So I have decided to spend 30 days with Ruby on Rails and blog it right here. Stay tuned for a daily post on rails, it will be fun.  I am starting my journey with TekPub’s Rails 3 production at http://tekpub.com/view/rails3/1

Step 1: Download node.exe

Get it from http://nodejs.org/#download and put it somewhere in your path e.g. c:\node

Step 2: Install git

Get it from here and install into your windows console if you want to use the windows command prompt instead of bash

Step 3: Install NPM (node package manager)

This one is a little more involved.  Run the following commands (ref: http://npmjs.org/doc/README.html#Installing-on-Windows-Experimental)

git config –system http.sslcainfo /bin/curl-ca-bundle.crt
git clone –recursive git://github.com/isaacs/npm.git
cd npm
node cli.js install npm –gf

Step 4: Install express

Express is a really cool web framework for nodejs and should simplify your web development considerably.  This is of course optional, but here are the steps anyway.

create a folder for your app e.g c:\projects\myapp

cd c:\projects\myapp

npm install –g express

node app.js

Now, if you visit http:/127.0.0.1:3000 you will see a 500 error page because you are missing a dependency.  npm install –d should fix it but that threw all kinds of errors in windows “couldn’t unpack blah blah”, “unknown error blah blah”, “out of memory blah blah”…  Fortunately, running this command downloaded the missing dependency (jade) into the temp folder, on my machine it was at C:\Users\Emad\AppData\Local\Temp\npm-1320719310093\1320719310093-0.5456247869879007\contents\___package.npm\package (if it is not there, you can get it from https://github.com/visionmedia/jade)

I copied the content of that folder into C:\node\node_modules\jade and that took care of the problem.  Now visiting http://127.0.0.1:3000/, I see

Step 5: Install linux in a Virtual machine

Yes, you read that right.  It is just much simpler to work with node stuff on linux.  Everything just works.  It seems like on windows, you are constantly swimming upstream.

I have always been envious of how easy it was/is to deploy a rails app.  It takes seconds and usually one command line.  It is just awesome.  So, I was really excited when a few weeks ago I ran across AppHarbor and it looked too good to be true.  I thought I would see how easy it would be to create a site and deploy it.  Instead of creating an app from scratch though, I am going to create an Orchard website.  If you haven’t seen Orchard, go check it out.  It’s really cool.  It’s a CMS/Blog engine written in ASP.NET MVC and is open source and very extensible.

Prerequisites: Setup git on your computer, see this link for instructions.

So, here is how to get a website up and running in seconds…

1 – Login to AppHarbor and create a new application

2 – Change your new application settings to enable write-access to the file system

3 – Start WebMatrix and create a new site from Web Gallery

4 – Choose Orchard and name your website

5 – Open up a command prompt (I use Console2)

6 – Change to the path of your new website e.g. cd c:\websites\mywebsite

7 – run the following commands

• git init
• git add .
• git commit –m “initial commit”
• git remote add appharbor https://eibrahim@appharbor.com/MyWebsite.git (the URL will be unique to your app)
• git push appharbor master (enter your AppHarbor password)

8 – Visit your new site on appharbor, in this example the site is located at http://mywebsite.apphb.com/ 

9 – DONE!!!  Just follow the prompts to setup Orchard

You have just deployed a web app and have it hosted for free.  You can easily scale it using AppHarbor’s cloud infrastructure.  It is simply awesome. 

Another cool feature is that every time you want to deploy a new version, you simply commit your changes and run the git push command above.  AppHarbor maintains different versions of your app and you can easily switch between versions.  So if you deployed a bad version, you simply click a link and deploy the last working version.

I personally haven’t deployed a scalable app on AppHarbor, so I would love to hear your feedback on how well the scaling works and if it is cost-effective or not.

We are all patiently waiting for the Windows Phone 7 update.  A few lucky ones already got it, but a whole lot of people including myself didn’t get it yet.  I find myself insistently checking blogs, twitter, Facebook and Google to figure out if and when the update will be available.  To pass the time and to simplify my life and reduce the stress of figuring out the status of the update, I built a free little WP7 app called “Dude, Where Is My Update?” or DWIMU for short.

You simply select your region and phone or operator and get the bad/good news.  I have a Samsung Focus, so unfortunately, I will be waiting for a long time.

But if you are in Sweden with the Hutchison Group then you should be getting the updates a lot sooner.

How does it work?

Right now, the app simply gets the data from Microsoft’s website at http://bit.ly/eMukfH.  I will write another blog detailing the technical implementation of the app.  I built a web service in Python and hosted it with Google’s AppEngine (because it is free).  DWIMU pulls the data from my web service which I will keep updated and in sync with Microsoft’s website.

Why you should download the app?

