Sam Gentile

.NET Dependency Injection/IOC Container Recomendations?

samgentile — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 00:10:00 GMT

At work, I am on a new project that is a long project and one that we get to pretty much start with a new slate. I can't say what the project is. What I can say is that the Project Leader is from the world of Java and very sharp. He wants to do this right to the extent that we can do in our environment. We have been doing some architectural explorations with Service Layer Pattern, Dependency Injection, and WCF across machine boundaries.I am not that versed in DI/IOC Containers but have done a lot of research including reading the new Manning book Dependency Inject With .NET and reading a lot of stuff on StackOverflow comparing containers. At the end of this, I've come down to NInject as my main choice with Castle Windor as a backup. I like a lot of things about NInject especially it's apparent simplicity but I worry about these benchmarks on iocbattle.com that seem to show NInject as 5x slower than others and the slowest overall followed by Castle Windsor. Should I be concerned? I read nothing but great things from NInject users everywhere. What are your recomendations? Thanks!

The Continuing Evolution of WCF–the Web Uris Evolve

samgentile — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 15:22:07 GMT

Some time ago, and I am sure I blogged about it, I wrote with approval Glenn Block started to engage the community with the first drop of the Web APIs for WCF. This is far past the previous work done in WCF 3.5 REST stack work as well as the REST starter kit. I think this is vital as it’s increasingly apparent that, in many cases, REST and the Web have won over SOAP and WS-* As I am on a project that has both WCF and the iPhone among others, all these devices speak HTTP.

AT PDC, Glenn conducted a session “Building Web APIs for the Highly Connected Web” where they announced WCF Web APIs, new work we are doing to make HTTP first class in WCF. There are now new bits on wcf.codeplex.com.

What’s new?

Below is a summary of the enhancements since the initial APIs

New message classes HttpResponseMessage<T> / HttpRequestMessage<T> allows accessing headers and using a strongly typed model.
Uri parameters can now autocast to primtiive types, i.e. a uri template of "{id}" can map to an integer parameter of id.
Matching of parameters is now by type if there is no match on name, ie. HttpRequestMessage req will work.
New Operation Handlers which replace processors and dramatically improve the authoring
New Formatters for plugging in custom media types
New Message Handlers for low level control over HTTP
Support for Form Url Encoding / Json and Xml out of the box.
IQueryable support with IQueryable<T> and without requiring attributes
Overhauled fluent API for configuration !!!!
Unit tests
Newer HttpClient
New samples
ContactManager is now a fully client based AJAX / JQuery application
new ContactManager_Simple illustrates the bare basics.
new HelloResource sample
Acceptance and Unit tests for some of the samples

There is a lot of information in the community. You should start with Glenn’s extensive post, “WCF Web APIs, HTTP Your Way.” Then after that, there are a number of great posts. I was really impressed by Alex’s new series (notice he’s a MVC jQuery Guy), “Microsoft Web API, the REST is done by WCF (Part 1)”, and more goodness with these other parts”

REST using the WCF Web API – Basics (Part2)

REST using the WCF Web API – refactoring to IoC style (Part 3)

REST using the WCF Web API – getting RESTful the BDD way (Part 4)

REST using the WCF Web API – getting more RESTful responses (Part 5)

Windows 8: HTML5 and AJAX/JavaScript == Modern UIs: HTML5, AJAX/JavaScript/jQuery

samgentile — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 20:39:00 GMT

Yesterday Microsoft finally revealed the Windows 8 User Interface. It’s Metro UI based with applications built using Web Technologies, that’s HTML5 & AJAX. I’m not surprised. No one should be surprised, although what is ~~going to happen to .NET is less clear~~ what is going to happen to .NET in the FRONT END Presentation layer is less clear (.NET is a clear technology for the server side domain, service and data layers). Microsoft has hinted at this direction with full support for jQuery and the demise of the proprietary Microsoft AJAX. Also, the tipping point occurred several years ago where you could essentially get a Web app to look as good as a native app without any of the footprint issues. The axis has flipped. People want great user experiences but they want them on the Web. Also, as Chris Love says, “If you are in complete shock that Microsoft is going the HTML5 route I am sorry, this you should have seen coming for a few years. It was inevitable. Last month Google unveiled Chrome OS and will have Chromebooks in the stores later this month. This is a Web OS where all the applications are HTML5, not some traditional compiled application.”

