editor-label">

                <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.GuestLastName) %>

            </div>

            <div class="editor-field">

                <%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.GuestLastName) %>

                <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.GuestLastName) %>

            </div>

            

            <div class="editor-label">

                <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.EventName) %>

            </div>

            <div class="editor-field">

                <%= Html.DropDownListFor(model => model.EventName, Model.EventList,"Select Event") %>

                <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.EventName) %>

            </div>

            

            <p>

                <input type="submit" value="Save" />

            </p>

        </fieldset>

  

    <% } %>

  

    <div>

        <%= Html.ActionLink("Back to List", "Index") %>

    </div>

  

</asp:Content>

A nice feature is the scaffolding that MVC has to generate code. I simply right clicked inside my Search() action, inside the EventsController and selected “Add View” and then I selected my strongly typed object that I wanted to pass to the view and also selected that I wanted the content type be “Edit”. With that the aspx page was completely generated, although I did have to go back in and change the textbox for the Event Names to a drop down list of the names to select from.

The new feature with MVC 2 are the strongly typed HTML helpers. So now, my textboxes, drop down list, and validation helpers are all strongly typed to my model. This features gives you the benefits of intellisense and also makes it easier to debug. “The Gu” has a great post about the feature in case you want more details. The DropDownListFor function to generate the drop down list was a little tricky for me. You first need to use a Lanbda expression to pass in the property you want the selected value assigned to in your model, and then you need to pass in the list directly from the model.

Validations

To validate the form, you can use the strongly type validation HTML helpers which will inspect your model and return errors if the validation fails. The definitions of these rules are set directly on the Model itself so lets take a look.

using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations;

using System.Web.Mvc;

  

namespace EventsSample.Models

{

    public class EventSearchModel

    {

        [Required(ErrorMessage = "Please enter the event number.")]

        [RegularExpression(@"\w{6}", 

            ErrorMessage = "The Event Number must be 6 letters and/or numbers.")]

        public string EventNumber { get; set; }

  

        [Required(ErrorMessage = "Please enter the guest's last name.")]

        [RegularExpression(@"^[A-Za-zÀ-ÖØ-öø-ÿ1-9 '\-\.]{1,22}$", 

            ErrorMessage = "The gueest's last name must 1 to 20 characters.")]

        public string GuestLastName { get; set; }

  

        public string EventName { get; set; }

        public SelectList EventList { get; set; }

    }

}

Pretty cool!

Okay, the only thing left to do is perform the validation in the POST action.

[HttpPost]

public ViewResult Search(EventSearchModel eventSearchModel)

{

    if (ModelState.IsValid) return View("SearchResults");

    else

    {

         IList<EventsModel> result = _eventsService.GetEventList();

        eventSearchModel.EventList = new SelectList(result, "EVentCode","EventName");

  

        return View(eventSearchModel);

    }

}

    }

If the form entries are valid, here I am simply displaying the SearchResult, but in a real world sample I would also go out get the results first. You get the idea though. In my case, when the form is not valid, I also had to reload my SelectList with the event names before I loaded the page again. Remember this is MVC, no _VieState here :)

So that’s it. Now my form is validating the data and when it fails it looks like this.

Filtering Dropdowns in a ASP.Net MVC App using jQuery and jSon.

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 02:46:20 GMT

I have often come across the need to load a dropdown list based on the selection of another drop down list on a form. In web forms it is really easy, especially if you were just doing a regular page post back. You simply set the dropdown’s AutoPostBack property to true and then on the change event load the second dropdown based on the value of the first event.

Then along came the Ajax Toolkit that had Ajax server controls that would basically do that for you pretty simply without a full page postback. You could see a demo of that functionality here.

How to do this with MVC

Now in MVC all the cool server controls are gone but with just a little extra work we can get the same functionality pretty easily. Moreover, using the Json protocol makes the population of the second drop down much lighter accross the wire.

In my example, I have a pretend scenario where the user selects an event from the first drop down and based on the value of the first selection, the options of the second is dropdown is populated.

Here is the view code I am using for this example. (Note: I am using the Sparks View Engine for the View Framework instead of the Microsoft MVC View Framework because it makes the mark up much cleaner.

<viewdata EventList="SelectList" />

  

  

<content name="head">

    <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.3.2.min-vsdoc.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

    <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.3.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

</content>

  

  

  

  

#using (Html.BeginForm())

#        {

          

 <div>

            <fieldset>

                <legend>Event Information</legend>

                <p>

                    <label for="eventname">Event name:</label>

                    ${Html.DropDownList("eventname", EventList)}

                </p>

                <p>

                    <label for="eventdate">Event Date:</label>

                    <select id="eventdate">

                        <option value="">Select Date:</option>

                    </select>

                </p>

                <p>

                    <input type="submit" value="See Event Info" />

                </p>

            </fieldset>

        </div>         

          

          

#}

If you are wondering why my second selection list is not generated by the HtmlHelper class it is only because I was not able to append to it using jQuery. Since it really wasn’t needed anyway I just decided not to bother.

