Steve Trefethen's LinkBlog

High Performance Multithreaded Access to Amazon SimpleDB

AWS Editor — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:16:39 -0500

We have just released a new code sample.

Written in Java, this new sample shows how Amazon SimpleDB can be used as a repository for metadata which describes objects stored in Amazon S3. The code was written to illustrate best practices for indexing S3 data and for getting the best indexing and query performance from SimpleDB.

Indexing is implemented at two levels. At the first level, multiple threads (implemented using the Java Executor) are used to ensure that a number of S3 reads and a number of SimpleDB writes are taking place simultaneously. At the second level, Amazon SQS is used to coordinate index tasks running on multiple systems, leading to an even higher degree of concurrency.

Bulk queries are implemented using a pair of thread pools. The first pool runs SimpleDB queries and the second retrieves SimpleDB attributes. With the proper balance between the two pools, a Small Amazon EC2 instance was able to make over 300 requests per second.

Check it out!

-- Jeff;

John Resig - Processing.js

(author unknown) — Fri, 09 May 2008 17:11:50 -0500

Introducing LINQ To Regex - ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog

(author unknown) — Fri, 09 May 2008 17:03:57 -0500

Unit Testing, Test Driven Development, Agile Development, Team System, .NET Architecture Blog by Roy Osherove

Mitsu's blog : Visual Linq query builder for Linq to Sql: VLinq

(author unknown) — Fri, 09 May 2008 17:02:12 -0500

Hi all, After almost one year of work and organization, I am very happy to share this project with you: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vlinq - new setup fixed (4/17/2008) The Visual Linq query builder is a Visual Studio 2008 addin. It's a designer that

How To: Getting Started with Amazon EC2 - PaulStamatiou.com

(author unknown) — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:05:05 -0500

Shared by Steve
Great tutorial on getting started with Amazon's EC2 service

Amazon EC2 is among the more potent items in Amazon's web services arsenal. You've probably heard of many of the other services such as S3 for storage and FPS for payments. EC2 is all about the elastic compute cloud. In layman's terms, it's a server. In slightly less layman's terms, EC2 lets you easily run ...

Microsoft Photo Info 1.0

Veign — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:41:29 -0500

Microsoft Photo Info allows photographers to add, change and delete common "metadata" properties for digital photographs from inside Windows Explorer.

When installed, a new "Photo Info" item appears on the context menu for files selected in Windows Explorer. To use, simply select one or more image files, right-click and choose "Photo Info" to open the Photo Info properties editor. You can edit metadata for files individually, or all together as a batch. Photo Info reads and writes metadata in IPTC and XMP formats (depending on file type). It also provides enhanced "hover tips" and additional sort properties for digital photographs in Windows Explorer.

Link:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...

Opera's answer to FireBug

(author unknown) — Wed, 07 May 2008 01:29:33 -0500

Shared by Steve
Cool! Always useful to have new debugging tools.

I'm a big fan of the Opera browser for its speed and excellent out-of-the-box functionality. One of the few things I have been willing to concede that it was lacking was a good interactive debugger like FireBug, until now. Opera Dragonfly has arrived!

.NET 1.1.4.1 with Contacts support released

api.rboyd — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 10:47:12 -0500

Posted by Frank Mantek, Google Data APIs Team

We are happy to announce that we've just just released a new version of the .NET client library for Google Data APIs, based on the Atom Publishing Protocol. There are a lot of changes in this release, but the most notable changes are listed here.

Visual Studio Project Templates
It was never so easy to get going. When you use the setup program, 6 project templates are placed into your Visual Studio template folder. Now, just use "New Project" and pick the template you like. You get a minimal, but working Google Data API application. They use a common login dialog, log you in, and display the result in a listview. It's easy to start, easy to modify. If you choose the archive download, just copy the templates from the subversion repository to your Visual Studio installation.

Better Visual Studio integration
After installation, the Google .NET assemblies are now registered and they will show up in the "Add reference" dialog. No more searching your harddisk to find the just installed SDK.

.NET 2.0 and upwards
Support for .NET 1.1 was removed with this release. Generics and other features just make the SDK perform better, as well as rendering it easier to maintain-something that will help us in adding more features in the future. If you still need 1.1 support, you can use the older versions of the .NET client library.

Support for Google Contacts
There is a new objectmodel for the Google Contacts API, as well as a project template to get you going.

You can find the release here:
http://code.google.com/p/google-gdata/downloads/list

and if you happen to find bugs or have suggestions, please post them here:
http://code.google.com/p/google-gdata/issues/list

BPA Free thanks to Eastman Tritan

(author unknown) — Sat, 03 May 2008 18:34:40 -0500

It's been almost 18 months since I first learned (and blogged) about Bisphenol-A (BPA). There has been a lot of press about this chemical recently as Canada has come close to banning the chemical from a number of products, most notably baby bottles.

Shortly thereafter a number of interesting things happened.

1) Nalgene, famous for their clear lexan polycarbonate water bottles, phased out all their polycarbonate products. Nalgene is probably responsible for exposing millions of adults to BPA due to their trendy and popular water bottles. I had half a dozen of these in 2006 (all replaced by SIGG bottles).

2) Wall-Mart announced it would pull all BPA bottles from its stores

The Today Show aired a report that basically said that all plastics with the #7 on them contained BPA. This is just wrong. #7 is a catch all for all plastics not covered by codes #1 - #6. While, BPA does generally carry the label #7, so do BPA-free alternatives made from bio-plastics like Polyamide. In fact, the #7 is so confusing that Camelback has removed it from their BPA-free products.

