Afternoon Tea

Archived Posts from this Category

Afternoon Tea – 11th June 2013 – Open Source Projects I Like: Glimpse

Posted by on 11 Jun 2013 | Tagged as: .NET, Afternoon Tea, ASP.NET, C#, Community, Development, Morning Brew

A couple of weeks ago I watched the dotNetConf Open Source .NET Panel’ discussion which brought together a number of people from the .NET Open Source communities to discuss the state of Open Source in our community. The discussion was a good one, well worth watching and made me start to think about some of the Open Source projects I like – one of which features in this post.

Glimpse

Glimpse
Glimpse provides the answer for server side code that the likes of Firebug and Chrome Developer Tools provide for the client side developer. The project was originally conceived by Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar back in early 2011, and launched at Mix11’s Open Source Fest.

Glimpse did the usual Open Source project dance through many <1.0 releases, and mid last year became a project supported by Red Gate. Since then things have rapidly accelerated, and the community team have blasted beyond the 1.0 release threshold.

Today sees the announcement of Glimpse 1.4, along with a significant new look and feel introducing a Heads Up Display to make the most significant and useful information always available when Glimpse is enabled. Check out the announcement post over on the Glimpse Blog for the full lowdown, including a short video which gives a real impression of how the new Heads Up Display actually works.

More Heads Up

Get Your Head Up!

I love that adding Glimpse to a project while working is as simple as adding a NuGet package

Install-Package Glimpse.MVC4

Once installed, build and run your solution, and then hit up the Glimpse Handler to see what’s installed and to enable the tool

http://localhost:12345/glimpse.axd

So far all as expected. Now head back to your web application, and you will be greeted by the new look Heads Up Display at the bottom of the page, in all its Metro’esque glory.

Glimpse Heads Up Display

The Heads Up Display appears across the bottom of all pages when enabled, providing at a glance key metrics about the page:

  • Key Overall Timing Metrics
    • Overall Time
    • Time spent network communicating
    • Time Spent processing Server Side Code
    • Time until DOM Ready
  • Server Side Processing Breakdown
    • In the MVC case identifying the Controller
    • The Action processing time
    • The View processing time
    • The Time taken by Database queries triggered by the page
  • Realtime updating view of the Ajax Requests

Hovering the mouse over each of these sections gives further information about the metrics in a concise and clear, yet information dense way:
Heads Up Display Detail

More new UI awaits you on clicking the ‘g’ logo in the corner, the traditional way to summon Glimpse’s detailed FireBug like UI to the foreground, which has also had the Metro style make over. If you’ve ever used Glimpse before you will be familiar with the range of information available in here, including the very useful (and even prettier now) Timeline view:

Glimpse Detail View - Timeline

Why Glimpse Works for me

  1. Very, very easy to get up and running
    The ‘Pit Of Success’ is easy to get into, install the package, enable via a URL, and you are reaping the rewards.
  2. Tells me useful information
    Glimpse has the useful metrics, configuration and information readily available – other than enabling it there is nothing more that needs to be done
  3. Friendly and far reaching community
    Nik and Anthony are nice chaps and have fostered a good community round Glimpse, and care about engagement in the open source community. The community is growing with with ever increasing numbers of contributors and extensions for all kinds of things ranging from pure ADO to SignalR – I’ve found the SignalR one useful on a number of occasions
  4. Easy Extension
    It’s pretty simple to start adding your monitoring for your own functionality to a custom Glimpse tab (so easy I’ve managed it!)

I’ve found having the metrics Glimpse provides to be invaluable on a countless occasions, and I encourage you to try it out, or even better, get involved with the project itself.

Full Disclosure – Anthony & Nik gave me a preview of the new Head Up Display functionality a few days ago, which prompted me to tell you how much I’ve liked Glimpse for quite some time – No money exchanged hands, but I might let them buy me a drink when I finally get to meet them both 😉

Afternoon Tea – 19th October 2012 – DDD North 2 Special

Posted by on 19 Oct 2012 | Tagged as: .NET, Afternoon Tea, Development, Morning Brew

DDD North 2 took place last weekend, and brought together a great bunch of speakers and attendees for a fantastic event up in Bradford. Many many thanks to all those who attended, the sponsors, and especially the organisers for making the day (and surrounding days) excellent fun.

A great number of people posted slides, reviews, photos and code online as a result of the event, and I’ve tried to collect together those that I’ve seen via RSS and Twitter. It’s almost certain that I’ve missed an number of posts out, so feel free to chuck links to anything I’ve missed in the comments (and I’ll approve them as they come in).

Speakers / Sessions

Reviews of the day

Future Events

  • DunDDD – Dundee on Saturday 17th November – Registration and session submission open now
  • DDD Brisbane – DDD is an international affair, with the next overseas event taking place in Brisbane on the 1st December. Session submission is open until 4th November

Afternoon Tea – Sunday 10th June 2012

Posted by on 10 Jun 2012 | Tagged as: .NET, Afternoon Tea, ASP.NET, C#, COM Interop, Community, Database, Development, Links, Morning Brew, SysAdmin, Talks / Presentations

It’s been quite a while since the last ‘Afternoon Tea’ post, and there have been quite a lot of significant announcements in the past few weeks, coupled with my being busy at work which has resulted in me building up quite a backlog of links which I really wanted to include in a Morning Brew. This post is my attempt to ‘clear the decks’ and get caught up again, and also provides the perfect excuse to do a link roundup of DDD South West which I had the pleasure of presenting at at the end of last month.

Software

  • Introducing jQuery++ – Justin B Meyer and the folsk over at Bitovi announce the release of jQuery++, a collection of DOM helpers which complement and extend jQuery
  • Bundler.NET – Bundler.NET brings the CSS and JavaScript minification and combining features of .NET 4.5 to earlier versions of .NET. The installation is simple via a NuGet package and the API reflects the .NET 4.5 implementation.
  • bddify is moved to GitHub and is renamed to TestStack.BDDfy – Mehdi Khalili gives an update on TestStack.BDDfy, the project formerly known as bddify, discussing the name change, and change to the projects hosting, along with looking at the structure of the NuGet packages which amke up TestStack.BDDfy.
  • #mvvmlight V4 for Windows 8 RP is available – Laurent Bugnion announces the release of version 4 of his MVVMLight framework for Windows 8 Release Preview
  • Get latest CSS 3 support in Visual Studio 2010 – Mads Kristensen discusses how you can get the latest version of the CSS3 support into your Visual Studio 2010 installation providing a link to the schema files required and giving instructions on getting it setup and installed in Visual Studio 2010
  • Tree Surgeon – Alive and Kicking or Dead and Buried? – Bil Simser gives an update on an old tool that I used to make considerable use of in the past. Tree Surgeon was a tool to create a standardized format of Development Source Tree structure. In this post Bil discusses how the landscape of .NET development has changed in the 4 years since its last release with improvements in T4 Templating and NuGet, and questions if there is a future for the project.
  • Introducing RabbitBus – Derek Greer introduces RabbitBus, a .NET client API implementation for working with RabbitMQ, aiming to provide constructs which are not provided in the standard RabbitMQ .NET client. The library is open source with code available on GitHub, and the installation is available in NuGet package format.

Information

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South-West 4.0

Next Page »