Blend 3 will use the Visual Studio 2010 C# editor

I could be wrong. But I could be right. Announced at the next Mix?

A birthday and looking back on my digital life

So it’s my birthday today. Every year until this now, my birthday has be the time for doing absolutely nothing. As I geared-up my community involvement this year, I find myself with so much to do and so little time that my birthday will be an after-thought this evening. Editing of alt.net content (7 hours of raw HD material to cut, compress, publish, of which I have only started), preparation of a talk next week, publication of a detailed guide for OpenRasta’s official launch (including delivering on my plan to port the Suteki project), a backburner project for Paris… And so far no contract in London, with agents driving the prices down and a global recession that is starting to ripple its effects through non-financial companies.

So I thought I’d celebrate the year by looking through my blog entries and twitters to provide for myself a roadmap of what I’ve done right and wrong.

2007

Had issues with a company and a manager with which I didn’t manage to work. Lesson learnt from it, there is a right time to move on and a right place to be efficient. Started a long rant on mocks and their uses, trying (poorly) to debunk the ideas that mocks were always better than fakes, and that there was a life outside of mocking frameworks. However, with the latest mocking framework syntaxes and new defaults, the problem will slowly go away.

2008

Spent a lot of time comparing and pondering how to provide data for the very poor http client called flash. Attended the first UK alt.net conference and felt so much more energized than I have been in years. Started giving presentations in user groups. Started working on the first version of Rasta that would lead me to write OpenRasta. Predicted that skydrive and foldershare (now WL Sync) would interop through the Sync framework (but Live Mesh doesn’t use skydrive yet, so this is not realized just yet). Organized the first alt.net beers event. Changed my relationship to code by switching my desktop to 30”. Started using twitter (and it’s all @CAMURPHY’s fault).Went to NxtgenUG Fest08. Made a point of supporting Linq2Sql and ignore Linq2Entities. Gave more talks. Went to Mix:UK, PDC, VBUG, TechEd…

 

And I’m  not including all the stuff I didn’t blog about. Very busy year indeed. And yet I feel I’ve pretty much under-achieved. So I take the public vow here to try harder. 5 year plan etc etc.

One more day at a conference…

And one more night of discussion, passion and learning. I get so much from meeting the people that attend conferences that I really think that not attending the sessions and only meeting people at dinner is where the value really is. I may just do that next year and skip the conf itself, and reserve myself for dinners, drinks and beer chatting.

Beginning of #TechEd – Early Bird WTF.

Thought I’d moan a bit more about the organization… By registering early, you get given, I quote the guide, ”a reserved seat” at the keynote.

When you check in, you get given a nice wristband supposedly giving you access to those seats. Comes in a nice plastic bag, together with a cap.  But no explanation notice explaining that, in fact, you need to come 30 minutes early to have your seat. So the wristband gives you the right to arrive early when no one else is there to choose a good spot. But it’s not reserved.

Of course, the very heavy booklet provided with the conference bag doesn’t mention those 30 minutes. Neither is any sign in the conference centre. Nor do the ladies giving you the goods in the morning.

So no “reserved” seat for me, because the reserved seat wasn’t really reserved at all. Fair enough.

But then one of the attendants that was managing the event replied, after my questioning:

“- you’re 15 minutes late, it was at half past for early birds
- but no one bothered telling me this
- well it must have been indicated, you should’ve been on time
- but there’s no sign, no documentation, no nothing about being there at half past?
- well we had those three rows over there. Don’t be late next time”

So it’s my fault no one mentioned we had to be there half an hour before? Or that you didn’t print it? Or that the documentation doesn’t show it anywhere?

Add to that there’s no Wifi in the room and not a single twitter mention anywhere, or facebook group, and I have to wonder what happened between last year and this year.

At least we get a nice conference bag, of about the same quality as the one from last year. As that one is nearing the end of its useful life, the new one arrives just on time.

#TechEd – Keynote

[Update: Indeed, the unannounced stuff was the sharepoint visual studio integration. Paul Andrew just blogged about it.

