Book Review - Building Mobile Applications Using Kendo UI Mobile and ASP.NET Web API

I've written a book review on 'Building Mobile Applications Using Kendo UI Mobile and ASP.NET Web API' and posted it up on CodeProject. Summary I liked this book and I took a lot form it that I am now using to build that sample application using KendoUI. If you want to learn about ASP.NET Web API then this book isn't for you and you'll learn a lot more from the ASP.NET Web API site.

Application Tracing

So OpenCover is as feature complete as I care to take it at the moment, I may do this one feature involving Windows Store applications should I have a need for it, and I decided to not continue with OpenMutate as I can't really find a need for it other than an exploratory investigation into reJIT.

I do have one more itch to scratch when it comes to profilers and that is application tracing and this may allow me to play with other technologies which I'll list later. This itch started a few months back, perhaps 6+ months ago, when I was trying to integrate some commercial tracing applications to an application I was working on and they both died horribly and I started to look for alternatives and found nothing available. Now I could have started the project then but I decided to pester both vendors until they fixed the problem which they eventually did (within a week or two of each other or so it seemed to me) and I integrated one of the solutions and moved on... but the itch never went away.

So what am I thinking... well a profiler (obviously) with 32/64 support (again given) and making obscene abuse of the COR_PRF_MONITOR_ENTERLEAVE functionality. The problem here is I don't really know what people will want to track (hey that is why there are companies that do this thing with BAs and such like to decide on this) so in the first instance I'll go at tracing everything (which will probably be very slow) and go from there.

This leads to the next problem, data, lots of it, lots and lots of it, and that data is going to need a home but a home I can then use to create reports at some point. For this I am thinking asynchronous, initially a queue and potentially an event source like data store like EventStore or NEventStore. The advantage of an event source would allow the ability to regenerate the views once we know what they are, perhaps something along the lines of Splunk or SplunkStorm would come into play.

So a name... always the hardest part but thankfully we have the internet and online dictionaries so I've gone with OpenDiscover.

Creating a simple NodeJS app with Mongo

Okay, I woke up this morning (6am) with a need to create a simple reporting dashboard to display the coverage results from OpenCover when it dog-foods its own tests. Now that OpenCover has no reported bugs, I decided to use my spare time to investigate other technologies for a while.

What I needed was simple 'online' storage to capture results from the build system and the ability to extract that data into charts. Normally I'd probably knock up a simple rails app because it is easy to do, however I decided, probably due to the heat, to use the following:

• node.js - a technology I haven't used but have meant to for a while; I also like the JavaScript syntax better than ruby (it's a personal thing)
• mongodb - a database I am familiar with
• google charts - free; as in beer.
• heroku - free; well my intended usage will be.

A quick time-boxed search of the web about how to use node with mongodb and create a RESTful API and I settled on the following packages:

• mongoose - for interacting with the mongo database
• restify - for creating a simple rest server
• nodemon - monitors changes in your app and restarts; sounds useful

I'll assume other packages will be added to the mix as challenges present themselves. It's now 7am and time for breakfast and then the fun starts... 

And a few hours later we have a simple storage system hosted on heroku all we need now is the charts

The repository can be found on github. 

I am sure it will evolve over time but it was very simple to get to this stage by leveraging the work of all those who have gone before.