source code bean » C#

MongoDB, C# and Mono

Peter — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:53:48 +0000

MongoDB is one of the many free open source NoSQL databases that exist today. I wanted to try out how well the official drivers for C# worked when using Mono.

On the MongoDB web site they have pre built binaries of MongoDB for almost every platform, i grabbed the 64 bit binary for OSX. No installation is required, just unzip the file and run the “mongod” binary from the directory. There is also a binary called “mongo”, this is the mongo interactive shell which is very useful.

The C# drivers are available, both in binary form and as source, from the C# language center. To get started I fired up MonoDevelop 2.8 running on Mono 2.10.8:

MonoDevelop has matured a lot since I used it the first time. It is still not as good as Visual Studio, but it is getting there. What takes most time to get used to is the totally different set of shortcuts, and the lack of all ReSharper magic.

Let me break down a simple console application example on how to use MongoDB using the official driver from 10gen:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using MongoDB.Bson;
using MongoDB.Driver;
using MongoDB.Driver.Builders;
namespace MongoDbTest
{
public class Article
{
public MongoDB.Bson.ObjectId id { get; set; }
public string title { get; set; }
public string status { get; set; }
public string[] tags { get; set; }
}
class MainClass
{
public static void Main (string[] args)
{
// Connect to the database and get a colleciton
MongoServer server = MongoServer.Create ("mongodb://localhost");
MongoDatabase db = server.GetDatabase ("mongodb-tutorial");
// Get an article collection
MongoCollection articles = db.GetCollection ("articles");
// Empty the collection (so all runs of this program will result in the same output)
articles.RemoveAll ();
//
// Create two articles
//
articles.Save (new BsonDocument
{
{"title", "A MongoDB article"},
{"status", "published"},
{"tags", new BsonArray { "c#", "mongodb" }}
});
articles.Save (new BsonDocument
{
{"title", "A Mono article"},
{"status", "draft"},
{"tags", new BsonArray { "c#", "mono" }}
});

If you type this in the MongoDB shell, you will see that the following articles are stored in the database:

> db.articles.find()
        {
          "_id" : ObjectId("4f097f8e74b5b343b97f56a7"),
          "title" : "A MongoDB article",
          "status" : "published",
          "tags" : [ "c#", "mongodb" ]
        }

        {
          "_id" : ObjectId("4f097f8e74b5b343b97f56a8"),
          "title" :
          "A Mono article",
          "status" : "draft",
          "tags" : [ "c#", "mono" ]
       }

// Find and print the first article
BsonDocument firstArticle = articles.FindOne ();
PrintArticle ( // Access the properties using indexing and then casting using the .As*
firstArticle["_id"].AsObjectId,
firstArticle["title"].AsString,
firstArticle["status"].AsString,
(firstArticle["tags"].AsBsonArray).Select (x => x.AsString));
//
// Typed collections
//
// Using indexing and the .As* operations is not that convenient. A better way
// is to use a typed collection. Earlier we defined a Article class, lets use it:
MongoCollection
typedArticles = db.GetCollection
("articles");
Article typedArticle = typedArticles.FindOneAs
();
PrintArticle (typedArticle.id, typedArticle.title,
typedArticle.status, typedArticle.tags);
// Save a typed article
typedArticles.Save (new Article {
title = "An article about MonoDevelop",
status = "published",
tags = new [] {"c#", "mono", "mono-develop"},
});
//
// Querying
//
// Find article with status draft
Article draftArticle = typedArticles
.FindOneAs
(Query.EQ ("status", "draft"));
PrintArticle (draftArticle.id, draftArticle.title,
draftArticle.status, draftArticle.tags);
//
// Updating
//
// Lets update the draft article and set status published
Console.WriteLine ("Nr of published articles before update:"
+ typedArticles.Find (Query.EQ ("status", "published")).Count ());
typedArticles.Update (
new QueryDocument { { "_id", draftArticle.id } },
new UpdateDocument { { "$set", new BsonDocument ("status", "published") }
// $set is atomic
});
Console.WriteLine ("Nr of pubhlished articles after update:"
+ typedArticles.Find (Query.EQ ("status", "published")).Count ());
//
// MapReduce
//
// This will count the number of times a tag has been used by using MapReduce
var map =
"function() {" +
" this.tags.forEach(function(t) {" + // Iterate all the tags and
" emit(t, { count : 1 }); " + // emit the tag name and initial count
" })" +
"}";
var reduce =
"function(key, emits) {" + // Reduce by tag name and summarize the result
" total = 0;" +
" for (var i in emits) {" +
" total += emits[i].count;" +
" }" +
" return { count : total };" +
"}";
Console.WriteLine ("MapReduce result:");
var mr = typedArticles.MapReduce (map, reduce);
foreach (var document in mr.GetResults()) {
Console.WriteLine (document.ToJson ());
}
}
public static void PrintArticle (ObjectId id, string title,
string status, IEnumerable tags)
{
Console.WriteLine ("id: " + id + ", title: " + title);
Console.WriteLine ("- tags: " + string.Join (", ", tags));
}
}
}

