Andrew J Beers

So I figure a great place to start out the real meat of my new code blog would be what is my current favorite design methodology for an N-Tier web application and some of the best practices to adhere to when starting out. First I would like to start out by saying a firm foundation of any application is paramount to the future success of that application. You will often talk to developers, myself included, who skimped on up front design and paid for it for the duration of the project. This is critical on any project because even a small quick hit can often turn into a huge monster with scope creep and sufficient lack of foresight.

So lets kick this off with technologies for part 1 shall we?

Presentation Layer - This is what serves your web pages. At the time of writing this MVC3 is king with a looming heir to the throne on the horizon being MVC4. All the same great features we have come to know and love about MVC3 with a few new ones surrounding device targeting, improved Inversion of Control support, scaffolding, HTML5 native support, and more. We augment this with the latest version of JQuery, JQuery UI, JQuery validate, Modernizer, and depending on need Knockout (Which might I add these all come pre-loaded in your scripts folder but all too annoyingly are frequently many versions out of date.) Resource to get you started: http://www.asp.net/mvc

Service Layer – This is where the guts of your application lives and is comprised of 3 main segments itself. Which if you are talking about N-Tier application development this solution file will house the final 2 tiers in a 3 tier architecture.

Service Endpoints – WCF hands down wins for exposing your functionality across the wire. This should be kept simple and clean and will interact with your domain project, persistence through an interface defined in your domain project, and handle the translation between data bound entities and your Data Transfer Objects (further referred to as DTOs) using a nice little utility called AutoMapper. Some resources on this:

WCF Primer: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/dd939784

AutoMapper: https://github.com/AutoMapper/AutoMapper/wiki

Business Logic – We will call this your “Domain” model, which anyone familiar with DDD is already smiling. This is where ALL of your business logic lives and the interfaces that define the external concerns like persistence and auxiliary dependencies (for example: an external service reference to say Melissa Data for address validation) lives.

Domain Driven Design: http://domaindrivendesign.org/resources/what_is_ddd

Persistence Layer – EF 4.3 is the current version of Entity Framework out and hands down the POCO or Code First  model for EF is amazing. I would suggest digging into Fluent configuration over annotations due to the agility that can be gained using fluent EF configuration.

EF POCO (Code First): http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/07/16/code-first-development-with-entity-framework-4.aspx

Disk Storage – This is the final main piece of the “application”. This is your actual write to disk means of storage. Using .NET you really only have one viable choice which is SQL Server. SQL Server 2008 is a must as it comes loaded with code completion and as a developer this will save you a ton of time. For anyone using 2005 or lower I strongly encourage you to at least grab the developer bundle from Red Gate which gives you some of the nicer, in my opinion, features of 2008.

Well to anyone who knows me knows that I have written quite a few blog engines and spooled up a number of my "own blogs" which after a period of time I get annoyed with and take down.   I won't make any lofty promises that this won't be any different HOWEVER we shall give it a spin.  First and foremost.. Google Prettify, lets kick the tires and see how well this works.  I'm not going to say this will all be about code but a LARGE chunk of it will be.  Just like my life, a significant portion of my day is spent on a keyboard for both work and fun.

Another thing I will give props to Tumblr for is giving us the capability of re-pointing a domain at their servers or even a sub-domain without using domain masking.  Pretty neat feature.  I have also heard that this RTE isn't entirely pointless for search targeting so I guess we shall see on that front as well. So lets get this first post out of the way and onto bigger and better things.  I might do a few short ones on intro tips and tricks with JavaScript and JQuery to get things rolling.  I did open up the "You'll get trolled" anonymous posts, so if you want a topic feel free to hit me up!  If you tell me who you are I'll even publicly thank you for the request! 

So lets get started right and put some code in this post.

Prettify Your Code on Tumblr

1) Go to Customize Your Layout

2) Click the teeny tiny "edit html" link

3) Smile because their layout editor actually doesn't suck

4) Put the code below into your blog and follow the instructions in comments

NOTE:  Remember to update the paths to the prettify.css and prettify.js files to the static file links for your tumblr account.  After enough of us put this in our blog they'll likely add hard paths for us to use but until then... Modify the URL's!!! 

<!-- We can't do anything without JQuery right? --> <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <!-- Download the following from http://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/ --> <script src="prettify.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="prettify.css" /> <script type="text/javascript"> $(function(){ //The below line makes the magic happen prettyPrint(); }); </script>

Now the crappy part is after you make these changes through the very nice and robust layout editor when you go to make your first "syntax pretty" post you have to go into HTML mode.  Unlike their awesome layout editor that allows tabbing and has rudimentary syntax highlighting their HTML editor for a blog post does not.  Suffer through it as will I.. and shortly I'll build a plug-in for their RTE if one isn't already out there.

To post an entry with pretty print capabilities you can use a <code class="prettyprint">...</code> or <pre class="prettyprint">...</pre> tag.