I did add some additional bullet points and text content to the slide deck since I’m not a big fan of standing in front of a bunch of that during a presentation and would rather talk with the attendees and show some code. Either way, check the slides out if you’d like.

http://www.slideshare.net/adammokan/introduction-to-signalr-10082193

Next up is some tweaks to my samples, which were not cooperating with me so much during my session. I will expose that repo on Github soon and post an update.

Enjoy.

My SignalR session begins at 11:30am (hour long) and will be held in room IRN-125.

For more info on Desert Code Camp, visit http://nov2011.desertcodecamp.com

On deck, in no particular order :

• A detailed post (with code and a Templify template to get you started) on a generic repository pattern for ASP.NET MVC 3 and Entity Framework 4.1 along with a unit tests that utilize SQL Compact edition that automatically create a new SQL Compact file upon starting tests, populates the schema with sample data, and then subsequently deletes the file after tests are complete. Dependency injection is done via Ninject, which is my IoC of choice for MVC3.
• A post on consuming portable areas in MVC 3 for a plugin-like architecture. Think “modules” that can be dynamically loaded.
• A post on the MVC lifecycle and when and why to use the various filter interfaces provided by ASP.NET MVC3.
• A post on Node.js from a .NET developers perspective and how to get started with hosting, the current state of node on Windows and so-on.
• A post on custom HtmlHelpers for MVC3 showing various techniques to keep those views nice and DRY.
• A post on running JetBrains TeamCity 6.5 in the cloud using Amazon’s EC2 “micro” instance and automatically bringing up build agents and terminating them after the build. The post would be aimed at .NET development.

* If you attended any of my sessions, please rate them for me. The feedback helps. I understand a lot of things were skipped due to time constraints, but I’d appreciate any constructive criticism as this was my first time speaking in a short one hour format. I learned, the hard way, topics need to be extremely concise!

Tools

• Templify – http://opensource.endjin.com/templify/
  • The Templify template I used to start my MVC project during my 11:30am session can be found here (in zip format).
  • I intend, when I have time, to put the template project on GitHub and add a build task to generate the template automatically. Until then:
    • To install the template, unzip the file. You should see a *.pkg file.
    • Copy the pkg file to your AppData\Roaming\Endjin\Templify\repo (as an example, on Win7, mine is C:\Users\amokan\AppData\Roaming\Endjin\Templify\repo)
    • You should then be able to make a new folder in Windows Explorer, right click on it and say “Templify Here”.
    • Enjoy my weird project conventions, find gaping issues with my template, make your own, or just downright loathe the whole situation.

Web Links/Bundles

• MVC Scaffolding – http://bit.ly/mvc_scaffolding
• PowerShell & T4 Template docs at MSDN – http://bit.ly/powershell_and_t4

That’s it for tonight. More coming soon along with code on GitHub!

Here is a bundle thanks to bit.ly and bridgeurl.

http://bit.ly/sevdnug_mvc3_presentation_links

I will also be posting all code samples on my GitHub account a few minutes before the presentation and posting the URL here and on my twitter account.

The meeting will start at 6pm and is held at Gangplank in downtown Chandler, Arizona.

More info and details can be found here – http://bit.ly/sevdnug_mvc

So I came up with an assembly I’m calling “ControllerNavigator” for now (http://github.com/amokan/ControllerNavigator). I didn’t spend time to come up with a cool name like the Ruby folks normally do yet. Will have to reference a cult-classic 80s flick or something if I do much more work on it. To use ControllerNavigator (man, I’m hating the name already), you reference the assembly in your MVC project, and add a line to your Application_Start() in Global.asax.

protected void Application_Start()
{
	AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();

	RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);

	ControllerNavigator.Navigator.DisplayNavigator(RouteTable.Routes);
}

That generates this markup at a custom route, which you could set as the default start page in Visual Studio during development.

What happens in DisplayNavigator is some fun C# reflection code that queries your MVC assembly to find all of the controllers, methods in those controllers, and any actionfilters/attributes they have. There are options before calling DisplayNavigator() to filter out certain attributes and also to specify which base class your controllers are inherited from, if different than System.Web.Mvc.Controller. Then, by stealing some of Mr Haack’s code from his RouteDebugger, it takes the data and generates a custom route (defaults to “/Navigator”) that shows a table listing your controllers, methods, method return types (ActionMethod, JsonMethod, etc), and finally a hyperlink that will launch that route in a new window.

