Discussions

1 hour ago, Cybermagell​an wrote

Seriously it's depressing to get an interview for a Senior Developer position, and when they ask "What happens on page postback?", and I say "Unfortunately I don't write in that manner" and I hear "Oh, um, hmm, well that's how you do it in .NET"

Sounds like that company might not be the right fit for you, but I don't think it's fair to dismiss writing code "in that manner" if it's a job requirement, despite being an older technology. You'd just have to learn it if you wanted that job.

I feel like I'm in the minority because I actually like web forms, despite my recent work with MV*. It provides a convenient, encapsulated object/event model to very RAPIDLY deliver solutions for a certain lob class of applications.

Web forms allowed an entire generation of small/medium businesses to leverage their existing VB6 skills and enter the web space and for the companies I've worked for, they've been wildly successful. I had a non-technical boss tell me once that the only true measure of software quality is if the company is making money using it.

@evildictaitor: Agreed... there's another one with Rob Schneider and "Kid" from Kid n Play that is equally crap. Who are they trying to sell to? Does Deuce Bigalow hold a lot of clout with CIOs or IT Directors?

The best Surface adverts I've seen so far are the simple "man on the street" adverts with the guy who actually EXPLAINS FEATURES. I watch that commercial and say 'Yeah, I could use that'.

http://imgur.com/gallery/hTc7eZN

I ran into something similar on a UDP server/client application ages ago. All subsequent UDPClients would continue to use the previous connection. In my case, I think all I had to do was UDPClient.DropMulticastGroup(MyAddress), but TCP is no doubt different.

Take a look here:

http://lamahashim.blogspot.com/2010/03/disabling-network-using-c.html

IIRC, this worked for UDP, but was not needed for my purposes because UDP gave me the DropMulticastGroup().

You can instantiate endpoints, service models/security, etc.. purely in code at runtime... no need for external config files. I would host a sample service that looks like what you want, consume it in Visual Studio with the Add Service wizard, then inspect the WCF proxy classes that are generated for you. From that you should be able to reverse engineer how to do it all in code. I'm not sure if this would satisfy your no shared dll requirement though... because whatever model you come up with would probably be best in a class library (shared).

it is pretty amazing compared to how it was not too long ago.

i like the option to now use chrome as debug browser with the live css toggle options/previews. also check out twitter bootstrap for fluid, responsive layouts that look good on tablets, desktops and phones. the framework is pretty amazing and easy to wrap your head around.

@figuerres: That's very similar to my own conclusions after investigating this stuff. Until the elastics can offer a compelling price point to the little guy for 24/7 or maybe some kind of sliding time share with people on the other side of the world, the only legit use case i can think of would be on-demand cpu cycles... like if you wanted a super computer to crunch serious numbers for one specific task, without investing in a bunch of ps3's/graphics cards and actually building the super computer.

I can only assume they offer better economies for general hosting when you get past a certain scale.

Thanks for all the suggestions, everyone. It's interesting to see who people are actually using.

The best vibe I'm getting is from SoftSys. http://www.softsyshosting.com/windows-vps.aspx

Mostly good reviews on the webhosting forums. Their Eco-2 unmanaged tier looks like it'll satisfy my needs at around $300/yr. That's not too expensive considering I'd be killing my dropbox account in favor of my own "My Documents" folder sync of less than 10GB... that's really the only thing i use dropbox for (if I ever got serious and had paying customers I would not use the server for personal backup).

I looked at azure and amazon but they get ridiculously expensive quickly. I do like the nice interface and extras with amazon (not to mention the full-use free tier.. azure should really offer something like this!). If you're serious about big scale then it'd be the way to go, but not for me.

Just looking for some first-hand accounts. I needs full RDP access with a dedicated share of memory/cpu... had been with gooodaddy for shared, but time to step up and I kind of want to get away from the goooo.

I've seen the microsoft web hosting referral site, but I'm looking for real world unfiltered/unbiased anecdotal evidence from real developers... and real numbers of hits per day without throttling. the number of fake reviews on "PR" sites is unbelievable and makes it hard to find real reviews.

My needs are Windows 2008 R2, Sql Express, at least 1 external IP, ability to host as many domains as i want, full trust, 2GB+, 50GB+, lots of transfer.

...or would I be better off just investing in a small box and self host out of my garage? Does anybody do this?

22 minutes ago, Jim Young wrote

The important thing in my mind is to have a distinct and isolated layer where database access occurs and marshals the data up to the POCO classes.

I think this is where I'm leaning... something like a distinct ViewModel layer containing my "client-safe" classes (almost the same as my DAL POCOs but with actual List<ViewModelPoco>, sans id's or other private sensitive info) and manually build up the state of my complex ViewModel step-by-step in each ViewModelPoco class constructor, by selecting out the "children" FK List<ViewModelPoco>. I know there are libraries like valueinjector to assist in merging the POCO values onto the ViewModelPoco values.

53 minutes ago, ScanIAm wrote

Plus, it's wasteful of bandwidth to bring along all that data if it isn't absolutely necessary for the UI.  You want to display a subset of what's in the POCO, so only transmit that.

I've been reading up on angular.js and that framework promises 2-way databinding on complex JSON. I think the amount of data transmitted would be offset by the fact I'll be dealing with a relatively "fat" client. A lot of multi-step stuff would be happening only in the browser, then submitting everything at the end in one post. (I know this is not REST).

Let's say I have some db tables and some POCO classes that map properties 1 to 1 with table columns. I'd like to select out a complex relationship, map those correctly to instances of those POCO classes and shuttle that complex object down to the browser as JSON... THEN go the other way... post that JSON, deserialize it back to my complex object for processing on the server.

Now obviously FK fields in the db schema should translate into List<POCO> in the "parent" object... so imagine an object with properties, including Lists of an object with properties, including Lists of an object with properties, etc...

Is there an end-to-end solution for this scenario? I guess I'm interesting in hearing strategies on how to best maintain that relationship database to browser and back again.