Output from the program:

id: 4f0989fc74b5b3458ae38105, title: A MongoDB article
- tags: c#, mongodb
id: 4f0989fc74b5b3458ae38105, title: A MongoDB article
- tags: c#, mongodb
id: 4f0989fc74b5b3458ae38106, title: A Mono article
- tags: c#, mono
Nr of pubhlished articles before update:2
Nr of pubhlished articles after update:3
MapReduce result:
{ “_id” : “c#”, “value” : { “count” : 3.0 } }
{ “_id” : “mongodb”, “value” : { “count” : 1.0 } }
{ “_id” : “mono”, “value” : { “count” : 2.0 } }
{ “_id” : “mono-develop”, “value” : { “count” : 1.0 } }

Using the C# driver for MongoDB, is as you can see, very straight forward. Usually when I run applications on Mono I make sure to build all libraries using the Mono compiler, to make sure the Microsoft compiler have not used any optimizations that is not supported under Mono (I have run into this issue in the past). However, in this case the .NET binaries on the MongoDB site seems to work just fine under Mono. I also downloaded the MongoDB C# driver source and build them using MonoDevelop without any problems.

One improvement I would like to see is LINQ support in the driver. It would be so much more convenient to be able to use LINQ and strongly typed objects to query the database or create MapReduce-functions.

String interning in C#

Peter — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 11:15:33 +0000

Last week a coworker sent me an interesting piece of code:

const string a = "";
const string b = "";
const string c = "hello";
const string d = "hello";
Console.WriteLine(ReferenceEquals(string.Empty, string.Empty)
? "Not so surprising…"
: "Oh, the humanity!");
Console.WriteLine(ReferenceEquals(a, string.Empty)
? "But I thought string was a reference type!"
: "Seems fair…");
Console.WriteLine(ReferenceEquals(a, b)
? " But I thought string was a reference type!"
: " Seems fair…");
Console.WriteLine(ReferenceEquals(c, d)
? " But I thought string was a reference type!"
: " Seems fair…");

Running the program will, maybe a bit surprising, produce:

Not so surprising…
But I thought string was a reference type!
But I thought string was a reference type!
But I thought string was a reference type!

The reason to this is what is called String interning. The CLR basically holds a hashmap of all the strings in the program (edit: string literals), one entry per unique string. So two identical strings will always have the same reference even though they are defined in different places. String interning is mainly used to speed up string comparisons (no need to check char by char if they are identical, if they have the same reference they are equal), but also to reduce the memory footprint of the application.

Reference types are always passed by value in C#

Peter — Mon, 02 May 2011 06:05:00 +0000

Last week i had a discussion with a friend about C# and passing parameters to methods. My friend asked why it is possible to use the ‘ref’ keyword for a reference type in C# when passing it to a method, he was under the impression that reference types are passed by reference to methods. This seems to be a quite common misunderstanding about C#, to make it clear:

Reference types are always passed to methods by value (unless you use the ‘ref’ keyword)

What happens when you call a method with a reference type as parameter is that the value of the reference (the pointer, an address to pointing to the referenced object) is passed to the method (by value). What this means is that you can not modify the original reference, but you can modify the object it is referencing (pointing to).

By using the ‘ref’ keyword you will pass the address of the reference to the method, which means that you can modify its value.

