I am going to start a series of articles on using FubuMVC for web projects. I have several reason for writing these, one of which is FubuMVC has a lack of documentation right now, so these articles will help out that cause. Also I am starting to do mostly web work, and want to do these apps with FubuMVC as opposed to Asp.net MVC. (This is purely for personal reasons).

Upcoming Topics:

Setting up the Bootstrapper and Global.asax
Creating Models, Views, and Controllers with FubuMVC
Adding database connectivity
Using HTML helpers

I will most likely cross post these to the FubuMVC wiki once they are refined and final, so if any of you have comments, ways to do things better, or find things I should explain or do differently, please leave me a comment.

Before You Begin

Before you start your setup, head over to the FubuMVC website, grab the latest version of the source and compile it. This way you will have the references I am using below.

Project Setup

The first thing you need to do is go setup your project and folder structure. I am not going to detail the process here, because most people have thier own preferences and naming conventions but for my sampl I will be using the following folder structure:

• FubuSample
• lib
• src
• FubuSample.Core
• FubuSample.Web
• FubuSample.Tests
• FubuSample.sln

You may have noticed above that I am using three different projects: FubuSample.Core (class library), FubuSample.Web (Web Application) and FubuSample.Tests (class library). Setup these projects and we will move on, mine look like this:

Got it, great. Next thing I am going to do is add references required for FubuMVC to work. I added the following references to my projects:

1. FubuSample.Core
   1. FubuMVC.Core
   2. FubuMVC.Container.StructureMap
   3. StructureMap
   4. Microsoft.Practices.ServiceLocation
2. FubuSample.Web
   1. FubuSample.Core
   2. FubuMVC.Core
   3. FubuMVC.Container.StructureMap
   4. StructureMap
   5. Microsoft.Practices.ServiceLocation
3. FubuSample.Tests
   1. FubuSample.Core
   2. FubuSample.Web
   3. FubuMVC.Core
   4. FubuMVC.Container.StructureMap
   5. NUnit.Framework
   6. Rhino.Mocks
   7. StructureMap

Once all the references are are in your 3 projects, you are almost ready to get going. The next thing to do is to setup a basic folder structure inside your projects. In the web project I added a Views folder and a Content folder; under the content folder I added seperate folders for images, scripts and stylesheets. Moving on to the Core project I added top level folders for  Config, Domain, and Web. Under the Web folder I also added folders named Controllers, DisplayModels, Html, and WebForms. My folder structure now looks like this for my projects:

Next up, setting up the Bootstrapper, Global.asax and Web.config for FubuMVC

Tags: Asp.net, FubuMVC, MVC, web

I have been working today with Jeremy Millers’ ScreenBinder stuff and ran into a problem today with the tests. The tests all passed fine in Visual Studio, and with rake at the command line on my computer. The problem however came when I checked the code into source control, I got a nasty test failure message in TeamCity:

Here is the error: Test(s) failed. System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException : The program issued a command but the command length is incorrect. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80070018)

So I did some googling around and found there is a bug in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 regarding this issue. So a little more work and I found a work around. I believe this bug only pertains to WPF stuff.

Workaround

On the build agent do the following:

1. Stop the TeamCity Build Agent service (Start –> Run –> services.msc –> TeamCity Build Agent –> Right Click –> Stop)
2. Browse to the service file (C:\TeamCity\BuildAgent\launcher\bin)
   
3. Right click TeamCityAgentService-windows-x86-32.exe and click Properties
4. Go to the Compatibility Tab
   
5. Click Show settings for all users
6. Change the Compatibility mode to be Windows XP (Service Pack 2)
   
7. Click OK a few times to close all the windows
8. Start the TeamCity Build Agent service.

You should now have a working build with WPF unit tests. Hope this helps somebody out as I was banging my head on the wall trying to figure it out.

Tags: How-To, NUnit, TeamCity, Testing, WPF

The scene opens on a typical fall Saturday evening at the local sports bar filled with enthusiastic football fans cheering loudly at the myriad of TV screens scattered around. In one small corner sitting around a high table is a group of people visiting about software development. Two guys, eager to make friends, walk up introduce themselves and let slip they’ve been developing software with CSLA for the past few years, and are looking for redemption.” The rest of the table then looks at each other and responds in chorus, “I’m Sorry!”

The shock on their faces at the collective “I’m Sorry” was a bit much. They knew some people have very differing opinions about different frameworks and tools, but hearing it confessed out loud was a breath of fresh air.

Recently our development team decided to stop developing with the CSLA framework. Before I get into specifics, I want to be very clear about something up front. I have no problem with people that continue to use CSLA. We used CSLA for nearly 4 years and it has worked in way it was designed.

While Hiren and I were at KaizenConf in Austin we made sure to find a few minutes each evening before getting caught up with a large group, to recap the day and share some new things we each learned. One of these nights while relaxing and evaluating what we’d been learning we came to the conclusion that it was time for us to step away from new development with CSLA and migrate existing codebases as well. Over the past week we have been outlining and discussing these ideas and why we have made the decision to move away from CSLA.