Microsoft is simply going the way most of the rest of the world is going. Silverlight is going nowhere – I hardly know of any Silverlight development outside of a passionate few. Chris Love again, “Let’s face it, despite the passion certain Silverlight developers have for their tools it never got broad acceptance. Its been around 5 years now and you are only seeing 65% install base. If it were going to work it would have been at 100% in the first year or so. Two things have held Silverlight and WPF back. It has a huge learning curve to do right. Unfortunately the vast majority of XAML developers opted to create the same battleship grey applications they did with MFC and plain old C# and VB. They never bothered to learn how to really build the great user experiences that Silverlight enabled.” Who wants to look at a bucket of XAML anyhow?

Davy Brion had a great piece a while back: Why We’re Going with HTML(5) Instead of Silverlight that really nails it so I am not going to repeat it. When we, at work considered the next generation UI for our newest project, Silverlight was not even a consideration. But HTML and AJAX/JavaScript were! MVC was! Chris Love alludes to the fact that many complain JavaScript is hard and it is! But that’s what jQuery is for. I also used to hate JavaScript. Last week, at work, I started to really learn jQuery and jQuery UI and I was shocked how jQuery-UI had legs as great cross-platform UI library. It now makes sense for us to do ASP.NET MVC together with jQuery and jQuery-UI in the direction Project Silk is going.

Project Silk provides guidance for building cross-browser web applications with a focus on client-side interactivity. These applications take advantage of the latest web standards like HTML5, CSS3 and ECMAScript 5 along with modern web technologies such as jQuery, Internet Explorer 9, and ASP.NET MVC3. The Mileage Stats RI is a multi-page interactive web application where the pages are rendered without requiring a postback. This creates the illusion of a desktop application. The lack of postbacks enable rich UI transitions between states (pages.) The browser application runs very fast because of the client-side data caching.The Mileage Stats RI JavaScript is modularized using jQuery UI Widgets. The widgets allow breaking the UI into small discrete stateful objects; providing a clean separation of responsibilities and concerns.

I wasn’t sure this had legs but I this newly-minted UI/ASP.NET developer was sure blown away how “rich” these browser UIs were. So I went off and started playing with jQuery-UI and I was blown away! There are so many available widgets and it doesn’t take much jQuery to script them in. Combined with an ASP.NET MVC infrastructure, this is the way we’re going. I hope to write much more as go along. It’s another paradigm shift folks – get used to it.

Update on Work and Web Technology

samgentile — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 22:42:00 GMT

Wow! Last post was June 4th on Windows 8th. I talked then about the Windows 8 UI and the HTML5/Javascript/CSS3 interface and, that indeed seems like a lot of people are achieving platform independence (more on that soon). So, I am happily still employed (over a year now) at the US Department of Homeland Security as I talked about in this post and still doing web development (although I have snuck in some WCF as our Service Layer in our latest project.

I want to talk about several things: our “waterfall” methodology and locked down environment, our change on ASP.NET MVC, new project with DI/IOC, HTML5/Javascript/CSS3, and iPhone/Blackberry development with Javascript toolkits.

As you might guess, our development methodology is not Agile and is pretty much Waterfall given the mission-critical stuff we develop that has to be up 24X7. Our environment is very locked down and the security folks are all over everything to ensure our web applications cannot be attacked. They also like everything about our desktops to be locked down and every piece of software needs to be approved. And the machines are Windows XP although we are piloting Windows7. The new thing is that we are developing a developer network separate from production that allows us to install anything. To that end, I have, of course, installed Resharper 6 right away, as well as Jet Brain’s dotPeek. In addition, we got the Red Gate tools including Reflector. But the important thing is the dev network lets me bring down and use Nuget to install open source tools like Ninject and Moq.