This is a short example illustrating this (remember, in C#, a string is a reference type):

class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
string s = "orig value";
Console.WriteLine("Orig value: " + s);
MyFunc1(s);
Console.WriteLine("After MyFunc1: " + s);
MyFunc2(ref s);
Console.WriteLine("After MyFunc2: " + s);
}
public static void MyFunc1(string s)
{
s = "new value 1";
}
public static void MyFunc2(ref string s)
{
s = "new value 2";
}
}

Output:
Orig value: orig value
After MyFunc1: orig value
After MyFunc2: new value 2

A simple image sprite generator in C#

Peter — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 20:17:01 +0000

Last week I posted the source code to a small program I wrote in Java to merge images into a sprite. This week I present the same application but in C#, pretty much translated line by line

using System;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Drawing.Imaging;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
namespace NSpriteGenerator
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
if (args.Length != 2)
{
Console.WriteLine("Usage: NSpriteGenerator {path to images} {output file}");
return;
}
var imagePath = args[0];
var outputFile = args[1];
var imageFolder = new DirectoryInfo(imagePath);
// Read images
var imageList = imageFolder.GetFiles("*.png")
.Select(file => Image.FromFile(file.FullName));
// Find max width and total height
var maxWidth = 0;
var totalHeight = 0;
foreach(var image in imageList)
{
totalHeight += image.Height;
if (image.Width > maxWidth)
maxWidth = image.Width;
}
Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Number of images: {0}, total height: {1}px, width: {2}", imageList.Count(), totalHeight, maxWidth));
// Create the actual sprite
var currentY = 0;
using (var bitmap = new Bitmap(maxWidth, totalHeight))
{
using (var canvas = Graphics.FromImage(bitmap))
{
foreach (var image in imageList)
{
canvas.DrawImage(image, 0, currentY);
currentY += image.Height;
}
canvas.Save();
}
Console.WriteLine("Writing sprite: "+ outputFile);
bitmap.Save(outputFile, ImageFormat.Png);
}
}
}
}

Output from a run:

PS C:\dev\NSpriteGenerator> .\NSpriteGenerator.exe C:\temp\gfx c:\temp\sprite.png Number of images: 10, total height: 640px, width: 34 Writing sprite: c:\temp\sprite.png

AppHarbor – Heroku for .NET?

Peter — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 20:24:31 +0000

I have been reading about this new startup that offers a service called AppHarbor. It seems very much as the same idea as Heroku for Ruby, but for .NET. The basic idea is that you deploy your code by pushing your code onto the server using Git, the server then builds, runs unit tests and deploys your application. Super simple!

When I first read about AppHarbor I got the impression that is was running ontop of Microsoft Azure, which turned out to be all wrong. AppHarbor is running in the Amazon Cloud on EC2 instances. When it comes to databases AppHarbor provides access to MySQL and MSSQL. Interestingly they recommend users to use MySQL:

“we expect to be able to offer MySQL on faster hardware and with more redundancy than SQL Server at the same price point. If you are planning to build an app on top of AppHarbor and have the option, we recommend you go with MySQL.”

Another interesting choice is that they have chosen Nginx as their proxy/load balancer.

Ok, let me show you how easy it is to create a simple ASP.NET MVC 3 application and deploy it on AppHarbour The first step is to go to appharbor.com and register an account. Once created you will be able to create your first app:

Give your application and press create. You have done all the configuring you need to do at AppHarbor.

Lets create a MVC 3 project with unit tests:

Make sure your project builds and that the tests passes. Also make sure you have Git installed, if not you can fetch it from here. Now open a shell and cd into the folder where you created your application.

