Sydney WebCamp Wrap Up

A nice wrap of the Sydney WebCamp by Catherine Eibner. It was good to hear that Scott Hanselman and James Senior both acknowledged that Sydney Webcamp was the best.

It was a huge success in its opening year and i hope it becomes even bigger in coming years 🙂

Race Day Commander – Project Setup

I have been very busy with lot of stuff and haven’t been able to focus on the “Race Day commander” project, in fact the day we  put the prototype in codeplex we haven’t had chance to even look at it.

It was good that one of my mates downloaded the project and reported that he had some problems in running the project.I knew what the problem could be and thought I will write a few instruction on how to setup the project.

So here is how you can make at least the project up and running while we work on adding real bits to make it a real-life application.

1. Download the database file(.bak) and the VS solutions file from here.
2. Restore it in your SQLExpress database and the name the database as RDC.
3. Change the connection string in both web.config files i.e. RDC.Admin & RDC.Web project, right now it says BART_PC\SQLExpress and change it to .\SQLExpress.
4. Run the project and browse to http://localhost:22676/Event/Index/1 as the default routing takes you the home index page and we haven’t fixed it yet.
5. Open a new instance of your browser and browse to http://localhost:32124/Comments/List.aspx and add comments. This is the dynamic data page which we tried to demonstrate during the demo.
6. Enter a few sentences in the comment field and enter todays date time in format dd/mm/yy hh:mn:ss so that the comments get added as the latest comment.
7. Flip back to the main application and you will see the comment appearing automatically.

In upcoming days i will start blogging into “deep dive” kind of stuff, meanwhile any feedback or comment is most welcome.

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Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC

I know 5 minutes is too short to explain the architecture design & components of an app, even if the application was build in 6 hours. One of things which we showed during the web camp presentation was the Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC.

I know a lot of people were confused by this  super-ninja style discussion  we had with Scott Hansleman . So i thought i would put some references about this extension and how we can use it for web assets management. Here is the link to learn all about it. http://www.telerik.com/help/aspnet-mvc/introduction.html .

Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC helps you manage your web assets easily by providing the following features:

• Combination
• Grouping
• Compression
• Caching
• Content Delivery Network Support (I love it 🙂 )

Hope it will give you the bigger picture of the whole extensibility of ASP.NET MVC as well and help you write highly responsive website.

Also worth mentioning is to plan using the existing CDN or building your own.

JQuery template

One of the coolest thing in “Race day commander” application is the use of JQuery template. In fact in our work place we have been using the open source “Jtemplate” plugin for quite sometime and it is a a great templating plugin. But at the #webcamp James Senior told us about the microsoft JQuery template and it was fun to use it.

The plugin is available at http://github.com/nje/jquery-tmpl and of course to learn it refer to Scott Gu’s blog.

For us, it was literally changing the ‘#’ character to ‘{‘ and hit refresh :-).

For Example in JTemplate it is:-

<div>
{# CommentText.substr(0,250) }
{#if CommentText.length > 250}<span>… more</span>
{#/if}
</div>

And in JQuery template it would be:-

<div>
{{= CommentText.substr(0,250) }}
{{if CommentText.length > 250}}<span>… more</span>
{{/if}}
</div>

This is really a cool way of making your page interactive and implementing “progressive disclosure” logic by having a template in the page and return tiny json objects and is not limited to ASP.NET MVC, in fact I use it a lot in my webforms which still have UpdatePanels ( Urrggghhh !!! )

Race Day Commander !!

This is the“Race day Commander” app which Anthony and I build at the Sydney web camp, thanks to Anthony who finally put in on codeplex and looking forward for feedback and contribution.

Some of the key features of this projects are:-

• ASP.Net MVC (using areas)
• Dynamic Data (used for rapid admin system generation)
• EF4 for Data Access (using SQL Express)
• Asset Management (using telerik ASP.Net MVC controls)
• AJAX (using jQuery)
• Live updates (using jQuery)
• Client side HTML rendering (using jQuery templates)
• Strongly typed references (using T4MVC)
• Error reporting (using Elmah)
• JavaScript Graphs and Charts (using Raphael)
• CSS3 (for styling)
• View Models
• Mobile Support (using custom view engine)
• Compression (using gzip)
• Typed App Config Access