TEERA 2.0: Technology blog

DevTeach 2009 is coming to Vancouver early next month. This is an event that you should not miss if you are around the area. I’ve been to a number of tech conferences and I must say DevTeach is my favorite. (and I don’t have any sponsor for the endorsement!) =].

The thing I like the most about this conference is the candid/no-marketing information and the quality of content. I’ve met a few of this year speaker earlier in March when I was down in ALT.NET Seattle and I must say that they know their stuffs. Their opinions can be quite controversial at times (to what you would hear from MS) but they’re thought provoking and sound. There’s also a deal going on where you bring 2 people in the price of one. So if you are going to attend a tech event this year, DevTeach is not the one to be missed.

Another note is that ALT.NET Canada is also coming to Vancouver and it’s right after DevTeach! If you are looking for good solid discussions, open space style, it’s definitely worth check it out. I must admit that I didn’t get to participate as much as I would like when I was at ALT.NET Seattle because I was half sick at the time. It’s a great experience and a lot of fun. See you there.

Last week I presented at BC .NET user group and there are a number of good questions I didn’t have time to answer. So here’s a recap.

Download sample code here

Why would I choose ASP.NET MVC over traditional WebForms?

The answer to this question deserves its own post. So you can read it the answer here. 

I’m an ASP.NET WebForm developer, how difficult is it for me to learn MVC?

Although development on MVC framework is different from WebForms, I don’t think it is difficult at all. In fact, if you are familiar with the MVC pattern, polymorphism, HTML, HTTP, and how the web works in general, you’ll feel right at home with MVC.

The fastest way to get a to know MVC is to create a new blank MVC project in Visual Studio and look at how the  HomeController class, model, view (under the folder Views/Home/Index.aspx), and routing in Global.asax are put together.

From this, you’ll get the basic idea of how MVC wire things up together. After that there are a number of sample applications you can inspect:

• NerdDinner 
• MVC Store Front 
• Oxite project

These 3 sample applications should be able to demonstrate how you can get MVC to work and how you can effectively leverage the framework and pattern. Also don’t forget to check out loads of tutorial on ASP.NET MVC website. 

Should I use JQuery with MVC? Can I use other JavaScript library?

ASP.NET MVC is shipped with JQuery (I believe now it’s 1-3.2 version), but you are NOT tied to the library. You can use any client side library you want. My team and I have been using MooTools for most of our MVC projects.

What do you mean when you say that ASP.NET MVC is stateless?

WebForms keep state (original values of ASP.NET controls on a page) inside ViewState. This ViewState is usually stored as a hidden field or inside a session. When an ASP.NET form does a postback, the server side then reads the values kept in the ViewState, restores the controls object model, and allows you to manipulate the values. This is the way ASP.NET WebForms tries to make the web stateful (every controls seem to remember their previous values).

ASP.NET MVC does NOT rely on ViewState. MVC view interacts with the controller (server side) via simple form post request to designated URI. All the values are encapsulated within the HTTP request. The server side controller only works the posted values and return final output of rendered HTML back to the browser.

Can I use both WebForm and MVC in one project?

Yes, you can but it is NOT recommended. In the project I’ve worked on, there are a migration period where we have to have both WebForms and MVC coexist in one project. Although it is possible to have both, it comes with a price of maintainability.

Do I have to use TDD or BDD in MVC project?

You do NOT have to do TDD or BDD in your MVC project. Test-Driven development is a good development principle but MVC is not tied to it.

How can I do databinding in ASP.NET MVC?

Please see the sample code accompanying the presentation. In the source code download, I show 2 ways of data binding, one with using <% foreach %> and another binds to ASP.NET repeater control.

Can I still use user control in MVC? Is there any 3rd party controls or components for MVC?

You can still use user controls in ASP.NET MVC via Partial Rendering. Though you may have to simplify your user control code for consistency with the framework.

AFAIK, I don’t think there’re free controls for ASP.NET MVC released just yet. But you really should check out MVC Contrib project on CodePlex, it offers a lot of helper classes that you will find very useful. On the commercial side, Telerik has released its MVC-Compatible web controls suite.

What about Ruby on Rails?