The future plans is to crowd source the update detection to get a more accurate indication of when you will be getting the update.  By simply running the app you will be able to see how many people already received the update for your selected network/phone/region.  Of course, this will only work if there is enough people using the app.  If I get enough downloads, I will release an update that will enable automatic detection.  So download it now and spread the word, if you want me to add these features.

I am actually typing this blog post on my Samsung focus in OneNote.

Things I like

1. Keyboard is phenomenal
2. UI is awesome.  Its a crazy world we live in when Microsoft does a better job with a UI than Apple.
3. Very responsive OS
4. Speech and voice commands are incredibly accurate.  I know the iPhone has that but it just never worked well.
5. Outlook works very well

Things I don’t like

1. The app bar at the bottom of the screen is very easy to accidentally hit while typing.  So in the middle of an email, i hit send accidentally while hitting the space bar.
2. No copy and paste.  Initially I didn’t care but then when I started getting emails with information that i wanted to copy and paste. I also tried to duplicate a formula in excel and i couldn’t copy and paste.  I am not retyping that formula for every row.
3. Keys are not very well placed.  I accidentally keep hitting the camera button or the soft buttons at the bottom (back, start and search)
4. The previous problem wouldn’t be too bad if I had multi tasking, but if I am playing a game or doing something else and I accidentally hit search, I lose my work/game.  It sucks.
5. I can’t buy audiobooks in the marketplace
6. I am missing some apps that are making it hard to forget the iPhone

Apps I need

1. Remember the milk
2. Evernote – if I can import my evernote notes into OneNote then i will be ok,  but i can’t.  Actually, I created a note taking application for free to fill the void.  It is not as powerful as evernote but I am constantly adding more features as I see fit.  See it here (marketplace link).
3. Audible player

Apps I would like to have

1. Kindle
2. tweetdeck

Best of All

It is ridiculously easy to develop for.  I have done iPhone and Android development and they have a very steep learning curve.  Don’t just take my word for it.  I created 4 apps in less than a month:

1. envision – basecamp client for windows phone 7 – see http://envisionhq.com
2. Picasa Viewer – see http://picasaviewer.com
3. Notesly Free – marketplace link
4. QuoteZen – 170k quotes with search and bookmarking capabilities – marketplace link

You might think that the above statement is very subjective because I have been doing .NET since version zero, but trust me WP7 development is easier than iPhone and Android.  Don’t believe me.  Try it out for yourself – http://msdn.com

Results

Here is an output of the results after 40 hands for:

player 1 – http://pastey.net/139513

player 2 – http://pastey.net/139514

dealer – http://pastey.net/139515

Here is another run:

player 1 – http://pastey.net/139516

player 2 – http://pastey.net/139517

dealer – http://pastey.net/139518

Screenshot

Disclaimer

you WILL EVENTUALLY LOSE.  I ran the simulator for a long time and I was down over $90k.

Source Code

You can get the source code for the application here – http://github.com/eibrahim/BlackJackSimulator

Anyway, I am currently working on a MongoDb GUI – there are none out there – and I decided to build it in WPF.  I am using the MongoDb driver by samus (link).  Displaying the data returned from a query as a table proved to be a lot harder than I thought.

Remember that the application doesn’t know anything about the domain model, so I can’t use strongly-typed objects.  This is the code to retrieve the list of user objects stored in MongoDb:

var collection = db.GetCollection<Document>(User);
var results = collection.FindAll();

This will return the results as ICursor<Document>.  Think of Document as the base type for all objects stored in MongoDb.  The actual collection of documents/objects/users is in results.Documents.  A Document implements the ICollection<KeyValuePair<string,object>>, this means that each document is basically a key/value list of all the object properties.  So a user object will be stored like this:

What I want to do is to take this list of documents and display as a grid.  I want it to look something like this:

I am no WPF expert but after Googling and reading tons of articles for hours, here is the solution I came up with.  If you know a better one, please let me know.

Here is the XAML for the ListView

<ListView Name="lvItems"  Margin="12,12,9,12"        IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem="True" Grid.Column="1"        ItemsSource="{Binding}" >

</ListView>

The first thing I need to do is define the grid columns:

private static GridView CreateGridViewColumns(Document doc)
{
    // Create the GridView
    GridView gv = new GridView();
    gv.AllowsColumnReorder = true;

    if(doc ==null) return gv; //return empty grid if null

    // Create the GridView Columns)
    foreach (var item in doc.Keys)
    {
        var gvc = new GridViewColumn();
        gvc.Header = item;
        gvc.Width = Double.NaN;
        gvc.CellTemplateSelector = new CustomRowDataTemplateSelector();
        gv.Columns.Add(gvc);
    }

    return gv;
}

I use the returned GridView to set the ListView’s Grid

var gridView = CreateGridViewColumns(results.Documents.FirstOrDefault());
lvItems.View = gridView;

So that takes care of setting up the grid column header.  Now, I need to bind the data.  I want to treat each document as a “Row”, so I create a custom class called CustomRow.  Some of the stuff in there won’t make sense right now, but bear with me.