NPR wrote about this a few weeks ago.

"I think the writing's on the wall for this chemical," said Aaron Freeman, policy director of Toronto-based Environmental Defence Canada. "You've got major retailers with huge market clout pulling BPA products ... and you've got consumers in droves who are opting for alternatives. They're a bit late to the game, but they are responding to that consumer demand."

The key word here is "consumer demand".

Nalgene cites consumer demand as the reason for pulling PBA products.

Question: Why is Nalgene transitioning from polycarbonate to other materials?
Answer: Nalgene’s principle goal is to create reusable containers for a wide range of consumers; from hikers and outdoor enthusiasts to commuters and kids on-the-go. We are always looking for new materials and products that help us meet that goal. Our decision to phase out production of the Outdoor line of polycarbonate containers is in response to consumer demand for products that do not include Bisphenol-A (BPA).

Today I was in REI with my wife and noticed that all the Polycarbonate bottles are gone. Instead they have been replaced with Bottles from Nalgene and Camelback that proudly say "BPA Free". I purchased a Camelback Better Bottle. These bottles are made from Eastman Tritan, a copolyester. Eastman developed Tritan due to consumer demand for a BPA-free plastic and announced availability on October 2007.

“CamelBak’s success comes from delivering consumers innovative products,” explains CamelBak CEO Sally McCoy, “Eastman partnered with us to create a BPA free CamelBak® Better Bottle using its new Tritan copolyester. This ground-breaking polymer allows us to better meet the needs of our customers by giving them a BPA free choice in re-usable bottles.”

Eastman Tritan™ copolyester is also easy to process and can be used in molds designed for polycarbonate. This feature allowed CamelBak to switch materials with minimal production changes. “Eastman Tritan™ copolyester is easy to work with. Only minor tooling and temperature adjustments were required to manufacture the CamelBak® Better Bottle with this new material, which facilitated the transition for our staff,” says Mike Crook, CamelBak’s Vice President of Operations.

“With its optimal combination of durability, clarity and BPA free construction, Eastman Tritan copolyester will enable us to accelerate the growth of our CamelBak® Better Bottle business using consumer desired innovation,” comments McCoy.

What I find amazing is that capitalism is at work and the market is responding to customer demand even if BPA has not been identified as harmful to children or adults by any government agency. Got to love it.

CamelBack proudly states on their homepage that they have an arsenal of new products that are BPA-free.

Do a search for BPA on Google and you'll see advertisements from:

REI
BornFree Bottles
Nalgene
Camelback

Amazon.com even has a BPA-free product store.

So where should you be on the lookout for BPA? Here are some obvious places and products I like.

Water Bottles

Recycle any of your clear Lexan water bottles and replace with BPA alternatives like:

Baby Bottles

Born Free (this is what my wife and I have been using for 18 months and we could not be happier)
Green to Grow
All Glass Bottles

most Glass bottles are narrow body and we preferred the wide neck or wide body, Born Free does make a Glass wide neck bottle.

Sippy Cups

Born Free
Avent (these truly rock and are spill proof)
SIGG

French Press

Glass - most French Presses these days are Polycarbonate.

Food Storage

Bodum Yohki
Pyrex Glass

Check out Z-Recommends for lots more product related BPA info.

This time next year I would not be surprised if BPA was a thing of the past. Unfortunately there are many places where we as consumers don't have a choice yet with respect to BPA (formula can liners, canned food liners, polystyrene coffee lids).

The posts on this weblog are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.

How to setup a live real-time polls using Google Docs

(author unknown) — Fri, 02 May 2008 06:29:33 -0500

via: Robert Scoble's shared items in Google Reader (drop this source • show all sources)

• help

relevance:

Form Builder; forms

• Aseem Kishore

(tell me more...)

rate it: |

akishore via Online Tech Tips shared by 1 people

I don’t think many people noticed, but Google Docs released a new feature a while back that lets you create live polls instantly and share the data with the participants while the poll is going on! That’s pretty neat! They can see the live data of the responses as people fill out the form.

Basically, you have to create a Spreadsheet and then setup a form on the spreadsheet. I’ll go through the steps to do this as it’s pretty easy to do and very cool!

How to create a real-time survey/poll

First step is that you need to log into your Google Docs account and create a new spreadsheet.

Now click on the Share tab at the far right of the screen. It’s between the Discuss and Publish tabs.

Name your spreadsheet something that represents the type of poll you are creating, i.e. “Best Game Console” or “Best Looking Celebrity”. Click OK and you’ll be brought to the share options.

Under the Invite People section, you need to choose “to fill out a form” radio button, then click Start editing your form.

A new window will pop up that lets you create your form. It’s pretty self-explanatory in that you can create a text question, multiple choice, check boxes, or a list. You can continue to add as many questions as you like.

Click Done when you are finished and you’ll see a preview of the form. Click Next to choose who you want to send it to. You can choose from your contacts or you can simply copy the link at the right and send that in an email.

To see the form itself, click on Go to live form at the top right. Now to see to the data coming in, simply close the pop up window to get back to your main window. You can now click the X at the right to get back to the main spreadsheet itself. You should now see that it says this spreadsheet is receiving entries via a form.

Go ahead and fill out the form yourself and you’ll see the results show up automatically in the spreadsheet!