Introduction from the business guy. I assume the black blocks in front of the stage the presenter keeps looking at is some sort of teleprompter. It’s always very annoying to see any speaker fixed on his slides / script.

Talking about how great it is to do business in Europe. Slides showing partners. Still don’t understand why a developer conference ends up with marketing and business cases. Could they do TechEd decision makers and stop boring me with all this amazing stuff people do with Microsoft software? Or at the very least try and hit my geek soft spot?

Zander is now on stage. No powerpoint, just Visual Studio demos. Thanks god a geek is finally presenting. Will be releasing stuff not talked about at PDC. Good! Wonder if that’s in the bits we got at PDC, need to rerun the VM tonight.

Showing the reflector equivalent that’s built in vs10, which we’ve seen at PDC. Showing assembly dependency analysis, delving into class dependencies. Sequence diagrams (see pdc bits). Gets me worried to see all this UML stuff creeping back in.

Showing off the blackbox replay for testers. Sweet if it comes for free, other tools have provided this for quite a few years now.

So the machine they’re demoing is actually being RDP’d into. Wow. Showing off vista’s graphics capabilities!

More WPF editor goodness. Still no sign of the new windowing promised for vs10. Lot of code visualization stuff. Mentions of MEF (@gblock is gonna be happy :) ).

Trying to debug a session, find the bug… But changes live code without writing a single unit test to confirm the problem. There really is a need for Microsoft to start a cultural change.

In no particular order, saw snippets for xml and javascript, jquery, web deployment and a test-first demo of MVC. There’s still a lack of understanding of the difference between test-driven and test-first, shame the two words are still used interchangeably. Some VB10 goodness.

Xml transformations for config files. So you mean I can solve my config problems with some config solutions? Wow.

Some sharepoint stuff I have no interest in, dozing off.

C++ parallel_for keyword to use 8 cores to do ray rendering of pong in 3d. Some touch support to move the pong cursor (what, you mean with a touch screen i can move stuff around? Wow.)

That part of the keynote has been delivered perfectly, but what was shown was mostly PDC stuff. Not seen that many non-PDC news, but maybe I missed a bit (or was that the Sharepoint thingy?)

On my way to Barcelona….

[pre-nagging: this post contains jokes about Italians, British, Spanish and French people. If you’re offended by generalization about nationalities on holidays, please skip this post altogether.]

What a joy to travel. Only a few hours after I left home, I am already feeling incontrollable urges to hate 4hundred of people that have been encumbering my travel plans. Let’s review what happened for me to manage to board the plane.

