I will continue to keep this site up but content updates will be limited.

For those that read this that I’ve met over the years, you may or may not know by now that I made a career shift back in January and I am now employed as a Senior Architect for a software company based in California (I still live in metro-Phoenix and work out of Gangplank in Chandler most days).

This move has me working with technology like Node.js, RabbitMQ, JavaScript client-side template “frameworks” like Backbone, Ember, and so-on. Aside from that, I spend a lot of time in the Bash shell and do some work with Erlang here and there.

This has all been quite a major shift from my focus on Microsoft development over the years, even though I’ve always been the type of person to be aware of and play with other technology available. I was looking for a new challenge and definitely found one. I’ve had to retrain my brain in many ways over the past two months and it’s been hard at times, but the amount of new things I’ve learned is staggering. My goal is to become a more well-rounded developer and I think this was the next step for me.

I just wanted to post a quick update and indicate that the blog isn’t dead, but I’m trying to figure out how it will fit into the work I’m doing now.

For those that haven’t checked it out, bring MiniProfiler into your application via NuGet with a

Install-Package MiniProfiler

If you are working in a web project (MVC, WebForms), you simply add the following line of code in your head block AFTER your jQuery reference (this line is formatted as Razor for MVC 3) -

@MvcMiniProfiler.MiniProfiler.RenderIncludes()

One thing worth mentioning is that on IE9, I had some issues with the UI of the profiler displaying appropriately. I looked around and found a post mentioning adding the following to your CSS file and sure enough, it fixed my IE9 issue. So, give it a shot if you have any problems displaying the profile on Internet Explorer.

div.profiler-popup
{
    overflow: visible !important;
}

Mini-Profiler UI on a simple ASP.NET MVC 3 page

I’ve had success using this for profiling ASP.NET MVC3 applications as well as Entity Framework 4.2 “Code First” queries within the apps, which is great. I still really like the Entity Framework Profiler tool from Hibernating Rhinos and rely on it heavily, but Mini-Profiler does a good job of showing ORM query issues.

I plan to try this out with some old WCF projects in the near future as well. In the meantime, pop it into one of your development applications and make sure your code is performing how you expect.

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

So, I setup a new sample project and pushed it to github for anyone to try. I have succesfully tested this sample in IIS Express as well as IIS 7. Both had no issues after some minor adjustments. For IIS Express I do note some modifications in the README in the github repo that you should take note of. But simply cloning and running should get you going. Be sure, if you are in Visual Studio, that you tell the project to use IIS Express though.

Here is the link to the sample project on github - https://github.com/amokan/Nuget.Server-Sample-Project

The basic steps to create the project like I did were:

1. Create a new “ASP.NET Empty Web Application” in Visual Studio.
2. Either use the GUI or NuGet Console to install the Nuget.Server package.
3. Adjust the web.config, as needed.
4. Profit (or happiness… i’m not sure what’s motivating you here)

Based on the test yesterday, I dug up an old blog post by Steve Marx (@smarx on twitter) that demonstrated running the Mongoose web server in a Windows Azure Worker Role on port 80. Using his example as a basis, I did the same with node.exe and it worked on the first attempt.

Check out the live site here* - http://nodetest.cloudapp.net/

node.js worker role in my azure dashboard

worker role settings in azure

I’ve not even messed with nvm or npm on Windows (and have no clue if they even work yet) or frameworks such as Express, which I enjoy for larger node projects. Here is a gist for the basic sample in the project. Even if you have never looked at node (but understand HTTP), it should be fairly clear.

I have posted the full source for the entire project on github and you should be able to simply download/clone and deploy to Azure with no issues. As mentioned in the readme file, the node application code is in the src/WorkerRole/node/ directory, along with node.exe itself.

I used a single ‘Extra Small’ instance and OSFamily ’2′ in case I wanted to do anything more advanced with PowerShell later on. I’m sure OSFamily ’1′ would be perfectly fine.

Github source - https://github.com/amokan/node-on-azure

If anyone else is doing any work with node.exe in an Azure role, be sure to post your findings and let’s see how far we can push this thing. Node is an amazing piece of technology and a great solution for high-performance APIs and shows the true power of JavaScript. The next step is integrating node with Azure Table Storage and other features in the Azure ecosystem. Maybe that’s already been done?

* I will leave the live sample running on Azure for a while. If the extra small instance gets slammed for some odd reason, I will drop it and update the post.

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.

The biggest one is the confusion (or possibly my lack of understanding) related to the whole “service administrator” situation. The team I worked with setup a new Azure account with a generic Live ID and I added myself and my teammates as co-admins in the panel. That all makes sense and all seemed to be well. We can all log in and see our roles and so-on. Then it starts getting inconsistent. For example, logged in as myself (with co-admin status), I can bring up new roles, storage accounts, and CDNs but cannot create a new SQL Azure instance, AppFabric features, and some other items. I must login with the primary admin id to perform or even view those features (such as AppFabric cache isntances).

I can understand the Azure team wanting to prevent co-admins from incurring more costs and maybe restricting some features, but that isn’t the case since I theoretically could prop up a multi-instance role as a co-admin. But when it comes to simply viewing my AppFabric cache information to setup my config file for caching, I must login as a the primary account owner to do so.

Has anyone else experienced this or have any feedback on something I may be doing wrong?

Can’t wait to get started on this project. Looking forward to working with a lot of new Windows Azure features and some really deep dives into guts of MVC3, which I’ve not been able to do in some time.

I will see you valley folks sometime after June 17th. Don’t have too much fun while I’m gone!