Pretty neat! You can keep the form open as long as you like and the data will be updated automatically! Even as the data is coming in, you can create formulas and charts to graphically represent the data! Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: google docs, create live polls, create real-time polls, live surveys, real-time surveys

Copyright © 2007
Online Tech Tips.
Aseem Kishore (digitalfingerprint: a59a56dce36427d83e23b501579944fcakmk1980 (66.150.96.121) )

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NSimpleDB - Use Amazon´s SimpleDB data model in your applications now - Part 4

ralfw — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 05:17:58 -0600

As explained in my previous postings , I implemented a local/embeddable version of the Amazon SimpleDB data model and API in C#. You can download the sources from my NSimpleDB Google Code Project and build the tuple space engine yourself, or you download...(read more)

Architecture astronauts take over

Joel Spolsky — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:01:57 -0500

It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft's bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that "Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work together on your behalf and under your control."

What was it, really? The idea that the future operating system was on the net, on Microsoft's cloud, and you would log onto everything with Windows Passport and all your stuff would be up there. It turns out: nobody needed this place for all their stuff. And nobody trusted Microsoft with all their stuff. And Hailstorm went away.

I tried to coin a term for the kind of people who invented Hailstorm: architecture astronauts. "That's one sure tip-off to the fact that you're being assaulted by an Architecture Astronaut: the incredible amount of bombast; the heroic, utopian grandiloquence; the boastfulness; the complete lack of reality. And people buy it! The business press goes wild!"

The hallmark of an architecture astronaut is that they don't solve an actual problem... they solve something that appears to be the template of a lot of problems. Or at least, they try. Since 1988 many prominent architecture astronauts have been convinced that the biggest problem to solve is synchronization.

Follow the story, here. I started picking on one company that appeared to be particularly astronautish: Groove, which was trying to rebuild Lotus Notes (a giant synchronization machine) in a peer-to-peer fashion.

Groove had some early success selling secure networks to the military-industrial complex, but didn't make much of a ripple outside that niche. Their real success was in getting bought by Microsoft, which brought Groove's designer and chief architecture-astronaut Ray Ozzie to the role of "Chief Software Architect" at Microsoft, supposedly the technical guy that would keep inventing the future after BillG left so that Steve Ballmer would have some new territory on which to build his next illegal monopoly.

And now Ray Ozzie's big achievement arrives and what is it? (drumroll...) Microsoft Live Mesh. The future of everything. Microsoft is "moving into the cloud."

What's Microsoft Live Mesh?

Hmm, let's see.

"Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about."

Wait a minute. Something smells fishy here. Isn't that exactly what Hailstorm was supposed to be? I smell an architecture astronaut.

And what is this Windows Live Mesh?

It's a way to synchronize files.

Jeez, we've had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I'm sorry. It seems like it should be. But it's not.

But Windows Live Mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. That's just the sample app. It's a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop. And synchronizing files is supposed to be, like, the equivalent of Microsoft Write on Windows 1.0.

It's Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can't stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.

And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn't stop him.

How on earth does Microsoft continue to pour massive resources into building the same frigging synchronization platforms again and again? Damn, they just finished building something called Windows Live FolderShare and I haven't exactly noticed a stampede to that. I'll bet you've never even heard of it. The 3,398th web site that lets you upload and download files to a place on the Internet. I'm so excited I might just die.

I shouldn't really care. What Microsoft's shareholders want to waste their money building, instead of earning nice dividends from two or three fabulous monopolies, is no business of mine. I'm not a shareholder. It sort of bothers me, intellectually, that there are these people running around acting like they're building the next great thing who keep serving us the same exact TV dinner that I didn't want on Sunday night, and I didn't want it when you tried to serve it again Monday night, and you crunched it up and mixed in some cheese and I didn't eat that Tuesday night, and here it is Wednesday and you've rebuilt the whole goddamn TV dinner industry from the ground up and you're giving me 1955 salisbury steak that I just DON'T WANT. What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don't want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build. The people? They love twitter. And flickr and delicious and picasa and tripit and ebay and a million other fun things, which they do want, and this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it's a fun programming exercise that you're doing because it's just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can't figure it out.

Why I really care is that Microsoft is vacuuming up way too many programmers. Between Microsoft, with their shady recruiters making unethical exploding offers to unsuspecting college students, and Google (you're on my radar) paying untenable salaries to kids with more ultimate frisbee experience than Python, whose main job will be to play foosball in the googleplex and walk around trying to get someone...anyone...to come see the demo code they've just written with their "20% time," doing some kind of, let me guess, cloud-based synchronization... between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can't think of a single useful thing to build for us, but they need another 3000-4000 comp sci grads next week. And dammit foosball doesn't play itself.

Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Storage Space, The Final Frontier

AWS Editor — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 23:07:16 -0500

Developers who have found our cloud computing model attractive have been asking us to be a little bit more open about what we are planning to do in the future. To date we've simply announced new additions to the Amazon Web Services lineup, with immediate beta availability at the time of announcement.

Earlier this year we started to post specifications for new features along with requests for feedback. We did this for the Amazon S3 Copy feature and for Amazon S3 Post Support . We received a lot of helpful feedback in both cases.

Now it is time for the next step...

I am excited to be able to tell you about an entire new feature, a feature so new that it doesn't even have a proper name, and that you can't use just yet. But you can read about it and you can start thinking about the best way to incorporate it into your system architecture.

If you have taken a close look at Amazon EC2, you know that the instances are ephemeral. The instances have anywhere from 160 GB to 1.7 TB of attached storage. The storage is there as long as the instance is running, but of course it disappears as soon as the instance is shut down. Applications with a need for persistent storage could store data in Amazon S3 or in Amazon SimpleDB, but they couldn't readily access either one as if it was an actual file system.

