Getting started on MongoDb with .NET Core

Coming from a strictly relational db world, NoSql style databases have always seemed a bit scary! I recently had the opportunity to play around with MongoDb for the first time, and I was quite surprised by how easy it was to get started!

I was recently interviewed by GaProgMan for his show “The .NET Core Podcast”!

Episode 21 - Orleans with Russell Hammett

Quick update to a post I did a while back regarding Orleans Dashboard — additional reporting metrics for your cluster!

I’ve been using docker for playing around with my dinky website, but the DockerFile/image has always been a bit brute forcey. It’s time to explore a somewhat more effective DockerFile!

As we continue exploring Microsoft Orleans — the virtual actor model framework — we happen upon Observers. Observers can be used to “observe” events, in the form of notifications, as an example.

With the government shut down (again!) I’m not working at the moment, so onto learning on stuff! I wanted to do something with a database, and I’ve gone done and forgotten how to work with them it’s been so long!

There are some differences in how one would host an Orleans server locally vs deployed in a production scenario. In this post, we’ll use some of the skills we’ve built on previously, to help us in our journey to hosting a production ready Orleans cluster.

Orleans is an actor model framework — a framework used for easily creating distributed systems across a cluster of machines. In this post we’ll explore the “Reminders” feature of Orleans.

Dependency Injection is an important part of writing loosely coupled, easily tested code. I’ve written a bit about it before, but not in the context of Microsoft Orleans.

Microsoft Orleans — Code Generation issue?

While working on the post “Microsoft Orleans — Reporting Dashboard”, I ran into an issue where code generation seemingly stopped “generating”.

Orleans is an easy to use actor framework, but how can you monitor your deployment? Luckily, there’s something simple to use — Orleans Dashboard!

Note this is not an Orleans post, not exactly — it’s just something I wanted to enhance on my Orleans Project, prior to moving on to demonstrating even more Orleans features!

We’ve explored Orleans for distributing application logic across a cluster. Next, we’ll be looking at grain reuse and grain state…

Have you ever had a LOT of projects in a solution, many of which use the same NuGet packages? Managing package versions could be a nightmare!

Orleans is an open source actor framework built by Microsoft research, and was used for halo cloud functionality! Here’s how to get started…

I’ve been a developer my whole life, professionally about 10 years. In those 10 years, I feel I’ve always been able to “get the job done”, but things really started to click for me, once I embraced the abstraction.

So, I’m losing faith in my google skills, there didn’t seem to be a one stop shop that I could find to give information on setting up a .net core console application with a IServiceProvider and utilizing IOptions… so that brings us here.

I’m close to wrapping up my initial pass through the solar projection feature of the website. One of the final touches is the ability for visitors to run their own projections.

I published my first NuGet package (https://www.nuget.org/packages/Kritner.SolarProjection/)! Kristen and I recently were considering (and have since financed) a 17,000 kw/year solar array, on the back of our house

Unit testing continued - dealing with changing requirements.

We’ve been doing a lot more concentration on unit testing at work lately, and a question has come up. What value do automated unit tests provide?

In the previous post, we had setup our basic WCF project to play around with for unit testing. So let’s get to testing!

In the previous post we got our first tests set up with moq. So now let’s see about creating some unit tests to go along with our WCF services.

In the previous post I started exploring unit testing, specifically with moq and for WCF services.

We had a new team lead start recently, he seems to have had a fair amount of experience in areas I’m only vaguely familiar with, mostly through reading. One of the first things being pushed for is a concentration on unit testing. While I did begin implementing some tests into our codebase a few months ago (around 250 so far), I feel that there’s still a long way to go. Luckily Chris is here to help impart knowledge to us, hooray!