Gojko Adzic

This may be a bit on short notice, but we are organising a follow-up to the Castle talk from a few weeks ago on the 12th. The talk will be focused on Developing Ajax Web applications with Castle Monorail and the best practices for developing web 2.0 applications with Castle. The talk will take place in Skills Matter offices on the 12th of June — participation is free but you’ll have to register upfront. See Skills Matter page on the event for more details.

In the third part of the Castle tutorial, we look into the features of Monorail that allow us to save a lot of time and effort when developing web applications. We explore advanced Monorail concepts that help us delegate error processing and authentication to the framework and reuse templates. We also look into how Monorail integrates nicely with ActiveRecord to automatically load and modify database objects based on HTML forms. Continue Reading »

It was a great pleasure to do the talk on Agile Web Development with the Castle Project tonight at Skills Matter — judging by the number of people that turned up, this is a very interesting topic and I’m sorry that we did not get through the entire thing (thanks to London underground for delaying everything with their famous signaling problems). If you were at the presentation, and are interested in attending one more talk on Windsor or Ajax Monorail capabilities, please drop an e-mail to people at Skills Matter and ask for another session, I’d be more than happy to do it.

The recording of the session should be online soon at the Skills Matter site. Meanwhile, here are the slides and some links that you might want to visit next:

• powerpoint slides from the presentation
• Castle project homepage
• Page controller pattern explanation from MSDN
• Velocity template engine language guide
• Castle demo application #2: Monorail basics
• Castle demo application #1: ActiveRecord basics

In the second part of the Castle demo application tutorial, we look into the basic features of Castle’s powerful Model-View-Controller system, called Monorail. Monorail is based on Ruby on Rails, and brings two very important features to .NET web development:

1. Good separation of concerns between the domain model, workflow logic and the user interface: this allows us to unit test larger portions of web applications, makes the code more reusable and gives us flexibility for the user interface.

2. HTTP request/response plumbing, allowing us to be much more productive when developing web pages: Monorail will automatically convert HTTP request data into strongly typed function parameters, even domain objects; it provides an infrastructure for aspect-oriented request handling and reacting to errors. That allows us to focus on the business logic of the web application and skip writing boilerplate web code. Continue Reading »

Castle project is a great .NET enterprise application framework. It helps us develop .NET applications and web sites by providing the plumbing and making it easy to test the most important parts of the system. I’ve decided to build a demo application with the Castle project for an internal training session, to show how easy it is to work with this framework and to demonstrate the best practices. I will post the tutorial in parts on this web site as I develop it. In the first post, we work on the object-relational mapping with ActiveRecord and write unit tests for the database mapping layer. Continue Reading »