As you can read in our forum post, we've been working on addressing this.

In the same way that your running EC2 instances, your Elastic IP addresses, your S3 buckets and your SQS queues can be thought of as items contained within the scope of your AWS account, our forthcoming persistent storage feature will give you the ability to create reliable, persistent storage volumes for use with EC2. Once created, these volumes will be part of your account and will have a lifetime independent of any particular EC2 instance.

These volumes can be thought of as raw, unformatted disk drives which can be formatted and then used as desired (or even used as raw storage if you'd like). Volumes can range in size from 1 GB on up to 1 TB; you can create and attach several of them to each EC2 instance. They are designed for low latency, high throughput access from Amazon EC2. Needless to say, you can use these volumes to host a relational database.

You will also be able to perform "snapshot" backups of your volumes to Amazon S3. You can use these snapshots to create new volumes or to roll back your stored data to an earlier point in time.

The volumes are accessible via a new set of APIs, with functions like CreateVolume, DeleteVolume, AttachVolume, and CreateSnapshot. The same functionality is also available via the EC2 Command-Line tools.

I spent some time experimenting with this new feature on Saturday. In a matter of minutes I was able to create a pair of 512 GB volumes, attach them to an EC2 instance, create file systems on them with mkfs, and then mount them. When I was done I simply unmounted, detached, and then finally deleted them.

First I created the volumes from the command line of my Windows desktop:

U:\USER\Jeff\Amazon> ec2-create-volume -s 549755813888

VOLUME vol-4695702f 549755813888 creating 2008-04-13T22:17:35+0000

U:\USER\Jeff\Amazon> ec2-create-volume -s 549755813888

VOLUME vol-59957030 549755813888 creating;2008-04-13T22:17:49+0000

U:\USER\Jeff\Amazon> ec2-describe-volumes

VOLUME vol-4695702f 549755813888 available 2008-04-13T22:17:35+0000

VOLUME vol-59957030 549755813888 available 2008-04-13T22:17:49+0000

Then I attached them to my EC2 instance:

U:\USER\Jeff\Amazon> ec2-attach-volume vol-4695702f -i i-6b3bfd02 -d /dev/sdb
ATTACHMENT vol-4695702f i-6b3bfd02 /dev/sdb attaching 2008-04-13T22:36:32+0000

U:\USER\Jeff\Amazon> ec2-attach-volume vol-59957030 -i i-6b3bfd02 -d /dev/sdc
ATTACHMENT vol-59957030 i-6b3bfd02 /dev/sdc attaching 2008-04-13T22:36:55+0000

Then I switched over to my instance, formatted and mounted them, and I was all set:

# yes | mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb
# yes | mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdc

# mkdir /space1 /space2

# mount /dev/sdb /space1
# mount /dev/sdc /space2

# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             9.9G  765M  8.6G   8% /
none                  851M     0  851M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda2             147G  188M  140G   1% /mnt
/dev/sdb              504G  201M  479G   1% /space1
/dev/sdc              504G  201M  479G   1% /space2

Perhaps I am biased, but the ability to requisition this much storage on an as-needed basis seems pretty cool.

A few EC2 customers are already using these new volumes and we will be opening it up to a wider audience later this year. You should sign up now if you are interested in gaining access to this cool new feature. If you don't already have an Amazon Web Services account, get one today before you sign up for the waiting list.

We'll be releasing more information as soon as possible and I'll do my best to cover it here when we do.

Updated: Here is some additional coverage:

Amazon's Werner Vogels talks about this feature in Persistent Storage for Amazon EC2.
RightScale's Thorsten vok Eiken does too, in Amazon takes EC2 to the next level with persistent storage volumes.

--- Jeff;

Animoto - Scaling Through Viral Growth

AWS Editor — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 14:04:30 -0500

Animoto is a very neat Amazon-powered application. Built on top of Amazon EC2, S3, and SQS, the site allows you to upload a series of images. It then generates a unique, attractive, and entertaining music video using your own music or something selected from the royalty-free library on the site. Last week I spoke to a group of Computer Science and IT students at Utah Valley State College. Before leaving Seattle I spent some time downloading images from their athletics site. I then combined this with some Southern Surf Syndicate music from The Penetrators and ended up with this really nice video:

There's a lot going on in the background. After the images and the music have been uploaded, proprietary algorithms analyze them and then render the final video. This can take an appreciable amount of time and requires a considerable amount of computing power.

Animoto co-founder and CEO Brad Jefferson stopped by Amazon HQ for a quick visit on Thursday. Earlier in the week we had seen their EC2 usage grow substantially and I was interested in learning more. Brad explained that they had introduced the Animoto Videos Facebook application about a month earlier and that it had done pretty well, with about 25,000 users signing up over the course of the month, with steady, linear growth.

The reaction from the Facebook community was positive, so the folks at Animoto decided to step it up a notch. They noticed that a significant portion of users who installed the app never made their first Animoto video — yet the application (as they themselves admit) relies heavily on the 'wow' factor of seeing your first Animoto video and wanting to share it with your friends. On Monday the team made a subtle but important change to their application: they auto-created a user's first Animoto video.

That did the trick!

They had 25,000 members on Monday, 50,000 on Tuesday, and 250,000 on Thursday. Their EC2 usage grew as well. For the last month or so they had been using between 50 and 100 instances. On Tuesday their usage peaked at around 400, Wednesday it was 900, and then 3400 instances as of Friday morning. Here's a chart:

We are really happy to see Animoto succeed and to be able to help them to scale up their user base and their application so quickly. I'm fairly certain that it would be difficult for them to get their hands on nearly 3500 compute nodes so quickly in any other way.