internal class CustomRow
{
    private int index = 0;
    private ArrayList _list;

    public CustomRow()
    {
        _list = new ArrayList();
    }

    public object Value
    {
        get
        {
            if (index < 0) index = 0;
            if (index >= _list.Count) index = 0; //wrap around and start from beginning

            return _list[index++];
        }
    }

    public object Current
    {
        get
        {
            if (index < 0) index = 0;
            if (index >= _list.Count) index = 0; //wrap around and start from beginning
            return _list[index];
        }
    }

    public void Add(object item)
    {
        _list.Add(item);
    }
}

Now, all I have to do is convert each document to CustomRow:

private object ConvertToRows(IEnumerable<Document> documents)
{
    var results = new List<CustomRow>();

    foreach (var document in documents)
    {
        var row = new CustomRow();
        foreach (var field in document)
        {
            row.Add(field.Value);
        }
        results.Add(row);
    }
    return results;
}

This is the full code used to setup the ListView:

lvItems.View = CreateGridViewColumns(results.Documents.FirstOrDefault());
lvItems.DataContext = ConvertToRows(results.Documents);

Did you notice the line with the CellTemplateSelector in the CreateGridViewColumns method above?  Well, I wanted my cells to display differently based on whether they are displaying string, date, an embedded object/document or a list of other documents.  So, I created a custom CellTemplateSelector:

public class CustomRowDataTemplateSelector : DataTemplateSelector
{
    public override DataTemplate
        SelectTemplate(object item, DependencyObject container)
    {
        FrameworkElement element = container as FrameworkElement;

        if (element != null && item != null)
        {
            var row = item as CustomRow;
            if (row != null)
            {
                var cell = row.Current;

                //set template based on cell type
                if (cell is Document)
                {
                    return element.FindResource("documentCell") as DataTemplate;
                }
                if (cell is IList)
                {
                    return element.FindResource("listCell") as DataTemplate;
                }

                if (cell is DateTime)
                {
                    return element.FindResource("dateCell") as DataTemplate;
                }

                if (cell is Oid)
                    return element.FindResource("idCell") as DataTemplate;
                return element.FindResource("stringCell") as DataTemplate;
            }

        }

        return null;
    }
}

Basically, I am returning a different DataTemplate based on the object stored in the cell.  As an example, here is dateCell template defined in the App.xaml file.

<DataTemplate x:Key="dateCell">
    <StackPanel>
        <TextBlock Style="{StaticResource cellStyle}"
                    Grid.Row="0" Grid.Column="0"
                    Text="{Binding Path=Value, Converter={StaticResource cellConverter}}" />
    </StackPanel>
</DataTemplate>

This is simply a TextBlock that is bound to the Value property of the CustomRow class (will explain later).  The cellConverter is custom logic that will convert the value of the cell accordingly.  For example, date is converted to short date, an embedded object is simply converted to an “(object)” string as shown above.  Here is my converter (ConvertBack hasn’t been implemented yet):

public class CellConverter : IValueConverter
{
    public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture)
    {
        if (value == null)
            return "(null)";
        if (value is Document)
            return "(object)";
        if (value is DateTime)
            return ((DateTime)value).ToShortDateString();
        if (value is IList)
            return "(list)";

        return value;
    }

    public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture)
    {
        throw new NotImplementedException();
    }
}

Explanations

At first, I tried to just bind directly to the list of values in each document.  The problem with that the DataTempalte only display the first item in the collection.  So my grid looks exactly like above but all the cells were set to the value of Id.  That is why I created the CustomRow class and that is why the Value property increments the indexer.  This way everytime I pull out the value for a cell, I increment the indexer so that the next bound cell will get the next value and so on. 

Again, I don’t know if this is the best solution, so if you do know of a better one then please let me know in the comments.  It will help all my readers.  Thanks in advance.

I like the subversion and it does the job for me, but after watching tekpub’s videos, I instantly realized the power of mercurial and why I must have it.  So I went ahead and converted my source control for dartfiles to Hg (hg is the chemical symbol for mercury in the periodic table). I was actually surprised by how easy the move went.

Here is what I did:

1. Downloaded and installed TortoiseHg
2. Exported my subversion project to a new folder 

   

3. Created a Mercurial repository at the new folder where I exported the code in step 2

   
   

4. Edited the ignore file (.hgignore) in notepad and added the following (which I found somewhere on stackoverflow)

# Ignore file for Visual Studio 2008

# use glob syntax
syntax: glob

# Ignore Visual Studio 2008 files
*.obj
*.exe
*.pdb
*.user
*.aps
*.pch
*.vspscc
*_i.c
*_p.c
*.ncb
*.suo
*.tlb
*.tlh
*.bak
*.cache
*.ilk
*.log
*.lib
*.sbr
*.scc
[Bb]in
[Db]ebug*/
obj/
[Rr]elease*/
_ReSharper*/
[Tt]est[Rr]esult*
[Bb]uild[Ll]og.*
*.[Pp]ublish.xml

5. Committed the repository

   

   

That’s all I had to do to setup mercurial. 

