Training

Can I See Some Code?

svn co code.google.com/p/jpboodhoo

The application is the start of what I hope will evolve to be a great learning resource for lots of things related to .Net development. The application does not currently cover any of the “extra” topics that I did not have time to get covered in the course. This is perfect because as request come in from people (including past students) asking how to tackle a certain problem, I will use this application as the demonstration area where I can tackle the problem, and update the code base, and you will be able to update your local copy and carry on.

I am going to write up another post about the Web Application as it is built very differently from traditional .Net based web applications. In following with the theme for my courses, there are currently no 3rd party frameworks (other than log4net) that have come into play. My goal with this web app is to demonstrate to people how far we can push raw .Net. The goal being that expanding their knowledge of how to creatively leverage .Net, they will be better prepared to jump into frameworks that they may currently feel daunted by. As time goes by, I will swap pieces of the application out with components that people are asking to see meaningful samples on:

NHibernate
Castle
Prototype
JQuery
..*

For people who are eager to get going right now, here are the quick and simple steps without a lot of explanation:

Anonymously checkout the trunk from the google code repository using the following svn command line: "svn checkout http://jpboodhoo.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ jpboodhoo-read-only"
Navigate to the checkout folder
Go into the build folder
Copy local.properties.xml.template and paste it into the same directory, then rename the copied file to local.properties.xml
Open up the local.properties.xml file with your favourite text editor.
Modify any of the settings in the file that are different on your machine.
Open up a command prompt and navigate to the build directory of the code.
type: "build load.data" and hit enter.
type: "build test.all.woc" and hit enter.
type: "build run"
The last task should fail (I haven’t automated everything yet)
Create a virtual directory called "nothinbutdotnetstore" that points at the following location (this location is created after you attempt to run the build run task) : ${checkoutfolder)\build\deploy\web\app
After successfully creating the virtual directory try the build run task again.
If the web browser pops up pointed at a web page (for the app) you are in business. Feel free to click through the first set of pages that are implemented (only 3 pages are currently implemented).

There are a couple of things that you will immediately notice about the application:

Clean front controller implementation with ASPX pages as the template views. There are no code behind pages in this web application. All web requests are handled by command objects that interact with the service layer, push the details into a "ViewBag" and then choose which view to render.
Logical layers in the project are separated using simple folders and namespaces (not full blown projects)
Build automation is its own project in the solution (props to Jay Flowers for this inspiration)
The current container implements (CustomDependencyContainer) is very simple and is handled by a big procedural application startup task.
Compile time support for the database layer. A couple of classes ago I introduced the concept of a generic TableColumn<T> type. In England after introducing this concept Scott Cowan leveraged his knowledge of MyGeneration to automatically generate strongly typed table definitions that we could leverage to do mapping (trust me when I say, this is nothing like datasets). Until moving into OR/M concepts deeper this gives a good place to start as the generation of the TableDefinitions is linked to whenever the SQL files change, so you will get compile errors if column types are now mismatched etc...

There are lots of other things I could talk about, but this code really is the start of what I see being a long running conversation between myself and other people wanting to learn. In all honesty for all of the emails I have not paid attention to this year, hosting code through google will allow me to answer peoples questions in a much more meaningful way as I can point them at this site to see the implementation of the code they had questions about.

Once again, the application is currently in its infancy, but as people start sending in the requests I now will have a venue and example to add upon to answer questions in a much more timely fashion!!!

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