Monthly Archives: February 2011

Injecting NServiceBus into ASP.NET MVC 3

Posted by David Boike on February 27, 2011 5 comments

In the past, integrating NServiceBus into a web application typically meant adding the fluent configuration block to the Global.asax file and then keeping a static reference to the IBus property, because ASP.NET has not been very friendly to dependency injection.

In ASP.NET MVC 3, Microsoft has changed that by adding some nice abstractions around dependency resolution.  With a little effort, this allows us to inject NServiceBus (and its dependency injection container) into the dependency resolution pipeline.

In this example, I will show how to add NServiceBus to an MVC 3 web application so that common NServiceBus types (IBus chief among them) are injected into your controller classes.

Note: Karl Nilsson has written a post extending this one, showing how to inject NServiceBus into an ASP.NET MVC4 Web API solution, which requires just a few minor adjustments.

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Apple iOS Push Notifications with NServiceBus

Posted by David Boike on February 8, 2011 4 comments

I’m no big fan of Apple’s Push Notifications API, but the fact is that iOS applications are no passing fad.  As developers providing server-side resources to mobile applications, our job is to do so as efficiently as possible.

For .NET developers able to commit financial resources, third party solutions such as Urban Airship can be the answer.  For developers wishing to control their own destiny, the open-source apns-sharp provides Apple push notifications and feedback services in a C# library.

Considering the ridiculous complexity of the Apple Push Notification format, it would behoove any developer to use apns-sharp instead of trying to re-invent the wheel.  NServiceBus together with apns-sharp would offer the reliability and scalability needed to successfully send push notifications for a high-capacity enterprise system.

Unfortunately, until recently apns-sharp and NServiceBus didn’t work and play well together.  I contributed to the apns-sharp to address these shortcomings.  In this article, I will describe how to use these modifications to apns-sharp to send push notifications with NServiceBus.

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My NServiceBus moment of bliss

Posted by David Boike on February 7, 2011 3 comments

Sometimes technology is more than just technology.  Sometimes it reaches out and grabs you, and you have a moment of bliss where you realize everything has changed, that this is going to change everything and make your life better.

LINQ was one of those technologies for me.  Not the query-like syntax, per se; I consider that to be just a fancy compiler trick.  But the set of extension methods for IEnumerable<T> and the way they can reduce a complex looping structure to a line or two is amazing and game-changing.

Over the last year I have been embracing NServiceBus.  Jonathan Oliver describes NServiceBus as the best thing to happen to distributed systems since Ethernet, and he’s right on the money.  My first major project using NServiceBus has now been in production for a few months, and since then I’ve been reflecting on the process.

Now I realize there was one moment – that perfect moment of bliss – when I realized NServiceBus had changed everything.

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