My EverNote Entry: OpenRasta, OpenWrap, and OWIN

Today I listened to a podcast by Herding Code. The podcast on Jan 25, 2011 is a very interesting and informational one. It is a talk with Seb Lambla on OpenEverthing, which includes OpenRasta, OpenWrap, OWIN and many other related resources.

I have used EverNote for quite awhile. It is an excellent web service for quickly making any notes. I have created a .Net notebook as public shared one. Therefore, I add one note on this podcast and related links in the notebook. For more detail information about this podcast and the talk on three major Open projects, see my .Net notebook.

The public notebook provided by EverNote can be used as a RSS feed. That means public notebooks can be subscribed to. I use EverNote to make notes for important things such as events, thoughts, and interesting thinks I found on web. In a way, it is my alternative way to write blogs to record my life's journey, almost everything, or a supplementary to my blogs.

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OWIN Framework as WebService in .Net

This blog is a late post. I was on vacation back to Beijing and Wuhan during the past Christmas time and came back on Jan 16, 2011. During my time in China, unfortunately, I could not write blog since Blogger is blocked. I knew this issue and I scheduled my posts before I left. I have been busy to pick up and organize my stuff in the past week. Now I am back to normal schedule, working, web learning, doing my project and enjoying my life.

This late post is on OWIN: Open Web Interface for .Net. I got this when I listened to Hanselminute podcast #244 one day before in last December. I wrote a note in my Evernote on this(my .Net notebook).

Afterwards, I tried Kayak, an example OWIN library. The result was very exiting. I spent about 1 hour time on a console project. With its running at work, I could access to the service from any box at my work to get HTML results. My box is Windows XP Prof, which suppose not having any IIS. To install a web server is very complicated. With OWIN or Kayak, based on this testing, I could create any web service. OWIN is a very simple framework. I'll further explorer its potentials. Most likely, I will use it as a REST based service to provide data. I have many projects or apps which depends on remote data such as SCADA historian data, SQL server or Oracle database. OWIN may be excellent solution as light weighted layer to provide data.

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RESTful Service Start Kit

I have been very interested in RESTful services, since it is a service based on HTTP Get, Put and Post protocol. Basically, you can use this service by using URL to provide your resources to end users with simple web protocol service. One way to explore the service is by using a web browser, which is URL based application to handle resources such as HTML and XML.

I have watched Pluralsight Screencast demos on Microsoft WCF REST Startkit. The Start Kit project was launched last year with Preview 1. Now it is in the stage of Preview 2. As MSD's artical: A Developer's Guid to WCF REST Start Kit, this new framework will be in the future versions of the .Net Framework.

However, what I tried the Preview 2 last week, I realized that some of template projects behavior differently from the version of Preview 1, as I saw in the Screencast. For example, one class of Service.basic.svc.cs is missing. From the class of Service.svc.cs I can see base class such CollectionServiceBase and ICollectionService but they are not available for editing. This makes it impossible to customized help descriptions, implementations and templates. Not sure if all these changes are available from other alternative classes or interfaces. I think I have to spend a little more time to read information about the Preview 2 and to get it work as I expected.

At the same time, I posted my questions about the change of Preview 2 and asking if there is other alternative Open Source based library available on StackOverflow. It seems like that there are very a few EST kits or libraries for .Net platform. One alternative is OpenRasta. It looks like that OpenRasta is very good package. Basically its architecture is based on three elements: resources, handlers and codec. Resources are information to be exposed to the REST service, handlers are HTTP handlers for GET, PUT and POST for various request patterns, and Codec is enCoding/deCoding of HTTP requests.

Though the person who provides OpenRasta is a very smart .Net developer, he has very limit resources, time and effort to move it out. So far it is not so widely used and it looks like that it does not support Atom and feed services. Maybe in the new release coming the next month, some more enhancement will be available.

I'll keep eye on this library and at the same time, I have to look at Preview 2 in a deep level. Enjoy exploring!

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MSDN Channel 9

In the past month I have been watching talks or conversations on MSDN Channel 9. Microsoft is going to be more open than before. I enjoyed those open talks on the technology and new stuff. Actually, I think that Microsoft attract many talent people who have been on Open development for years and Microsoft has learned that they can gain benefit by join the Open world!

I found the Channel 9 one day when I tried to find out any shows or videos about REST web service with .Net or Visual Studio. To my surprise, I found a series talks on this at Channel 9. The best talks are offered by PluralSight.com, which is a search on its site for REST. PuralSight has better quality videos. Based on the talks, I found that Microsoft provided a REST package for REST web service development, and it is very impressive.

In addition to that, from Channel 9, I found many other great Open source projects posted to CodePlex, which is Microsoft Open Source web site. I have used many Open source libraries there, including Json.Net, MVC...

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