1. International
   I was ready to leave the house on time, until I realized that for some Murphy’s law reason, my travel pass *and* my Gatwick express pass didn’t actually print, and Vista just silently failed on me. 5 minutes delay.
2. British
   The cab then shows up 5 minutes late, getting me to the Gatwick express at 15:03. And *then* do I realize that, for maintenance work, said service leaves every 30 minutes instead of every 15. 35 minutes delay.
3. More British!
   Well, you didn’t really expect the Gatwick express to arrive on time did you? 50 minutes delay.
4. Italian
   As it happens, a big Italian contingency was sharing the same train as I. Having been raised with Italians, I’m fairly used to them being slow and unorganized (and nearly as rude as the French). But when there’s only one elevator for the already overcrowded train, things just add-up. Wait for 15 minutes to get an elevator, 65 minutes delay.
5. British more and more, and some Italians
   Thanks to BAA, once I finally arrived at the airport level, and only one floor from checking in, a BAA representative barks at me that my luggage is too big to take the escalator. Bless the spotty face and the arrogance of the yellow-wearing Gatwick idiots.  At that point, I’m lower on the food chain and have to accommodate with the 2 out of 4 functioning elevators to get to departure. Wait for another 10 minutes, 75 minutes delay.
6. British Airways
   Well, by that point, even though I was checked-in, the whole masquerade of pretending to call the controller about late-checking of luggage is unfolding, me knowing that under no circumstance do you try to get in touch with the guys handling the luggage by phone. Ever. You need a radio. But the masquerade to protect the attendants from telling me to fuck off unfolds, adding another 10 minutes. At that point we reach 85 minutes of delay.
7. British Airways again
   Wait to get ticket changed at Customer Service. 15 minutes wait. Get told that I should queue (again) in the ticket buying queue. another 15 minutes. The fact that I have a business ticket seems to have no importance on how fast you get treated when you have a problem. People may wear smile well, but the customer service still painfully sucks. I stop counting.
8. Easyjet
   Last flight to leave for Barcelona is Easyjet, from which I buy a cattle-class ticket for £139. I never travelled with them until now, and I know why. Gate checking an hour late, hundred of people just trying to walk on each-others and a waiting room that is probably not dissimilar to the corridor leading you to the fatal injection room in some Texas prisons. None of the staff has shown a single smile by now.
9. Spanish
   Well, considering the destination, I have to moan about those a bit. While the lady next to me has been very polite and adorable, the (overweight) guy in front of me has insisted on reclining on his seat. Either that or said seat is reclining under the weight. In either case, the 17” laptop keeps on pressing uncomfortably against my stomach, making me regret the minute I thought getting the laptop out would be a good idea.
10. Spanish on the other side…
    So of course, with the lack of space and strong sense of agoraphobia growing on me, not tamed in the slightest by the double bloody-Mary I inflicted upon myself, I politely ask the Andalusian woman behind me if she wouldn't mind too much if I reclined my seat. Of course, I did check that the only thing on her table was one of those miniature overly-salted overly-aromatized overly-fat overly-disgusting and overly-non-bio  Pringle pack. If you’ve never had the delicious pleasure of enduring airline snacks, the cylinder measures roughly 3 inches. But of course, said brunette, either not understanding my desperate attempts at sign language, or just being an annoying bitch (my preferred explanation so far), refuses with an arrogant no. Not the polite one you would expect, being apologetic for denying your freedom to ensure theirs. No no no. The aggressive “are you kidding me” refusal. Thought about slapping her face, or worse, just reclining the seat anyway. Give up, tuck in and put the laptop in my belly.
11. German
    At last a smile from one of the flight attendants. I wondered for a long time why traditional airlines attendants always looked middle-aged, and where the young ones were. Now I know, they’re all trying to make a living working for easyjet.
12. British
    Uh. Yeah, you guessed it. The plane is *very* late.
13. American
    My iphone battery dies before I manage to connect to any network.
14. Spanish
    Finally make my way out of the plane and try to accommodate my smell to the lack of locker-room scent that I had to suffer for the last two hours. Of course, TechEd buses are not running anymore, and the (4) guys waiting with a TechEd sign have no will to help you get to your hotel, pointing you to a cab. Sweet.
15. Spanish
    Get in cab that has a big logo specifying they accept credit cards. Of course the guy refuses to take my card at all, so it’s off to the cash point, at a total interest of nearly 7% + £2 of transaction fee. Silly me I leave him a tip. Should’ve let him rot in hell. His teeth seem to enjoy the place.
16. Hilton Diagonal Mar
    So you’d think with such an insane trip, with a booking made in June, Hilton would at the very least solve my problems. Nope, non-smoking room and no way to get a smoking room. At that point I’m exhausted and will just flaunt the non-smoking status until I get a room of equivalent size or more in *smoking* environment. Otherwise they’ll have to rebrand my room. Or charge me. But as there’s no mention of such a charge anywhere…
    Speaking of which, don’t even get me started with the quality of the internet, that I have the privilege of paying a freakin 100€ per 7 days for. Or the fact that their book where you supposed to have all the information for your stay, including the room service, is still unordered and missing entries. Second year in a row.

Oh, and in the process I just realized I forgot my TechEd card at home!

Follow Sebastien’s adventures tomorrow as he tries to get the room he booked and get registered at the convention center. *orders another beer and pops a prozac*.

[Update: after feeling bad and going down to smoke outside the hotel, I managed to get my room changed tomorrow. There’s some light at the end of the tunnel.]

[Update 2: On the up, hotel room changed. On the down, breakfast eggs made me sick this morning. At the conf center, hopefully everything will be a smooth ride from now.]