There were a lot of people showing interest in learning more about Ruby on Rails after the presentation. And I think they definitely should check it out. A lot of good ideas from Ruby on Rails community have been incorporated into MVC framework. But despite what some people would say, I don’t think ASP.NET MVC is intended to be Rails-clone.

I do work on Ruby on Rails as well and they are different. One reason that Rails is cool is because it leverages a lot of dynamic feature of Ruby the language. The only similarity I see between ASP.NET MVC and Ruby on Rails right now is the fact that it implements the MVC pattern and good guiding principles such as Convention over Configuration, DRY, and YAGNI.

If you want to learn and find out more about Ruby on Rails, it’s definitly worth check out this free online course.

Any comment or questions, feel free to leave comment on this post or contact me at teera@zolomedia.com

During my presentation on ASP.NET MVC  last week, an audience asked me the question of why he should consider MVC over ASP.NET WebForm. Hence this blog post.

ASP.NET MVC is an alternative to implement web site/application on Microsoft Platform. It has been emphasized countless times that it’s not a replacement for WebForm. WebForm will continue to improve in parallel with MVC.

MVC incorporates a lot of feedback on the lacking of WebForms. It also adopts a lot of good ideas from other community especially Ruby on Rails community. IMHO, here are why you should consider MVC over WebForm

Simplicity for complex application

From my experience, WebForm works well when the application is simple and well-architected from the get-go. But when you build a complex web app, the layer of abstractions can become a thorn.

Imagine a common complex scenario, you have a nested master pages and a user control in the content page. You want the user control to call change binding of a DataGrid in the top-level master page and trigger DataBind() method when pre-render event of the user control is executed? This is a common scenario when you build a large enough application with ASP.NET WebForm, and it can easily make your application become unmaintainable. The cause of this is ASP.NET WebForm tries to abstract away complexity and web based environment (HTTP, statelessness, REST). It promotes event based model like that of the desktop application.

ASP.NET MVC promotes a simpler way to develop an application. Following Model-View-Controller pattern, master pages, pages, user controls (partials), take the data model passed from controller and manage their own rendering. ASP.NET MVC framework does not try to abstract way complexity but address it with the pattern.

Designer Friendliness

ASP.NET MVC gives you more control over HTML. WebForms “Controls” tries to abstracts complexity with auto-gen gibberish IDs, hidden fields, and auto-gen javascript. This can be a big deal if you work with designers who have no experience working with ASP.NET. Most of the designers would agree with me that

this

<h3>Products</h3>

<ul class="productList"/>
 
<% foreach(Product product in ViewData.Model.ProductList){ %>
 
<li><img src="Photos/<%= product.ProductID %>.jpg" /><br/><%= product.Name %></li>
 
<% } %>
 
</ul>

makes more sense than

Testability

If you don’t do Test-Driven Development or don’t do testing this is probably not a big deal for you :). And it’s probably OK if you don’t test your application. I’ve been working in several teams on large scale project whose done zero testing.

But I am a TDD practitioner and believe that testing is good. So, ease of test is a big deal for me. It is possible to do TDD and good testing coverage with WebForm but it is not easy. I did try Model-View-Presenter on WebForm but it comes with a price of complexity and bloated code. Just for the sake of testing. A good testable framework should allow you to do this without additional complexity. I found it fun and much easier to do this with MVC.

WebForm is not evil!

All that said, I don’t think WebForm is evil at all. MVC and WebForm are just different and there are times when I would recommend WebForm over MVC

Investment in WebForm for existing projects

Although some aspect of webform and MVC can coexist in the same project, it is not recommended. And converting your WebForm project to MVC is not trivial.

MVC may requires more investment

MVC offers you a greater control over your development, however, that means you have to roll up your sleeves and invest a more in extending the MVC framework to get it to work as you expect. Unlike Rails, MVC framework does not provide you with full support in many aspects, especially in the Model (’M’ of the MVC).

That’s why we now have multiple view engines to choose from and different inversion of control containers. Some people are comfortable with choices and building their own extensibility, but not everybody does. In terms of tooling, Microsoft still have to give developers answer in Visual Studio. IMHO, the tooling support for MVC is not there yet.

Another related issue would be the use of open source libraries in your projects. There are a lot of open source libraries and extensions available for MVC. You can find it a lot easier and fun if you can use them, but this is not the case for all projects.