You are probably wondering – where is the source control server and where are you committing too.  This is the part that is different than what I have been used to with subversion.  Obviously if you are using git or similar distributed SCM then you are familiar with this concept.  Mercurial stores all your source code changes and tracking locally right in your folder inside a .hg subfolder (similar to .svn folders but not exactly).  When you commit you are just committing to your local repository.  This is pretty cool because it lets you commit locally, roll back to a different time, branch and do all kind of cool things without having to deal with a server. 

Imagine you are working on feature 1 then you get an email for an urgent bug (lets’ call it bug 2).  You can’t really work on it because feature 1 is not complete and the code won’t compile and things could get messy.  You want to fix the bug but you don’t want to lose all the work you put into feature 1 and you are note ready to deploy.  With mercurial, it’s pretty easy to handle this situation.  Simply go back to a point in your history before you started working on feature 1, create a new branch for bug 2, fix it then commit and push it, you can then deploy this version and then come back and merge the bug 2 branch with your feature 1 branch and continue working on feature 1. 

I probably didn’t do a good job explaining this scenario but hopefully you will at least get an idea of what I am talking about.  If not then head over to http://mercurial.selenic.com/ and take a look at their great documentation.

Remote Repository

In most cases, you will want to setup a remote repository so you can “push” code to it.  “Pushing” is another concept that was new to me.  Basically, you commit locally and you push remotely (or centrally).  This gives you the flexibility to commit all day long every time you make a change and only when the code is ready and stable you “push” it to the remote repository where other developers can get to it.  I setup my remote repository at bitbucket – http://bitbucket.org/ – they have a free account and some very reasonable pricing.  If you are working on open source/public code, you can always use Google code or codeplex; they both support mercurial.

Here are the steps

1. Created an account at bitbucket.
2. Setup TortoiseHg to talk with the remote repository (right-click > TortoiseHg > Repository Settings)

   

3. Pushed my code to the remote server

TeamCity Integration

I use TeamCity as my build server (blog post).  Once everything was working nicely, I had to get TeamCity to work with the new SCM.  This was pretty easy as well.  I basically removed my old SVN root from my TeamCity project and added a new root to point to mercurial

To make this work, you have to install mercurial on the server.  Get it from http://mercurial.selenic.com/downloads/

Initially, I had a problem with the HG command path and it was giving me some weird error like failed to create process or something like that (I can’t remember).  It turned out the problem was that TeamCity couldn’t deal with spaces in the path.  The install location was “c:\Program Files (x86)\hg” so I just moved it to c:\hg and everything worked.

Once everything was working well and after working for a few hours, doing a few commits and one deployment, I realized the power of mercurial.  Just take a look at my repository history and you might grasp the awesomeness that is mercurial.

Here is the dirty way:

public static string Serialize(this object obj)
{
    string XmlString = String.Empty;
    using (var memStream = new MemoryStream())
    {
        var serializer = new XmlSerializer(obj.GetType(), string.Empty);
        using (var xmlText = new XmlTextWriter(memStream, Encoding.Default))
        {
            serializer.Serialize(xmlText, obj);
        }
        XmlString = Encoding.Default.GetString(memStream.ToArray());
        memStream.Close();
    }
    return XmlString;
}

The resulting XML looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="Windows-1252"?>
<ZipContentInfo xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
    <FileName>00107_tokyoatnight_1680x1050.jpg</FileName>
    <FileSize>281268</FileSize>
</ZipContentInfo>

Here is a cleaner way:

public static string Serialize(this object obj)
{
    var ser = new XmlSerializer(obj.GetType());
    using (var tw = new StringWriter())
    {
        using (var xw = XmlWriter.Create(tw, new XmlWriterSettings() { OmitXmlDeclaration = true }))
        {
            var ns = new XmlSerializerNamespaces();
            //Add an empty namespace and empty value
            ns.Add("", "");
            ser.Serialize(xw, obj, ns);
            return tw.ToString();
        }
    }
}

And the resulting XML looks like this:

<ZipContentInfo>
    <FileName>00107_tokyoatnight_1680x1050.jpg</FileName>
    <FileSize>281268</FileSize>
</ZipContentInfo>

select top 5 * from users order by newid()

Nhibernate is a different story.  I am new to NHibernate and I both love and hate it.  I hate the steep learning curve and the unobvious ways of doing things.  Anyway, here is how to select 5 random records using nhibernate.

