Mark O'Grady

I have read both of the Wrox ASP.NET Problem Design Solution books based on the Beerhouse CMS

Wrox ASP.NET Beerhouse Problem Design Solution

Wrox ASP.NET MVC 1.0

I think these books are fantastic. They are based on a CMS for an imaginary pub it offers a blog, polls, a newsletter, forum and ecommerce. They really show you how to design your system properly, so your DAL, BLL and your user interface are seperated out really nicely. You are able to create a great foundation for a CMS. I have plenty of books on ASP.NET but I think most of them are written as references, with really small scope of expansion and they don't really explain potential pitfalls and issue you run into.

I have worked on a few projects, some by really experienced programmers, but I think often common program structure and standards are not adhered to or ignored. It causes major issues in both debugging and expansion. I really think its worth reading these books even though you are not looking into ASP.NET.

The first book was great because you feel one person wrote it but it does take a long time to code. You can tell with the MVC version that it has been written by different people but using the Linq2SQL it is really quick to code. The problem with Linq2SQL is its not going to be extended by Microsoft but it will be by Codesmiths with PLINQO. I have not opted to work on a personal project in the Entity Framework, which is very similar and is the big brother of Linq2SQL. You no longer use the DataConext and instead use Entites. eg the model is called mark then L2SQL initiation: markDataContext dc = new markDataContext(); EF: markEntities ef = new markEntities(); Suprisingly this to my an hour to figure out.

The MVC book also doesn't show you the shortcuts eg right clicking on the controller action to create a view but I think its good you get an understanding of various methods. I think there is better ways to validate your inputs.

Nerd Dinner

Another great example for MVC is the Nerd Dinner by most of the Microsoft Employees including Scott Gu(The main man) and Phil Haack(Senior Product manager MVC). This really gives you a better introduction when starting from scratch and there are alot of cool things to look at.

This probably didn't make much sense but I hope it helps anyone thinking of buying these books. If you have never touched ASP.NET I would definitely look at ASP.NET MVC. It feels more compact and cleaner.

New Year / New Server

I have at last decided to bring my blog back. Sadly my previous backup had corrupted, so I thought I would start again.

I am currently using blogengine.net which is great but I am rewriting my new blog in asp.net mvc ( I will talk about this in another post).

Hosting Nightmare

I have had a complete hosting nightmare at the end of last year. I am currently using EUKHOST who to be fair are not that bad. I did have an issue with Plesk continually crashing, which took a long time to resolve. I think it was due to using ASP.net MVC but after an update everything was fine.

I thought I would try a few other hosting companies; I tried Switchlink a relatively new company from the Manchester area. They were extremely cheap and I think they were very inexperienced. During a whole month of trying to get the server working I was never able to install SQL Server without a barrage of warnings. I tried every hack with no success. I have installed it hundreds of times previously and never had one issue. I tried all the hacks. The support was extremely slow; generally I would receive an answer 2 days later after a lot of chasing. Eventually I gave up and used daily.co.uk that seemed to receive good reviews. I logged on to the new Windows 2008 server and they offered dotnetpanel rather than plesk. I ran an installer that setup everything and followed all the instructions. When I ran dotnetpanel half the settings were missing. Every time I sent them a support call they wanted to charge me £30 until I said I would leave them. After testing dotnetpanel at home and having no problems I asked them whether I could have a new image and start again because something wasn't right. They wanted to charge me another £30 at which point I cancelled. I don't know how these companies have any customers, I was unable to host one site and did not try anything difficult or out of the ordinary.

It has been a good learning curve because I have learnt a little more about IIS7.0. I am now back with EUKHOST with a new Windows Server 2008 VPS and within minutes I was able to host my sites and install SQL with no problems. I will also be making regular backups.

I am currently using the default template I will soon alter this and then upload my own blog CMS.