3rd party controls and component

If you are working on application that rely on 3rd party controls and components it might not be a good idea to switch over to MVC (at least not yet). Especially when the components are in the core or crucial part of your application, I would suggest you stay with WebForms until your component vendors have something to offer in MVC space. Some 3rd party controls vendors like Telerik already made components that work on MVC.

Developers preference

In the end, if you are project managers or business managers, you really should talk to your development teams on what they’re comfortable with. Many developers prefere working with WebForms, especially if they have background in desktop application development. If a developer is new to web application development, he/she may find MVC to demand more learning on MVC and web environment.

Well, and that’s my not-so-short answer to the question. If you have any further questions or want to discuss more please feel free to comment on this post or drop me an email at teera@zolomedia.com

Yesterday I worked on fixing up a legacy Java code and I found it laced with a lot of  “//TODO” comments. A class with most TODOs topped at 12. Worse, these TODOs are mostly critical make-or-break feature and assumptions. Here’s an example:

public void run(){
 
   ...  //TODO: Should notify user for failure and rever the transaction
 
  //or we can set a maximum number of rety or batch processing?
 
   if(resultBatchId == 0){
 
      //Should not happen!
 
      resultBatchId = 1;
 
}
 
   ...
 
}

I was baffled when I saw this kind of coding througout an application that is now running live. Worse, to apply fixes to some of these todo tasks break the application entirely since so many features have been developed on top of these assumptions. Adding a //TODO deposits technical debt on your project significantly. After that I had to call for a meeting and make it clear for everyone on the team, especially junior developers and interns on how to deal with todo tasks.

A few guidelines we came up to deal with to-do tasks are

1. Never check in a code with //TODO . All the unknown assumptions or decisions on a feature should be made clear when you work on a task or a bug ticket.
2. If //TODO is necessary because the decision cannot be made at the moment or have to wait for response from other stakeholders, log it as a ticket or work item. This is to make sure that they won’t be forgotten.
3. The convention we have with was

   //TODO: #RW1251 - description here

   where #RW1251 here is a log ticket number

4. Code review is strict for every check-in.
5. If assumption or a hack is applied to bypass the //TODO, you must notify your team lead for approval and record the detail in the ticket and email.

In software development, any to-do tasks are not likely to get done. Developers are known to prefer working on a new features instead of coming back to help and adjust the code. So when should we do the TODOs? My answer is always “NOW”.

Next month I’ll be presenting at BC .NET user group on ASP.NET MVC framework. The talk will be focusing on how and why you should consider ASP.NET MVC for you next project.

Instead of the usual “presentation” I decide to kick it up a notch and make it more of a real-world case study walkthrough the process of moving a traditional ASP.NET project to MVC framework. And one thing I can promise you is that this talk will have no fluff, no marketing talk, only candid opinion from my side :).

Here’s the full description of my talk on the user group website.

“ASP.NET MVC is out but should I use it on my next project? What’s the development experience like? In this presentation, I’ll take you through the real world experience my team had converting traditional ASP.NET application to MVC. We’ll examine the good and the pain points we found and show you how to unleash the full capability of the MVC framework. I’ll also introduce you S#arp Architect framework and show how it can help you in your next MVC project.“

And here’s a rough agenda of topics and a few things I’m planning to include:

• ASP.NET MVC, what’s in it for me?
• I have an application developed in ASP.NET web form, is there any way I can migrate it to MVC framework?
• How to unleash and take full benefit of the MVC framework
• And of course, I’ll show a lot of code
• I’m planning to have a lot of time for Q&A and discussions at the end as well.

Date & Time: May 5th, 6.30pm

Location: Building SW3 room 1750, BCIT Burnaby campus, 3700 Willingdon Ave, Burnaby BC

For more detail, check out the event detail page on the user group website.

So if you are around the area, I hope to see you there :).

Lately I’ve been doing quite a lot of work in the area of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). To people unfamiliar with this subject, it would seem like it’s a part of marketing but I found out first hand that this is not true. Especially if you are a web developer or business owners, SEO IS CLOSER TO YOU THAN YOU THINK. I need not remind you how vital google (or search engines) ranking is for any online businesses, so you never know the day your customers ask for explanation of why their sites are not topping the ranks.

