MVC/JQuery meets X-Mas Music Project

dotjosh — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 02:26:00 GMT

My friend Dave and I embarked on a project a few weeks ago, initially just meant to be an audio CD for our family, that included some rockin' versions of everyone's christmas favorites. As we started to record it, we got more and more excited about how it might turn out. Being the uber code master that I am, I opted to make a website... then in a blink, a friend who is incredible at Flash offered to help. This turned out to be a great experience for all of us, and the feedback has been tremendous.

I'm very proud to share with you (make sure your speakers are on) www.metalxmas.com

The code-behind
I wanted to have a spot for friends, family, and haters to post their honest ramblings, so I decided to go with the much-loved JQuery/ASP.NET MVC combo; what a joy as always. One bug I ran into, that seems to have been noticed before me, is the ability to cache the root page of your ASP.NET MVC site using the OutputCache attribute. According to this thread, the mvc team will have a fix soon. For the time-being, I ended up caching at the repository level by just sticking the data response from disk into the HttpContext cache to ensure I only read and parse my xml file every 10 seconds.

Nothing else too interesting came up. I added some spam protection, input validation (client and server-side), and HtmlEncoding to protect any hijacks. All in all, another great experience. I would share the code, but I have a certain Oxitephobia.

Scalability
In the hopes (and delusions of grandeur) of this thing being picked up as even a semi-viral hit. I wanted to make sure the site wouldn't go down. I placed the flash file, the four mp3 files, the images, and the css file on a CDN. I initially started with Amazon S3... but at 15cents/gig compared to SimpleCDN's 6cents/gig I had to switch. I've been very happy with my experience, and they even include $15 worth of free credit when you first sign-up. A friend of mine suggested I use the YSlow plugin to analyze my site; this ended up with the following configuration:

HTTP Compression enabled on CDN (via url configuration) and IIS (c'mon, if you haven't done this yourself already, DO IT NOW)
Set content expiration on all files on CDN to have 10 year expiration headers (I named the files themselves with version numbers to allow for forcefully expiring if needed)
JQuery and SWFObject scripts hosted via google
All scripts at the bottom
XHTML 1.0 Strict validated by W3

This ended me with an A score with YSlow. I felt accomplished.

Parting thoughts
I hope you enjoy it, it's definitely meant to be funny - so don't take it too seriously. Feel free to pass it along to your friends and family!

Inheriting code (that smells)

dotjosh — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 19:23:00 GMT

Josh: I am excited to be furthering the development of your tremendously popular website. How may I gain access to the source control repository?
Customer: Give me a second... *You've got mail! - sourcecode.zip*

Wow, this isn't my ideal way of getting my hands dirty in a project. But, this will be easy to fix.

Opening this .NET 1.1 ASP.NET app, I find three projects and no solution file. Confused, I open the projects individually and realize there is a huge circular reference issue that was circumvented by compiling the projects seperately and then referencing their output assemblies. Yuck. There are also heaps of bugs in the code causing all sorts of unneeded memory usage that's causing the application to freeze and recycle several times a day. Finally, I'm told that all of the latest features created for the site have been causing problems everywhere else. I think it's time for a change.

After several weeks of unit tests, refactoring, SVN, and CC.NET configuration.

The site no longer crashes.
Features can be implemented faster and more effectively.
Source control provides a source history with much safer storage.
A new version of the site can be deployed with the click of a button.

There is still a lot of work to be done. But, I think this goes to show the power and reason for being agile.

Josh Schwartzberg high-fives the CLR : ASP.NET

MVC/JQuery meets X-Mas Music Project

Inheriting code (that smells)