Apologies for the silence… Out of work and conferences

Sorry to all people reading (and not taken over by tweeter fever). Between PDC and KaizenConf, I took a couple of days off and am now getting ready to meet even more great people in TechEd.

I’m doing the initial edit for some of the videos I took at KaizenConf / PDC (mainly recording of sessions, the interviews will take a bit longer). I hope to manage to get a few more at TechEd. Bittorrent of the raw material to follow.

Oh, and I still don’t have a contract, so any work you feel I may be able to help out with, please shoot me an email at seb@serialseb.com. Thanks!

KaizenConf , so far, has been about…

• Self-improvement
• Corporate adoption of lean
• Talking about how learning how to be a good developer and a good chefs are one and the same thing
• Talking about the American economy
• Talking about the meaning of feature
• Talking about the interaction between France and Quebec from the 1960s
• Talking about the cost of adopting technology and its value depending on the project / team size
• Talking about the waste of adopting lean in the silo of IT
• Talking about recognizing failure and success

I probably forget many, but my brain is obscured by the level of discussion and contribution that happens here. None of the PDC / TechEd events compare to the thrill you get when surrounded by extremely opinionated and excited people. I’m in geek heaven.

I am a ToolWindow

For anyone that attended Glenn’s talk.

Alt.net OpenConf session at PDC!

For all of you alt.netters and interested parties, I just came back from the OpenConf style area next to the exhibit floor, and there’s an alt.net track being proposed.

It’s at 15:30 on Tuesday. Be there or be square! (how tacky…)

Alt.net London Beers #4 – 25th of November

If you plan to attend, please leave a comment on this entry.

I should have the time in the next few days to publish the result of the third edition of the alt.net beers. Thanks for everyone who came and made it a very successful event.

So let’s plan the date for the next one. From now on, I’ll organize the event on the last Tuesday of each month. To make sure we don’t step on each others toes, most of the UK community events now share their dates in a central location, so hopefully you won’t ever have to make a choice between all the amazing events that happen in the UK.

Following on the success of the previous events,I am happy to announce the next alt.net London Beers event. Tequilla\ has been nice enough to let us use their downstairs lounge bar, to continue with the tradition of beer-oriented conferencing.

The format is a mini openconf-style session. Here are the rules, slightly changed to learn from the previous event.

• Arrivals, discussion and socializing between 18:00 and 19:15, with one necessity: find the topic of the day and find the questions that we will try to answer.
• Between 19:15 and 19:30 we will vote on the subject we want to talk about, in two rounds, by raising hands.
• At 19:30 the big clock will start ticking for a time-boxed 60 minutes workshop on the subject. The goal is simple: can we as a group get insight and progress our understanding of the problem.
• At 20:30 the clock will ring and that will be it of the conversation. Everyone will be invited to fill-in a wiki with a one or two line answer to two questions: what did you want to get out of the session, what did you get. The goal is to capture a snapshot of the state of mind at the event, and to be able to compare those with the result of our reflections that, I’m sure, will be extensively shared on blogs, mailing lists, twitter, etc.
• Once this is all written down, everybody will be able to continue the discussion in the pub or wherever they see fit.

The location:

TEQUILA\ London Limited
82 Dean Street
London, UK
W1D 3HA

View Larger Map

We’re always looking for new locations and one or several sponsors. If you or your company is interested, pop me an email seb@serialseb.com.

PDC tomorrow, WeHo tonight

Anyone wanting to come for dinner / drinks in WeHo (gaying PDC up a bit), or meet from tomorrow, phone number is +44 7789 00 8282 :)

Being in a printed program again

I just got confirmation that you voted for one of my sessions for DDD. I’m thrilled! It’s going to be an absolute pain to write the material needed to get what I want out of it, but the community and the people attending will choose the content, which I am very excited about.

And on the same level of excitement, the VBUG annual conference will be receiving yet another game of Bingo with me delivering a more polished version of the MVC talk I gave in London and Brighton.

The interesting bit about the VBUG conference is the printed agenda. I need to get a proper speaker picture, because the one I gave looks dreadful. Actually, the picture is alright, but I look dreadful :)

Seeing my face on that leaflet reminded me of the leaflets I received for various conferences I attended and spoke to, on peer-to-peer networks, back in 2000.