First we need to configure git with your name, the email you used to register at AppHarbor and last the git postBuffer size:

PS C:\dev\appharbor\MyCoolApp> git config --global user.name SourceCodeBean PS C:\dev\appharbor\MyCoolApp> git config --global user.email mail@sourcecodebean.com PS C:\dev\appharbor\MyCoolApp> git config --global http.postBuffer 52428800

After this we initiate the git repository:

PS C:\dev\appharbor\MyCoolApp> git init PS C:\dev\appharbor\MyCoolApp> git add . PS C:\dev\appharbor\MyCoolApp> git commit -m "initial commit"

And when this is done we add AppHarbor as a remote repository:

PS C:\dev\appharbor\MyCoolApp> git remote add appharbor https://moberg@appharbor.com/mycoolapp-1.git

We are now set to push our code onto AppHarbor. To push it just type:

PS C:\dev\appharbor\MyCoolApp> git push appharbor master

We should now be able to see the project building:

Hopefully it built successfully. A problem I ran into was that I had ASP.NET MVC 3 RC installed and AppHarbor had the RTM version installed, this caused my first attempt to build my project to fail. After upgrading my local version and fixing the project I pushed a new version that built without problems.

We can now browse to the site (yay! that was way easier than setting up IIS manually):

Failing tests

Ok, lets change something in our application that will make a test fail:

Now we are going to be bad and not run our unit tests before commiting and pushing the code

PS C:\dev\appharbor\MyCoolApp> git commit -a -m "a failing test" PS C:\dev\appharbor\MyCoolApp> git push appharbor master

.. and we are building again

Woot! The build has failed!

We can easily see that it is the test that verifies the text on the start page that has failed

Ok, lets fix it!

Commit and push it again. And wait for the build to complete.

Yay! Our new version built successfully!

Lets check it out:

Rolling back to a previous version

Being able to rollback an update is sometimes necessary and AppHarbor makes it ridiculously simple, all you need to do is to press the “Deploy” link next to an old version. Clicking it will build and deploy the selected version.

We can now see that it is the first version that is active

I love the idea behind AppHarbor, this is really how sites should be deployed! However, using AppHarbor also means giving up some control over your environment. It will be interesting to see how they handle, for example, upgrades between different versions of IIS, installation of service packs, etc. Two features i miss is the ability to run background jobs and a distributed cache to use, but hopefully it will be coming to AppHarbor. AppHarbor still a very young startup, and so far what I have seen is really impressive!

MVC 3 RTM Install Error (after upgrading to VS2010 SP1)

Peter — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 18:28:54 +0000

Yesterday I installed Visual Studio 2010 SP1 on my home computer. After the installation I wanted to upgrade MVC3 to the RTM version (I had the RC version installed), so i uninstalled the RC and downloaded the new version. The installation came half way, then stopped, in the log file i found this:

Installation failed with error code: (0×80070643)

Not very helpful, but at least something to google. Then I found this blog post. The author describes pretty much the same issue that I had, so I did what he suggested, unpacked the installer using 7-Zip and installed the MSI packages in the following order:

1. aspnetwebpages.msi
2. aspnetwebpagesvs2010tools.msi
3. aspnetmvc3.msi
4. aspnetmvc3vs2010tools.msi
5. nuget.msi

This happily installed MVC3 without complaining. Thanks Michael!

The must have tools for C# development

Peter — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 07:00:01 +0000

Visual Studio 2010

I don’t think Visual Studio needs an introduction. VS 2010 brought us .NET 4.0 that contains a lot of new goodies!

ReSharper

ReSharper is the absolut must have for Visual Studio. It provides very improved navigation and search, refactoring, code generation, code cleanup and unit testing. I have gotten so used to having ReSharper installed so today I have a really hard time using Visual Studio without it.

Some useful shortcuts

Ctrl+T : Go to type
Ctrl+Shift-T : Go to file
Alt-Ins: Generate code (constructors, properties, implementing/overriding members)
Alt+Enter : Show available quick-fixes and context actions
Ctrl+Space : Symbol Code Completion
Ctrl+Alt+Space : Smart Code Completion
Shift+F12 : Find usages
Ctrl+Shift+R : Refactor this
Ctrl+R+R : Rename this
Ctrl+R+M: Extract method
Ctrl+R+V : Introduce variable
Ctrl+R+F : Introduce field
Ctrl+R+P : Introduce parameter
Alt+Shift+L : Locate in Solution Explore

PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2010

PowerCommands 10.0 is a set of useful extensions for the Visual Studio 2010 adding additional functionality to various areas Visual Studio. This is some of the commands I find must useful:

Copy References
Paste References
Copy As Project Reference
Edit Project File
Open Containing Folder
Open Command Prompt Here
Unload Projects
Reload Projects

Visual Studio 2010 – Productivity Power Tools

Productivity Power Tools from the Microsoft Visual Studio team contains a lot of great extensions

Very much improved dialog for add reference
Solution Naigator – a enhanced Solution Explorer
Improved tab system for editor
Highlight current line (isn’t it weird that VS is missing this feature?)

