To that end I’ve been exploring the Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) stack recently. If I’m going to step outside of the Silverlight bubble, then why not explore the platform that has been used to create so many successful online projects. What I’ve found so far has left me very impressed. Without any real knowledge of language, syntax, or tools, I was able to get a website up and running in just two days. It wasn’t a sophisticated website, nor did it really do anything that useful, but it did prove out a number of important concepts that would pave the way for a larger project. I was able to successfully build two web services, one using SOAP and WSDL, the other a REST based service using JSON. I was able to retrieve data from a MySQL database via these services and digest it from an AJAX client. Deployment is as simple as copying files over ftp. No configuration, no magic project files or solutions, or .user files to confuse and confound. The tools are certainly not as advanced as Visual Studio, but so far I’m very impressed by all that I’ve seen. Stay tuned for more.

MEFedMVVM is a framework available on CodePlex that extends the MEF concept to include the MVVM pattern for both WPF and Silverlight.

I used MEFedMVVM to create a lightweight code sample browser application to demonstrate a simple use of the MVVM pattern in Silverlight that employs MEF to couple such common services as a singleton model and view model messenger (mediator).

See it in Action
The code sample browser application is used to host the public code sample repository here:
http://code.stuartthompson.net/samplebrowser

The download archive is available here:
http://svn.stuartthompson.net/public/CodeSampleBrowser/CodeSampleBrowser.zip

Code Structure
The code sample browser is divided into five projects and uses MEF to import and export implementations between the different modules. MEFedMVVM is used to connect the views with their respective view-models. The five projects and their purposes are as follows:

CodeSampleBrowser
The main Silverlight application. This contains the xaml files that implement the views, styles, and converters necessary to present the application.

CodeSampleBrowser.ViewModels
This project contains the view-models that provide the functional interface to the application. The two main view models provide interfaces for the code sample list (navigation) and code sample detail layouts.

CodeSampleBrowser.Core
The model and core system code. The runtime implementation of ICodeBrowserModel is declared and exported as a singleton.

CodeSampleBrowser.Entities
POCOs (Plain Old CLR Objects) are declared here. They form the currency used to communicate domain values between modules.

CodeSampleBrowser.Web
A simple ASP.NET project used to host the Silverlight application during development.

Disclaimer: This code is provided as is, without warranty, and without guarantee of fitness for any purpose. Use at your own risk.

While essentially the same style of application, TripJournal brings a lot more to the table. Instead of simply tracking your route, you can also take photographs or videos, or add text notes. These are recorded with location data so that in reviewing the trip you can see exactly where and when you took the picture or added the note. This makes for a nice journal of your route. The software offers an export to a KMZ file that can be viewed in Google Earth to replay your trip at a later date. The Lite version is free, lacks a couple of features and is ad-supported, but offers the KMZ export and so might be appropriate for many users.

So far I’ve recorded only a couple of test trips but have been extremely happy with the visual presentation of the options, ease of use, and excellent export feature. The KMZ files do contain a lot of data and so file sizes could grow pretty quickly. This shouldn’t present too much of an issue given today’s storage spaces but might be something to watch if you’re taking a long trip.

Once TortoiseSVN is installed your Explorer context menu will contain some new commands. You can use the SVN Checkout command to checkout from a repository:

Clicking the SVN Checkout command will display the checkout dialog. Here you need to supply the url of the repository as well as a destination folder on your local machine:

Clicking OK will begin the checkout process. If the repository is password protected you will be asked to supply your credentials after clicking OK.

I’ve hosted a variety of sites with both Windows and Linux hosts over the last ten years. I’ve run a number of different setups from a stripped down Debian distribution out of my home using DDNS, all the way up to a remotely hosted private Windows server. I’ve always liked being able to dabble in hosting sites from ASP classic, ASP.NET, PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc.. as I find it a super way to learn and sometimes one technology is just more suitable than another for the problem at hand.

How Do Silverlight & “The Cloud” Change This?

With the advent of Silverlight, the need for a technology specific host changes. Because Silverlight is a browser hosted solution there is absolutely no reason you can’t host it on Linux. All you have to do is upload a .xap file to the server and then include an <object> tag to that .xap file in an .html page. It’s that simple. The Silverlight code is all running on the client machine so it doesn’t matter who is delivering the html page and xap file. The rich-client experience means that the technology running on the server is irrelevant.

What about the server side? What about WCF? Well, the beauty of Silverlight, web services, SOAP, and all that web 2.0 goodness is that it doesn’t matter what the Silverlight app is talking to. It could have a conversation over telnet if need be to interact with remote data stores. The cloud starts to make that even more interesting. Azure was built to be an open standard. This is a good thing. You can use Visual Studio to build out your Azure projects but ultimately they are hosted in the Azure net. You don’t need a Windows host to access Azure storage, as this post shows:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brian_swan/archive/2010/07/19/accessing-windows-azure-queues-from-php.aspx You can use the cloud very effectively as your data store while also using Silverlight as your user interface. You could also use Windows hosting for your web services or SQL server hosting while delivering your Silverlight app from your Linux host.