The name of my view is called Events and it resides in my Home controller and the code for populates that view looks like this.

public ActionResult Events()

        {

            IList<EventDto> events = new List<EventDto>();

            const int upper = 5;

            for (int i = 0; i < upper; i++)

            {

                var eventItem = new EventDto() {EventCode = i.ToString(), Eventname = string.Format("Name {0}", i)};

                events.Add(eventItem);

            }

  

            var eventList = new SelectList(events, "EventCode", "EventName");

            ViewData["EventList"] = eventList;

            return View();

        }

Nothing special here. I am just creating a list of events and then passing it to a SelectList so it can be populated in the view.

So when the page loads the HTML looks like this:

  

                <legend>Event Information</legend>

                <p>

                    <label for="eventname">Event name:</label>

                    <select id="eventname" name="eventname"><option value="0">Name 0</option>

<option value="1">Name 1</option>

<option value="2">Name 2</option>

<option value="3">Name 3</option>

<option value="4">Name 4</option>

</select>

                </p>

                <p>

                    <label for="eventdate">Event Date:</label>

                    <select id="eventdate">

                        <option>Select Date:</option>

                    </select>

                </p>

                <p>

                    <input value="See Event Info" type="submit">

                </p>



And the page looks like this:

The JsonResult Function

ASP.Net MVC comes with different controller actions, one of them being the JsonResult action. Like the ActionResult, the JsonResult sends data back to the view but in this case, the response is converted into JSON.

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Get)]

        public JsonResult EventDates(string eventCode)

        {

            IList<EventDateDto> eventDates = BuildEventDates(eventCode);

            return Json(eventDates);

        }

In writing the function, first I have to tell it action to respond do. In this case I want it to respond to “GET” requests, so I need to add the AcceptVerbs attribute to the function with the “GET” verb stated. The function needs to have the parameter for the event code that the user selected in the dropdown, and then based on the parameter the application gets a list of dates. These collection dates (are formatted as strings in this case) are then passed back by calling the Json() function.

The jQuery function:

So in order to get the data for the second dropdown we need to make an AJAX call to the server and pass it the value of the first dropdown when its “change” event is fired.

When the event is fired, we can then use the jQuery $.AJAX call to make a “GET” request to the URL as such: …/Home/EventDates?eventCode=3. When you look at the header of the request you also notice that “Accept” attribute is set to “application/json, text/javascript, */*”.

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">

        $(function(){

          $("select#eventname").change(function(){

                var data = $(this).val();

                var json = {eventCode: data};

                

                

                $.ajax({

                  type: "GET",

                  url: "/Home/EventDates",

                  data: json,

                  dataType: "json",

                  error: function(xhr, status, error) {

                    alert("error routine");

                  },

                  success: function(res){

                    var $dropdown = $("select#eventdate");

                    $dropdown.find('option').remove().end();

                    $dropdown.append('<option value="">Select Date</option>');

                    for (var i = 0; i < res.length; i++) {

                        $("select#eventdate").append('<option value="' + res[i].EventDateName + '">' + res[i].EventDateName + '</option>');

                      }

                      

                  }

                });

          });

        })

        </script>

Notice that the data we are passing must in the request must be in a jSon format. So in the case the data we are passing is {eventCode:3}. The response we get back is:

[{"EventDateCode":"10/27/2009","EventDateName":"10/27/2009"},{"EventDateCode":"10/30/2009","EventDateName":"10/30/2009"},

{"EventDateCode":"11/2/2009","EventDateName":"11/2/2009"},{"EventDateCode":"11/5/2009","EventDateName":"11/5/2009"},

{"EventDateCode":"11/8/2009","EventDateName":"11/8/2009"},{"EventDateCode":"11/11/2009","EventDateName":"11/11/2009"},

{"EventDateCode":"11/14/2009","EventDateName":"11/14/2009"},{"EventDateCode":"11/17/2009","EventDateName":"11/17/2009"},

{"EventDateCode":"11/20/2009","EventDateName":"11/20/2009"}]

If the response is successful, the callback function takes the collection that is returned and build a string of <option> tags and append it to the select object.

Update:

In the MVC 2 version the JsonResult response will by default throw an exception. This is because of a subtle vulnerability in which someone could gain access to sensitive information. You can get the details from Phil Haack's post. So the moral of the story is if you passing sensitive imformation in the response, it is probably better for you to make a POST rather than doing GET like I did in this example. If you are not passing sensitive information and you still would to use a GET request then you will need to change the JSon method from:

return JSon(eventDates);

return JSon(eventDates, JSonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);

Build a REST Web Application with WCF and jQuery

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:40:25 GMT

Introduction

So at my work, we started on a new web application, and mainly because a lot of guys working on it were going to be new and also because it is somewhat a visible project; we figured we would keep the risk low and use the traditional web forms ASP.Net application.

On the other hand we still wanted the separation of concerns you get from a MVC style application, and because we were also planming on using designers for the web pages who were very proficient with jQuery but who did not know much about ASP.net. As a matter of fact, most of these guys write jQuery and HTML with a simple text editor…show offs :)

Also, for performance reasons and the fact the web designers were very familiar with the protocol, we wanted to pass JSON objects back and forth from the client to the server and vice versa.

Another goal is we want to keep as little as code as possible in the web project and place it in a different “Core” assembly. This would make deployments for us easier.

The Solution Layout

The solution looks like this:

The EventList.aspx page will be the page I will use for this demo. I deleted the associated code-behind files with and also removed the references of the code-behind from the page deplaration.