One annoying ‘feature’ is the triple click to navigate to source, never got it to work properly so I disabled it. Some shortcuts also colide with ReSharper so some tweaking is needed to make it work perfectly.

Thoughts on the Nokia / Windows Phone 7 deal

Peter — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 07:28:21 +0000

For the last week the news that Nokia has chosen Windows Phone 7 as their main operating system for all their new smart phones has been all over the news. A lot of people are very upset and say that Nokia should have gone with Android instead, or that they should have invested more in their own linux os Meego. Personally, looking at the options Nokia had, I think this is might be the best move Nokia could have done. Let me explain why.

For years Nokia has been struggling keeping Symbian alive. Symbian is an old operating system and has well served it purpose in millions of Nokia phones. However, during the last few years Nokia has totally failed on innovating, pretty much every other vendor now have smart phones running Andriod that offers more features and a better user experience then what Nokia can offer. Nokia needed to make a drastic change and the choices at this time were not that many.

Meego
Android
Windows Phone 7

Meego is Nokias in house developed linux based operating system. The vision behind Meego is great, but development has been too slow. From what I have seen of Meego it is a great operating system if you want to customize and geek around with your phone, but it is not yet ready for prime time. Another problem with Meego is that it is lacking an ecosystem of applications and developers (such as App store for IPhone or Android Market). Placing the bet on Meego would have been extremely risky and Nokia knows this.

Android seemed like the most obvious choice for Nokia. This is what most other vendors are offering and there is a big ecosystem around Android. The problem with it is Nokias limited way of differentiating themselves, they do not just want to become another “Android vendor”. Sure there are several ways they could have differentiated themselves on Android, just like HTC and Samsung are trying to do, but it seems like this was not enough for Nokia.

Windows Phone 7 was released at MWC in 2010 and is a totally new operating system from Microsoft. It is based on Windows Embedded Compact 7 with a new UI layer called Metro. It does not inherit anything from the horrible mess that was Windows Mobile 6. The deal Nokia made with Microsoft gives Nokia ‘special privileges’ to WP7, that other manufactures do not get. It is not clear yet exactly what this means, but what is clear is that this will make Nokia the main WP7 vendor on the market, clearly better than being just another Android vendor.

So will it be successful? Time will tell, but Microsoft has put a lot of money into WP7 and will not let it fail. At the same time Nokia has a reach that no other cell phone vendor has (they are still the by far biggest manufacturer of phones in the world), so if they are able to successfully build an application ecosystem around WP7 I think it will be a success and we will get a mobile space with three main players, Apple iOS, Android and WP7. Competition is good and vendors need other choices than Android for their phones (iOS is apple only, so in a way it does not play the same game).

For C# developers, such as my self, i think getting full backing from Nokia is good news. I would love to develop applications on the Windows Phone 7 platform. From what I have seen from the tools it integrates very well with Visual Studio and seems to be a lot of fun to work with. Maybe now is the time to start learning it?

Entity Framework 4 – Code First

Peter — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 21:57:57 +0000

Entity Framework 4 itself is interesting but what really got me hooked was the CTP 4 preview, and what Microsoft call “Code First”. Code First allows us to describe our model using regular POCO classes, instead of designing our model using either the EF editor or creating in directly in the database.

A very simple example of this would be to create a two classes to store blog entries and comments.

public class BlogEntry
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Title { get; set; }
public string Body { get; set; }
public virtual ICollection Comments { get; set; }
}
public class Comment
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public string Text { get; set; }
}

As you can see, this is regular C# classes, no decorators or inheritance involved. Now we need a class that will access the database:

public class Db : DbContext
{
public DbSet BlogEntries { get; set; }
public DbSet Comments { get; set; }
}