-- Jeff;

Movin' on up

(author unknown) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 07:24:06 -0500

There are strange things afoot! (Well, perhaps not "strange," and certainly not just at the Circle K.) In the coming weeks, upon visiting www.feedburner.com, selected publishers will have the opportunity to sign in using their Google Account and experience FeedBurner, now as part of the Google.

If you are among these merry few who migrate early you won't see many changes at first. In fact, you might find yourself saying, "my, it's awfully quiet in here. Almost…too quiet." (But it may look a bit Googlier around the edges.) Your feeds should continue to hum along as they did before, and all of your settings will be yours to manage through your new or existing Google account. This is the same shiny Google account you use to sign into other services at Google.

Following on the footsteps of this account migration, FeedBurner will start to look and feel more like a set of Google services, and we will be completing much tighter integration into other Google services such as Google AdSense. (If you are a feed advertiser, don't worry: we have some happy surprises coming for you as well, and if you are an advertiser who is not yet a feed advertiser, you too shall be blessed with good fortune.)

As part of this Google Account migration, we will need to make a few process changes for our API partners. Effective immediately, the FeedBurner Management API will only be available for existing FeedBurner partners and those Google partners who currently have access to other Google AdSense APIs. The Awareness API will continue to work exactly as it did before, noting that once you migrate to a Google account, you will have to use your Google account credentials IF you use the authenticated API.

If, going forward, you do not want to sign in with a Google account, you can always take your feeds with you by redirecting your subscribers back to your source. Migration will ultimately be here for everybody, including all you MyBrand folks who are master of your domain.

47 ASP.NET MVC Resources to Rock Your Development

craigshoemaker — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:59:00 -0500

Craig Shoemaker takes you on a tour of the best ASP.NET MVC resources available today.

Listen to the Show Here

jQuery

How have I missed jQuery all this time? I am really loving the support jQuery can provide for all kinds of things like AJAX and controls, but my favorite feature is the support for CSS3-like behavior that is available today in a cross-browser fashion.

Here is a script I used recently to "stripe" a table (provide alternating row colors).

$(document).ready(function() {
    $('table.striped tr:odd').css('background', '#eee');
});

Community Events

Here are some community events that have come across my radar lately.

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! Day Ireland - Saturday May 3rd 2008! This FREE developer event brings DDD to Galway!
West Michigan Day of .NET May 10, 2008 -- Grand Rapids
TechBash May 10, 2008 in Nanticoke, PA

ASP.NET MVC Resources

By now surely you have had at least some exposure to the new ASP.NET MVC framework. As with any new technology often times trying to find the quality resources to rely on may be a trying task.

Get the Latest

To help make your development experience more comortable the following is a list of 47 of the most interesting and helpful ASP.NET MVC resources available to-date. Now while we can all agree that this post becomes a legacy artifact as soon as I press the "Publish" button, make sure to frequently visit the links below for the latest ASP.NET MVC goodness:

Frequent the Tags: Let the .NET community bring you the best MVC content on DotNetKicks, Technorati and del.icio.us
Ask the Questions: Find out the answers to your burning questions on the official ASP.NET MVC forums
Search the Web: Use Google to help you find posts and articles with the highest Google ranking and what's recently emerged in the blogosphere (rss)

Introductions & Architectural Overview

Let's start with a good foundation, shall we? The following links are a good read for the uninitiated as well as those who have had the bits since before preview 2.

What is ASP.NET MVC and Where's It Going? Scott Guthrie details the ASP.NET MVC roadmap and announces the changes made to the ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 along with links to a five part tutorial series introducing the platform.
MVC 101: Simone Chiaretta introduces the framework by explaining the technology along the natural breaking points. If you'd like to watch some demonstration videos you can watch Scott Hanselman's excellent presentation from MIX08 and Jeffrey Palermo's show over on DNRTV.
ASP.NET MVC Request Lifecycle: Stephen Walther provides a detailed explanation of each step in the MVC request lifecycle. Making his post even more valuable is how he ends the piece by highlighting the extensibility points at each stage of the lifecycle.
Why Not Support Post-Backs?: One of the most common questions of experienced WebForms people is, "Why throw out the control model?" This thread does a good job of addressing that issue.
Want the Source?: You can download the MVC source code here.
The Latest: Scott Guthrie announces pre-Preview 3 and Fredrik Normén gives you a step-by-step on working with the pre-Preview 3 release.

Routing

One of the first mindset shifts you have to make is to think up-front about the URLs on your site. The Routes Table is a new concept introduced along with MVC. These links will help you get started:

Routes 101: The best place to start learning routes is Scott Guthrie's first tutorial on the subject.
Placement: Most of the tutorials on routes show you how to set them up in the Global.asax. Having these in a class require compliation and deployment to realize changes. To avoid these problems, Ian Suttle shows us how to store routes in the database and Fredrik Normén has an example of how to maintain your routes in the web.config (perhaps the most natural place).
Upcoming Changes: Phil Haack details the upcoming changes to routes. In his words, "Isn’t preview code so much fun?" :)

Building the UI

Once you've got the basics down you are going to want to know how to execute some of the common tasks that you are used to doing under any development platform. These links will get you up-and-running.