When I added the EventService.svc WCF Service into the project, Visual Studio added the EventService.svc.cs file and the IEventService service contract interface. I moved them to the Core project and changed the namespaces.

I also added a folder for the Unity service factory build up. You can see how I did it in a previous post.

The Service

Since I moved the associated files that were added when I added the WCF Service, I have to go in and change the declarations so they point to the proper place.

   1: <%@ ServiceHost

   2:     Language="C#"

   3:     Debug="true"

   4:     Service="RestSample.Core.ServiceContracts.EventsService"

   5:     Factory="RestSample.Core.ServiceContrainer.UnityServiceHostFactory"

   6: %>

Also the code behind reference was moved and Factory attribute was added to point to my custom Unity Service Host Factory.

The Service Contract

The Service contract needs to be decorated with the ServiceContract attrubute; but I also need to specify that this message will take “POST” requests, and that the protocal will be JSON.

   1: using System.ServiceModel;

   2: using System.ServiceModel.Web;

   3: using RestSample.Core.DataContracts;

4:

   5: namespace RestSample.Core.ServiceContracts

   6: {

   7:     [ServiceContract]

   8:     public interface IEventsService

   9:     {

  10:         [OperationContract]

  11:         [WebInvoke(Method = "POST",

  12:             ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json,

  13:             BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Bare)]

  14:         EventList GetLatestEvents();

  15:     }

  16: }

The implantation of this contract is injected with my controller where my response will be built up.

Here is the service contract implementation:

   1: using RestSample.Core.Controllers;

   2: using RestSample.Core.DataContracts;

3:

   4: namespace RestSample.Core.ServiceContracts

   5: {

   6:     public class EventsService : IEventsService

   7:     {

   8:         private readonly IEventController _eventController;

9:

  10:         public EventsService(IEventController eventController)

  11:         {

  12:             _eventController = eventController;

  13:         }

14:

  15:         #region IEventsService Members

16:

  17:         public EventList GetLatestEvents()

  18:         {

  19:             return _eventController.GetLatestEvents();

  20:         }

21:

  22:         #endregion

  23:     }

  24: }

Here is the controller class implementation:

   1: using System;

   2: using System.Collections.Generic;

   3: using RestSample.Core.DataContracts;

4:

   5: namespace RestSample.Core.Controllers

   6: {

   7:     public class EventController : IEventController

   8:     {

   9:         #region IEventController Members

10:

  11:         public EventList GetLatestEvents()

  12:         {

  13:             var list = new EventList {Items = new List<EventItem>()};

  14:             const int upper = 5;

  15:             for (int i = 0; i < upper; i++)

  16:             {

  17:                 list.Items.Add(new EventItem

  18:                                    {

  19:                                        EventCode = i.ToString(),

  20:                                        EventDate = DateTime.Today.AddDays(-1*i).ToLongDateString(),

  21:                                        EventName = string.Format("Name {0}", i)

  22:                                    });

  23:             }

24:

  25:             return list;

  26:         }

27:

  28:         #endregion

  29:     }

  30: }

Obviously I am just returning back trash, but you get the point. Here are the data contracts:

   1: using System.Runtime.Serialization;

2:

   3: namespace RestSample.Core.DataContracts

   4: {

   5:     [DataContract]

   6:     public class EventItem

   7:     {

   8:         [DataMember]

   9:         public string EventCode { get; set; }

  10:         [DataMember]

  11:         public string EventName { get; set; }

  12:         [DataMember]

  13:         public string EventDate { get; set; }

  14:     }

  15: }

   1: using System.Collections.Generic;

   2: using System.Runtime.Serialization;

3:

   4: namespace RestSample.Core.DataContracts

   5: {

   6:     [DataContract]

   7:     public class EventList

   8:     {

   9:         [DataMember]

  10:         public IList<EventItem> Items { get; set; }

  11:     }

  12: }

The web.config Set Up.

Because I want to return JSON, and because I moved the service files; I need to make some changes to the System.ServiceModel section of the web.config.

<system.serviceModel>

    <behaviors>

        <serviceBehaviors>

            <behavior name="RestSample.Core.ServiceContracts.EventsServiceBehavior">

                <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/>

                <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false"/>

            </behavior>

        </serviceBehaviors>

  <endpointBehaviors>

    <behavior name="WebHttpBehavior">

      <webHttp />

    </behavior>

  </endpointBehaviors>

    </behaviors>

    <services>

        <service behaviorConfiguration="RestSample.Core.ServiceContracts.EventsServiceBehavior" name="RestSample.Core.ServiceContracts.EventsService">

            <endpoint address="" binding="webHttpBinding" contract="RestSample.Core.ServiceContracts.IEventsService" behaviorConfiguration="WebHttpBehavior">

                <identity>

                    <dns value="localhost"/>

                </identity>

            </endpoint>

            <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange"/>

        </service>

    </services>

</system.serviceModel>

I added an Endpoint Behavior and specified webHttp and then referenced it in the endpoint. This enables the “web programming model” for WCF which makes the service RESTful.

I also changed the name and contract location of the service so it points to new location in my solution.

Now my service is ready and if I run the service file at this point I get the standard service page to come up to show the everything is configured properly.