I have some more ideas to make this more useful, which are listed on the GitHub page, but in the meantime feel free to check it out or steal the code to make your own version. If you have questions or comments, hit me up on twitter.

I was an early smartphone adopter going back to the WindowsCE/Mobile days, then a PalmOS phone, then an iPhone, and now I'm using a Google Nexus One. I love my Nexus One, but I've not found the time to get my Java hat on and mess with much development lately. Being that the new WinPhone7 development is Silverlight, XNA, and C#, that will be very easy for me to mess with some development during lunch at work and things like that. I have some XNA experience from years ago and have been wanting to mess with that again sometime, too. This all gives me a good excuse.

I'm pretty excited about the technology stack. This blog post by Mike Hodnick (who does some awesome Silverlight audio/synthesizer development) describes his first-impressions of the tools. Sounds like the emulator is somewhat limited, but I'm sure we will see improvements over the next few months.

With this announcement and the Silverlight 4 RC release at MIX10, I expect this year to blow up with Silverlight development.

Get started with Silverlight 4

Windows Phone 7 development site

That brings me to (one of) the jQuery Autocomplete plugins. I need this functionality in an ASP.NET webforms application and wanted to give it a shot. I started messing with “jQuery Autocomplete plugin 1.1″ by Jörn Zaefferer. You can find the code and info at http://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-autocomplete/. 

I’m mostly interested in doing an autocomplete via a remote web service call that returns json data. The example in the zip file includes a little php page that just responds to a HTTP-GET and spits out some hard-coded json. I’m working in .NET, so I made a simple ASMX web service to query my database and return a DataTable as json. (Note – There are isues with the built-in serializer to return a DataTable as json. A google search will find you a number of functions or alternate ways to generate a json string from a DataTable.) 

Right away, I found I was having problems with the autocomplete in this environment. First off, you have the whole issue with ASMX web methods only accepting a POST by default. This is easy to change, but not advised. You can find info on that issue here – http://encosia.com/2008/03/27/using-jquery-to-consume-aspnet-json-web-services/ and some other good info here – http://encosia.com/2008/06/05/3-mistakes-to-avoid-when-using-jquery-with-aspnet-ajax/ 

You’ll also notice in the above blog links that there can often be issues when POST-ing to a web method with encoding set to json, that you will need to pass your json params as a string. If you’re using something like Firebug to watch your ajax posts, you’ll catch this right away. 

But the main issue for me were the assumptions that the autocomplete plugin makes. It, by default, will only do a HTTP-GET. You can use the $.ajaxSetup in jQuery to set your future ajax calls to a default, but I wanted the ability to make this decision when calling the autocomplete plugin. 

I made these changes to jquery.autocomplete.js in the $.ajax section :

$.ajax({
// try to leverage ajaxQueue plugin to abort previous requests
mode: "abort",
// limit abortion to this input
port: "autocomplete" + input.name,
dataType: options.dataType,
//setup new options for asmx - amokan
type: options.httpMethod,
contentType: options.contentType,
//end new options - amokan
url: options.url,

This allows me to now handle my client side code a little better.

$("#task").autocomplete(
"http://somecomputername/jsonServiceTest/Testing.asmx/GetSomeDataNoParam",
{
dataType: 'json',
httpMethod: 'POST',
contentType: 'application/json; charset=utf-8',
max: 100,
scroll: true,
matchContains: true,
minChars: 3,
parse: function(data) {
var rows = new Array();
//your parsing logic
},
formatItem: function(row, i, n) {
//do something
},
width: 260
}
);

I’m still working on cleaning up the data parameter section of the plugin a bit before I post the full code.
If you’re curious, here is my ASMX method. Be sure to add the [ScriptService] attribute to your class in the ASMX file so it can handle AJAX properly. If you are using an older .NET without the System.Web.Script.Services namespace, this will not work for you. Note that the parameters “q” and “limit” are sent automatically by the autocomplete plugin. “Q” is the string currently typed into the text control so you can filter your query based on what the user has typed and “limit” is the max number of rows. Obviously, its up to you to implement these in your query if you chose to.  

[WebMethod]
[ScriptMethod(UseHttpGet = false, ResponseFormat = ResponseFormat.Json)]
public string GetSomeDataNoParam(string q, int limit)
{
DataTable dtSomething;
//connect to db, do your exception handling, etc
dtSomething = //your DAL or whatever you use
//use my method to parse the datatable into json
return GetJSONString(dtSomething);
}

Hope this helps a bit and I will be sure to upload some more code as I get this working a bit smoother in my environment.