Will Beattie's Blog

I have just launched a pet project of mine called Idea Jumble.  If you're like me you have lot's of ideas throughout the day, some good some bad and some downright ridiculous.  However, I often find myself using a Notepad (geek I know) to jot them down throughout the day and then I email them to my personal email at the end of the work day.  So what is Idea Jumble ?  It is just a very simple way to Log ideas and also Shape those ideas by adding follow up ideas to the original idea. Ideas can be made public or kept private and can be tagged.  Also any Ideas can be Ranked.  The site is built on the ASP.NET MVC framework  with a SQL Server 2008 Express backend and hosted on EC2 .  It's my first MVC project to go live and was built using TDD.  I've done some funky stuff with Caching and Castle Windsor Interceptors which I'll be posting about soon.  Sign Up Now! and start logging, sharing and shaping your ideas. 

So I've just completed deploying an application to my first GoGrid server, this is the same application as what I've previously deployed to my Amazon EC2 instance . As I mentioned before the application is an ASP.NET MVC  front-end with supporting WCF services running on against a Sql Server Express 2008  Database.   Because I run a Vista development machine I was aware of the fact that running .NET MVC on IIS7.0 outperforms II6.0 with the wildcard ISAPI filter which is what I had to resort to when using my EC2 instance. What I didn't know was by just how much.  On a general note the overall learning curve and time taken to setup the server and then deploy the application was far less than with Amazon EC2. So full credit to Go Grid for the intuitive user interface. Also not having to concern myself with Elastic Block Stores and tracking down the Windows Server Install Disc Snapsh0t to install FTP server was a great help and thing's which have been made unnecessari...

Overall I am really happy with Sql Server 2008 , especially the intellisense.  However there is one thing that is driving up the wall and that is if you have any columns starting with Id or IDENT_CURRENT to be correct,  the intellisense defaults to IDENT_CURRENT so typing a query like  SELECT * FROM [MyTable]  WHERE Id = 1  This becomes especially painful as Id turns to IDENT_CURRENT, so now when I write my query I have to type Id and then  point the mouse cursor down to get rid of the Intellisense drop down. This is highly annoying, would appreciate if anyone knows if there's a solution to this. 

Great news for everyone using Amazon S3 for Content Delivery.  Amazon have just lauched CloudFront  which  " delivers your content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance." The 4 Locations are Hong Kong, Japan, Europe and the United States. This is really great news and was the missing piece to the puzzle given that most of my traffic is coming from the Asia-Pacific region.  Nirvanix  have been offering this for sometime now and was my first choice, but now the tables have turned.  The combination of Ec2 , S3  and now  CloudFront  make the Amazon Service Offering impossible to ignore.  Stay tuned for some initial tests on how CloudFront performs from the various locations. 

style="" > So recently I got the chance to deploy my first application to Amazon EC2.   I've got to say after a little bit of trial and error I think the service is pretty amazing and is definetly the future of web hosting and you sure can't beat the price US $0.125 / Hour which is essentially US $90 / month. Bandwidth between S3 and your Ec2 instance costs nothing so is very attractive for Media Transcoding and other such tasks. The requirements were as follows: .NET 3.5 SP1 ASP.NET MVC Beta SQL Server Express 2008 with Advanced Services IIS 6.0 Velocity Ideally I would want to host the Application on a Windows Server 2008 instance so that I could leverage the features of IIS 7.0 and also have a dedicated SQL Server 2008 instance, but unfortunately Amazon does not support this yet and it's unclear when this will happen so I had to use a makeshift approach. To manage your instances you can and should use th...

Recently I had an Advanced Search requirement which had to enable Users to specify a combination of fields to search for and the operator e.g. AND, OR and the type of comparison to do e.g. LIKE, EQUALS. The DataLayer is built upon the Entity Framework and I'm using LINQ to Entities as the query mechanism. So my overriding goal was to keep this Strongly Typed but maintainable as well. Firstly I created a generic SearchInfo object of which there would be one for each field that needed to be included in the search. public class SearchInfo<T> { public Expression<Func<T, object>> PropertySelector { get; set; } public QueryOperator Operator { get; set; } public StringComparer Comparer { get; set; } public string Value { get; set; } } public enum QueryOperator { And = 0, Or = 1 } public enum StringComparer { Equals = 0, StartsWith = 1, EndsWith = 2, Contains = 3 } Now if we just had to deal with the AND operator we could achieve this by con...

I've just come across a minor change which caused the Value on my TextBox's to be set to "System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[System.String,System.Object]" The HtmlHelper.TextBox method has changed. The previous (MVC Preview 5) method overloads were HtmlHelper.TextBox(string name) HtmlHelper.TextBox(string name, object htmlAttributes) HtmlHelper.TextBox(string name, string value) HtmlHelper.TextBox(string name, IDictionary htmlAttributes) HtmlHelper.TextBox(string name, string value, object htmlAttributes) HtmlHelper.TextBox(string name, string value, IDictionary htmlAttributes) These have been changed to: HtmlHelper.TextBox(string name) HtmlHelper.TextBox(string name, object value) HtmlHelper.TextBox(string name, object value, object htmlAttributes) HtmlHelper.TextBox(string name, object value, IDictionary htmlAttributes)