It all started a few months ago when we first started getting introduced to the Alt.Net ways of developing software. What I mean by the Alt.Net ways are things like S.O.L.I.D. principles, ORM use, unit testing, Domain Driven Design, Mocking, TDD, etc… All of this has really changed the way we think about and develop software. Even before this though Hiren and I made a very dangerous combination of developers because we are never satisfied with a piece of code once it is written, we usually have to talk one another into just leaving it alone because it works and is as good as it needs to be to get the job done.

There are several driving forces behind this decision, but the primary one is that our CSLA business objects just leave a bad taste in our mouth. Our systems are moderately complex and it is not uncommon at all to have a class with 1500 – 2500 lines of code, in fact that is probably an average line count in most business objects. The other thing that really smells to us is that the “model” contains a lot of stuff that is not directly related to the model, namely data access.

I would like to take a minute to point out some of the things I really like and will miss about CSLA, and some of the other reasons for making the switch.

CSLA, I will miss some of you:

• Validation Rules System
• Data binding Support
• Combo of these == reach UI validation for user
• Good set of guiding principles and samples to get started with.
• Rocky’s Books!

I won’t miss these parts though:

• Data Access code in business object
• Difficult to mock out data access in mocking
• N-Level undo – I never, ever used this but had to contend with it, like it or not
• “Super” Classes

These are purely my opinion so take them as they are. I still think CSLA has a place for some people and unlike others I have run into on the internet, I will not bash you or think you are stupid for using it. CSLA was an excellent stepping stone for us; it introduced and really engrained the Object-Oriented Programming style of thinking into our minds. I/we just feel like we have matured to a new level of development through better understanding of our software development process and how apply those skills to our situation.

We are still learning and don’t yet know exactly what our development style is going to be end-to-end on this project. We have a long way to go before we are completely comfortable with all these new tools. Luckily, the Alt.Net community seems to be an open and accepting group and nearly everyone is willing to help us out along the way.

What I do know is that no team can just take what one person or one book says and do it that way. It won’t work. What we are doing is educating ourselves on different practices and tools and using what works for us, we do a lot of spikes right now. We are also building our domain model with POCO’s which gives us a great amount of flexibility in the infrastructure and presentation layers of our system. As we continue this process I will post successes and failures here on my blog.

Tags: alt.net, CSLA, Development

Gabriel Schenker has just posted an excellent article explaining in detail how to the 1st and 2nd level cache in NHibernate works. This is a long overdue article on caching that will greatly benefit the community. The article also explains the differences between Get(id) and Load(id) when retrieving entities through NHibernate. I am recommending this article because it is an in depth look at one of the pieces I covered earlier on Ayende’s session from KaizenConf.

Tags: alt.net, Caching, Development, NHibernate

I know this is a little late and somewhat out of order but I really feel compelled to write a public thank you note to all of the facilitators and attendees at the pre-conference workshops and the KaizenConf open spaces conference. I have made a boat load of new friends in the ALT.Net community that I know will be long lasting and very fruitful. The 4 day conference was by far the best conference I have ever been to. I came with so many questions got some answers and left with even more questions. It was very humbling to be surrounded by a lot of smart people, at the same time it is also very encouraging because these people are all very nice, friendly and real.

Workshops

The workshops that were put on were outstanding. I personally attended the Advanced NHibernate talk which was very helpful, you can see my notes here. I also went to the DDD Chalk Talk on Thursday afternoon, this was a very good talk about different aspects of Domain Driven Development. Friday started off with Jeremy and Chad’s Opinionated ASP.Net session and followed up with Dave’s Pull Don’t Push - Lean Systems and KanBan. All of these sessions were great. I have linked to what information is available now, and will link more as I find it.

Open Spaces

Friday night we “Opened” the space and one of the topics I suggested is Lean software engineering / KanBan with a small team. I didn’t know if anybody would vote for my topic or not but low and behold they did. So at my first open spaces event, I was also the convener of a space. This was a little bit intimidating at first but I handled it very similar to the way I do my college classes, we just all talked. Special thanks to Dave Laribee, Chad Myers, Chris Bilson and others that I don’t know your names, for being so involved and speaking during this session.

I spent time in some other very good sessions such as KanBan Applications, and Concurrent Set Based Software Engineering. There were so many good topics that I can’t even remember what all they were,  but there is a full list on the wiki.

As an action item on Sunday with KanBan in Small Teams I committed to documenting my teams implementation of the Lean Methodology with a KanBan task board.

In conclusion, Thank You again to all the great people in the Alt.Net community that came together in Austin to make this a very memorable event.

Tags: alt.net, KaizenConf, Lean

UPDATE: I have lost my virginity in regards to attending my first software conference, just in case that wasn’t clear… you know who I am talking to.