First class a new order class to perform random ordering:

public class RandomOrder : Order
{
    public RandomOrder() : base("", true) { }
    public override SqlString ToSqlString(ICriteria criteria, ICriteriaQuery criteriaQuery)
    {
        return new SqlString("newid()");
    }
}

Then use the new class in your query:

IList<User> users = session
    .CreateCriteria(typeof(User))
    .AddOrder(new RandomOrder())
    .SetMaxResults(5)
    .List<User>();

Done…

<div id='pnlUsers'></div>
<div id='pnlMessages'></div>
<div id='pnlStatus'></div>

I can easily hide all the divs up by doing a wildcard selection on elements with an id starting with “pnl”, like this:

$("[id^=pnl]").hide();

You can even narrow it to only divs like this:

$("div[id^=pnl]").hide();

There is another example with even more explanations over here.

^(?#Protocol)(?:(?:ht|f)tp(?:s?)\:\/\/|~/|/)?(?#Username:Password)(?:\w+:\w+@)?(?#Subdomains)(?:(?:[-\w]+\.)+(?#TopLevel Domains)(?:com|org|net|gov|mil|biz|info|mobi|name|aero|jobs|museum|travel|[a-z]{2}))(?#Port)(?::[\d]{1,5})?(?#Directories)(?:(?:(?:/(?:[-\w~!$+|.,=]|%[a-f\d]{2})+)+|/)+|\?|#)?(?#Query)(?:(?:\?(?:[-\w~!$+|.,*:]|%[a-f\d{2}])+=(?:[-\w~!$+|.,*:=]|%[a-f\d]{2})*)(?:&(?:[-\w~!$+|.,*:]|%[a-f\d{2}])+=(?:[-\w~!$+|.,*:=]|%[a-f\d]{2})*)*)*(?#Anchor)(?:#(?:[-\w~!$+|.,*:=]|%[a-f\d]{2})*)?$

There is more information on Ivan’s blog.

The code is also very simple.  I didn’t add all the extra options that the API makes available and just wrote enough for me to shorten a URL.  Here it is:

public static class BitlyApi
{
    private const string apiKey = "[add api key here]";
    private const string login = "[add login name here]";

    public static BitlyResults ShortenUrl(string longUrl)
    {
        var url =
            string.Format("http://api.bit.ly/shorten?format=xml&version=2.0.1&longUrl={0}&login={1}&apiKey={2}",
                          HttpUtility.UrlEncode(longUrl), login, apiKey);
        var resultXml = XDocument.Load(url);
        var x = (from result in resultXml.Descendants("nodeKeyVal")
                 select new BitlyResults
                            {
                                UserHash = result.Element("userHash").Value,
                                ShortUrl = result.Element("shortUrl").Value
                            }
                );
        return x.Single();
    }
}

public class BitlyResults
{
    public string UserHash { get; set; }

    public string ShortUrl { get; set; }
}

Using this code is very straight forward.

var shortUrl = BitlyApi.ShortenUrl("http://www.verylongUrl.com").ShortUrl;

bit.ly has tons of features and a great API.  You can even see stats of any bit.ly generate url using /info.  for example: http://bit.ly/info/S0vRy shows you stats for http://bit.ly/S0vRy

Another feature I really like is their bookmarklet which you can keep on your browser’s bookmark bar and click it to shrink the site you are at…  It even pops this side bar with a bunch of useful info.

The API is pretty well documented at http://code.google.com/p/bitly-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation

Don’t forget to follow me on twitter.

I created a themes folder under the content folder

Then I referenced my css file in the master page using a helper method

<%= ThemeHelper.GetCss() %>

I also use a helper method for images

<img src=’<%=ThemeHelper.GetImageUrl("reply.png")%>’ alt="reply" class="icon" />

But most of my images are set in the stylesheet, which makes it easier to manipulate different skins

The helper methods above look at the defined theme in the config file (or database or wherever you store your settings) and then return the path to the correct resource.

Take a look at these live samples:

• www.yonkly.com
• www.isweat.com
• www.hokietalk.com

They are all using the same codebase but have a different theme defined.  The trick is in making your HTML css-friendly by naming elements and assigning them classes as well as using Divs and avoiding tables.  This allows you to create a stylesheet that radically changes the look of the site.  Think of the element ids and classes as an API to your view, that the css can manipulate.

I also added a feature that lets you upload a folder theme as a zip file and have the application unzip it into the themes folder.

It would be cool if we can define a "virtual folder" in our application, so I wouldn’t have to use helper methods.  Imagine if you could just say /content/theme/logo.gif and it would just work.  The theme folder doesn’t really exist but instead it would route to the correct folder based on a setting.  I wonder if I can do that with current routing mechanism in asp.net mvc!!!  Anyone?

For example, my AccountController takes IEmailService, IFormsAuthentication and MembershipProvider (abstract class) as parameters.

