Setup MongoDB

• Download the latest version of MongoDB from http://www.mongodb.org/downloads (v1.8.2 at time of writing)
• Unzip the files and place the bin folder somewhere (e.g. c:\mongo\bin)
• Create a folder c:\data\db (this is the default expected folder mongo will use)
• Double click on mongod.exe

Congratulations you’ve just setup mongodb and started it!

Do stuff in c#

• Create a new Console Application
• Using Nuget (Tools > Library Package Manager > Add Library Package Reference), search for “mongocsharpdriver”, let Nuget add the references
• Paste in this code:

  using MongoDB.Bson;
  using MongoDB.Driver;
   
  namespace MongoDbTest
  {
      class Program
      {
          static void Main(string[] args)
          {
              // connect to server
              var mongo = MongoServer.Create();
              // create database
              var db = mongo.GetDatabase("test");
              // create collection
              var books = db.GetCollection("books");
              // create entry
              var book = new{
                              Id = ObjectId.GenerateNewId(),
                             name = "Dans Book"
                         };
              // save entry
              books.Save(book);
          }
      }
  }

• Run the application.

Congratulations you’ve just leveraged MongoDB from .Net!

Don’t believe me?

Okay so this is about as basic an example as I could make it and of course the application starts, runs and finishes without much of a fanfare. Just to go a tiny bit deeper we’ll use the Mongo shell to look for our entry…

• From your Mongo directory (c:\mongo\bin), double click on Mongo.exe and enter:

   db.books.find()

Voila! You should see the book you just saved using your app returned.

This obviously barely scratches the surface but does get you up and running and demonstrates just how simple MongoDB is to get up and running. Now go dig a little deeper: http://www.mongodb.org/.

We love playing with new technology and strive to stay on top of the latest and greatest. We also regularly attend industry events and user groups such as FOTB, Droidcon, 360Flex, DDD, NxtGen and LFPUG and always looking for the next great event.

You’ll get to work with the likes of me, @andreablack, @peterkeating and @colinl along with occasional input from great talents such as @nwebb, @getrichhull, @amw7 and others to help us build world class RIAs.

We get all sorts of interesting projects ranging from sales tools for one of the worlds largest toy manufacturers to really cool audio slow-downers to help people learn to play music. We like to consider ourselves ‘platform agnostic’ which means we don’t get caught up in the “my tech is better than your tech” arguments. We focus on learning as much as possible and using the best tool for the job. This is great fun for us, we don’t get stuck using the same old technology and means our clients get a better result from experienced and unbiased opinion.

If you’re a developer with good OOP experience, familiarity with Flex and/or .Net and a genuine passion for building amazing user experiences and writing great code why not check out our openings and drop us your CV/portfolio.

• Learning Silverlight (this post)
• Learning Silverlight #1 – where to start
• Learning Silverlight #2 – Tooling Up
• Learning Silverlight #3 – Getting Started
• Learning Silverlight #4 – Sample Project

Anyway, for the first time in who knows how long I have found myself a weekend spare which I am intending to use to do a bit of a Silverlight deep-dive. For anyone reading this not familiar, I have a fairly strong background in .net and extensive experience of Flash and Flex. I’m hoping this provides me with a decent platform and offers a rapid learning curve for this exercise.

I’m mostly interested in seeing the potential for how productive Silverlight development can be. I am fairly hopeful that the tools (namely Visual Studio and Blend) will be a strong artillery for RIA development. I am also intrigued to see how much of the forming the basis of an app in Blend through drag n drop is actually useful for producing real, maintainable, efficient apps. Rather than the typical no-code solutions I’ve experienced in the past which have been more or less useless beyond simple proof of concepts. I’m sure there is a point where Blend stops and actual coding takes over, I’m just curious to find out what that point is. E.g. is it just skinning/styling or can there be some actual useful time-saving gained in the application development process through it’s state-management, data-binding and other wizardy type features.

I’m going to be blogging and tweeting the progress so feel free to follow and I’m very much open to ideas, opinions and suggestions.

Always assume the call you’re making will work.

Some context for the above, I recently got sick of my iPhone and decided to give Android a spin, side-stepping the obvious discussion here, one of the things that has irked me about the Android experience is that it just doesn’t feel as responsive as the iPhone for certain applications, specifically email. So I started to compare the two and realised that the iPhone reacts to my interactions immediately whereas Android seems to wait for approval from the server. This eye-opening discovery led to me imposing a new standard here at Moov2:

Every user interaction must have an immediate and obvious reaction.