The Client

Now that the service is working I am just going to write some jQuery to make a call to the service when a button is click.

Here is the aspx page.

<%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Shared/Main.Master" %>

<asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="head" runat="server">

    <script src="../Scripts/json2.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

    <script src="../Scripts/restsample.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

</asp:Content>

<asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="ContentPlaceHolder1" runat="server">

    

    <input type="button" value="Make Call" id="restCall" />

</asp:Content>

Here is the jQuery

  

$(document).ready(function() {

    setInputFunction();

});

  

function setInputFunction() {

    $('input').click(function() {

        makeEventCall();

    });

}

  

function makeEventCall() {

    $.ajax({

        url: 'http://localhost:56296/Services/EventsService.svc/GetLatestEvents',

        type: "POST",

        processData: false,

        contentType: "application/json",

        timeout: 10000,

        dataType: "text",  // not "json" we'll parse

        success: function(data) {

            loadSuccessful(data);

        }

    });

}

  

function loadSuccessful(data) {

    var result = JSON.parse(data);

    console.log('result', result);

}

  



So the jQuery code above makes a call to the service when the button is clicked. Here are some things to notice about this jQuery code.

First off, you cannot see it here but I have a script reference to the jQuery 1.4.1 file located on the Microsoft CDN. More on that here.
The url is the a combination of the service url and the function GetLatestEvents.
I need to specify “POST” as the type because that is what I specified on my ServiceContract.
I am going to return back text and then parse it using Douglas Crockford's json2.js.
For this demo, I am just going to log the response to the Firebug console using the console.log feature. (Note: remember to take this out later because you will get a JavaScript error in other browsers).

So with I am done and now when I bring up that web page and click the button I get this JSON response back.

{"Items":[{"EventCode":"0","EventDate":"Saturday, February 20, 2010","EventName":"Name 0"},
{"EventCode":"1","EventDate":"Friday, February 19, 2010","EventName":"Name 1"},
{"EventCode":"2","EventDate":"Thursday, February 18, 2010","EventName":"Name 2"},
{"EventCode":"3","EventDate":"Wednesday, February 17, 2010","EventName":"Name 3"},
{"EventCode":"4","EventDate":"Tuesday, February 16, 2010","EventName":"Name 4"}]}

The response in Firebug looks like this:

Hope that helps :)

Blog Site Updated

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 11:22:26 GMT

I just updated my blog with the latest version of BlogEngine.Net version 1.6. You can get the latest downloads here.

Also, I updated my theme to Indigo. I think it is a really nice look if I do say so myself. You can get a bunch of themes here (click on the theme pack link), and if you want to see a screencast on how to update you theme you can check it out here.

The guys at BlogEngine.Net have done really nice job with this application. I have been using it since the 1.1 version many years ago, and have been really happy with that they have done. As you can see from previous posts, I have been going though their site and seeing if I could convert it to MVC. I don’t actually plan on using that version, but I must say I am learning a lot not only about writing good code, but also about how blogging sites work in general.

Anyways, if you need a .Net blog site; BlogEngine.Net gets a thumbs up from me.

MVC and Thumbnails with StructureMap

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:51:56 GMT

In the process of looking for a way to read large images from a file or database, and displaying them as thumbnails, while all the while doing this using the MVC framework and TDD; I came accross two really good blog samples. One by Josh Holmes and the other approach by Tom Janssens. I took the latter example, and it worked like a charm.

The only I change I made was to refactor the singleton function that retrieves the MemoryStream so that I can test it. I used StructureMap in this case so I could inject it into the ThumbNail class. Therefore the GetMemoryStream function which was static so it could used as a singleton was moved to it's own class.

Here is the interface:

    7     public interface IImageMemoryManager 

    8     { 

    9         MemoryStream GetStream(Image image, int width, int height, ImageFormat imageFormat); 

   10     }

The function in the sample that converts the image into a MemoryStream will then located in the concreate class ImageMemoryManager which impliments the above function.

On the Application_Start event of my application, I can call out to a bootstrapper class that loads up StructureMap mappings and saves it so it can be used later.

   28         protected void Application_Start() 

   29         { 

   30             RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); 

   31             BootStrapper.ConfigureStructureMap(); 

   32             ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(new GalleryControllerFactory()); 

   33         }

The Bootstrapper class configures the StructureMap mappings.

    6     public class BootStrapper 

    7     { 

    8         public static void ConfigureStructureMap() 

    9         { 

   10             StructureMapConfiguration.AddRegistry(new StructureMapSiteRegistry()); 

   11         } 

   12     }

And here is mappings:

    9     internal class StructureMapSiteRegistry : Registry 

   10     { 

   11         protected override void configure() 

   12         { 

   13             ForRequestedType<IContentType>().TheDefaultIsConcreteType<ContentType>(); 

   14             ForRequestedType<IPictureRespository>().TheDefaultIsConcreteType<SqlPictureRespository>(); 

   15             ForRequestedType<IImageMemoryManager>().TheDefaultIsConcreteType<ImageMemoryManager>().CacheBy( 

   16                 InstanceScope.Singleton); 

   17         } 

   18     }

Notice the IImageMemoryManager maps to the contrete class ImageMemoryManager, and since initially it was a singleton class; I want to designate the mapping's InstanceScope as Singleton by using the CacheBy function.

