In case you don’t know yet, I have had been working on a football (Soccer for us, living in USA) venture, GoalFace.com, for a while with a group of football fanatics! Happy to say that we are now on alpha and please feel free to check it out to experience best football community experience.

Few weeks ago, while I was having my daily dose of techcrunch, I stumbled on this post about creating One-of-Kind fan page on facebook. Not having done much on facebook, I have decided do something like that for GoalFace.

My initial version simply followed the directions to a static custom home page for GoalFace (with a home page screen shot). Then, I felt little ambitious and started exploring ways to make it dynamic. I came across this post while looking for ways to bring the dynamic content.

With simple show/hide logic at my disposal, I ventured into creating GoalFace Tour page on facebook. Well, after couple of hours later, I have a simple, slide show looking, GoalFace fan page on facebook.

My team has some very innovative ideas on extending our facebook presence. I will be updating my blog as I bring them to life. Mean while, please feel to drop a line or two.

One of the project I have been working for a while is finally out on Alpha. If you are a Soccer fan, you must check this site “For Fans of the Beautiful Game“.

Hopefully, I will be blogging more!

Thanks,

And then there is ASP.NET MVC to make make web development clean and TDD friendly. If you are not familiar with ASP.NET MVC you should check out Scott Gu’s Blog posts on different previews (currently Preview 4).

There are quite a few articles on how to integrate ASP.NET MVC and JQuery to make our lifes happier. A simple google search for “ASP.NET MVC with JQuery” return quite a few articles.

Here, i am not going to talk about how to use JQuery for communication (for making AJAX Calls) or presentation (Subtle or major UX effects). Insted i am add “SuperFlyDOM” to the mix. The most important part of SuperFlyDOM is the way that it lets us define the Templates. If are making a AJAX call and expecting a JSON Response, the chances are we are expecting a list of objects and would probably need to display them in either a tabular or (un)ordered list to the DOM. SuperFlyDOM is the perfect allay for this situation.

If i have a JSON object with serialized properties (ID, Name, Url), and i want to display/populate these JSON objects to the User by Manipulating the DOM, all i needed to do are the following simple steps…

I need to create a template (which is very easy depending how complicated you want the item to look after it is rendered) – To simply display an anchor tag, you could use the following Template

var itemTpl = function(){return ['a', {href:this.Url, id:this.Id, className:'myclass'}, [this.Name]]};

I am creating an “a” element with properties “href”, “id”, and “className” and it will have the “Name” value go in between the “a” tag. The good thing about templates is they you can change the way what goes in to the template and how it will be presented (markup) could be changed with out much coupling with the rest of the app.

Once you have the template, you could make a simple call to one of the methods provided by SuperFlyDom, tplAppend(jsonObj, itemTpl), foreach JSON object in your collection. Thats it. This is the best way i have found to deal with JSON objects rendering. If you know any better techniques, please feel free to drop me a line.

Note- You can also do string concatenation on Templates as follows…

var itemTpl= function(){return ['a', {href:'/product/' + this.Name+'/', id:this.ID, className:'myClass'}, [this.Name]]};

This is one of the few techniques i have used in DealFlakes.Com, Online Deal Aggregator.

Good Luck…

[update]

I thought its good to include few more sample templates, just to give more info on template creation.

To render the following HTML

<div id=”id-of-the-object” class=”someClass”><a href=”/point to some url” target=”_blank” title = “name-of-the-object”>name-of-the-object</a></div>

our template is going to be something like

var itemTps = function() {return ['div', { id:this.Id, className: "someClass"}, ['a', {href:"/point to some url", target: "_blank", title: this.Name }, [this.Name]]]};

the key understand the templates are as follows

• “[” is for creating a new element (could be a text element)

• “{” represents the attributes of the enclosing elements.
• Enclose your elements with single quotation “‘” marks
• Enclose your attribute values with double quotation “”" marks…

Hope this clears few things…

DealFlakes is basically a Deal Aggregation portal !

1. JQUERY (for communication and User Experience effects)
2. LINQ – (Linq-to-SQL and Linq-to-XML to talk to my data stores)
3. And at this point ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 (I love the caching and Authentication modules in this preview)
4. SQL Server (2005) with some XML files
5. And hosted on IIS7 (Windows Server 2008)

I have learned quite a bit of JavaScript while working with Jquery and i encourage all of you to have a look at it. I am sure, you are going to love it. And my CSS skills are getting better Well, layout is kind of similar to Digg, umm(they invented the wheel)!!!

Any how, if you are a bargain hunter and would like to keep some money in your pocket (May be more available balance on your credit card) you should check out dealflakes.com. I am going to keep this as a serious website and not going to play with it any more (at least that effects the Functionality and User Experience). And yes, i will be adding some very exciting features very soon. So, stay tuned.

Go DealFlakes…

Budigelli

I had some trouble with web.config file migration in the beginning (need to migrate web.config file to work on server 2008’s integrated mode).

All the projects i am working on going through a face-lift at this time. I will update the progress as i make them available.

Thanks for your time..

