So a couple weeks ago I decided to test a few changes made to SubSonic3 that fixed a LINQ evaluation bug related to medium trust. Using a simple console app on linux/mono, I tested basic data access to a SQLite database using repository mode, and to my surprise it worked!
I’ve always been a big fan of SubSonic since its 2.0 version, which I used for a mid-sized e-commerce site. With a totally rewritten core, 3.0 uses LINQ (language integrated query) for all of its data access providing a great alternative to Dblinq for the Mono platform.
So there are a couple great walkthroughs out there that talk about using jquery jsonp in cross-domain scenarios. They talk a lot about the requesting and server side, but not so much about how to use the callback. So to clarify, I’ll step through what I did to make this work including providing my implementation for a new ActionResult called JsonPResult for MVC.
So lately, I’ve been pretty wrapped up with kids and family so I haven’t had much time to post anything new. However, I did start a new project, which I’ll detail out more as I go. It’s been quite the experience so far since I decided to build this one from the ground up using MySql and Linux/Mono. I’ve never designed apps like that before. For one, I’ve had to learn a new set of design tools for MySql as opposed to my comfortable Sql Management Studio. And I’ve also had to very incrementally test different programming technologies and methods that were questionably supported in Linux/Mono. The beauty of this is that no matter what I do to make it work for Mono, the app will always work on Windows, and there’s little development time lost if I have to fall back to its native platform.
Lately, I’ve been really digging the new Ubuntu 10.04 on my desktop and web server. So I’ve been meaning to get a post out here describing how I got Mono trunk installed since it comes packaged with 2.4.4. After much testing, I finally have finished getting a script to work with a fresh, vanilla install.
I stumbled on this blog post by Boris Schieman where he wrote a bash script to compile and install the Mono trunk. I made a few tweaks to it for a vanilla linux install for the tagged 2.6.4 release and setup another one for updating a mono trunk build using the daily tarballs. I’ve successfully tested both versions on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid. I’m just a casual linux/mono user, so use this at your own risk.
This is way cool. From time to time, I tend to screw around with stuff I enjoy that really has little productive value. A year ago this month, I recall wanting to continue writing about sharing your personal music without using IIS and hosting the music directly from a WCF standalone executable. Well it turns out this is a whole lot simpler than I originally thought.
Disclaimer: This probably isn’t best practice, and it’s ripe for enhancements. My hope is that it gets your imagination fired up and motivates you to continue where I left off.
Challenges:
How the heck do I stream an MP3 file to a media element via WCF (without having to download the whole file before playing it)?
Cross-site scripting policies are blocking my download requests. How can I serve these up via my self hosted WCF REST service?
Silverlight3 doesn’t support WCF REST yet. How do I deserialize the WCF REST contract messages?
Changes Since Last Release
My original design was very simple. I hosted the Silverlight files and used WCF with an IIS server at home. The player pulled a list of files and locations. The player’s media element source was set directly to a music file hosted in an IIS virtual directory. All that works great until you are on a machine without a web server. Ultimately, I wanted to figure out a way for the user to host their music repository from their desktop with a simple executable and port forwarding. Which means it would have to serve up all the resources necessary to run the Silverlight player. It would also have to serve up the WCF services and actual music files themselves.
Since the last post a year ago, I’ve made quite a few little tweaks to the player like: regular expression search, random songs, random play order, and a volume control. I also integrated a compact SQLite database for searching so the server-side doesn’t have to do a file system search for each request.
So for the third and final part of this series, I want to walk through how I ported a very small project I posted on CodePlex awhile back called SiteManager. It is an extremely simplified CMS application that I wrote using Linq to Sql and MVC in order to provide a very basic and easy website tool. It uses membership provider for authentication and Linq to Sql Classes with its database in MS Sql Server. For this walkthrough, I’ll be converting the database to MySql and adapting Linq to Sql to Dblinq so it can completely run on Mono and Linux.
As the second part of this series, I’ll look at building a website that can use the MySql Membership Provider. This is one of the main hang-ups I’ve run into while porting one of my ASP.NET applications to Mono. With the latest MySql Connector, this turns out to be a very easy thing to do. It’s nearly as simple as setting up your web.config with the correct parameters and getting the right connector version.
I’ve always kept an eye on the Mono project, mostly out of curiosity and intrigue. The last time I played around with Mono it was at version 2.0, and at the time I didn’t really spend a lot of time on it because it didn’t support some of the things I was using. Well recently, I regained interest in Mono when I saw it now supports MVC and some of Dblinq. And since I’ve been buzzing on the whole MVC thing for awhile, I decided to check Mono out for myself and start a fun little porting project. So this is the first part of a three part series describing everything I did to get a server up and running and one of my Asp.Net MVC applications ported to Mono.
This first part will cover installing and configuring an OpenSuse 11.2 server with Apache/Mono and SSH. The second part will talk about how to setup a MySql Membership provider (with mono and Windows), and the third part is a walkthrough showing how to port a simple Asp.Net MVC site to mono and MySql. I’m also targeting those of you who use virtual hosting where you might only have SSH (after install) to configure your server, so I will be using text based tools: SSH, vi, and yast for all my installations and configuration after getting the base system installed.
So the other day, I wanted to build a confirmation dialog using jQuery with an existing Asp.Net web forms Button control. I wanted this dialog to be modal; and upon confirmation, I wanted it to postback using the Button’s server-side click event. After toying with the jQuery dialog, I realized that its dialog doesn’t suspend the process while waiting for user input. So it also causes problems with confirmation since clicking the original button will always postback. So with a few tweaks, you can prevent the postback and emulate the click event pretty easily.
Okay, lemme tell ya… I really, really like SubSonic right now. I’m building a basic data integration application, and I wanted a simple way to store some basic tracking data locally. I didn’t want to build it into a Sql Server or create a super complicated data layer, so I decided to give SubSonic3’s Repository Mode with SQLite a try. SQLite gives me a simple, zero-config, file-based database solution for the app, and SubSonic provides a nice, clean way to push and pull data with it.
First of all, if you haven’t seen Conery’s five minute demo video on repository mode, you should. It’s very cool. Once you watch it, you’ll get the basics of migration and understand the idea of building the object model first while using the database purely as a storage mechanism. In this case, I built my class, and I’m letting Migration handle all the schema generation for me. It will also create a new database file if one doesn’t already exist. That’s the idea right?
So a couple weeks ago I decided to test a few changes made to SubSonic3 that fixed a LINQ evaluation bug related to medium trust. Using a simple console app on linux/mono, I tested basic data access to a SQLite database using repository mode, and to my surprise it worked! 
