Visual Stuidio Web Application Project

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11/13/2009 4:41:51 PM
adam@ai500.com
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Visual Stuidio Web Application Project

I am new to mojoPortal and am trying to find out if it will fit my customer's needs.  What I have seen so far, everything looks great.  One question I have is is it possible to convert the web site to a Visual Studio web application project?  (The customer would like to, at some point, possibly run this on Azure, which requires a web application project.)  I made an initial attempt at doing this by creating a new Visual Studio web application project, copied in all the deploment files from your web site "mojoportal-2-3-1-9-mssql-deploymentfiles", then tried to utilize the "Convert to Web Application" tool.  Ended up with over 300 exceptions - all similar to: Error Unable to convert to Web Application format because the code-behind file 'Blog\ViewPost.aspx.cs' does not exist.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Adam

11/13/2009 4:51:01 PM
Joe Audette
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Re: Visual Stuidio Web Application Project

Hi Adam,

With a Web Application Project, all the C# source code is compiled into dlls in the bin folder. mojoPortal web project actually is a Web Application Project.

What you are not understanding is that the "deploymentfiles" package is pre-compiled and has no C# source code, it is meant for production deployment, that is why VS treats it like web site project.

To work with the source code in Visual Studio, I recommend getting the source code download which has all the source code and Visual Studio solution files.

However, I will say, it will not currently run on Azure, it can use SqlAzure for the database, but the web code currently uses the file system which cannot be done on Azure, we need to first create a file system abstraction layer so we can implement support for running the web in the Azure cloud.

Hope it helps,

Joe

11/13/2009 5:19:03 PM
adam@ai500.com
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Re: Visual Stuidio Web Application Project

Thanks Joe.  That makes sense.  Also, thanks for the quick response. 

Looks like you've got a great product here - hope you're getting a lot of beer for all your work.

11/13/2009 6:06:47 PM
adam@ai500.com
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Re: Visual Stuidio Web Application Project

Joe,

Are there currently any plans to create a file system abstration layer?

In your estimation, would this be a significant undertaking?

Thanks,

Adam

11/14/2009 6:46:08 AM
Joe Audette
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Re: Visual Stuidio Web Application Project

Hi Adam,

It definitely is not a trivial undertaking. The abstraction layer will have to be a provider model so different things can be plugged in under the hood for blob storage and a default provider will be implemented in mojoPortal that uses the file system. As indicated on my Road Map, I have plans for an add on product for web farm support, Azure support will be part of this package but it is currently only in the planning phase and there are other projects ahead of it in my queue.

The places where we currently use the file system directly include:

  1. User uploads like images and media.This is where Azure (or other cloud services like Amazon) or the database could be used for storage.
  2. Logging - currently to a text file but not difficult to change this to log to the db.
  3. The Lucene.NET search index depends on the file system. Solving this will probably be the most challenging, it will be difficult to make it perform well using a database because it really needs random access. Probably will have to use memory for the search index and just back it up to storage.
  4. We use cache dependency files to clear items from the cache we touch the dependency file. Some other solution for clearing the cache will have to be devised.

As this is only in the planning phase I don't yet have a target date.

Best,

Joe

11/14/2009 1:48:54 PM
adam@ai500.com
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Re: Visual Stuidio Web Application Project

Thanks for the detailed and honest answer.

By the way, we have selected to go with mojoPortal over a number of other CMS products, in large part due to your obvious dedication and involvement.

11/14/2009 2:01:58 PM
Joe Audette
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Re: Visual Stuidio Web Application Project

Hi Adam,

Very glad to hear it! mojoPortal is a labor of love for me so it is very gratifying both to work on it and to see adoption growing fast.

Best,

Joe

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