Shiju Varghese's Blog

In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to build a web app with Node.js and MongoDB, and will deploy it on Windows Azure as a Windows Azure Web Site. Firstly, I will create a web site with Node.js, Express.js, Mongoose and MongoDB. Then I will create a MongoDB database on MongoLab, which is a MongoDB as a service hosted on Cloud, and finally deploy the web app to Windows Azure Web Site. The source code for the demo app is available on Github at https://github.com/shijuvar/NodeExpressMongo

The year 2012 was the year of hypes and we had lot of discussions about Cloud, Big Data and Enterprise Mobility. The year 2013 will be the year, where we can see lot of hypes will become realities. Just going behind the hypes will not help you, but a pragmatic approach to new technologies will give you lot of business values and operational agility. In 2013,  Mobile apps will continue the momentum and Cloud adoption will be widely improved on 2013. Organizations, especially larger organizations will invest huge amount for enabling the enterprise mobility in the year 2013, and they will try to expose REST/Hypermedia APIs over the organizational data, for providing a better mobility across the enterprise and public world.

In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to write unit tests for an ASP.NET MVC action method, which handles both Ajax request and normal HTTP Request. I will write a unit test for specifying the behavior of an Ajax request and will write another unit test for specifying the behavior of a normal HTTP request. Both Ajax request and normal request will be handled by a single action method. So the ASP.NET MVC action method will be execute HTTP Request object’s IsAjaxRequest method for identifying whether it is an Ajax request or not. So we have to create mock object for Request object and also have to make as a Ajax request from the unit test for verifying the behavior of an Ajax request. I have used NUnit and Moq for writing unit tests.

I have just migrated my EFMVC app from .NET 4.0 and ASP.NET MVC 4 RC to .NET 4.5, ASP.NET MVC 4 RTM and Entity Framework 5 Code First. In this release, the EFMVC solution is built with Visual Studio 2012 RTM. The migration process was very smooth and did not made any major changes other than adding simple unit tests with NUnit and Moq. I will add more unit tests on later and will also modify the existing solution.

I did a presentation on Node.js at FOSS.IN 2012, in Bangalore, India. The title of the talk was “Building Web Apps with Node.js”. The slides used for the talk can download from here and the source code can download from Github at https://github.com/shijuvar/NodeExpressMongo. The demo app is a simple CRUD application built with Express.js, Jade, Mongoose and MongoDB. Please note that I would continuously update the source code at Github.

In the previous blog post Microsoft TypeScript : A Typed Superset of JavaScript, I have given a brief introduction on TypeScript. In this post, I will demonstrate how to use TypeScript with ASP.NET MVC projects and how we can compile TypeScript within the ASP.NET MVC projects.

JavaScript is becoming a ubiquitous programming language for the web, and the popularity of JavaScript is increasing day by day. Earlier, JavaScript was just a language for the browser. But now, we can write JavaScript apps for browser, server and mobile. With the advent of Node.js, you can build scalable, high performance apps on the server with JavaScript. But many developers, especially developers who are working with static type languages, are hating the JavaScript language due to the lack of structuring and the maintainability problems of JavaScript. Microsoft TypeScript is trying to solve some problems of JavaScript when we are building scalable JavaScript apps.

Microsoft has recently announced the preview release of Microsoft Driver for Node.JS for SQL Server which allows the Node.js developers to connect Microsoft SQL Server database and Windows Azure SQL database. This is a great addition to the tool set for Node.js developers. NoSQL databases are widely using with Node.js for building high performance apps. However, in many situations we might be required a relational database where we can use Microsoft Driver for Node.JS for SQL Server, to working with Microsoft SQL Server database and Windows Azure SQL database. I have a created CRUD demo in Node.js with Express framework which can be available on Github at https://github.com/shijuvar/NodeOnAzure/tree/master/SqlNode . The demo app is built with Node.js, Express.js, Jade View Engine and the node-sqlserver module.