Interesting how life can seem like a rollercoaster sometimes, but is all but cyclic. You raise, you fall, you learn. I’ve been truly blessed in 2008 to meet fantastic people and go back in the speaking circuit, meeting countless amazing people and working on exciting things.

All this just to thank the people that listen to my rants when I give talks, the London .net User Group for getting me back in the speaking mood and giving everyone the opportunity to do it, the absolutely brilliant community we have in the UK, to the alt.net crowd, to the non alt.net crowd, and even to the Entity Frameworks proponents :)

While I’m in a ranting mood…

Seen in the wild.

        /// <summary>

        /// This is only for Unit Test Use

        /// </summary>

Code is not shown to protect the guilty, but it’s a method to set a property on an entity class.

Multiplying project files…

I was going to have yet another rant on separating everything in a ridiculous amount of project files, to ensure separation, and started venting to one of my colleague, at which point he mentioned Jeremy just posted on the issue: Separate Assemblies != Loose Coupling. Amen.

Thanks Jeremy, that saves me a post.

HttpResponse.Flush forces Chunked transfer…

That one took me quite a while to understand. I’ve been building the integration tests for OpenRasta, a bunch of classes that configure a full web-server and run a real request-response scenario. This should hopefully help in limiting regressions, and may also be used in the future to ensure continuous compatibility with IIS6 on plain .net 2.0.

I’m leveraging the kernel http support present since Windows XP SP2 to create an http listener dynamically and initializing the asp.net runtime inside it, though the very useful HttpListener class.

After a lot of debugging, I discovered that my test was failing because of an encoding issue. Instead of returning the content that was sent to it by OpenRasta, an 18 bytes string, I ended up with much more than that, with line breaks in the middle. A quick look at the returned headers and it became very obvious that the system was sending me back chunked-encoding, a process by which the data is sent in blocks, each prefixed with the size, and suffixed with entity headers. The thing is, there is no support at all yet in OpenRasta for chunked encoding.

Here is the block of code causing all thesetroubles.

        public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)

        {

            IRastaContext rastaContext = RastaConfiguration.GetService<IRastaContext>();

            rastaContext.SetContext(context);

 

            _pipeline.Run(rastaContext);

 

            context.Response.Flush(); // <!-- see that one?

        }

As you can see, I was calling Flush on the HttpResponse object in the IHttpHandler that runs the OpenRasta pipeline. I quite understand the reasoning behind switching transparently to chunked encoding when requesting a data flush, you want to clear the data queue by sending it to the client, but you do not know yet how much data you will send later. At that point, using Content-Length is not possible, and chunked encoding is the only way to achieve the desired result.

Looking at the msdn documentation for HttpResponse.Flush you will notice there is no mention of that behavior. But not to worry, other developers thought it may come handy to document, and you will find the following on the mono documentation.

HttpResponse by default will buffer all of the output before it is sent to the client. To control the delivery of the data developers can use this method (or alternatively set the HttpResponse.Buffer property to false).

If chunked transfers are enabled for this response, this will try to use the chunked transfer.

Elementary, my dear Watson.

Once upon a time, code I wrote…

  After installing Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta, I noticed that it automatically indexed files shared on my big tera-server. And below is a nugget from code I’ve lost a long time ago, back when I was helping write a failed emulator for Dark Age of Camelot. A C# OpenGL reader that could render models of the game.

Track me down!

Added to the site, the calendar of which events I’m attending. That way, anyone wanting to give me a million pound, or punch me in the face, and everything in-between, will know where to find me :)

OpenRasta status update

This entry may be outdated. For the latest updates on openrasta, see www.openrasta.com.

A couple of people have access to the code and have been kind enough to give reviews. I’m always open to more people helping out in the very early design phase before I go all public with the framework I’ve been nagging everybody about for months and months, so pop me an email to seb@serialseb.com and I’ll give you access. OpenRasta will be under an MIT license and I’ll publish it all to the world. I need to ensure what needs refactoring before release is refactored and that it is a fully functional beta first.