Component Controllers, User Controls or Views?: Mike Bosch shows you how to use the component controller class to render parts of views that do not rely on the main page's ViewData. Chris Sainty doesn't want to be stuck with just using traditional user controls, but wants a "partial view" that you can provide with variable-based parameters. When you want to use traditional user controls, Rob Conery wants to show you how to use ASP.NET user controls appropriately in an MVC application.
UI Helper Methods: Rob also has more help for you to demonstrate how to use the UI Helpers to generate links, forms, buttons and more that automatically map to your controller classes.
Pagination User Control: Robert Muehsig demonstrates how to build a pagination view user control.

Integration with the Familiar

Learn to use MVC with AJAX, the Membership framework as well as older versions of IIS.

MVC + AJAX: Nikhil Kothari shows us how you can use the existing ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX framework with MVC.
MVC + ASP.NET Membership: Make sure to remember that ASP.NET is much more than just the Page/Control paradigm of WebForms. Troy Goode has started an ASP.NET Membership Starter Kit to help you get started adding membership to your site.
MVC + IIS 5.1 & 6: A tenant of the MVC is extensionless URLs. Getting extensionless URL to work on IIS versions earlier than IIS7 can be a difficult task. Charles Vallance shows you how to get your IIS 5.1 or 6 server ready to serve an MVC site. James Geurts also offers a way to do the same thing in IIS6 using an ISAPI rewrite.

Implementing Security

Forms authentication is alive and well with MVC, but you need to interface with the system in a different way:

Securing Controller Actions: While you will still use forms authentication, MVC is all about defining resources via the URL so folder-based lock-downs don't make as much sense. The best way to add a secure layer to your application is to secure controller actions.
Using XML: Check this out! Azam Sharp shows you how to secure controller actions with an XML file.

REST

As they say, REST has been around for a long time, but there are those of us who are just being introduced:

Definition: Get the high-level story over on Wikipedia.
REST 101: Ryan Tomayko explains REST to his wife in "How I Explained REST to My Wife" and we all win. Dino Esposito also illustrates on the concepts of REST in MVC.
REST + MVC: Rob Conery describes ASP.NET MVC in the context of REST. Aaron Lerch demonstrates how to build your site once and make it readable by both machines and humans.

Validation

Without the page/control paradigm of WebForms some have wondered if MVC developers are going to be left to reimplement validation JavaScript all over again. Lay your worries to rest!

Validation Control Framework: Matt Hawley is working on a very nice validation framework for MVC that harnesses a lot of what already exisits in the standard control-based JavaScript libraries (Make sure to read the comments on this post too!) You may also want to check out the Validator Toolkit over on CodePlex as well.
CAPTCHA: Helping to keep the bots out is Nick Berardi with an article on how to add CAPTCHA to your apps.

Testing

One of the main reasons of using MVC is to have the ability to fully test your applications.

ASP.NET MVC Testing 101: ASP.NET MVC Framework – Part 2: Testing
From the Ground Up: Rob Conery explores TDD while building an MVC application. Rob's just getting started and we're expecting some great lessons by the time he's done.
Testing Actions: Jeffrey Palermo discusses his experiences testing controller actions and offers how to streamline the process in the future.

Books

Blog posts and podcasts are great, but to really sink into the technology check out these books:

ASP.NET MVC In Action (Manning Early Access Edition)
Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework

Amazon.com Widgets

Building Your Own Home Theater PC

(author unknown) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:22:56 -0500

I've kept a PC in my living room for the past three years as my primary home theater interface, and I heartily recommend it. It's shocking how cheap and easy it is to build a home theater PC these days.

I've been pondering an upgrade to my creaky old home theater PC, and rave reviews of the new integrated AMD platform at Tech Report, Silent PC Review, and Tom's Hardware finally pushed me over the edge.

CPU	AMD Athlon X2 4050e 2.1 GHz (45w)	$70
Mobo	Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H Micro ATX	$100
RAM	Kingston 2GB DDR2 800	$39
PSU	Seasonic ECO 300W	$55
DVD	Lite-On 20X DVD±R SATA	$29

I didn't buy the PSU because I already have that particular model, but I bought everything else on this list for a grand total of less than 250 bucks. (You can save a bit on the power supply, but I don't recommend it, particularly if you plan to leave your HTPC running 24/7. Efficient power supplies not only save you money on electricity in the long run, but also tend to be of generally higher quality, and quieter to boot.)

The new AMD 780G platform is striking in its simplicity. Just pop in the RAM and the low-power Athlon X2 CPU and you have an (almost) complete ultra low-power home theater PC. Just check out the awesome array of rear panel connections:

We have the expected stuff (4x USB, gigabit ethernet), but the exciting part is DVI, VGA, and HDMI video out! Not to mention optical digital out for beautiful, pristine digital audio direct to your receiver. Those are the key connections for a home theater PC. We even have an eSATA port and firewire thrown in, which is always nice.

I simply dropped the new motherboard and DVD in my existing transparent acrylic Micro-ATX PC case, replacing the old stuff. (If you're thinking of going this route, I can recommend the Antec Minuet Micro-ATX case for $100, which conveniently comes with an efficient power supply, too -- but be aware of the half-height expansion slots.)

I kept my existing hard drives (a small 2.5" boot drive for low noise / power consumption, and giant capacity 3.5" drives for long-term storage and recording), and my Hauppauge PVR-150 dual analog PCI tuner card, which I love to death.

For the longest time, integrated graphics was synonymous with craptacular graphics. That's not the case for this new AMD 780g chipset. The integrated graphics are fully DirectX 10 compliant, comparable to the latest entry-level discrete video cards. Gaming isn't our goal, though this would be perfectly adequate for many games. More importantly for a HTPC build, the integrated graphics support the full suite of H.264 and WMV video playback acceleration.

