I found that I almost moved my resources from what all based on Microsoft technology to the world of open source.

And I found the productivity level still acceptable with a good selection of technologies.

I found the open source application [...]]]> It is weird to say, but after I’ve employed myself and coding various projects.

I found that I almost moved my resources from what all based on Microsoft technology to the world of open source.

And I found the productivity level still acceptable with a good selection of technologies.

I found the open source application development didn’t as bad as I think from the previous.

Even I’ve many high level of certification by Microsoft on application design, development. (MCPD, MCTS, MCSD, MCAD and so on…) I still quite happy to say that I’m happy entering into the world of open source today.

As my most projects are built as a web application, I mainly moved from ASP.NET MVC 3 to Rails 3.

Even I’ve spent some time learning Ruby, I’m very happy with it, I love Ruby on Rails 3 over ASP.NET MVC 3. Much.

Ruby on Rails was built for high level of productivity in every aspect of it, that’s why I love RoR over ASP.NET MVC.

What I love on ASP.NET MVC is just it gives me control on everything of my web application.

I can hook and customize almost everything in the pipeline with ASP.NET MVC while I can focus on business value more in RoR.

Source code control, while I’m working on Visual Studio 2010, I decide to ignore Visual Source Safe as it will load my time, I’ve to setup the server and else…

While in open source world, I choose Git, and I’m not setting up it myself as I decide to work with GitHub.com and pay them to get some number of private repositories.

It is cool and by far easy to use.

For the coding IDE, nothing can beat the experiences got from Visual Studio. I tried Aptana Studio 3, RubyMine and no one can beat Visual Studio 2010!

While I’ve chosen JetBrains RubyMine as my primary IDE for RoR, I still need to use command-line to complete various things on RoR.

Another note, I really love Ruby Gems, the Bundler things… as I don’t have to find and pay for 3rd party components to integrate into my app, it almost FREE in RoR while in ASP.NET, it have been charged! High price!

Wow, after 3 months of self employed, I found I moved to open source platform surprisingly. I think I should consider to move more on open source world.

Here is my current development environment

My primary machine

• PC with Windows 7 x64
• Ruby
• RubyGems + Rails 3
• JetBrains RubyMine
• Git

My secondary machine

• Mac Mini with OS X Snow Leopard
• Ruby
• RubyGems + Rails 3
• JetBrains RubyMine
• Git

I’m planning to give my primary PC to my son and getting new iMac with Macbook Pro 17″ for further development.

Good bye to Windows?

- Absolutely no because some of my Internet marketing tools still rely on Windows OS. (Scrapebox – who can live without it?)

- At least, I should have a one copy of Windows on my virtual machine application.

Talk soon,

Today I’m going to share with you if you get stuck trying to learn IoC and implement it into your own ASP.NET MVC application.

I’ll not going to write a deep content about IoC but somehow I will share the short brief of the concept of IoC and how you can easily implement [...]]]> Hi guys,

Today I’m going to share with you if you get stuck trying to learn IoC and implement it into your own ASP.NET MVC application.

I’ll not going to write a deep content about IoC but somehow I will share the short brief of the concept of IoC and how you can easily implement IoC in your ASP.NET MVC application using MVCContrib.

First of all, let’s share together what is IoC? and what it is for?

IoC stands for “Inversion of Control” which sometime it had been named as DI or “Dependency Injection”.

Actually, both is the same, just a different name.

IoC or DI is the concept that looks like how you code your application to make it support for plug-in architecture.

Such as the old days WinAmp which it can output multiple result from audio files such as…

• Output a sound to speaker (playing music)
• Output a sound to MP3 (encoding)
• Output a sound to WAV (decoding)

and blah blah blah…

There are several plug-ins for WinAmp as a DLL, when you need some new to make WinAmp to output to, you just coding a new DLL and implement what you want there.

This way, when you code the main app, you will never know or never care of what the output will do, it (main app) just output the sound stream to the output plug-in.

This is a good pattern and fit for ASP.NET MVC approach as it’s a real separation-of-concern.

And here is a snippet code of how you can implement this type of application. (plug-in enabled)

- Create an Interface for the output such as …

public interface IPlayerOutput
{
void Play(byte[] soundStream);

void Pause();

void Resume();

void Stop();
}

- In the main app, you should add reference to IPlayerOutput interface and using it like this…
public void btnPlayClicked(object sender)

{

IPlayerOutput *output = new XXX; //Replace XXX with the code to create an instance of the chosen plug-in – usually populate from .DLL files within the output plug-in folder

output.Play(YYY); //Replace YYY with a stream of audio file

}
- This way, the main app will never care of what the output plug-in will do, it just send the audio stream to.

- When you want to code for a send-to-speaker plug-in, you just implement the IPlayerOutput interface and write code to send-to-speak there such as…
public class SpeakerOutput : IPlayerOutput

{

public void Play(byte[] stream)
{

// 1. Decode the audio stream

// 2. Send RAW to speaker

}
}
- If you want to code for WAV output plug-in, just do the same thing but different in the Play function such as…

public class WavOutput : IPlayerOutput

{

public void Play(byte[] stream)

{

// 1. Decode the audio stream as WAV format

// 2. Save WAV data to disk

}
}

- Then, you can let user choose which DLL to be used and load it into the IPlayerOutput interface within the main app. Voila!

So… How it is related to IoC?

Actually, it is the same concept as the plug-in architecture.

The main point is to make each components of application loosely coupled.

To make it simple, IoC is the concept to make your application’s layers independent as much as possible.

You can do IoC by coding like the above set of code in your application. However, it will take you sometime to do yourself.

And that’s why Castle Windsor come into place… They already created this type of things for you!

Anyway, I will not show here how it is being used by generic application. Instead of, I will use Castle Windsor in combination with MVCContrib to do IoC in ASP.NET MVC application.

All I can say is… “It is very easy to do, not that hard like what the concept did”.

To be continued on Part #2…

What is SEO-friendly URL?

It’s a URL that search engine love and will result in a better ranking for your web pages/site.

Let’s say you have an accounting system software and [...]]]> Well, as a ASP.NET developer. You and me know that it’s a bit hard to apply what we called SEO-friendly URL for ASP.NET applications.

What is SEO-friendly URL?

It’s a URL that search engine love and will result in a better ranking for your web pages/site.

Let’s say you have an accounting system software and your product URL is http://www.xxx.com/product.aspx?Id=432 //Search engine will never know what the product is all about. They just saw Id=432 which doesn’t make sense for them. Actually, it also doesn’t make sense for human as well.

The SEO-friendly URL is a ‘wrapped’ URL to let people/robot read and know what this URL is all about. Let’s say about the above Product which have a new URL as http://www.xxx.com/product/AccountingSoftware

Search engine will know that this URL is all about Accounting software, then they will forward some traffic to your site with the “Accounting software” keyword.

In the PHP/Apache platform, the developer will usually use URL rewrite module easily. Almost every web hosting support this.

Unlike ASP.NET/IIS which is less flexible for configuration. You have to enable some URL rewrite ISAPI libraries which almost every web hosting don’t allow you to do that.

The good news is after ASP.NET MVC was released, it has a built-in routing feature which let you implement a SEO-friendly URL easily without messing up with IIS ISAPI.

You can provide many samples on Google, or even on Microsoft ASP.NET MVC website as well. See –> ASP.NET MVC –> Learn –> Routing and you will see how it’s easy to implement.

I’ll not provide a sample code here as I just want to mention that now you can easily implement SEO-friendly URL with ASP.NET.

Just try and leave me some messages if you got a problem implement it.

See ya babe!