I can then inject the these mappings into all my controller by inheriting from the DefaultControllerFactory class calling the GetInstance function in StructureMap to build out the injections.

    7     public class GalleryControllerFactory : DefaultControllerFactory 

    8     { 

    9         protected override IController GetControllerInstance(System.Type controllerType) 

   10         { 

   11             IController result = null; 

   12             if (controllerType != null) 

   13             { 

   14                 try 

   15                 { 

   16                     result = ObjectFactory.GetInstance(controllerType) as Controller; 

   17                 } 

   18                 catch(StructureMapException ex) 

   19                 { 

   20                     Debug.WriteLine(ObjectFactory.WhatDoIHave()); 

   21                 } 

   22             } 

   23             return result; 

   24         } 

   25  

   26     }

By the way, you can get a real good sample code to this by taking a look at the MvcContrib samples.

Now I that the function is isolated I can test it.

   72         [TestMethod()] 

   73         public void GetStreamTest() 

   74         { 

   75             ImageMemoryManager target = new ImageMemoryManager(); // TODO: Initialize to an appropriate value 

   76             Image image = Image.FromFile(@"C:\Projects\Gallery\source\Gallery.Tests\Images\shuttle5-768.jpg"); 

   77             int width = 100; 

   78             int height = 100; 

   79             ImageFormat imageFormat = ImageFormat.Bmp; 

   80  

   81             MemoryStream actual = target.GetStream(image, width, height, imageFormat); 

   82             Assert.IsNotNull(actual); 

   83         }

I could probably put together a more rigorous test here, but its testable.

The ThumbNailResults class which is returned to the view now looks like this.

   10     public class ThumbnailResult : FileStreamResult 

   11     { 

   12  

   13  

   14         public ThumbnailResult(Image input) : this(input, input.Width, input.Height) 

   15         { 

   16         } 

   17  

   18         public ThumbnailResult(Image input, int width, int height) : 

   19             base( 

   20             ((IImageMemoryManager) StructureMap.ObjectFactory.GetInstance(typeof (IImageMemoryManager))).GetStream( 

   21                 input, width, height, ImageFormat.Png), 

   22             "image/png") 

   23         { 

   24         } 

   25  

   26  

   27  

   28  

   29     }

Thanks to Tom and Josh in providing really nice examples. It's nice to see the community contributing with really good examples to such a new framework!

Spark View Engine – Render Partial While Passing the Model

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 09:14:28 GMT

Just a quick follow up on my previous post specifically about rendering partial views using the Spark View Engine. If you want to use a partial view and you also want to pass it a model, you just create parameter and pass the model in that parameter.

As I stated, the convention for the shared content is to create a file in the “Shared” view directory and prefix the file with the “_”.

For example:

I have created a post list partial file and I am going to call it from my “Index” view in the “Home” folder.

In the HomeController class, the Index action is just returning 10 items in a IList collection.

   1: public ActionResult Index()

   2: {

   3:     IList<PostDto> items = _postService.GetMostRecentPosts();

4:

   5:     ViewData["BasicPosts"] = items;

   6:     return View();

   7: }

Next, my Index view passes the collection of posts to the partial control. The Index.spark file has the following code.

   1: <viewdata BasicPosts="IList<PostDto>">

2:

3:

   4: <postList posts="BasicPosts" />

Now the model is in the partial file and I can do with it what ever I want. In this example, the _postList.spark file has the following code that loops through the collection of posts and displays the “Title”.

   1: <ul>

   2: <for each="var post in posts">

   3:     <li>${post.Title}</li>

   4: </for>

   5: </ul>

The above sample produces this partial view.

Building an List of Links Asynchronously Using jQuery, AJAX, PURE, and Spark View Engine for MVC

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 13:05:05 GMT

Yes, I know the title is a mouthful, but its all the cool stuff I used to make this trick work. I have mentioned before that I have been using the Spark View Engine with ASP.Net MVC just because I think it is much cleaner markup when it comes to intermingling HTML with C#. I also mentioned that I have been working on my blog app and like my own home blog page, I want to have a blog roll. So what I did was create a table with two records containing information about my two favorite blogs.

Now what I want to do is on the Master Page that I am using is have to these two links display on the page asynchronously after the base HTML loads.

The Spark Master Page and Partial Rendering

There is pretty good documentation for Spark for getting started, so I won’t go into detail about it here; but there are a few things I wanted to mention. The default way to use a Master Page in the Spark View Engine is to create a folder named “Layouts” inside the “View” folder and then to add a file named “Application.spark” in that folder. This is the convention that will allow all other views to access that Master Page unless otherwise specified.

