Adventures in Development

Babak's experiences in software development

jquery, ajax, and .NET Web Services

Feb 26

Posted by bnaffas in Uncategorized | No Comments

Recently, I have been working on a few projects that require an ajax friendly life cycle for an ASP.NET web application. Much of the work I did is based on Rick Strahl’s post: http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/896411.aspx.

Working on top of what I learned from this article, I decided to leverage the rich capabilities of .NET’s Web UI components as part of my ajax implementation using HTML injection. I used jquery to bind a standard button to make a call to my Web Service method.

The service created and populated a standard GridView object. The service would then render that object and return the HTML that was generated. This HTML, once returned by the service call, would be injected into a DIV tag that served as the container for the results table.

HTML Button –> ajax call to .NET web service –> GridView rendering –> HTML injection

Continuous Integration with Cruise Control .NET + NAnt

Dec 30

Posted by bnaffas in ASP.NET, continuous integration | No Comments

UPDATE CruiseControl.NET 1.5 RC1 has been release and is available here.

At work, our Cruise Control .NET implementation consists of numerous development projects each with multiple different CCNET projects associated with it (one per environment per branch). In order to make the projects more maintainable, I have created a separate configuration file for each development project.

Defining variables and separating ccnet.config configuration file into smaller files has helped better maintain the projects as time went on.

Defining and using variables

Variables can be defined using the following format

<cb:define KEY=”VALUE” />

To reference that variable later in the configuration file, simply use $(KEY)

Check out the Cruise Control .NET website for complete explanation of variables using the pre-processor.

Separating the configuration files

<!DOCTYPE cruisecontrol [
<!ENTITY PROJECT_NAME SYSTEM "file:project.xml">
]>
<cruisecontrol xmlns:cb=”urn:ccnet.config.builder”>
&PROJECT_NAME;
</cruisecontrol>

On caveat with this idea is that changes to the separate configuration files are not recognized until the cruise control is restarted by either restarting the service or modifying the ccnet.config file.

Building and Deploying ASP.NET Web Applications

The NANT target below is a full parameterized call to MsBuild.exe to compile any solution.

<target name=”build”>
<exec program=”${MSBuildPath}”>
<arg line=’”${SolutionFile}”‘ />
<arg line=”/property:Configuration=${SolutionConfiguration}” />
<arg value=”/target:Rebuild” />
<arg value=”/verbosity:normal” />
<arg value=”/nologo” />
<arg line=’/logger:”C:\Program Files\CruiseControl.NET\server\ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.MsBuild.dll”‘/>
</exec>
</target>

Parameters

MSBuildPath - The path to the MsBuild executable. For .NET 2.0 and 3.5, this is C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\MsBuild.exe on a 32-bit Windows OS.

SolutionFile - The relative path from the build file to the solution file. Fully qualified paths are also allowed.

SolutionConfiguration – “Release” or “Debug”.

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BootBootReboot.com

Nov 18

Posted by bnaffas in ASP.NET | No Comments

I have been working on a website to aggregate funny technology related content across the internet. So far, I have been able to integrate pictures, YouTube videos, and some RSS content from fmylife and clientcopia

I have created the site using ASP.NET and SQL Server. I made this decision solely because I use Microsoft’s platform every day for my professional work.

BootBootReboot.com

Picture Uploads and Thumbnails

The pictures page (http://www.bootbootreboot.com/pictures) allows visitors to add their own pictures. Upon uploading a picture, a thumbnail is also generate for that picture. The code below shows how to create a thumbnail of an uploaded image.

public System.Drawing.Image CreateThumbnail(System.Drawing.Image original, int width, int height)
{
return original.GetThumbnailImage(width, height, null, new IntPtr());
}

Ajax using jquery + .NET Web Services

Recently, I have also been introducing some new ajax functionality using jquery and .NET web services. This combination has allowed me to easily introduce a “preview” feature for uploading images and YouTube videos.

Content Management

Youtube Videos

The site is being updated to use the Youtube play list as the content manager for the videos page. Comments and ratings will be retrieved for the detail page and visitors to bootbootreboot.com can add their own comments and ratings.

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Performance and Load Testing with WebLoad

Oct 20

Posted by bnaffas in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Recently, I had to perform a load test on our new project. We are using WebLoad to test the performance at different levels of load to see how it holds up. While WebLoad offers its own set of analytics, I am also using perfmon to see how each tier is performing under the stress.

I originally planned on using WebLoad 8.4 for the performance testing but have decided to stick with version 8.1. The free license for 8.4 limits you to 10 virtual users (the load size) where as V8.1 does not have any limitation.

WebLoad 8.1 can be downloaded here.

Perfmon Counters

The following counters will give the most pertinent results.
ASP.NET

  • Requests Queued
  • Requests Current
  • Request Execution Time (lower is better)
  • Request Wait Time (lower is better)
  • Requests Rejected (lower is better, is best)

System

  • Context Switches / sec

Memory

  • Pages / sec
  • Available Bytes
  • Committed Bytes

Processor

  • % Processor Time
  • Active Server Pages
  • Request Wait Time
  • Requests Queued

Web Service

  • Current Connections
  • Bytes Send / sec
  • Connection Attempts / sec
  • Current Blocked Async I/O Requests
  • Current Blocked bandwidth bytes

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Adventures in WCF
(Windows Communication Foundation)

Sep 15

Posted by bnaffas in ASP.NET, WCF | No Comments

My latest project at work has me working with WCF for the first time and it has been an interesting experience. Over the next few weeks, I will be discussing configuration, debugging, and deployment of the WCF service and connecting to it.

Microsoft provides a few tools that can help debug your WCF services.

Error Handling

Typically, I add Global.asax to a web application in ASP.NET and use the Application_Error event to handle any uncaught exceptions.

protected void Application_Error(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
//Insert your application’s exception logging here
}

This doesn’t work (still looking into why) for WCF services, even when hosted on IIS. A good work around is to wrap each service method with a try…catch block and calling the exception logger in the catch block.

public Object MyWcfWrapperMethod( int i )
{
try
{
//Call the method being exposed by WCF
}
catch( Exception e ){
//Log the exception
}
finally
{
//do your clean up here
}
}

Testing

Unit tests are especially helpful (aren’t they always?) in the development of your WCF services as messages from errror and exceptions can (and will) be hidden by subsequent errors. An invalid parameter to a stored procedure call can result in a high level System.ServiceModel.CommunicationObjectFaultedException.

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