On to the change on MVC. I talked about how we couldn’t work with ASP.NET MVC and couldn’t deploy it. Our new project is a huge web application with capabilities that also have to work on iPhones and Blackberry devices. We moved to Windows Server 2008 R2 servers in the dev network with IIS7 so ASP.NET MVC is now plausible. We have also come to the conclusion that ASP.NET MVC 3 is that magical “third” release from Microsoft where they finally get it right. We want to write web apps right with separation of concerns and testing plus using HTML5. ASP.NET MVC 3 gives us that and that is what we are using on the new project. I love the Razor syntax!

On the new project, we are getting the chance to do things “right” and I have settled on NInject for DI and Moq for mocking in unit tests.

It has been getting increasingly clearer that everyone is doing HTML5/Javascript/CSS3 apps and we are sticking to that. What changes from that post, is I have given up on Project Silk. I frankly don’t understand it and it seems like a framework way too hard to use. We intend to employ ASP.NET MVC 3 on the “desktop” with jQuery/jQuery UI. Which leads to mobile phone development with Javascript toolkits…

One of the things that makes my job really exciting is that I get to do a lot of things. Its not just the same plain web development. One of those things is that the new project needs to support iPhones and Blackberry devices for this app. We looked at doing native IOS development with Objective-C and Xcode. But the exciting thing is that I found a whole bunch of open-source HTML5/CSS3 frameworks with Javascript. One I like so far is Sencha Touch. As they say, “Sencha Touch allows you to develop mobile web apps that look and feel native on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry touch devices.” It supports another open source mobile framework, PhoneGap, which seems to be the common demoniator to provide the access to the native features of the mobile device. Sencha Touch uses it. Rho Mobile uses it. Titanium Mobile uses it. It’s an exciting area! Its amazing to find all these HTML5/Javascript/CSS3 frameworks out there. Rho Mobile uses Ruby but I don’t think we have the time to learn Ruby right now. Is anyone using these frameworks and what do you think?

ASP.NET MVC 4 Developer Preview with Mobile Support Released (My Experiences)

samgentile — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 22:42:00 GMT

I am not at the Microsoft Build Conference and missing all the exciting developments . It’s going to take me a while to digest all the developments although it looks like I was mostly right about Windows 8 and the HTML5/CSS3/Javascript programming model even though .NET is not dead (yet).

I have been talking about work with the new project with ASP.NET MVC and then looking at things like Sencha Touch, PhoneGap, and jQuery/jQueryUI, as well as jQTouch. In fact, I was able to use straight HTML5/CSS3/Javascript with jQTouch to create a pretty comprehensive iPhone application.

But what got me really excited today was the release at Build of ASP.NET MVC 4 Developer Preview. I thought, “what if we could have one code base – ASP.NET MVC for the web app and also for the mobile clients?” That’s because a cool thing about MVC 4 is that there is a Mobile project template as well as lots of features for mobile development. So I downloaded it today at work and ran through the mobile tutorial. I’m impressed so far! I was able to use Safari for Windows and it’s developer mode to emulate a iOS/iPhone 4 application with the tutorial as well as playing around. MVC 4 is built on top or uses the wonderful jQuery Mobile. It’s a pretty good model using jQueryMobile’s markup like <ul data-role="listview" data-inset="true">.

The problem is that our “customer” will not be switching to iPhone 4’s and staying with the Blackberry Torch 9810 and 9900 devices. jQTouch definitely supports it. It doesn’t seem like ASP.NET MVC 4 does not (it doesn’t seem like there is any Blackberry support) but my good friend Brad Wilson on the ASP.NET team texted me in answer to that “It's built on BrowserCaps, and you can also extend it to include your own sub-types and rules fairly easily. For example, all mobile devices are .mobile right now, but you could add an iPhone rule and use .iphone” I don’t know what that means yet but I am hopeful to learn from my readers and the team. What do you think?

WCF in .NET 4.5/Visual Studio 11

samgentile — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 21:17:00 GMT

(Provided by WCF team to me)

There are a variety of new features

Scalable modern communication stack

* WebSockets support: new transport, client & server support.