So here is what can be done with OpenRasta now and what I’m currently working on. See it as both an announcement and my task-list to the runner-up to the official release. You can refer back to the previous version of OpenRasta I already introduced. For various reasons the original Rasta never made it to open-source and its code has now died, and as far as I know no one will maintain it. OpenRasta is a fresh take on it, but keeps the same configuration API and the same concepts in a fresh new format with fresh new codes (and fresh juicy unit tests).

So by now you know there are essential components in OpenRasta: URIs, Resources, Handlers, Codecs and the pipeline.

The framework

• OpenRasta.dll contains the bulk of the implementation, and compiles successfully on the .net framework 2.0 and on Silverlight. Great for embedding OpenRasta in your traditional asp.net application and start migrating your code over. And why not provide a REST-friendly server from the .net Compact Framework? (starting to sound like a marketing drone there)
• The silverlight support will eventually provide for duplex http so you can architect your RAI test-first and REST-friendly, reduce coupling, and enjoy your life more. IN PROGRESS.
• Most of the features are implemented straight into OpenRasta, such as dealing with form content-types browser send you. That means no reliance on some of the asp.net limitations on file uploads.
• OpenRasta.Server.dll is your asp.net integration point, with support for traditional IIS6 and Integrated IIS7 modes.
• Did I mention OpenRasta runs on asp.net 2.0? Alongside your webforms?

The pipeline

• The pipeline is a series of pipeline contributors. They all act upon a small area of functionality, change a couple of things and give control back. The good news is that you have full power to change any of the existing contributors, add your own, etc. The default pipeline has 17 components which support the execution of the whole system.
• Each contributor registers when it wants to be executed, and it is always relative to another contributor. The pipeline, once initialized, builds a chain of calls and execute them sequentially. And there is a small type that will let you register for multiple steps in the pipeline and be called only when you are ready.
• You can add and remove contributors at configuration time to replace or modify existing behavior. IN PROGRESS.

URIs and URI decorators

• You define your resource Uris using the common http template syntax. It’s a clean-room implementation of the .net 3.0 UriTemplate and UriTemplateTable classes to run on 2.0. It will support both the 3.5 modifications and some extra features sometime in the future. May donate the code to mono if their implementation hasn’t progressed much.
• Several Uris can identify the same resource, but in different languages. /home and /accueil will automatically set-up everything you need to override the default client’s language.
• Of course, in any real-world scenarios, your URI doesn’t only describe an abstract resource that is easy to name. There are plenty of little tidbits of things you may want to include, such as the document type (.html anyone?), the language (/en/mydocument), maybe even the version (/en/mydocument(v1)). Most frameworks would have you declare all the combinations of those urls to design your resources. In OpenRasta you simply define a Uri decorator that will change the way the request is processed and clean-up the Uri before passing it on for processing. Out of the box, you’ll have document types, language, http method overrides (for those nasty PUT you want to do from your html forms) and view selection (for when one resource have several views applied to it).

Handlers

• Once your Uri is matched to a resource, a handler is going to be selected and one of its methods called.
• You don’t have to inherit from anything, or implement any interface.
• You name your method using the name of the http method the client sent you. Want to send data? Implement a Get(). Want to append data? Implement a Post().
• Sometimes you want more meaningful names. Just declare a small attribute to map the correct http method to the correct clr method.
• Parameters are declared naturally, without multitudes of hacks, strings or attributes. The codec will be responsible for mapping whatever the client sent to whatever CLR types you are expecting. The framework will map your url templates to your parameters too.
• Want optional parameters? Add an [Optional] attribute. Want a default value? Enter [DefaultValue]. And any CLR language implementing default values will support those too. I think that includes the VB guys :)
• You can even have parameters that map to http headers.
• Your handler method returns what makes sense to you. Don’t want to return any resource to your client? Discover the joy of the void return type! Always return a type? Just declare that type as the return type. And when you want to return RESTful information, simply return an OperationResult.
• Your handler only select objects, not views or other things that doesn’t concern it. You return an object and a Codec will render it to the client.
• And of course, you can add plenty of filters that execute before and after the method calls. A logging filter (IN PROGRESS) and a Principal security filter come out of the box, so you can get people to authenticate.