I just read Brian Mavity’s latest post and am obviously rowing the same proverbial boat that he is. This is not only my first software development conference but the first software development conference our company has ever sent anybody to. I personally have already taken more away from this than I ever imagined. Just sitting around at dinner or socializing with the same people whose blogs I follow is somewhat intimidating, but they are all very welcoming and want to help us new guys get going. I have had conversations (okay, mostly absorbing) with Ayende, Chad Myers, and Jeremy Miller. I have also been able to speak one on one with others and will most definitely get the opportunity to do some more.

Same as Brian Mavity, if you your company does not care enough about their development team to spare a little time and money to get you involved, you should consider finding a place that does or making your voice heard better to accomplish this.

I am really looking forward to the next few days worth of activities.

Tags: .NET (C#), alt.net, Development, KaizenConf

As some of you know I am attending KaizenConf for the next few days. I am going to use my blog as my notepad as I take notes during different workshops and sessions. My note taking skills sometimes have a lot to be desired so be patient if these notes look very sketchy. I will try my best to come back through and make sense of them later.

Advanced NHibernate

I am currently sitting through Ayende’s workshop on Advanced NHibernate and there is some really good stuff going on here. Three of the topics I have found most interesting is Multi-Tenancy, Full text indexing with NHibernate Search, and caching with NHibernate. NHibernate search is a project that combines Lucene, a proven java index tool, and NHibernate to alleviate strain on the database engine by keeping indexes on disk and performing queries on that data faster. Indexing is accomplished by decorating entities with attributes. Of all these topics caching with NHibernate has really grabbed my attention as it probably has the greatest results for the applications I am currently working.

Caching with NHibernate

1st Level cache –Contains Identity Map – Session – Single instance of an object in a particular session

2nd Level Cache – contains the SessionFactory – lives for the entire application lifetime, it also has 4 levels of cache within it:

timestamp
query cache
collection cache
entity cache

Caching Configuration

Enable query cache <property name=”cache.use_second_level_cache”>True</property> in NHConfig – A single on off switch in the application to enable/disable caching is not a good solution because caching is complex and could affect business rules and performance. So you have to enable caching for a specific entity by using Cache_usage = CacheMode (ReadWrite for Ayende’s samples) in the entity mapping file. The NHibernate cache hashtables are stored like below:

Entities Cache:
————————-
Blog#1 : { Name: “…”}
Post#1 : {…}
Post#2 {…}

Collection Cache
—————————
Blog#1.Posts { 1,2,3,4,5,6} – stores id’s only

Query Cache:
—————————
“select top 5 * from Post” : {1,2,3,4} // stores id’s only

Ayende used his blog sample for all of the code examples today. When he put caching on the Blog, and the collection of posts in the blog map and on the post entity the fewest calls to the database occurred. To enable query caching the property cache.use_query_cache = true in the config file.

Session.Load vs Session.Get

Load == I know the entity exists in the database, it returns a proxy to the object. Throws an exception if the object is not lazy loaded and cannot be found.

Get == NH really goes to the database and fetches a row or throws an exception if it does not exist.

Which one of these to use depends on the business rule for the entity.

NHibernate Contrib project descriptions

NHibernate cache libraries:

PrevelanceCache – persistent caching for smart client applications

SysCache – using ASP.net caching – gives it the ability to put things in the cache and forget about it – only works if you have one machine.  Other wise you get cache poisoning.

SysCache2 – ASP.net caching in the farm – maybe application is not the only thing that updates the database. This is good when the application is not the sole owner of the database.

MemCache – a distributed hashtable, thats it basically it is distributed caching.– Server sitting on TCP with a hashtable – the Client caches the key and always goes back to same server in farm for cache retrieval. Very simple, works very well. This is also known as MemCacheD and is the same caching strategy that Facebook uses.

SharedCache – SharedCache from CodePlex

Velocity – From Microsoft – more complex than memcache, more options but they validate the cache space you have.

Other NHibernate Contrib Projects

NHibernate.Linq – pretty good, handles most of the common scenarios, does not handle the crazy scenarios that are capable in LINQ. Currently working on a fully functional LINQ library.

NHibernate.Validator– Just as you can specify constraints in SQL Server. You can specify constraints in your mapping file and the validator will validate that for you.

Spatial – GIS applications

Shards – partition the data across multiple db’s – written by Google to deal with problem of having multiple database. You can teach NHibernate a sharding strategy so that it knows which database to use. This is a strategy that is used by companies such as Facebook.

Another very interesting topic Ayende talked about is self optimizing queries. This would be used by session.Future<TYPE>() you could use this in your repositories on all lists/CreateCriteria methods. This creates a MultiCriteria which returns multiple result sets in one database trip. This is very similar/exactly like multiple result sets in stored procedures.

Tags: .NET (C#), alt.net, Development, KaizenConf, NHibernate