Microsoft have release MVC Release Candidate 1, I’ve had a little play with MVC and it looks very promising, although it is a different way of programming for your web site, the benefits are huge.
You can download MVC Release Candidate 1 from this link
I’m personally going to wait for our usergroup member to publish his book before I take a leap in to the MVC world.
I’m selling my Ski Boots on Ebay, if any one is interested
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300289215769
I’m not currently working on WCF, but I when I find some useful links I’ll add them here
Set of links for WCF
Getting Started with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
If you’re going to do any extensive WCF services it is worth getting hold of Programming WCF Services by Juval Lowy
I’ve been playing with my Weather station, Watson W-8681, since Christmas Day, and I love it.
It came in a small box, all tidy and wanting to be built on Christmas day
Taking it all out of the box, you get the rain water measurer, wind direction, software CD, temp and wireless sensor and a cover to protect it, wind speed and all the fixing clamps needed.
The LCD display is very clear, and it is wireless, which means I can place it anywhere in the house and still know what is happening outside. A single click anywhere on the LCD display lights up the panel for easy viewing.
Once the instruments are all assembled, it looks like a real weather station.
Software need to run the weather station, and pick up the data, which then stores all the data in EasyWeather.dat file
To enable upload to the Internet I used Cumulus software which take the EasyWeather.dat file and processes it, uploading html file via FTP and it also allow you to upload the data to Weather Underground, to allow others to see your results
I have all my data being sent to the village web site
All in all I am very pleased with the Weather Station. The software is very retro and could do with being update, perhaps to WPF or Silverlight, but I don’t have the time at the moment to embark on a new project.
When you start to play with the Entity Framework you will soon come up with the need to store your connection in a common place. To do this you will need to with provide the connection string to the Entity Object Context or provide the Entity Connection. I prefer to us the Entity Connection as you can explicity define each section of the connection.
C#
VB.NET
and if you need to pass in the UserID and Password
For some more help on setting this up check out Ricka on Dynamic Data
After using StructureMap for a while I thought it would be nice to generate a simple example of how it all works, so I’ve built in Visual Studio 2008, both C# and a VB.NET version.
StructreMap Example.zip (4.47 kb)
StructureMapExampleVB.zip (9.41 kb)
For more information on StructureMap please go to their main website
If you need to know more about IoC’s then it’s worth making a look at the following links:
List of .NET Dependency Injection Containers (IOC)
What with Entity Framework around, I have been finding it quite hard to find any good information about the Framework, so I have started to compile a list of good resources
The ADO.NET Entity Framework Overview
Mike Taulty is Mr Entity Framework
Professional ADO.NET 3.5 with LINQ and the Entity Framework
Have you ever had a table to a lot of rows, when I mean a lot I mean over 1,000,000 records.
If you try and perform a row count like
SELECT COUNT(ID) FROM table
it just takes forever.
If you are running SQL server you can perform a look up in the sysindexes table
SELECT rows
FROM sysindexes
WHERE id = OBJECT_ID(‘table‘)
AND indid < 2
much fast, but not so easy.
Whatare the differences between LINQ to SQL v LINQ to Entities, well:
LINQ to SQL uses tables as entities
LINQ to Entities allows me to write C# LINQ queries that run against a conceptual data model.
The following table provides a summary of the features within each LINQ object
So this means that LINQ to SQL uses a database model to create its entities, where as the Entity Framework work on a layer of abstraction above the data, this is a most important feature. As most database changes are taken care of by the schema and mapping without requiring a change to the obect model – making it so you do not have to refactor and rebuild your objects.
The second difference is the Entity Framework has the ability to allow the entity inheritance and entity composition. This means that you can create an entity that is composed of colums originating in multiple tables without any complex join logic.
In summary:
Microsoft has released it’s Entity Framework to the work, so does this mean the death of LINQ to SQL? Check out my blog on this, Death of LINQ to SQL
So why is LINQ so good, well the problems with data has always been around the different and many way you need to know to interface and programme to. For example if you conntect to a Microsoft SQL Server database, you need to know SQL, to read and write to XML files you need to learn XPath or XQuery, to query Active Directory you need to know LDAP (Lightweigth Directory Access Protocol). To know all of these are more is quite a task.
SO along comes LINQ, which is a intergrated query language, which provides the same query language and grammer features, no matter where the data is held.
Microsoft started off by allowing developers to use LINQ to XML, LINQ to L, and LINQ to Objects. These are all good starting blocks, but I have always been aware that Microsofts intention has been to pull all of these together and under one method, and that is the Entity Framework. Which is built on top of LINQ and ADO.NET 3.0.
In order to use the Entity Framework you will nedd Visual Studio 2008, along with Service Pack 1 and .NET 3.5
Once you have created your project, say an Console Application, you can get down to generating an Entity Data Model
Okay, now it is time to query the data
What is nice about LINQ is it looks and feels very much like SQL. With one exception, you have to write the syntax back to front. Why I hear you ask, I don’t know the official answer to this, but my thoughts are that it is due to intellisense, as by writing you syntax backwards the intellisense can find the information you need.
Okay to query the Products table, you will first need to create an instance of the NorthwindEntities Class, where did this come from? Well it was created when you created the .edmx file.
NorthwindEntities entities = new NorthwindEntities();
Dim db As New NorthwindEntities()
Next we have to create the LINQ statement to read the Products table / entity
var products = from p in entities.Products
where p.ProductID == 7
select p;
Dim products = From p In entities.Products _
Where p.ProductID = 7 _
Select p
To find out more about LINQ and the Entiry Framework check out The ADO.NET Entity Framework OverviewThe ADO.NET Entity Framework Overview or Introduction to ASP.NET Dynamic Data