Proud and smug feelings of wearing my user experience hat were soon interupted when challenged to explain wtf I actually meant by this. So, for example, deleting an email from a list of viewed email messages. When I hit delete I expect that message to be removed from the list and if that happens as soon as I press the delete button, I’m a happy chap. Conversely, if I have to wait, even a couple of seconds, I may think I missed and try hitting it again… and again… etc. So developers, quite simply, as soon as that delete button is hit, remove the message from the list and THEN send your call informing the server to do it’s part. This approach can be applied to pretty much any application development that involves a rich user interface, Flash, Flex, Silverlight, AJAX, Android, iPhone, native desktop apps and whatever.

But what if something goes wrong?

Of course, just throwing the message away willy-nilly is reckless, there’s a whole host of things that could prevent that message from being deleted. The user might be offline, the email list might not be up to date or there may just be some other bug elsewhere making the delete email process just plain not possible at the moment. In this case, sheepishly, politely and unobtrusively, let your user know the fact and pop the email back where it came from. This will obviously be a nuissance to the user, but how often does this really happen in comparisson to how often it works? Very rarely, and it’s no less annoying for the user than having to sit there waiting with no response only to find out the action failed.

What if I NEED the response in order to update the UI?

So deleting is a fairly convenient example because we’re taking away from an already viewable interface, what about if we’re adding to our interface based on the response from our call? For example displaying the list of emails in the first place. Well, for this I suggest you present all of the interface elements that you know are going to be available and just provide some indication that something else is going on to reassure the user that their input has been acknowledged. So when the user chooses to view their inbox, immediately react and change the view, present them the ‘Inbox’ title, show them any user controls they might be able to interact with and display the space those messages are going to load into with some form of preloader/spinner and note indicating their messages are being retrieved.

So take a minute and review your result handlers to see how much UI stuff is being done there. Could it be moved to before the call was made? This sometimes means you need to think about how to best back-track when things go wrong but for the 95% of the time when you just get the result you’d expect you’ll deliver a MUCH more responsive feeling interface that your users will thank you for.

By the way, if you’d like to actually see some code demonstrating this concept tweet the following message to Pete who has prepared a very clean implementation of this for a Flex application we’re currently working on: “Hey @peterkeating, codez pls http://bit.ly/f8HOyp. I’m sure he’ll oblige with a sample soon enough.

The following is a brief rundown of the talks I attended and my thoughts on them.

WP7, iPhone, Droid – Oh My !

Chris Hardy
Chris presented the process for creating a simple twitter client application for Windows Phone 7, he then went on to demonstrate the same process for creating a similar app for iPhone using MonoTouch and then again for Android using MonoDroid. WP7 development was very impressive, using a familiar development paradigm is very appealling and what I’ve seen of the OS so far looks impressive.

Next was MonoTouch, I’m a little undecided about this, I thought what has been acheived with MonoTouch (iPhone development in C#) however it’s still Mac only and as there is no abstraction you still need to familiarise with the iPhone platform specifics which makes it seem like it might just be worth doing full blown native iPhone dev especially considering there’s a fairly significant file size impact on any MonoTouch apps. That said however, give me C# over objective c any day, will definitely look at it more, especially as I won one of Chris’s books so a good excuse. Finally MonoDroid was demonstrated, it’s early days at the moment and is currently in a private preview state but shows promise. MonoDroid is going to be available for Visual Studio (windows) and MonoDevelop (mac). Again, I’m not convinced about shoe-horning c# when java is quite similar anyway but there is an obvious appeal to being able to use a consistent technology stack and catering for all three major platforms.

I don’t think for any one platform these tools can rival native development, but for targetting all three I defienitely think there is significant benefit and the ability to leverage existing skills is a big win. Chris provided a good amount of information in an hour about the very relevant field of mobile development.

Packaging in the .NET World

Sebastian Lambla
Seb was a very good speaker, very entertaining in a kind of French Basil Fawlty fashion with “hints” of bitterness about more enterprise backed projects of a similar ilk. Bitterness aside, OpenWrap looks like something the .net community has been needing for a long time. It also goes way beyond simply package management offering facilities for publishing and updating your own packages amoungst a host of other features. There was a lot to go through and a few hiccups caused by some late night coding under the influence but overall a great demonstration.

Is NoSQL the Future of Data Storage?