I have couple of blog posts on my journey to find a reasonably priced (read, under my budget) windows server 2008 host with decent SQL Server 2005 data storage space. Like you find in most blogs, i have AdSense all over my blog:( So, i was going through the blog the other day and found a new advertisement for SQL Server hosting.

Having done substantial research on the existing hosting providers, i was surprised with this new provider. For a second, i thought may be i didn’t really search right!!! With Google’s AdSense TOC in mind (i believe i should not click on the AdSense links on my own site ), i patiently opened a new window and typed in the site’s name. Well, I got a web site that has nothing to do with either SQL Server or Hosting. I guess they choose to bid on SQL Server hosting related keywords (May be they are cheaper compared to the right keywords in the market sector they are in).

In any case, i was thinking…Is it OK to advertise for something to make a user click on that link they offer complete different business model. Considering it is an online entity i was out of there in a second. But, how would we react if a Brick-and-Mortar store does this to us? You see a restaurant name out side only find some weired stuff in side?

Would love to hear your thoughts!!!

The website i was talking about is www.sortprice.com and see the image.

For some reason, the search phrase “asp.net mvc forms authentication” looks like an auto-generated search! Umm, i am sure i have searched before along those lines with out any problem. Any one ever had this issue!!

Check the below screen shot..

Careful what you are searching for Something could be wrong

My biggest concern is the testing! I develop on Vista running IIS7 and to deploy it on Windows Server 2003 running on IIS6 seems to be a big risk. I don’t have any Windows server 2003 machines to set up a stage environment! So, to minimize the potential risk, i am again in the hunt for a hosting provider with Windows Server 2008. I have upped my budget to $70-80 per month.

Mean while, I have tried/tested HostExcellence.com and FullControl.net. I would try to elaborate more on that some  time.

I finally found that my current host (where the application is current running), WebHost4life.com is providing Windows Server 2008 (from today!!!). I have asked them to upgrade my account to the Server 2008 platform. They are usually pretty good to respond, lets see what happens this time.

Note : This domain (budigelli.com) is hosted on Media Temple. So far, i am happy with them for the price and features.

Thanks,

One of the main thing was the way i handle my Data Layer. My Data Layer is a class library project and I have separate Business, Entity, and UI layers. My Data Layer is done using LINQ to SQL with stored procedures (All my interaction with Database are using Stored Procedures). When i dragged and dropped required tables and stored procedures in to the designer, behind the scenes, the DBML file, (specifically, the DataContext class) hasa default constructor that stores the connection string. To Re-iterate, we have this connection string defined in Web.Config, and app.Config (gets created for class library projects), and this hard coded value in “.dbml” File.

I googled for few min to find out couple of good posts on this issue and here is the summary and the steps to only have one connection string in “web.Config” file.

You can find more info on this by Rick, by Jon Gallant, and by David Klein.

I went ahead with what was posted on David klein’s article. On the “.dbml” designer properties, first made the “Application Settings” to false and tried to compile with partial class. But that didn’t compile. I read the comments David’s post and made the “Connection” to “Null”. When i saved and compiled the project it compiled. So, i deleted the Settings File, App.Config File and compiled and ran the application with out any problem.

Now, i only have one place to manage my connection string (in web.config file).

Recap.

• Set the “Connection” Property for the “.dbml” designer file to “Null”
• Create a partial class for your DataContext class and have the constructor with base constructor reading the connection string from web.config file

public partial class DataClasses1DataContext

{

public DataClasses1DataContext() : base (ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["ConnectionString"].ConnectionString)

{

OnCreated();

}

}

• Make sure you have Connection string in your web.config.

Thats it. Simple !!! Happy Coding…

Update: The next time i tried to add a Stored Procedure or Table to the DataContext Designer, i still have to go to the properties of the DataContext and tell it not to read from “appsettings” and set the connection string to null/empty string. I wish there is a permanent way to say, do not populate these values

I could not find a decent host with the following requirements for (under)  $50.00

I was looking for

• Windows Server 2008 (for IIS7)
• Decent amount of storage (about 5-10 GB)
• Reasonable Bandwidth (Not sure, but may be around 100-200 GB)
• SQL Server Space min 1 GB (The most important thing)

Those were my requirements! Am i asking for too much? Not sure, but could not find a host offering the above hosting package under $50.00. If any hosting provider(s) reading this post, there is a sector not covered!!!

The biggest problem i see with most hosting package is the SQL Server Space. Some of them offer as much as 50MB (Not a TYPO). 50MB? and let me install up to 6 Databases each with that size. I am not really what i could do with 50MB, esp – my app regularly pools data from different data sources.

With all said and done, i have signed up with a Basic VPS package on GoDaddy.com. I was not sure what to expect when moving from a shared hosting to VPS, but i was in for a big surprise.

On shared hosting, all i needed to do was upload the files and make sure my connection string are properly mapped! On VPS, i have this server (clean slate) that need to configure as per my needs. I am installing .NET 3.5, SQL Express, ASP.NET Preview 3, Configuring my emails (POP3 and SMTP). Big Change!!! i am not even at half way through my set up and would write more on how it goes…

If you are moving from a shared hosting to either VPS/VDS or Dedicated Server, plan on setting aside some time for deployment. Good Luck