        1: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">

       2: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">

       3:   <head>

       4:     <title>${H(Title)}</title>

       5:     <link rel="stylesheet" href="~/Content/Site.css" type="text/css" />

       6:     <use content="head"/>

       7:      <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.3.2.min-vsdoc.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

       8:     <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.3.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

       9:     <script src="/Scripts/pure.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

  </head>

  <body>

    <div id="wrapper">

        <div id="header">

            <div id="logo">

                <h1>Website Logo Goes Here</h1>

            </div>

            <div id="search">

                Search goes here

            </div>

        </div>

        <div id="header_menu">

            <ul id="menu">

                <li>

                    <a title="" accesskey="1" href="#">Home</a>

                </li>

                <li>

                    <span>|</span>

                </li>

                <li>

                    <a title="" accesskey="2" href="#">Blog</a>

                </li>

                <li>

                    <span>|</span>

                </li>

                <li>

                    <a title="" accesskey="3" href="#">About Me</a>

                </li>

                <li>

                    <span>|</span>

                </li>

                <li>

                    <a title="" accesskey="4" href="#">Contact</a>

                </li>

            </ul>

            <div id="menu_spacer">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

            </div>

        </div>

        <div id="content">

            <div id="colOne">

                <div class="box">

                     

                    <myLinks />

                </div>

            </div>

            <div id="colTwo">

                <use content="view"/>

            </div>

        </div>

        

    

  </body>

</html>

Some things to notice on the master page here, is that I am accessing jQuery, and PURE. Of course, jQuery is the JavaScript framework that makes almost everything JavaScript related really easy. The other script tag for PURE is also a JavaScript framework but it is mainly to make the mapping of markup to your JSON response much easier. We use it a lot where I work, so I have become a big fan of it. I will demonstrate that later.

Also another thing to notice in this code is the tag <myLinks />. This is how Spark does partial HTML rendering. The convention for partial rendering in Spark is to create a file in the “Views/Shared” folder that is prefixed with “_” and has the extension “spark” like all the other views. So for my example above, I have a file located at “<project_location>/View/Shared/_myLinks.spark”.

The Controller Class

Nothing special here. I have a controller class that returns a JSON response. The only thing I should mention though is in order for PURE to work with a list of records you will need to rap your List object in another object. Also, as mentioned in a previous post, I need to return a JsonResult to get the properly formatted response. Since these links won’t change much (I am not that fickle) I am caching this action using the OutputCache attribute.

       1: using System.Collections.Generic;

       2: using System.Web.Mvc;

       3: using Aviblog.Core.Dto;

       4: using Aviblog.Core.Services;

       5:  

       6: namespace Aviblog.Web.Controllers

       7: {

       8:     public class LinksController : Controller

       9:     {

      10:         private readonly ILinksService _linksService;

      11:  

      12:         public LinksController(ILinksService linksService)

      13:         {

      14:             _linksService = linksService;

      15:         }

      16:  

      17:         [AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Get)]

      18:         [OutputCache(Duration = 60, VaryByParam = "None")]

      19:         public JsonResult All()

      20:         {

      21:             Links links;

      22:             IList<LinkDto> result = _linksService.GetActiveLinks();

      23:             links = result != null ? new Links() {LinkList = result} : null;

      24:             return Json(links);

      25:         }

      26:     }

      27: }

My Links class looks like this:

       1: using System.Collections.Generic;

       2:  

       3: namespace Aviblog.Core.Dto

       4: {

       5:     public class Links

       6:     {

       7:         public IList<LinkDto> LinkList { get; set; }

       8:     }

       9: }

This will generate a JSON response as follows:

{"LinkList":

[{"LinkId":1,"Title":"Scott Gunthie","Description":"Scott Gunthrie\u0027s Blog","BlogUri":http://weblogs.asp.net/scuttgu/,

"FeedUri":null,"IsActive":true},{"LinkId":2,"Title":"Scott Hanselman",

"Description":"Scott Hanselman\u0027s Blog","BlogUri":"http://www.hansleman.com/","FeedUri":null,"IsActive":true}]}

Notice, that I now have my wrapper class called LinkList that I can use to tell PURE that this is my collection.

The Partial HTML that Loads the Links

So in my _myLinks.spark file I have the JavaScript that is going to make an AJAX call to get the links, and the PURE code that will map the response back to the unordered list.

   1: <script type="text/javascript">   1:  
   2:     $(document).ready(function() {
   3:         $.ajax({
   4:             type: "GET",
   5:             url: "/Links/All",
   6:             dataType: "json",
   7:             success: function(res) {
   8:                 var $blogRollList = $("ul#blogRollList");
   9:                 
  10:                 var directive = {
  11:                     'li':{
  12:                         'link<-LinkList':{
  13:                             'a':'link.Title',
  14:                             'a@href':'link.BlogUri'
  15:                         }
  16:                     }
  17:                 };
  18:                 
  19:                  $blogRollList.render(res, directive);
  20:  
  21:             }
  22:         });
  23:     });
</script>

2:

3:

   4: <h3>Bloggroll</h3>

   5: <div id="blogRoll">

   6:     <ul id="blogRollList">

   7:         <li><a></a></li>

   8:     </ul>

   9: </div>

I am using the $.Ajax function to make a call out to my controller class “LinksController” and the action “All”. If the code returns a successful response, the PURE code maps the response to the list.

The $blogRollList variable is the ul tag that I want my response to be loaded into.

The directive variable is how I tell PURE to map my response. It is saying for each item in the response, create a list tag. The “link<-LinkList” is saying for the collection LinkList there will be items named “link”. Inside that declaration I am then using each “link” item that was defined and them mapping it to an anchor tag.

