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Thursday 20 June 2013

Microsoft Asp.Net MVC 4, SignalR, the Cloud and Google

As if Shakespeare's sonnets were not mind boggling, the awesome guys n gals of Microsoft, Apple and Google have added dimensions to how you exercise your mind, to keep it decision savvy. It is, quite possibly, equal only to how I used to feel when up against William Shakespeare's sonnets in my second year of graduation. (Even today, I can guarantee that not one of those sonnets have enhanced or improved my outlook towards life (then why did they make me go through all that?)).

Imagine a toad (or is a frog more suited? Either way, feel free as both leap and hop quite willingly.) as it leaps from one grass cover into another lest it croaked, literally speaking!

This is how 'you' feel (and if 'you' do not, let me know and I will change the 'you' to 'I' but, of course, it is in a manner of rhetoric that I say so, so please do not take it too seriously)  as you go through the new technology initiatives from Microsoft and Google (being partners in technologies that make platform compatibility to nearly 70%) and Apple, to some extent (that is, when I try to get even more awed by technology than necessary and venture into OS X and iOS).

I had followed Asp.Net till about 2.0 or maybe, till the MVC days and since I knew about MV, courtesy, XCode/IB, I was satisfied that I was well-equipped; but not even the sonnets gave me the kind of jolt that words like Grease, Breeze, Ember, SignalR (I used to live near Signals Enclave as a child so I embraced this word (due to its familiar sound) as a South Indian, on a trip to North India, does, when meeting another native from his home town.) did and the other words are as monstrous as Cucumber, Jasmine and the rest (Okay, so you thought REST was it, did you? YOU SUCKER. There is LESS now!) sound to newcomers to the Open Source world of Agile software development.

Installing SignalR, an open source, browser implementation to enable client-server synchronization through asynchronization (tell me when it gets too simple) in Asp.Net web applications is not such a cake walk.

Because. while trying to figure out (by searching forums) the various parameters related to an installation, you will come across a post that will cause you to wish for a "rollback" mechanism in your installation (Did I hear the "adhiga prasingee" (a Tamil word. I am so liberated thanks to words like Katanga and OWin that I am convinced that people can figure out what you want to say, no matter if it is Japanese or Tamil!) say, "Oh, didm't you know? Such a mechanism exists?"?) - the post says, "you 'may not' cancel an install of the Asp.Net web tools 2012.2 nor install the Asp.Net updates while Visual studio is open as it "will" (not may) cause Visual Studio to misbehave!".

I will continue with a "Safe and sane install step-by-step" of SignalR in the next post, as in this one I seem to have drifted a little but totally justified (you ill know it when you install and use it) but I do have a thought here (not claiming any self-bragging rights) - I developed a code editor (jvWriter) way back in the 90s (code coloring, intellisense and the stuff) that I used to think was at par with VS, then, but what they have introduced with Web Extensions (see?

You were sitting back, relaxed, that there was nothing else!)

for Javascript and CSS is only an over-hyped term for a plug-in.

Why I mention this is that  you should be careful before going overboard about any new technology announcement - they may just be a glossed up word for something simpler that used to exist but because of the new demands of the Cloud, network security protocols, data management hardware, and Google APIs the econo-market needs may be the real cause for the new technological terms and not, really, - technical needs!

Ps.: If you had to frequently roll back your reading mechanism back and forth over a sentence (to stay with me in those long, complex sentences with all the brackets and sub-sentences), that is how reading the Sonnets used to make me feel!

But so that you get something from this post, here are just two images to get you started with SignalR (if you have downloaded ASP.Net web tools 2012.2 but are unable to see a SignalR template - one thing that may help you faster is that it is an Item Template and.not a VS project template.)

Start the "Package Manager Console" from the Tools- menu (VS Express 2012 for web) as below.


This will open the console as below. Type the highlighted text and the necessary references, .js files will be added to your Solution/Project. 


That is right. You can add the SignalR package only after you have created a project, an empty web app should do.



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