* Interoperable UDP multi-cast channel

* TCP support for high-density scenarios (partial trust)

* Async.NET integration - ASR generates Task overloads, Dispatcher is aware of operations returning Task<T>

* Improved streaming support

Continued commitment to simplicity

* Further config simplification; VS intellisense for .config files. Making WCF throttles/quotas smarter & work for you by default;

* XSD build task (you can now add your XSDs and we'll silently compile them into C#)

* Better manageability via rich ETW & e2e tracing

//BUILD Talks

Building Web APIs in Windows Azure with WCF to reach any device<http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/SAC-798T> , Glenn Block

Building real-time web apps with WebSockets using IIS, ASP.NET and WCF<http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/SAC-807T> , Paul Batum, Stefan Schackow

Building data-driven HTML5 apps with WCF RIA Services<http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/TOOL-800T>, Dinesh Kulkarni

Building real-time web apps with HTML5 WebSockets<http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/PLAT-373C> , Ravi Rao

What's new in .NET Framework 4.5<http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/TOOL-834T> , Joshua Goodman

Building and running HPC apps in Windows Azure<http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/SAC-452T> , Greg Burgess

Windows8: Why Do You Make It So Hard for Me?

samgentile — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 16:40:35 GMT

I wanted to get out ahead of this and install Windows8 and investigate programming for it so I could write about it here. I started a new category on the blog here. I can’t get to the programming because first, I couldn’t install Windows 8, and then after the install didn’t include the programming tools.

Let me explain. I wasn’t at Build so I didn’t get Windows 8 + programming tools pre-installed for me on a tablet. I said it’s ok but I want to get ahead on this thing and do at home. That’s when the trouble started. I first tried this technique and install to shrink my one 600GB drive into two drives and have one for Win8. Worked for him (dual boot) but not for me. I quickly found out on Win8 install that I had “dynamic” disks and Win8 refused to install to dynamic disks. Of course, there was no way to convert a dynamic disks.

I then tried a variation of Scott Hanselman’s tutorial and especially this one to try to install the full Win8 + dev tools on my 64-bit machine via a VHD except that I didn’t have a big enough USB stick and I couldn’t burn the huge 4.8GB ISO on my DVD. I used Virtual Clone Drive to host the ISO. I think the end result was this dreaded VHD_BOOT_INITIALIZATION_FAILD when Win8 would reboot during the install. Then, the other option on the public download page (I DON’T have MSDN!) was the 3.6GB ISO. I misread the page to say that this ISO included another one that had the programming tools so I downloaded, burned to DVD, install continued (Yay!) but when reboot came the same dreaded VHD_BOOT_INITIALIZATION_FAILD message! I now had two useless VHD files but no install! Worse yet, as my Microsoft friends confirmed, there were Bing results for that message but no answers yet.

I should have given at this point but I was determined to have the new toy! I took a sacrificial other laptop that was 32-bit. Remember that. The public download page has ONE ISO for x86. Again, I misread the page and thought it included an ISO with the programming tools. I mean, why would they have a developer preview without the freaking developer preview tools? I burned the DVD and miracle of all miracles, Win8 finally installed on the 32-bit machine. I congratulated myself and looked for the dev tools. Not there. I asked on Twitter and Brad Wilson said, “@SamGentile There isn't one. You need to install the OS with the preinstalled Dev tools.” What a waste! I had an OS with no dev tools! What’s worse, there is no way to make this work if you don’t have MSDN and you have a 32-bit machine! The public download page has only ONE ISO for 32-bit systems and that’s for the base OS WITHOUT tools? So how do I do it Microsoft for a 32-bit system?? Why are you so hard for me to learn how to develop apps for YOUR os??

Viewport Meta Tag and Using HTML 5/CSS3/jQuery to Build Mobile Interfaces

samgentile — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 18:41:00 GMT

Welcome to my new HTML5/CSS3/JQuery category. Not only do I believe that these technologies represent the present and future of Web Development, but also as a way to do cross-platform (cross-device) Mobile device UI development. Yes, you heard me right. These technologies make possible cross-platform mobile web development for the first time. Some background. In this post, I started to talk about HTML5 and why we were starting to go that way. I updated and started to talk about the Mobile JavaScript libraries like Sencha Touch, PhoneGap, Rho Mobile, jQueryMobile and others. Then I investigated ASP.NET 4’s Mobile support. They’re all not going to cut it.

