Web Notes

In the last few days I spent some time trying to unify structure of one of the project I`m currently working on. Most of the changes were about changing variable types because it`s were not used right way. That is why in this post I want to share my observations and practices with you. First of all we need to understand what ' variable definition ' is and how it`s different from ' variable initialization '. This part should be pretty straightforward:   variable definition  consist of data type and variable name only <data_type> <variable_name> ; for example int i ; . It`s important to understand how variable definition affects your code because it behaves differently depends weather you work with value or reference types. In the case of value types after defining variable it always has default value and it`s never null value. However after defined reference type variable without initializing it has null value by default. variable initialization  is

In my two previous posts ( part 1 and part 2 ) I described both simple and more advance approach of creating Rest-full API in MVC 4. Today I want to take another step forward and go a little deeper  in the creation of API. In this post I`m going to describe how we can create asynchronous API functions which bring better performance to our applications. The first thing that need to be understand is an asynchronous operation in .NET Framework. In .NET Framework 4.0 one of the most important changed was introducing Task  class.The Tasks in System.Threading.Tasks namespace are a method of fine grained parallelism, similar to creating and using threads, but they have a few key differences and the main difference is that Tasks in .NET 4.0 don’t actually correlate to a new thread, they are executed on the new thread pool that is being shipped in .NET 4.0. More about task you can read here  but to understand this article all you need to understand about the Task<T> class is that th

In my previous post  I wrote about first steps in creating Rest-full API by using ApiController . Now it`s time to make next step and go a little bit dipper inside web services created in MVC. In this post I want to describe two very important aspect: creating a real life scenario for web service implementation of POCO entity extend presented scenario and make it asynchronous To complete this tutorial one more class is needed. This class is a simple fake of some database which  is wrapper around a very few collections and allow all CRUD operation. Moreover the implementation of this fake database uses a singleton design pattern to prevent creating instance of it each time and maintain state between web service calls. Code Snippet /// <summary>          /// Represents a fake database.          /// </summary>          public sealed class FakeDbContext         {              private static volatile FakeDbContext instance;              private

Introduction to MVC In the last few years a software architecture changed very heavily. From desktop (forms) application which were very popular in Windows XP users move to SOA and now completely start using web based solution hosting in a cloud . Of course such evolution is not something bad, just the opposite in my opinion because web based application are highly scalable, better secured and available from each place in the Earth where user has an Internet connection. Such a big changes in software architecture cause that also programming model has to change. As response for this need, IT companies start working for on new technologies and improving existing ones. APIs became very popular tool  in a developer hands and whole communication became much more lightweight (by switching from XML to JSON) - mainly because the emerging market of mobile devices. In a new MVC version 4 also Microsoft introduce some improvements which allow developers creating web services (APIs) in well kn

An asynchronous operations become very popular in modern programming because by using its developers can take full advantage of multicore processors and perform several operation at the same time. Multithreding exists in ASP.NET since 2.0 version but it was very sophisticated to use it. However starting from .NET 4.5, ASP.NET is fully compatible with all these great features . To demonstrate how to start with the asynchronous operation in ASP.NET 4.5 I`ve created very simple solution which consist of three projects (Picture 1.): AsyncPageService - REST service based on a ApiController ; provides function which will be called by the website. AsyncPageWebsite - main ASP.NET website. Contracts - contains shared type between service and website. Picture 1. Solution projects. In my solution data is served by very simple REST web service, which is build by using  ApiController  from ASP.NET MVC. Inside this I`ve created two controllers (first return N random integers and the sec