During my testing, I want to mock the email, authentication and membership calls.  For example when the user calls FormsAuthentication.Login, I don’t really care if actual call succeeded but rather that my login action works appropriately in the case FormstAuthentication.Login succeeds (or fails).  I just want to mock that call.

I started off creating a few tests and slowly they have grown to several.  There was a lot of repeated code in my unit tests and to be a good citizen of the DRY universe, I needed to refactor the code.

For IoC, I initially started with StructureMap but now I am using Ninject. 

I created this module to bind my interfaces to mocked instances.  It looks like this:

internal class TestModule : StandardModule
{
    public override void Load()
    {
        Bind<IEmailService>()
            .ToConstant(MyMocks.MockEmailService.Object);

        Bind<IFormsAuthentication>()
            .ToConstant(MyMocks.MockFormsAuthentication.Object);

        Bind<MembershipProvider>()
            .ToConstant(MyMocks.MockMembershipProvider.Object);

        Bind<IContactListService>()
            .ToConstant(MyMocks.MockContactListService.Object);
    }
}

Notice that I bind the interfaces to actual instances and not classes.  These instances are declared in a global static class that will be accessed from my unit tests.  As you can tell from the name, they are all mocked objects (I am using Moq).  Here is how the MockEmailService looks (all the others are declared the same way):

internal static class MyMocks
{
    private static Mock<IEmailService> _mockEmailService;
    public static Mock<IEmailService> MockEmailService
    {
        get
        {
            _mockEmailService = _mockEmailService ?? new Mock<IEmailService>();
            return _mockEmailService;
        }
    }

So all this is good to setup Ninject and create my mocks.  Now I want to easily and generically create a controller, so I can quickly create unit tests.  In order to do that, I created a TestControllerFactory class that basically creates a controller with all the appropriate dependencies injected.

   1: internal static class TestControllerFactory

   2: {

   3:     private static IKernel _kernel;

   4:     public static IKernel Kernel

   5:     {

   6:         get

   7:         {

   8:             if (_kernel == null)

   9:             {

  10:                 var modules = new IModule[] { new TestModule() };

  11:                 _kernel = new StandardKernel(modules);

  12:             }

  13:             return _kernel;

  14:         }

  15:         private set

  16:         {

  17:             _kernel = value;

  18:         }

  19:     }

  20:  

  21:     public static T GetControllerWithFakeContext<T>(string httpMethod) 

  22:         where T : Controller

  23:     {

  24:         var con = Kernel.Get<T>();

  25:         con.SetFakeControllerContext();

  26:         if (con != null) con.Request.SetHttpMethodResult(httpMethod);

  27:         return con;

  28:     }

  29:  

  30: }

In line #10, I use the TestModule class mentioned above to setup the Ninject Kernel.  In lines #21 to #28, I create an instance of T which must be of type Controller from the Kernel which will automatically create the Controller with all the mocked objects.  In line #25 and #26, I just set a fake/mocked context and the Http Method for the request (more info here).

Now my unit tests are very clean and easy to setup.    Using MbUnit as my unit test framework, here is a unit tests that tests the reset password functionality.

   1: [Test]

   2: public void ResetPasswordQuestion_Should_Send_Email_On_Success()

   3: {

   4:     var newpassword = "newpassword";

   5:     MyMocks.MockMembershipProvider

   6:          .Expect(p => p.ResetPassword(username, answer))

   7:          .Returns(newpassword);

   8:     MyMocks.MockEmailService

   9:          .Expect(m => m.SendPasswordReset(username, newpassword));

  10:  

  11:     var ac = TestControllerFactory

  12:                 .GetControllerWithFakeContext<AccountController>("POST");

  13:  

  14:     var results = ac.ResetPasswordQuestion(username, question, answer);

  15:     //write some asserts in here to make sure things worked

  16:  

  17:     //verify all mocks

  18:     MyMocks.MockMembershipProvider.VerifyAll();

  19:     MyMocks.MockEmailService.VerifyAll();

  20: }

Line #5: I mock the ResetPassword call on the membership provider and tell it to return the new password

Line #8: I mock the SendPasswordReset method on the email service

Line #11: Get an instance of AccountController from the Ninject Kernel

I just write some code to make sure the expected results took place and that my mocks were properly exercised and that’s pretty much it.  No need to have an SMTP server working to test this, no need to have a database, no need to have an authentication method, no need to implement the interfaces or write dummy methods.

I am like a kid in a candy store with all these things: mocking, dependency injection, inversion of control, unit testing…  I am loving it.

So what do you think?  Is this a good way to go about it?  Is there a better way and what is it?

It wasn’t too hard to get up and running in asp.net mvc.  Corey’s post was a good starting point but I was too lazy to type all his code in, I wrote my own.  It was pretty easy to get Ninject to work.