It turns out from my work that I found that HTML5’s new tags including the Viewport and especially the new styling tags in CSS3 allow you to create a compelling mobile experience. For instance, you don’t have to go out and learn Objective-C, XCode, for the iPhone or WebWorks for the Blackberry devices. Actually, RIM has dumped WebWorks and requires us to use the Ripple Mobile emulator for the Chrome browser and go HTML5/CSS3/Javascript. BTW, my investigations show that if you are going to HTML5, CSS3, forget even IE9. You need a WebKit based browser like Safari (which can emulate IOS - set Developer Mode - then User Agent) and Chrome. We use the Ripple Mobile Emulator running inside Chrome to emulate the Blackberry Torch 9810 and the Blackberry 9900.

So what is the Viewport meta tag? The Viewport meta tag was introduced by Apple Mobile Safari to let Web Developers control the viewport’s scale and size. It’s now an universal standard. Unless you tell it otherwise, Safari on the iPhone is going to assume your page is 980px wide. If you are going to do mobile web development for the iPhone and Blackberry devices with the smaller dimensions, you must let Mobile Safari (or Ripple for the Blackberry) know about it by adding a viewport meta tag to the head element of the HTML documents which sets it to the device width:

meta name="viewport" content="user-scalable=no, width=device-width" />

This gives you a big step to giving mobile users an enhanced experience. Next comes in CSS3 with new enhanced styling like webkit-gradient and webkit-border-top-left-radius (for rounded corners) let you do an amazing amount of styling for the iPhone or Blackberry. First, I should talk about the new CSS3 Media Queries. You can use them, like in the following code among the spreadsheet:

link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="iphone.css" media="only screen and (max-width: 480px)" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="desktop.css" media="screen and (min-width: 481px)" />

So where are we learning all this stuff at work besides experimentation? A fabulous new book started all this: Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (Making App Store Apps Without Objective-C or Cocoa). Don’t be fooled by the title! This book will take you through all of HTML5 and CSS3 including Client-Side Data Storage and Offline Application Cache. In fact, as you know, we are not even going for iPhone applications but the Blackberry Torch 9810 and Blackberry 9900. If it’s got an HTML5 capable browser, then you can do this web site development. It’s a whole new world out there!

Entity Framework in Three-Layered Services Application Pattern, ASP.NET MVC and Firewalled Layers?

samgentile — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 17:56:00 GMT

I worked hard with my Tech Lead to build a version of the UI prototype we are showing for our new project. I talked about building it in HTML5 and CSS3 and how pleased we were with that. This week, the working hard refers to we built a whole another version with ASP.NET MVC 3 and the Entity Framework with WCF as the Service Layer (on another machine). The new 4.1 version of Entity Framework is super nice and has Code First. It also goes hand and hand with ASP.NET MVC. We have to use Stored Procedures so we built it that way. I did function Mapping for two stored procedures and it was easy to call them from MVC via the Entity Framework.We achieved that and were somewhat happy. However we had dependencies we didn’t like.

The dependencies we didn’t like probably result from our necessary security architecture and Three-Layered Services Application Architectural pattern. The Entity Framework is fine when everything is one machine and we had our Model in the ASP.NET MVC project. It even worked fine when we had it as a Class Library project Domain Layer. The problem was the coupling. We had to have the EF Domain project referenced both in the WCF Service (which was OK) and also in the UI (ASP.NET MVC app) which is completely NOT ok. This was necessary to map the complex type the stored procedures returned and use that type in the MVC app. That's when the Entity Framework begun to break down for our use.

Let me go over the architecture more clearly. Entity Framework Data/Domain Layer talking to a SQL database server on another machine. That was in itself, behind the WCF Services which were on yet another machine. That was all called by the ASP.NET MVC application on another machine. Because of this, the Domain Layer with EF (to reference the complex return types) had to be referenced by both the WCF services project and the MVC project. No way, We’re DHS where security is #1, The security folks would eat us alive if the EF data layer was referenced and accessible (connection string too!) from the front end. That’s why there is all these layers and a firewall between the MVC app and the Domain/Data Layer.