Gary Short
NoSql is a subject I’ve been interested in since catching Neil Robbins’ presentation about it at NxtGen Southampton a few months ago. Gary gave a great flying tour of the background, options, uses and advantages of NoSQL databases. He addressed most of the questions I’d had and has convinced me further that NoSQL dbs are worth considering for projects. Gary had a very good insight into the world of nosql and has clearly done his homework.

Building Silverlight Applications for Business (and fun)

Ian Blackburn
Ian gave a run-through of the latest release of Silverlight, some key considerations and an overview of the popular MVVM approach. Ian re-affirmed how far Silverlight has come in a relatively short space of time and it has come a long way. Silverlight is now a very capable rich client platform and how offers the features and a great development environment. Ian also went through RIA services which I’m not really that sold on. It seems to me RIA Services encourages logic leaking between service and client layers.

Ian also touched on a point I feel is key for the further success of Sliverlight which is the lack of designers picking up Expression Blend, in Ian’s words “I know how to use Blend, I also know how to dress myself but it doesn’t mean I look good”. This is a point I was concerned about three years ago when first looking at Silverlight and its very disappointing that more hasn’t been done to get Blend into the hands of some really talented designers. A lot of Silverlight applications out there still look very… developer designed.

Things you should know about SQL as a developer

Simon Sabin
Databases is probably my least favoured aspect of software development, coupled with the fact UI is one of my preferred aspects it was very tempting to miss Simon’s talk about SQL Server and attend the session on WPF. However, as I’m often left to face SQL issues Simon’s was the sensible choice. Turned out to be a good choice as this turned out to be the most useful session of the day. Simon is extremely knowledgeable about SQL Server and clearly has a lot of experience. He isn’t a gung-ho DBA type trying to ensure everything gets managed at the database level and doesn’t think everything belongs in stored procedures and does have a very balanced view and understanding of the software developers role. The information he provided was invaluable hopefully he will publish his slides as they are a great source of simple steps to improve the performance and maintainability of your database. Check out his blog as he has posted some of the information there.

Conclusion

Overall it was an excellent event and Microsoft provided great facilities, the DDD team put on an extremely well organised event and there was a good buzz amongst the attendees.

If you’ve been considering getting into Silverlight development in an effort to extend your skillset bbits is offering a Silverlight Masterclass in the UK in June. Here follows the spiel:

The Silverlight Tour comes to the UK – and it’s called the Masterclass!

This 3 day hands-on training with both designer and developer tracks looks awesome and (uniquely) has two expert trainers per course.

Currently scheduled in London, Manchester, and the Midlands for June, all courses also come with the chance to win an xbox 360, and Silverlight Spy licences!

Early bird discount of £100 if you book in May, and if you are a member of #SLUGUK or #nxtgenug there are additional discounts to be had.

Full Details are here: http://silverlightmasterclass.net

In addition bbits are holding a raffle for a free ticket for the masterclass. To be eligible to win the ticket (worth £1095!) you MUST paste this text, including all links, into your blog and email Ian@bbits.co.uk with the url to the blog entry. The draw will be made on June 1st and the winner informed by email and on http://silverlightmasterclass.net

So if Silverlight has been on your to-do list for a while and you want to short-cut to being a pro check it out

I did have debug enabled and seemingly nothing i changed would stop the error. Many of the solutions found when first searching didn’t work, what I had to do was to delete all files from the following directory:

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\temp\Temporary ASP.NET Files

We recently deployed an Intranet system that used some of the ASP.Net AJAX framework, two users were receiving a javascript error and not displaying a tabcontrol. The first js error was “invalid character at line 0″ and the second was “ajaxcontroltoolkit is undefined”. This baffled me as all the client machines were identical (in fact they were using a Citrix client so they were definitely identical).

Anyway turns out it’s something to do with the last modified date of the assembly if it’s somehow set to be in the future compared to the date of the server it is running on (possibly due to a converstion from UK to US date formats for example) you will get this error.

The solution is to simply change the last modified date of the assembly which can be done either using one of several freeware applications available or by using the very simple console application provided at Plain Old Stan’s blog. I used this and just set the date back a year and it resolved the issue.

Hopefully that’ll be of some use to someone.

The ‘Textbook definition’ by Martin Fowler
Very useful explanation with some basic sample code (.net) by Ayende
Castle Windsor step by step basic intro (.net)
Prana – a Spring-ish IoC Container for AS3 by Christophe Herreman (via jesterxl)

This stuff doesn’t come naturally to me to say the least so if anyone else has any links they want to share feel free to post them in the comments.