To try out storing and retreiving some values, i created a simple console application:

using System;
using System.Collections.ObjectModel;
namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
var db = new Db();
// Create a new video
var blogEntry = new BlogEntry() { Title = "Coding some EF in VS2010", Body = "Pretty sweet!" };
blogEntry.Comments = new Collection();
blogEntry.Comments.Add(
new Comment()
{
Name = "Han Solo",
Text = "Great article, will show it to Chewbacca"
});
blogEntry.Comments.Add(
new Comment()
{
Name = "Darth Wader",
Text = "Good work my son, you are just learning to know the power of the dark side"
});
db.BlogEntries.Add(blogEntry);
db.SaveChanges();
// Loop videos and
foreach (var v in db.BlogEntries)
{
Console.WriteLine("BlogEntry Id: " + v.Id + ", Title: " + v.Title);
Console.WriteLine("Comments:");
foreach (var tag in v.Comments)
{
Console.WriteLine(" Comment Id: " + tag.Id + ", Name: " + tag.Name);
}
}
}
}
}

Executing the program prints (not very surprising):

PS > .\ConsoleApplication1.exe
BlogEntry Id: 1, Title: Coding some EF in VS2010
Comments:
Comment Id: 1, Name: Han Solo
Comment Id: 2, Name: Darth Wader

Now to the interesting part, what really happened?

If we start SQL Management Studio and connects to my local SQL server express instance we can see that Entity Framework has automatically mapped the POCO objects to tables and setup the corresponding relations.

And we can see that the data got stored:

So far so good, now we come to the part where EF code first isn’t really mature enough yet. Say we want to make a small change to our Comment class, add a new property for example. The application will compile without compiling but the next time we run the application it will throw the following exception:

Unhandled Exception: System.InvalidOperationException: The model backing the ‘Db’ context has changed since the database
was created. Either manually delete/update the database, or call Database.SetInitializer with an IDatabaseInitializer
instance. For example, the RecreateDatabaseIfModelChanges strategy will automatically delete and recreate the database,
and optionally seed it with new data.
at System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.CreateDatabaseOnlyIfNotExists`1.InitializeDatabase(TContext context)
at System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.Database.Initialize()
at System.Data.Entity.Internal.InternalContext.Initialize()
at System.Data.Entity.Internal.InternalContext.GetEntitySetAndBaseTypeForType(Type entityType)
at System.Data.Entity.Internal.Linq.EfInternalQuery`1.Initialize()
at System.Data.Entity.Internal.Linq.EfInternalQuery`1.GetEnumerator()
at System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.DbQuery`1.System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable.GetEnumerator()
at ConsoleApplication1.Program.Main(String[] args) in C:\Dev\ConsoleApplication1\ConsoleApplication1\Program.cs:line
33

Which means that we pretty much has to delete the database and recreate it after every change we make – definitely not how i would prefer to work.

Conclusion
EF code first looks like a step in the right direction, but in order to make it usefull EF must provide automatic database migrations without loosing data, both for development use and for production use.

First steps toward EPiServer and ASP.NET MVC

Peter — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 20:33:38 +0000

Recently I started a new assignment at a customer where we are going to build their new public web site and their intranet, both of them based on EPiServer CMS 6. The person leading the project is very found of ASP.NET MVC, so my first task was to experiment with EPiServer and ASP.NET MVC, to try to get a running prototype up.

I did some research online to see what others had done. I found two great posts by Joel Abrahamsson and one from Fabio Fabrizio, who based his solution on Joels experiments.

Joels first attempt was to create a base class from which all Controllers inherited. However, this made the controller do more than it should and made it very hard to test. His second attempt was to create a custom model binder and make every action receive currentPage as a parameter. This approach makes it much easier to create unit tests for the code, since it is now possible to moc the currentPage parameter.

Fabio took a different approach and decided to implement a custom MVC handler and a controller factory. This approach fits very well with MVC and felt like the right way to go, so I decided to create a prototype based on Fabios code. Fabios code was based on EPiServer CMS 5 and ASP.NET MVC 1.0, but I wanted to use EPiServer 6 and ASP.NET MVC 2.0, so I started porting the solution.

Porting the solution to EPiServer 6 and ASP.NET MVC 2.0 required some changes to both code and configuration, which not all of them was trivial. At the moment I have a prototype up running, and it works remarkably well! I will continue my experiments and post my results.