Codecs

• A resource can be read and written from and to an http connection using Codecs. Some are provided in Rasta (json, xml, html, html form data), and writing one is brain-dead easy.
• You can let the client decide which content-type it will receive by using well-established content-type negotiation semantics. It’s all done for you. And it even serves application/xhtml+xml to firefox without you having to touch a line of code.
• When sending data from html forms, <input name=”customerName” value=”value” /> will call Post(string customerName);
• Ok, everybody does that. When using <input name=”Customer.Name” value=”value” /> this will call Post(Customer customer) with the correct property done for you.
• Ok, most MVC frameworks do that. When using <input name=”AddressOf(Customer).PostCode” value=”value” /> this will call Post(AddressOf<Customer> customer) with the postcode property set.
• Ok, some MVC frameworks do that. When using immutable types, <input name=”Customer.DateOfBirth.Date” value=”12” /> the method Post(Customer c) will be called with the date set on a new date of birth. And you can set property chains as far as you want, and write to read-only properties. Convinced yet?
• Ok, maybe some MVC frameworks may be able to do that. When using <input name=”Customer.DateOfBirth.Date” value=”12” /> the method Post(ChangeSet<Customer> c); will be called, and you can update your objects with whatever changes are being sent through.
• Oh, and the same stuff can work with other content-types too. Implementing http patch has never been that easy.
• Codecs also can use different views. Want to have one page to view and one page to edit your customers? Just declare a view using TranscodedBy<WebFormsCodec>(new { index = “~/CustomerView.aspx”, edit = “~/CustomerEdit.aspx” });
• The return data depends on what the client requested. And that includes error pages, 404s, 401s, etc. IN PROGRESS.
• You can stream data from the client rather than have asp.net download everything for you, for any multipart type. IN PROGRESS.

And the rest

• Http Digest Authentication out of the box. IMPLEMENTED. With time-sliding security window and logoff functionality! IN PROGRESS
• An error mechanism for your webforms to manage validation errors while still returning RESTful status codes, that still renders correctly when dealing with json, xml, etc. IN PROGRESS.
• Everything, and I do mean everything, goes through an IoC container. If you don’t use one, OpenRasta use its internal one. If you use one, OpenRasta automatically registers all its dependencies in it. Comes with a Windsor Castle implementation.
• All the configuration can be done without a single attribute anywhere, either by leveraging conventions or using the fluent configuration API.
• Automatic cache management based on your resources (including Last-Modified and ETags). IN PROGRESS.

What to look forward to in beta 2

• VB9 XML literals, NHAML and NVelocity view engines. NOT STARTED.
• Full AtomPub support. NOT STARTED.
• StructureMap support. NOT STARTED.
• An additional configuration mode for the attribute junkies that will scan your assemblies and configure OpenRasta automatically. NOT STARTED.
• Support for asynchronous operations (need to define the exact use-cases for this first). NOT STARTED.
• An optional reverse cache for your handlers. NOT STARTED.

Way past my bed-time. That should give you a good idea of where I am at with OpenRasta and what kind of things it will enable you to do. Email me to peek at the code before anyone else!

Porting the Suteki Shop to OpenRasta

Mike Hadlow has just announced the commercial release of Jump the Gun, an online shop based on his Suteki Shop cms. Mike is an extremely bright guy that I’ve met quite a few times at various conferences, and he’s built it all on asp.net MVC.

Because OpenRasta doesn’t have much of a documentation at the moment, and because it would be nice to have a comparison between the two systems, I’ve offered Mike to start porting Suteki to OpenRasta sometime over the weekend. The good news is that it will live side-by-side with the existing Suteki Shop. I’m leaning towards calling it Sutekool :) . And then we’ll be able to compare the performance and flexibility of both frameworks. I’ll porbably learn a lot in the process,

Thanks Mike for the great work and for the opportunity of having the first side-by-side comparison of asp.net MVC and OpenRasta! Now if we had someone porting it to monorail, we could have a real overview of what the .net MVC world has to offer.