4. September 2013
ZeroKoll
Node
In my last post, I gave an introduction to using express to serve up your HTTP content to users. It walked through most of the features needed to get started, but there was one thing that was missing, but still very important, and that is error handling. However good you are at coding, you will get errors. It will obviously not be your fault, but you never know what the user manages to do… ;)
So it is definitely important for us to handle errors in a graceful way. Luckily, this is pretty simple to do… But first, we need to create a simple express-based webserver to work with…
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28. August 2013
ZeroKoll
Node
My last post covered module loading in node…or at least try to cover the basics in an understandable way… This time, it is time to create something a bit more useful, a proper web application, using a module called “express”. And instead of me talking a whole lot about what I am about to talk about, let’s just get into it…
The first step is to install express. This is done using the NPM as always. The only thing to really decide is whether or not you want to install it globally using the -g parameter, or just locally. Me, I am just going to do it locally, so I use the following command
If you install it globally, you can use express to create a “skeleton” application by running the following command
express -s -J <folder name>
This will give you a fullblown express app to start working with. But as I intend to explain the basics, I will start from scratch, and thus just install express to begin with.
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14. August 2013
ZeroKoll
Node
Ok, so in my previous post, I introduced Node to newcomers. And I am in now way condescending towards people new to Node. But, wait…Chris, you are always condescending!? Not quite true, but in this case I am definitely not, as I am myself a n00b in the area.
The goal with my blogging about node is to share the stuff I learn along the way, in a way that I think make sense to a C# dev like myself. It might not be the correct node lingo, and I might be wrong in some cases, but I just call it as I see it…
This time around, it is time to have a look at modules in node, and how we load them.
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8. January 2013
ZeroKoll
Azure
So a couple of weeks ago I posted this blog post on how to upload files to blob storage through Mobile Services. In it, I described how one could do a Base64 encoded string upload of the file, and then let the mobile service endpoint convert it and send it to blob storage.
The upsides to this is that the client doesn’t have to know anything about where the files are actually stored, and it doesn’t need to have blob storage specific code. Instead, it can go on happily knowing nothing about Azure except Mobile Services. It also means that you don’t have to distribute the access keys to your storage together with the application.
I did however mention that there was another way, using shared access signatures (SAS). Unfortunately, these have to be generated by some form of service that has knowledge of the storage keys. Something like a Azure compute instance. However, paying for a compute instance just to generate SASes (plural of SAS…?) seems unnecessary, which is why I opted to go with the other solution.
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As part of not doing very much coding lately, I have decided that I am going to try to spend more time trying out new frameworks and technologies. And hopefully, that will en up with a lot more blog posts with interesting stuff. This time I have looked at a ridiculously funky micro framework for building HTTP-based services called NancyFx. It is really simple to get started with, but still very powerful…and modern…
Nancy can be hosted in a variety of ways, including in ASP.NET MVC, WCF and self-hosting. In this post, I will look at hosting Nancy in a console application as I had little interest in setting up anything big. And using NuGet, it was a piece of cake to get started. Just start up a new Console application project and then NuGet Nancy.Hosting.Self.
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5. December 2011
ZeroKoll
WCF
Lately I have been working with a bit of WCF for a client, and one of the things I have had to do is to create a service behavior to handle some security things. However, due to the fact that this application needed to run in several different environments, it needed to have different configuration under different circumstances.
The real need was actually to be able to remove the behavior in some circumstances, and add it in some. But I didn’t really want to do it through a bunch of if-statements in my behavior. Instead I wanted it to be done through configuration so that I could turn it on and off using config transforms…
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1. November 2011
ZeroKoll
Azure
Configuring your application when running in Azure can be a little confusing to begin with, I agree. However, it isn’t really that complicated as long as you understand what config goes where and why.
In Azure, you have 3 places that affect your configuration. Actually it is in more places than that if you count machine.config files and stuff like that, but I’ll ignore that now… And to be honest, it is only 2 places, but you need to tweak 3 places to get it to work…
When you create a new Azure web application project, you get 2 projects in your solution, one “cloud project” and one Web Application Project for example, and both have some form of configuration going.
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I guess it is time for another Azure Service Bus post. The previous ones has been relatively popular, so I thought I would do one more post to cover one last feature in the bus. (I say one last now, but I am pretty sure I will be back…)
Topics and subscribers are the basic units behind the Service Bus implementation of the pub/sub pattern. And as expected from a “simple” pattern like this, it should be simple to implement, and it is. The basics would be, create a topic, add subscribers that subscribe to messages from the topic, and finally push some messages to the topic, which are then relayed to the subscribers. Simple as…
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I guess it is time for another look at the Azure Service Bus. My previous posts about it has covered the basics, message relaying and relaying REST. So I guess it is time to step away from the relaying and look at the other way you can work with the service bus.
When I say “the other” way, it doesn’t mean that we are actually stepping away from relaying. All messages are still relayed via the bus, but in “the other” case, we utilize the man in the middle a bit more.
“The other” way means utilizing the message bus for “storage” as well. It means that we send a message to the bus, let the bus store it for us until the service feels like picking it up and handling it.
There are several ways that this can be utilized, but in this post, I will focus on queuing.
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I am now about a week and a half into my latest Azure project, which so far has been a lot of fun and educational. But the funky thing is that I am still excited about working with the Service Bus, even though we are a week and a half into the project. I guess there is still another half week before my normal 2 week attentions span is up, but still!
So what is so cool about the bus, well, my last 2 posts covered some of it, but it is just so many cool possibilities that open up with it.
This post has very little to do with what I am currently working on, and to be honest, the sample is contrived and stupid, but it shows how we can use REST based services with the bus.