I’m going to start posting about a lesson or a useful tip I learn that can hopefully help you optimize your website for ranking. I intend this post to be generic for both technical and non-technical audience. And if you are a developer-turned-SEM consultant like myself, you’ll find this post series helpful. Any feedback is welcome.

To start off in SEO, the first thing you should be looking at is planning your SEO strategy.

Short term SEO

Short term SEO usually goes from 1-3 months period and not exceed 6 months. Short term SEO is only appropriate for a certain type of projects. For example, promoting seasonal products, promoting a movie or a music album release.

Since you have a short time frame of 1-3 months to monitor, you should start planning and implementing at least a month before the launch of a campaign. The key SEO objective of this type is to sprint the page up to top ranking for search engine. After the short monitoring period, the importance of search engine ranking will become minor.

Long term SEO

Most search engine optimization campaign is usually long term in nature. This is appropriate for online business and not target specific seasonal period of time or a specific marketing campaign. For long term SEO, monitoring the result and frequent updates are crucial as long as the website operates. You should make sure that the search engines ranking of your web site are update and consistent with your goal.

In most case, online businesses should adopt both  short term and long term and use them in combination. Having a long term SEO plan for long running business and occasionally implement short term SEO for seasonal products, discount, or new products introduction is a common pattern.

Where to start with SEO planning

IMHO, the best place of start the optimization is first talking to your customers and understand the business goal of the SEO campaign. Without understanding the business goal, you will not be able to come up with effective plan of actions. In most case the main goal usually falls into one of these categories:

Increasing number of visitors

This goal is applicable to all types of web sites. More visitors means more revenue that can be generated from advertising. The plan for increasing number of visitors tend to be long term SEO.  Two things to keep in mind when you come down this road are trying to cover all the key content of a web page and selecting highly competitive keywords.

Increasing sales of products and revenues

For an e-commerce websit that’s already open for business, the end result tends to focus on sales and visitor-to-customer conversion rather than increasing number of visitors alone. Picking the righ keywords alone will not be enough. To get the most out of this plan, SEO is usually a part of an special advertising campaign or a special sales event. Remember that the result of a SEO campaign should be measurable and allow you to figure out the return on investment.

Promoting brands or products

When the goal of a SEO campaign is to promote product or services, timing becomes more critical. You would want the result, whether it’s ranking or seachability, to be optimal during the peak of a product’s popularity. This type of SEO campaign usually start at least a month before the PR campaign to start. This buffer time will be spent on page optimization, content generation, and give some time for search engines to pick it up.

You don’t have to optimize an entire web sites, but you have to make sure that all relevant contents are in place. The landing page of the product must be optimized and ready. At minimum, the landing page must be geared up with the information on where to find and purchase the product, links to additional information, and links to store location. 

One caution though, for this type of campaign, the site visitors tend to spend time to read and drill into the content rather than skim through it if the content hits home. On the other site, if the content appears to be inconsistent with the campaign theme, it’ll like to to damage your business’s credibility.

Other types of search engine optimization goals

A part from the three goals listed above. SEO is frequently use to enhance an image of a product or a brand. Many websites also implement SEO to gain credibility from customers and search engines as well.

A while back I was helping a friend recovered his online business product from negative reviews on various sites.  What we did were revamping the product website look to be more professional, revisiting the content of all the web pages to make sure that it’s up to date and accurate. Then we went on a campaign of link building and inviting many customers to re-review the product. His web site started picking up good ranking after positive reviews and external links to information came in.

What you should get out of your SEO planning

A summary list of things you should get out of your SEO planning

1. Clear business goals and objectives of the campaign
   You must come to a mutual agreement with your customer about the business goals and objectives of an SEO campaign. SEO objectives will be developed from this.
2. Desired outcomes and units of measurement
   With business goals and objectives in hand, you should set key desired outcomes of a campaign and how to measure result. Again, you and your clients MUST be in mutual agreement. Create a Statment of Work document and have your customers sign it if possible. If things go wrong, this document will become your standing point and a basis of your argument on performance.
3. Website assessment
   Now that you have outcomes and measurements laid out, the next thing you can do is assessing the current state of the website. Compare the current status and what it should be. Target areas and pages that require optimization.
4. Optimization process and required actions
   Building on top of your assessment is the plan for actions. Each action should have description and estimate time of when it start, when it should complete, and the effect it’ll have to the entire SEO campaign.
5. Plan for report, review, and recommendation for improvement
   It’s also important to plan on how you would collect, review, and report results to your customers. Establishing the means of reporting and review will help you rethink website objectives and whether if it’s measurable.