I know a WEI graphics score of 3.5 doesn't sound like much, but brother, let me tell you -- this is light years ahead of anything else on the market at this power consumption point.

My old Pentium-M single core struggled to play back 1080p videos. The Athlon X2 4050e CPU I chose is one of AMD's low power dual core models, far from top of the line. The testers at SilentPCReview found any modern dual core chip is more than enough for the most strenuous of video playback tasks:

Gradually underclocking the CPU, we found that the Blu Ray disc began to stutter at about 1.1Ghz, while audio glitches were detected in the WVC1 clip at 1.4Ghz. 1.5Ghz was the lowest clock speed that would smoothly play back all our clips. This was a fantastic result as the lowest clocked X2 on the market is 2.0 Ghz.

AMD is a better choice for a home theater PC because their idle voltage and multiplier throttling -- the marketing term is "Cool n' Quiet" -- is outstanding. (I'm also glad to have the opportunity to support AMD because I'm desperately afraid of a world where Intel is the only CPU vendor. And you should be too.) This variant of the Athlon 64 X2 chip is so new that CPU-Z doesn't quite recognize it by name. But as you can see, at idle, it clocks down to a miserly 1 GHz and reduces its power consumption to barely over one volt.

My old highly optimized HTPC build consumed just under 80 watts at idle, up from around 65 before I began upgrading it to make it more Vista friendly. Guess how much this new HTPC platform build, which is more than twice as powerful, consumes at idle? Let's whip out our handy dandy kill-a-watt and find out:

FORTY. SIX. WATTS.

That is flippin' amazing. We're talking about a powerful modern PC here, with quite a bit of additional hardware you wouldn't find in most PCs, including a dual TV tuner PCI card and three hard drives. Granted two of those drives are in sleep mode most of the time, but still. 46 watts -- twice the power at almost half the energy consumption! Incredible! Silence and efficiency were nowhere near this easy three or four years ago.

Needless to say, I'm pretty excited about this particular $250 upgrade, and I can sell my old parts to underwrite it.

On the software front, as I mentioned at the top, I've been a fan of Windows Media Center since the first version; it's one of the best products to come out of Redmond in years, and the version of Media Center bundled with Vista (well, Ultimate and Home Premium, anyway) is the best yet. With a hardware setup this compelling, I'm sure you'll have no problem at all mating it with your favorite HTPC software.

If you do end up running Windows and connecting your HTPC to a DVI or HDMI capable television, beware. Getting an exact, pixel-for-pixel connection between your HTPC and your TV isn't easy. For example, I had trouble getting the ATI Catalyst graphics driver to accept 852x480, the standard resolution of our old plasma EDTV. Sure 800x600 worked fine, but the aspect ratio was totally off. That's where PowerStrip comes in.

PowerStrip will let you achieve that ideal pixel-for-pixel perfect connection between your graphics card and your television. I selected the built in EDTV preset as a custom resolution, and all was well. PowerStrip is the go-to utility for tweaking home theater display output.

We use our home theater PC every day. It's silent, draws very little power, and it's small enough to tuck away cleanly in our living room decor. It plays anything through a slick 10-foot UI, and offers unrestricted access to the web at any time. Putting a great one together today is almost ridiculously easy. If you haven't considered building your own home theater PC -- why not?

UPDATE: since people asked, here's a complete from-scratch build list for a home theater PC.

CPU	AMD Athlon X2 4050e 2.1 GHz (45w)	$70
Mobo	Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H Micro ATX	$100
RAM	Kingston 2GB DDR2 800	$40
DVD	Lite-On 20X DVD±R SATA	$30
Case/PSU	Antec Minuet w/80plus certified PSU	$100
HDD	Western Digital quiet 500 GB	$90
Tuner	Hauppauge low profile analog cable/TV	$76
Remote	Standard Media Center IR	$17
		$523

If you plan to use Vista Media Center, add a Vista Home Premium SP1 license for $110. I also saw that Blu-Ray internal drives (read only) are down to $130 as of the time I'm writing this.

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Faster Builds with MSBuild using Parallel Builds and Multicore CPUs

Scott Hanselman — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:40:48 -0500

UPDATE: I've written an UPDATE on how to get MSBuild building using multiple cores from within Visual Studio. You might check that out when you're done here.

Jeff asked the question "Should All Developers Have Manycore CPUs?" this week. There are number of things in his post I disagree with.

First, "dual-core CPUs protect you from badly written software" is just a specious statement as it's the OS's job to protect you, it shouldn't matter how many cores there are.

Second, "In my opinion, quad-core CPUs are still a waste of electricity unless you're putting them in a server" is also silly. Considering that modern CPUs slow down when not being used, and use minimal electricity when compared to your desk lamp and monitors, I can't see not buying the best (and most) processors) that I can afford. The same goes with memory. Buy as much as you can comfortably afford. No one ever regretted having more memory, a faster CPU and a large hard drive.

Third he says,"there are only a handful of applications that can truly benefit from more than 2 CPU cores" but of course, if you're running a handful of applications, you can benefit even if they are not multi-threaded. Just yesterday I was rendering a DVD, watching Arrested Development, compiling an application, reading email while my system was being backed up by Home Server. This isn't an unreasonable amount of multitasking, IMHO, and this is why I have a quad-proc machine.