With UI code that runs on the client, and storage/querying that runs in the cloud, the need for a beefy server that is processing requests for thousands of simultaneous users starts to melt away. No longer do you need a powerhouse server host to deliver a highly responsive, massively multi-user website. You can offload the heavy UI work to your users and the heavy backend work to an elastic hyper-grid like Azure. By only paying for the processing and storage you use with Azure the cost of hosting drops dramatically. It will be interesting to see what effect this has on the server market moving forward.

As more and more sites move to a “free to use” model that is supported by advertising and premium subscription services, the capital costs for hosting present the largest impedance to profit. By removing the need for Windows Server 2008 licenses (currently $1000 to $4000 per machine! http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/pricing.aspx) and by lowering the hardware requirements you can dramatically affect the bottom line for SaaS services. Silverlight presents the final missing piece in this assembly by providing a rich, easy to develop, client-hosted user interface that can hold its own against Flash and let the MS-brained developers write the code.

It’s good to see Microsoft supporting more open standards to give rise to different scenarios for hosting and delivery. I’m especially impressed that both Silverlight and Azure can be run and used without any need for Windows server technology. A custom rolled internet server (like the ones we all wrote in C or C++ in our comp sci classes!) could be used to deliver the content. As long as it can serve the files it will do the job.

“The law of leaky abstractions means that whenever somebody comes up with a wizzy new code-generation tool … you hear a lot of people saying "learn how to do it manually first, then use the wizzy tool to save time…”

“And all this means that paradoxically, even as we have higher and higher level programming tools with better and better abstractions, becoming a proficient programmer is getting harder and harder.”

It still pays to know the fundamentals.

/// <summary>
/// Raised when a property changed notification is sent.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="propertyName" />
/// A <see cref="System.String" /> identifying the property that
/// changed.
/// </param>
protected void OnPropertyChanged(string propertyName)
{
    if (PropertyChanged != null)
        PropertyChanged(
            this,
            new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName));
}

This allows me to create properties that look like:

/// <summary>
/// Gets or sets the Name.
/// </summary>
/// <value>
/// A string that contains the Name.
/// </value>
public string Name
{
    get { return _name; }
    set
    {
        if (_name == value) return;
        _name = value;
        OnPropertyChanged("Name");
    }
}

That’s still a lot of typing! More typing is less doing. To add these properties more efficiently I developed the following code snippet:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<CodeSnippets xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet">
    <CodeSnippet Format="1.0.0">
        <Header>
            <Title>
                Notifying Property
            </Title>
            <Shortcut>
                propnotify
            </Shortcut>
        </Header>
        <Snippet>
            <Declarations>
                <Literal>
                    <ID>type</ID>
                    <Type>System.Type</Type>
                    <ToolTip>The property type.</ToolTip>
                    <Default>type</Default>
                </Literal>
                <Literal>
                    <ID>propname</ID>
                    <ToolTip>The property name.</ToolTip>
                    <Default>propname</Default>
                </Literal>
                <Literal>
                    <ID>varname</ID>
                    <ToolTip>The variable name.</ToolTip>
                    <Default>varname</Default>
                </Literal>
            </Declarations>
            <Code Language="CSharp">
        <![CDATA[/// <summary>
        /// Gets or sets the $propname$.
        /// </summary>
        /// <value>
        /// A $type$ that contains the $propname$.
        /// </value>
        public $type$ $propname$
        {
            get { return $varname$; }
            set
            {
                if ($varname$ == value) return;
                $varname$ = value;
                OnPropertyChanged("$propname$");
            }
        }]]>
            </Code>
        </Snippet>
    </CodeSnippet>
</CodeSnippets>

Now I can just type propnotify and press Tab to get a template property snippet in my code. This saves a bunch of time when declaring the notifying bound properties within a view model.

What interesting code snippets have you developed? Do you rely upon a third-party tool such as Resharper or CodeRush, or does the snippet system in Visual Studio 2010 meet your needs?

TechCrunch summed up the problem right away and it didn’t take a marketing genius to realize the problems of pairing images with articles from around the web. There were reports of pornographic images showing up next to entirely unrelated search results, and of competing brandings being associated together. Can you imagine the press release of the Windows 7 phone being paired with an Apple logo? If the service didn’t slowly die through lack of use, I could only imagine it was a matter of time before the lawsuits would do the job instead.

Bye bye, Cuil. Nice idea, but the web just isn’t ready yet.

Then click the Picture button from the Illustrations section of the Insert ribbon. Browse to the picture and click Insert to insert the picture inline in the email.

Now you can send picture replies to your boss inline instead of having to rely upon him/her to open the attachment.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171868(v=VS.100).aspx#core_new_features_and_improvements

I’m very excited for April 12th 2010.