I basically created a NinjecteControllerFactory class that inherits from the DefaultControllerFactory and overrode a couple of methods.  The class looks like this:

public class NinjectControllerFactory : DefaultControllerFactory
{
    private IKernel _kernel;
    public NinjectControllerFactory(params IModule[] modules)
    {
        _kernel = new StandardKernel(modules);
    }

    protected override IController GetControllerInstance(Type controllerType)
    {
        return _kernel.Get(controllerType) as IController;
    }
}

Then in my Gloval.asax.cs file, I called this code to setup Ninject.

IModule[] modules = new IModule[] { new WebModule() };
ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(new NinjectControllerFactory(modules));

The WebModule module has my configuration and looks like this:

public class WebModule : StandardModule
{
    public override void Load()
    {
        Bind<IAppService>().To<AspAppService>();
        Bind<IEmailService>().To<EmailService>();
        Bind<IContactService>().To<ContactService>();
        Bind<IContactRepository>().To<SqlContactRepository>();
        Bind<IFormsAuthentication>().To<FormsAuthenticationWrapper>();
        Bind<MembershipProvider>().ToConstant(Membership.Provider);
    }
}

Of course, you can create as many modules as you want to configure your application and pass them in the controller Factory.

This code was working fine for me and then Nate Kohari mentioned that there is a Ninject.Framework.Mvc extension that allows me to easily integrate Ninject into the MVC pipeline.  So, I decided to download the code, build it and use it.  I initially had some issues because it was referencing a different version of the core dll, so I had to rebuild that as well.

I changed my Global.asax.cs file to the following:

public class GlobalApplication : NinjectHttpApplication
{
    protected override void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
    {
        routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

        routes.MapRoute(
            "Default",                                              // Route name
            "{controller}/{action}/{id}",                           // URL with parameters
            new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" }  // Parameter defaults
        );
    }

    protected override IKernel CreateKernel()
    {
        IModule[] modules = new IModule[] { new AutoControllerModule(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly()), new WebModule() };
        return new StandardKernel(modules);
    }
}

Initially I was getting errors when navigating to an injected controller, which was fixed by add the AutoControllerModule to my modules and passing it the current assembly.

So far Ninject is looking great, the API is fluent and very discoverable and the contextual binding is very slick.  So I am going to stick with it for now and see how it goes.  The documentation seems pretty good and the Nate is very responsive in the Google Group.

Naturally, my research lead me to a post by Scott Hanselman (see it here) which lists some of the more popular IoC and dependency injection frameworks out there.

Spring.Net

I started of looking at Spring.Net and was very impressed by its features, samples/tutorials and documentation but it felt like it would be too much for this project and the learning curve seemed somewhat steep.  Its configuration syntax also looked very verbose.  But if you want to learn more there is a good article over here.

Castle Windsor

It looked easier to learn/use than spring.net but there getting started section was incomplete even though Scott says that it is well documented.  So that was a little discouraging.

Autofac

I really liked there syntax and looked really easy to use and figure out, but the documentation was very limited.  It was just a bunch of wiki pages in Google Code.  Though, they did have instructions on how to integrate it with MVC

StructureMap

Initially, I learned about structure map from a post by Phil Haack’s and I kind of liked it right away.  It was easy to pick up and figure out and Phil’s example helped to get me started quickly.  I checked there website and it has an impressive list of features and is well documented.

PostSharp

PostSharp is really cool but is not an IoC container.  It is a policy injector and a really easy way to do Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP).  Rather than trying to explain what exactly it does and screw it up, take a look at the “About PostSharp” page.  Even better check out this “getting started” walkthrough – you will be very impressed.

Must Pick One

I know there is a lot more IoC containers out there (which I glanced over), but these were sufficient for me.  Initially, I thought about using AutoFac but when I started to actually use it and ran into some issues, the documentation was not helpful at all.

I have decided to go with StructureMap as my IoC Container and dependency injector.  I might also use PostSharp to implement logging and tracing as aspects – there is no cleaner way.

Helpful Links

For a good explanation of IoC Containers and the Dependency Injection patter, read this article by Martin Fowler.

This also a good explanation that might help you understand IoC Containers.

You should definilty take a look Matthew Podwysocki’s comparison of the different IoC containers out there and their different (or rather similar) configuration and syntax.

Books you must Read

Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns

And Martin Fowler’s indispensable reference for software patterns Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

Validate my Choice

What do you think of my choice?  Does it really matter which one I go with?  Do you prefer a different IoC container and why?

Time to choose a unit testing framework… I love choices!!!

What do I want from my JavaScript Library?

I want it to be easy (I am not a JavaScript expert)
I want it to be small
I want it to be fast
I want it to be extensible
I want good documentation and/or community support
I want good/easy AJAX support
I want it to be asp.net-friendly
I also want it to be testable (I am using TDD for this project/book)
Open Source would be nice but not required

What are my options?

jQuery – http://jquery.com/
Microsoft AJAX – http://www.asp.net/ajax/
Dojo – http://dojotoolkit.org/
Prototype – http://www.prototypejs.org/
YUI – http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

This is a shortlist but if you want a more exhaustive, read this.  I only picked these, for the simple reasons that I have heard of them and are somewhat known by the community.