I am sure the EF folks thought about this although all of Microsoft’s demos fixate on the ASP.NET MVC app reference and call the Entity Framework locally. I looked at the N-Tier chapter of Julie Lehman’s excellent book but I didn’t understand use of a Data Bridge with a an arbitrary CommandExecutor object (remember we are just learning EF!). So, the end result for now is I broke the dependency on EF and the Domain Layer in the MVC app by taking it out and rewriting the Domain/Data layer into what I knew – Entity objects and Repository pattern objects that just used straight ADO.NET. Yuck, circa 2002!

The EF folks must of thought of this stuff. Certainly some of you readers and developers must be going beyond the MVC project and the EF data model in the same machine/layer. Certainly some of you must be doing N-Tiered stuff with it in an architecture where the EF parts are behind firewalls and not referenced in the UI. Please share.

Working with the WCF NetMsmqBinding with WAS

samgentile — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 01:03:16 GMT

Let’s face it. NetMsmq is the bastard child amongst the WCF bindings. Many WCF developers just resort to the default Request/Response paradigm and the BasicHttpBinding or WsHttpBinding. Of course, queuing and One-Way Asynchronous Messaging can be a powerful instrument in your service designs. But many ignore it. Thus there isn’t much out there about the NetMsmqBinding, especially when hosted in WAS (even worse when deployed to multiple servers). The notable exception is Tom Hollander’s excellent MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting Them to Play Nice Together. Recently, I had course to spend some quality intimate time with NetMsmq and WAS and was surprised at how hard it was and how many places one can trip up.

Just a little aside: I had reported, that in my role the last year and 1/4, I had become a Web Developer and no sign of WCF but recently WCF has become my sole attention for the last few weeks as we gauge it it’s suitability for our Service Layer in a new project.

Here’s a sort of list of the getting all the moving parts working together:

You need to first enable WAS so that it can host TCP. Bring up Control Panel – Turn On Windows Features and ensure that Windows Communication Foundation HTTP Activation and Non-HTTP Activation are checked for the Microsoft .NET Framework
In the same place, ensure that the Windows Process Activation Services (WAS) is enabled. The checkbox is entitled Windows Process Activation Services and check both items underneath it
Well, of course, you can’t have MSMQ without installing/enabling it. So, in the same place, enable MSMQ checking Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) Server Core and Active Directory Support as well as MSMQ HTTP support.
On each IIS WAS server to use MSMQ, bring up IIS Manager
In IIS Manager, in the Connections pane, expand that connection to the computer, expand Sites, right-click Default Web Site, and then Edit Bindings. If WAS has been installed correctly, it should list the default protocol bindings for the Web site – net.msmq should be listed there.
Close the Site Bindings dialog.
In the Connections pane, expand the Default Web Site item, and then choose YOUR Web Application/Service
In the Actions pane (on the right side), click Advanced Settings
In the Advanced Settings dialog box, add a comma (,) and the text net.msmq to the Enabled Protocols box
Here’s the tricky part. You have to create a queue now for communications. You can usually call a queue whatever you feel like it. But as Tom points out, however, when you are hosting your MSMQ-enabled service in IIS 7 WAS, the queue name MUST match the URI of your service’s SVC file. For example: if the application name in IIS is PortalLoadSimServices with an SVC file called MSMQService.svc, then the queue must be called PortalLoadSimServices/MSMQService.svc.
He also explains why all queues used for WCF should be private.
In the Computer Management application, expand Message Queuing. Right-click Private Queues and select New | Private Queue.
Type in the name of the queue.
The next step is very important and if not done correctly, will be the source of many obscure MSMQ errors. You must enable secure access to the queue for NETWORK SERVICE and Authenticated Users service accounts by right-clicking Properties
Implement the code
If you don’t have any HTTP endpoints, you may have to publish a Metadata Exchange Protocol (MEX) endpoint to serve up metadata so you can generate the proxy. The following shows that as well as declaration of the NetMsmq endpoint

<host>

</baseAddresses>

</host>

17. Ensure the NetMSMQ Listener Adapter is turned on in the Services panel! I can’t tell you how many times I got cryptic errors like the queue permissions are incorrect when it turned out the Listener wasn’t on!

Well, I hope this helps other people out.