The Result

So now when the page loads I get the result:

Syndicating RSS in an ASP.Net MVC app using WCF

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:26:46 GMT

About a month back Rob Conery mentioned that he was going to create a blogging application using MVC, which caused me to think to myself: “SELF! why don’t you try something like that and see what you can come up with?” So in my spare time when I am not doing real work or at home shuttling kids around, I’ve been playing around with this idea. I am really happy with my BlogEngine.Net set up and probably will continue to use it even if I were to finish this app but I figure this would be an opportunity to just do something different than I have been doing lately and learn some new things that I have not had a chance to work with as of yet.

So with that in mind, one of the first things I decided to tackle was going about syndicating an RSS feed and as it turns out it is not too terribly difficult to do; although, there are some things I did struggle with—uhhh---but I am getting ahead of myself.

Build you own ActionResult

I mention in my previous post that ASP.Net come with several different controller actions, and the one that I used in the that example was the JsonResult. Well JsonResult really is just a class that is derived from the abstract class ActionResult. I can write my own class that derives from ActionResult to return back to the view an RSS feed which is what I am going to do in this example.

        1: using System.ServiceModel.Syndication;

       2: using System.Web.Mvc;

       3: using System.Xml;

       4:  

       5: namespace Aviblog.Core.ActionResults

       6: {

       7:     public class RssResult : ActionResult

       8:     {

       9:         private readonly SyndicationFeed _feed;

      10:  

      11:         public RssResult(SyndicationFeed feed)

      12:         {

      13:             _feed = feed;

      14:         }

      15:  

      16:         public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context)

      17:         {

      18:             context.HttpContext.Response.ContentType = "application/rss+xml";

      19:             var formatter = new Rss20FeedFormatter(_feed);

      20:  

      21:             using (XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(context.HttpContext.Response.Output))

      22:                 if (writer != null) formatter.WriteTo(writer);

      23:         }

      24:     }

      25: }

So in my custom RssResult that inherits from ActionResult, I need to then override the ExecuteResult method. Inside that method I then need to set the response type to “application/rss+xml” so it can be rendered as RSS. The next thing to notice is that in my constructor I am passing in an object of type SyndicationFeed which is a part of WCF. It is in the System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespace. You can find it by referencing the System.ServiceModel.Web assembly. I can then use the Rss20FeedFormatter to generate XML which is RSS compliant.

Building the SyndicationFeed

Building the SyndicationFeed object is where I had the most trouble. If you just want a simple compliant RSS feed, this guy works great; however, as you can see just from looking at my own RSS feed there many other elements you can extend to an RSS feed and adding those to the SyndicationFeed element is a bit tricky.

       1: public SyndicationFeed Buildfeed()

       2:         {

       3:             var settingQry = _settingsRepository.GetSettings();

       4:             const string nameKey = "name";

       5:             const string nameDescription = "description";

       6:             const string link = "link";

       7:             string blogTitle = _settingsService.GetValue(settingQry, nameKey);

       8:             string blogDescription = _settingsService.GetValue(settingQry, nameDescription);

       9:             Uri blogUrl = _settingsService.GetUri(settingQry, link);

      10:  

      11:             var feed = new SyndicationFeed(blogTitle, blogDescription, blogUrl);

      12:  

      13:             foreach (var element in _feedRepository.GetFeedElements())

      14:                 feed.ElementExtensions.Add(BuildXmlElement(element));

      15:  

      16:             feed.Items = LoadPosts(_postService.GetMostRecentPosts());

      17:             return feed;

      18:         }

      19:  

      20:         private static XmlElement BuildXmlElement(FeedElementDto element)

      21:         {

      22:             var doc = new XmlDocument();

      23:             XmlElement feedElement = doc.CreateElement(element.Prefix, element.Element, element.Namespace);

      24:             feedElement.InnerText = element.InnerText;

      25:             return feedElement;

      26:         }

From the code you can see that when I am instantiating the SyndicationFeed object I am passing in the title of the blog, the blog description, and the URL. Where it got a bit hairy, was adding other elements that prefixed a common namespace. I could add the namespace for each element (as seen in the code) but there does not seem to be a way to put the common namespaces in say the channel element and then just use the prefix to those namespaces later. I ended up having to repeat the same namespaces over again. But that being said, it is still pretty easy to build the feed.

Once the feed object is ready I then could add each of the posts by mapping them to a SyndicationItem object and then add those collection of objects to the items collection in the feed.

       1: private static IEnumerable<SyndicationItem> LoadPosts(IEnumerable<PostDto> posts)

       2:         {

       3:             IList<SyndicationItem> items = new List<SyndicationItem>();

       4:             foreach (var post in posts)

       5:             {

       6:                 var item = new SyndicationItem();

       7:                 item.Title = new TextSyndicationContent(post.Title);

       8:                 item.Authors.Add(new SyndicationPerson(post.Author));

       9:                 item.Content = SyndicationContent.CreateHtmlContent(post.PostContent);

      10:                 items.Add(item);

      11:             }

      12:             return items;

      13:         }

The Controller Class

Now that I have my RssResult and my functionality to build the SyndicationFeed object, I can then create an action inside my controller class that puts the two together.