Although it’s not so technical, planning is critical for any SEO campaigns, whether it’s long term or short term. Even with minimal brief planning will help you identify what needs to be done and if it’s going to deliver the desired result. If you are new to search engine optimization, I would recommend SEO planning to be the first thing you do.

Recently a client asked me to help speeding up his business website (built with ASP.NET MVC beta). He’s got a few complaints from customers of how slow the site is. So I ran YSlow extension to see how bad it was and…not surprisingly it was really bad.

 

First of, it got an F on YSlow. What worse was the time it took the site to load

 

 As you can see, this page takes 10.56s to load. The first request for HTML content took ridiculously long (7.6s)!!

YSlow offers quite a comprehensive advices on how to make your web page load faster. Some key points can be implemented easily, some are difficult, and some are possible only if you have total control over the web server.

GZip Filter

The first thing I do was googling for how to gzip the output. I found this blog post by Kazi Rashid showing how to create ASP.NET MVC GZip and caching filter. This action filter applies GZip compression to HTML output from controller action. The cache filter allows you to take control of the output caching per action. The code works right off the bat and they’re very useful.

Reducing number of requests

What I set out to do was to reduce number of request for JavaScript and CSS down to one for each. I came across Omar’s blog on how to implement a handler to combine multiple files and cache them for faster return. Though I tweaked Omar’s original code a bit so that the handler would cache the static file content for each individual files, and compose/recompose based on the set of files I specify in web.config file.

Minifying JavaScript

Next, I downloaded YUI compressor. To run the compressor, you’ll need to have Java installed on your machine. Follow the page instruction and apply compression on all JavaScript and css files. Alternatively you can create MSBuild task for Visual Studio by follow this blog post.

Removing ETags

ETags are evil. You can read more on the effect of ETags from Yahoo site from YSlow web page. On Removing ETags on IIS 7 is quite easy. I found this blog post to be descriptive and very useful on removing ETags from IIS 6 and 7.

The Result

 Let’s see what we got from doing all these improvement. Well, it’s not yet an “A” site, but as you can see, there’s a lot of improvement.

 

 These little improvement points may seem trivial but the effect can be paramount. Following these simple steps, the loading time for this site is reduced from 10 seconds to 1.30 seconds! (Note: I disabled my cache and refreshed the IIS cache). 

 Looking at the time it takes to load the site. The major impact is from GZipping the output HTML. 

 Future improvement

A few things I wasn’t able to do require control over IIS. This was not available since the site itself is going through a web hosting and not VPS or dedicated server. For more information on caching, it’s worth checking out the following resource:

- Caching and cache control 

- Setting static resource cache in IIS7 

If you are running a e-commerce site and want to go full blown on optimization and speed, you should also consider content delivery network like Akamai as well. 

Though it’s a bit late but let me congratulate ASP.NET MVC team on 1.0 release. The official announcement was made by Scott Guthrie at MIX 09 in Vegas. You can read the full blog post about this release on Phil’s blog. This is a great achievement for both Microsoft and the community. As we all know, MVC is one of the very first products from Microsoft with the source freely released and taking full feedback from the community.Â

If you have not done so, go get ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RTM here and have fun :).

Angad forwarded this to me a a few other. This pdf is an essential for anyone who’s starting out or already involved with FOSS.

Click here to download the PDF

note: Kudos for Shakthi Kannan, the creator.

ALT.NET Seattle 2009 is at the end of this week. This is going to be my first ALT.NET meeting so I’m pretty excited. I’m looking for a good discussions, specially in the following areas:

• ASP.NET MVC and MVC-based framework (e.g. Fubu MVC)
• Distributed Agile team and agile collaboration for overseas teams
• TDD and BDD
• Advanced IoC and MEF

I’ll be heading there on Friday, hopefully it’s not too late to catch the afternoon workshop. See you there