.NET User Group May Meeting - Nblogr

Ivan Porto Carrero

• Senior developer
• Xero
• Creator of Nblogr

What is Nblogr?

• Blogging Engine
• Base library for other projects
• My experimental project
• Extensible
• Showcase for technologies
• Decided to actually go through making it a proper application because of people asking me for it.

Why another blogging engine?

• Underestimated the work involved.
• Used to be my experimental project / Facing fears
• None of the blogging engines do what I want them to do at the time I started the project.
• Exploring open source
• Contributing to the community
• There is no community blogging platform built on .Net
• Base for a range of other applications that are based on blogging technology (CMS, forum, wiki, …)

Which technologies?

• Base4 (http://www.base4.net)
  • Base4 takes care of the O/R mapping
  • Base4 is a lot more than just an O/R mapper
• Castle (http://www.castleproject.org)
  • MVC framework a la Ruby on rails
  • Contributed to the project myself (minor patches)
• Prototype (can be replaced)
• .NET framework (the best framework for programming)

Base4 brush-up

• Services layer over your database
• Good layer of abstraction of my data
• Objects instead of database schema.
• Seamless setup experience
• Supports migrations

Castle introduction

• Castle mission statement: to provide a simple set of tools to speed up the development of common enterprise and web applications while promoting good architecture.
• MVC framework
  • Promotes separation of concerns
  • Basic castle setup would be
    • Models => Castle provides ActiveRecord through Nhibernate
    • Views => Castle provides multiple view engines (aspx/webforms, nvelocity, brail, …) (rendering engine)
    • Controller => the director of the application. Delegates input to services. And sends the output to the views.
  • Castle provides Inversion Of Control which makes your application a lot more flexible.

Nblogr architecture

• Views & JavaScript
• Controllers
• Service Layer
• Base data object
• ASP.NET App Svc & Logging & Output compression module
• Base4 server/client
• Castle facilities for Base4
• SQL Server 2005

Architecture

• Membership provider
• More logging
• Output compression
• Initialisation of mapping service
• DataObject
  • Generalisation works well
  • Abstract service works as DAO
• Services Layer
  • Do the actual work
  • 1 class, 1 responsibility
  • 1 method, 1 task
• Controller
  • Common functionality in base classes
  • Receive input from request
  • Dispatch to services
  • Output results to view
• View
  • Render results
  • A view is a representation of data

Status / Roadmap

• Current status = Alpha
• Roadmap
  • Multi user management
  • OpenID and CardSpace
  • Themes

HELP!!!