That said, the limits to which a machine can multi-task are often limited to the bottleneck that sits between the chair and keyboard. Jeff, of course, must realize this, so I'm just taking issue with his phrasing more than anything.

He does add the disclaimer, which is totally valid: "All I wanted to do here is encourage people to make an informed decision in selecting a CPU" and that can't be a bad thing.

MSBuild

Now, enough picking on Jeff, let's talk about my reality as a .NET Developer and a concrete reason I care about multi-core CPUs. Jeff compiled SharpDevelop using 2 cores and said "I see nothing here that indicates any kind of possible managed code compilation time performance improvement from moving to more than 2 cores."

When I compiled SharpDevelop via "MSBuild SharpDevelop.sln" (which uses one core) it took 11 seconds:

TotalMilliseconds : 11207.7979

Adding the /m:2 parameter to MSBuild yielded a 35% speed up:

TotalMilliseconds : 7190.3041

And adding /m:4 yielded (from 1 core) a a 59% speed up:

TotalMilliseconds : 4581.4157

Certainly when doing a command line build, why WOULDN'T I want to use all my CPUs? I can detect how many there are using an Environment Variable that is set automatically:

C:>echo %NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS%
4

But if I just say /m to MSBuild like

MSBuild /m

It will automatically use all the cores on the system to create that many MSBuild processes in a pool as seen in this Task Manager screenshot:

The MSBuild team calls these "nodes" because they are cooperating and act as a pool, building projects as fast as they can to the point of being I/O bound. You'll notice that their PIDs (Process IDs) won't change while they are living in memory. This means they are recycled, saving startup time over running MSBuild over and over (which you wouldn't want to do, but I've seen in the wild.)

You might wonder, why do we not just use one multithreaded process for MSBuild? Because each building project wants its own current directory (and potentially custom tasks expect this) and each PROCESS can only have one current directory, no matter how many threads exist.

When you run MSBuild on a SLN (Solution File) (which is NOT an MSBuild file) then MSBuild will create a "sln.cache" file that IS an MSBuild file.

Some folks like to custom craft their MSBuild files and others like to get the auto-generate one. Regardless, when you're calling an MSBuild task, one of the options that gets set is (from an auto-generated file):

<MSBuild Condition="@(BuildLevel1) != ''" Projects="@(BuildLevel1)" Properties="Configuration=%(Configuration); Platform=%(Platform); ...snip... BuildInParallel="true" UnloadProjectsOnCompletion="$(UnloadProjectsOnCompletion)" UseResultsCache="$(UseResultsCache)"> ...

When you indicate BuildInParallel you're asking for parallelism in building your Projects. It doesn't cause Task-level parallelism as that would require a task dependency tree and you could get some tricky problems as copies, etc, happened simultaneously.

However, Projects DO often have dependency on each other and the SLN file captures that. If you're using a Visual Studio Solution and you've used Project References, you've already given the system enough information to know which projects to build first, and which to wait on.

More Granularity (if needed)

If you are custom-crafting your MSBuild files, you could turn off parallelism on just certain MSBuild tasks by adding:

BuildInParallel=$(BuildInParallel)

to specific MSBuild Tasks and then just those sub-projects wouldn't build in parallel if you passed in a property from the command line:

MSBuild /m:4 /p:BuildInParallel=false

But this an edge case as far as I'm concerned.

How does BuildInParallel relate to the MSBuild /m Switch?

Certainly, if you've got a lot of projects that are mostly independent of each other, you'll get more speed up than if your solution's dependency graph is just a queue of one project depending on another all the way down the line.

In conclusion, BuildInParallel allows the MSBuild task to process the list of projects which were passed to it in a parallel fashion, while /m tells MSBuild how many processes it is allowed to start.

If you have multiple cores, you should be using this feature on big builds from the command line and on your build servers.

Thanks to Chris Mann and Dan Mosley for their help and corrections.

Related Links

MSBuild Blog - The MSBuild team's blog.
MSBuild Sidekick v2 - A visual editor, ala NantPad, for MSBuild files.
MSBuild Visualizer - An old project of Mitch Denny's trying to make large MSBuild files easier to visualize.
How to get MSBuild building using multiple cores from within Visual Studio

Technorati Tags: MSBuild,C#,VB

Apple Releases Boot Camp 2.1 Update

(author unknown) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:52:17 -0500

Apple released Boot Camp 2.1 for Windows XP Service Pack 3, Windows Vista 32 and Windows Vista 64.

This update addresses issues and improves compatibility with Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Windows Vista running on a Mac computer...

Steve Trefethen's LinkBlog

High Performance Multithreaded Access to Amazon SimpleDB

John Resig - Processing.js

Introducing LINQ To Regex - ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog

Mitsu's blog : Visual Linq query builder for Linq to Sql: VLinq

How To: Getting Started with Amazon EC2 - PaulStamatiou.com

Microsoft Photo Info 1.0

Opera's answer to FireBug

.NET 1.1.4.1 with Contacts support released

BPA Free thanks to Eastman Tritan

How to setup a live real-time polls using Google Docs

How to create a real-time survey/poll

Related posts

NSimpleDB - Use Amazon´s SimpleDB data model in your applications now - Part 4

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Storage Space, The Final Frontier

Animoto - Scaling Through Viral Growth

Movin' on up

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Building Your Own Home Theater PC

Faster Builds with MSBuild using Parallel Builds and Multicore CPUs

MSBuild

More Granularity (if needed)

How does BuildInParallel relate to the MSBuild /m Switch?

Apple Releases Boot Camp 2.1 Update