       1: public class SyndicationController : Controller

       2:     {

       3:         private readonly IRss20SyndicationService _rss20SyndicationService;

       4:  

       5:         public SyndicationController(IRss20SyndicationService rss20SyndicationService)

       6:         {

       7:             _rss20SyndicationService = rss20SyndicationService;

       8:         }

       9:  

      10:         public RssResult Rss()

      11:         {

      12:  

      13:             return new RssResult(_rss20SyndicationService.Buildfeed());

      14:         }

      15:     }

The Result

So when I browse to domain/controller/action in this case http://localhost:64533/Syndication/Rss I get the following RSS sample:

       1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

       2: <rss xmlns:a10="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" version="2.0">

       3:   <channel>

       4:     <title>Steve Moseley</title>

       5:     <link>http://www.test.com/</link>

       6:     <description>Trying my best to apprehend all these dev changes.</description>

       7:     <blogChannel:blogRoll xmlns:blogChannel="http://backend.userland.com/blogChannelModule">http://www.avingtonsolutions.com/blog/opml.axd</blogChannel:blogRoll>

       8:     <blogChannel:blink xmlns:blogChannel="http://backend.userland.com/blogChannelModule">http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/syndication.axd</blogChannel:blink>

       9:     <dc:creator xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">Steve Moseley</dc:creator>

      10:     <dc:title xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">Steve Moseley</dc:title>

      11:     <geo:lat xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#">0.000000</geo:lat>

      12:     <geo:long xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#">0.000000</geo:long>

      13:     <item>

      14:       <author>Steve</author>

      15:       <title />

      16:       <description>

      17:        blah, blah, blah

      18:       </description>

      19:     </item>

      20:   </channel>

      21: </rss>

Looks pretty good, although, if you look at my actual RSS feed and this one, you will notice that the name spaces are repeated verses being listed at the top as they probably should be. I need to play around with it some more but this gets the job done and I did not have to write all that much code, which is nice.

Creating a Custom Trace Listener for WCF

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:43:32 GMT

Introduction

We have been using WCF to consume a lot of 3rd party web services, and one of things we depend on when testing is being able to see the actual request and response that is being sent to and from the host. This is expecially inportant in 3rd party services, because the service is essentially a black box in which there is no way to know what is going on except that you send it a request and you get a response back. I posted how, out of the box, you can configure WCF to write the message to a trace xml file, but one of things about writing to a file is that if you or your testers do not have access to the web server where the file is being written then this is not going to work.

Solution

The way around this problem is to create a custom trace listener that catches the messages and does what ever you want. Here is a simple sample.

Create a class that inherits from the TraceListiner class.

    1 using System.Diagnostics;
    2 
    3 namespace WcfTrace.Trace
    4 {
    5     public class WebTraceListener : TraceListener
    6     {
    7         public override void Write(string message)
    8         {
    9             //write you custom code here
   10             Debug.WriteLine(message);
   11         }
   12 
   13 
   14         public override void WriteLine(string message)
   15         {
   16             //write your custom code here
   17             Debug.WriteLine(message);
   18         }
   19     }
   20 }

The next thing to do is to wire up the custom class in the web.config (or app.config) so that when messages are created ,they caught by the custom trace listener class. The config below is telling source messages to use the sharedListener named xml which the custom trace listener listed above.

  108   <system.diagnostics>
  109     <sources>
  110       <source name="System.ServiceModel" switchValue="Information, ActivityTracing" propagateActivity="true">
  111         <listeners>
  112           <add name="xml" />
  113         </listeners>
  114       </source>
  115       <source name="System.ServiceModel.MessageLogging">
  116         <listeners>
  117           <add name="xml" />
  118         </listeners>
  119       </source>
  120     </sources>
  121     <sharedListeners>
  122       <add name="xml" type="WcfTrace.Trace.WebTraceListener,WcfTrace.Trace" />
  123     </sharedListeners>
  124   </system.diagnostics>
  125 
  126   <system.serviceModel>
  127     <diagnostics>
  128       <messageLogging
  129           logEntireMessage="true"
  130           logMalformedMessages="false"
  131           logMessagesAtServiceLevel="true"
  132           logMessagesAtTransportLevel="false"
  133           maxMessagesToLog="300000"
  134           maxSizeOfMessageToLog="200000"/>
  135     </diagnostics>

That's it. Now when ever a web service call is made, the custom trace listener class is executed, passing it the trace messages.

Entity Framework 4.0 Sneak Peak - POCO Goodness!

Tue, 12 May 2009 12:47:02 GMT

A while back I posted that I was looking into the viability of using Entity Framework, and at the time I was genuinly excited about what it had to offer. I even stated that I would report back to you my findings. So I set out to try and create a domain layer that used EF as an O/R Mapper but also tried maintained percistance ignorance with the data objects it was passing around. Percistance Ignorance being the objects containing the data retrieved from the database should not contain any information about the mechanism it used to retrieve the data.

To be honest, I was pretty disappointed with my findings. Entity Framework 3.5 is pretty intrusive. All data objects had to either impliment an EntityFramework interface or had to be a subclass of an EntityObject class.

I never went back and revisited that blog post, mainly because I did not want to spew vile about the product; so I just let it be and started looking into nHibernate. I was sort of down because all the good tools like LightSpeed cost money.

Well now it looks like Microsoft has heard our gripes about the products short comings and is going to do something about it.

You can read all about it here.