3 days later

It’s been 3 days since I started this post and I have spent all that time playing around with these libraries…  I have gone back and forth in my opinion on which library to use.  I love jQuery’s selectors, ease of use and community support.  Porototype is also very popular and somewhat similar to jQuery; but I would take jQuery over Prototype for the simple reason that I like jQuery.  YUI (Yahoo! UI) library is beautiful looking and very comprehensive.

jQuery

Pros

1. Ease to learn and use
2. Beautiful syntax (the least typing)
3. Great community support and lots of fans
4. Decent Documentation
5. I already own the book
6. QUnit test framework (http://docs.jquery.com/QUnit)

Cons

1. UI isn’t that great
2. Library is not as full-featured without plugins
3. Plugins are somewhat inconsistent in quality depending on the author

Prototype

Pros

1. Good documentation
2. Good community support
3. Lots of books
   1. Practical Prototype and script-aculo.us
   2. Prototype and script.aculo.us: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This!
   3. and many more…
4. Great UI with the add-on script.aculo.us (http://script.aculo.us/)

Cons

1. Couldn’t find a testing framework (but I didn’t look too hard)
2. For some purely emotional reason, I prefer jQuery

YUI

Pros

1. Great UI components and styles
2. The best documented library out there, hands down.
3. Distributed hosting of JS files – the script files will be downloaded from Yahoo server, so when my site becomes a mega-hit, it will scale better.
4. Great test framework and test runner – check these demos
   
5. The most complete library
6. PDF cheat sheets for every component

Cons

1. Very verbose – not as elegant as jQuery, but that’s not too hard to fix e.g. I can assign YAHOO.util.Event to a variable $E and use $E as the shorthand.

The rest

I got tired of all the research and decided to wrap it up, so I glanced over Microsoft AJAX and Dojo and realized that there isn’t enough there to justify more research.

The winner…

When I started this post, I was pretty certain my final choice will be jQuery.  Then I started playing with Prototype and it looked really good, which kind of opened my eyes to the need to be open minded and objective.  This lead to a more objective look at YUI and the conclusion to use YUI.  I was very impressed with YUI’s look & feel, extensive documentation, testing framework and the icing on the cake was the free hosting of the JavaScript libraries.  This was a really tough decision because I still love jQuery the best.

When upgrading my production applications, I have always struggled with trying to update my production database schema to match the latest schema.  This has always been a manual, error-prone and time consuming task.  One that I always dreaded and postponed to the last minute.  It usually involved crossing my figures, praying to the SQL Gods and running a hand-made migration script against the production database.  I am not a DB guy, so you can imagine how much un-fun this was.

Long story short, you can do this with a few clicks in Visual Studio 2008. 

Start a new schema comparison

Select your source database (e.g. development database) and your target database (e.g. production database)

Click Ok.  Visual studio will compare the two schemas and display the results in a grid, showing you what objects (tables, views, procs, etc…) have changed and the action you want to take.

Select any item that has changed and you will see the differences between source and target.

The last pane at the bottom contains the update (migration) script that will run against the target to make it identical to the source.  You can quickly scan it to make sure you are not wiping out your entire production database (not recommended).

You can also customize the update by clicking the drop downs in the grid to customize the script

Once everything looks good to go, just hit the button "Write Updates" and you are done.

This has been a sore in my side for a long time and I am glad I discovered this.  I am actually kind of pissed off because I have always seen that menu and never really tried to click it.  Oh well!!!

Hmm…  What to do with all the time I just freed up???

NOTE: According to msdn this feature is only available in the Database Edition and Team Suite versions.  I am running Team Suite (click Help > About Microsoft Visual Studio to find out your version)

So, after several minutes of googling, I found several solutions that I didn’t like.  John Hann uses reflection to test private methods.  Tim Stall has a similar solution at the code project.  Andrew Stopford suggested that I don’t test private methods and use code coverage to make sure that they are being exercised.  I was about to use the methods suggested by John Hann and Tim Stall to test my private methods, but then I accidentally (thanks to IntelliSense) discovered PrivateObject.

The PrivateObject class is part of the Team Test API.

Allows test code to call methods and properties on the code under test that would be inaccessible because they are not public.
from msdn

It turned out to be pretty easy to test private methods and the code looked like this:

var myController = new TwitterController();
var po = new PrivateObject(myController);
var page = 1;
var count = 25;
po.Invoke("ImportTweets", new object[] { page, count });

The code above will call the private method ImportTweets and pass it two integer parameters.  This is the equivalent of calling

myController.ImportTweets( page, count);

Note that this is essentially what John Hann and Tim Stall suggested but why use extra code when PrivateObject is already available for you.