My earliest experiences of nature were of playing in the yard — and out back — as a child in a Houston suburb. As I recall it, our backyard had a pecan and some young oaks, along with multiple gardens. There was a red oak — or perhaps a maple? — planted out front, and a sweet gum tree whose seed casings would bring forth caution in even the most carefree of barefoot children. And of course there was the St. Augustine grass. This was all conducive to much play outside. But the best part was behind the fence: The Ditch.

Desiring to learn about both Node.js (particularly as an API server) and ASP.Net Web API, I decided to throw one more technology in the mix and see which one is faster at relaying messages to a service bus, namely, RabbitMQ.

• Part 1: Test Runner
• Part 2: Initial Node.js Code
• Part 3: Web API Code
• Part 4: Enhanced Node.js code

Time to turn that Node.js test green. In Part 2, I succeeded in publishing a message to RabbitMQ using Node.js. However, my automated test failed: the .Net test runner could not handle the generated message. Three key elements were missing, which are required for the MassTransit .Net library to interpret the message correctly:

Desiring to learn about both Node.js (particularly as an API server) and ASP.Net Web API, I decided to throw one more technology in the mix and see which one is faster at relaying messages to a service bus, namely, RabbitMQ.

• Part 1: Test Runner
• Part 2: Initial Node.js Code
• Part 3: Web API Code<
• Part 4: Enhanced Node.js code

And now, I finally get back to blogging about the ASP.Net Web API code that I wrote for this head-to-head comparison of REST service and message bus integration. The official tutorials were my guide for Web API, and as with the test runner in part 1, I used MassTransit as a convenient library for publishing from .Net code to RabbitMQ. Owin was my solution for self-hosting the web application.

Aqueduct-as-garden outside
the Mansion of Mazra’eh
in Israel. November 2010.

Many social websites, and web-based applications, have a notification process where the server sends a signal back to the browser, informing that particular user that there is a message. “You’ve got mail,” as America On-Line used to say it. Consider the picture below, from Twitter, which shows that I have one new notification. That number increments automatically when a new notification arrives, without having to reload the full page. How does that work? Well, this blog post doesn’t try to answer that directly. In fact, it is simply a collection of notes pointing out how to use Microsoft’s SignalR technology to achieve this.

The Bahá‘ís of Irving are trying out a concept: on the last Friday of each month, we’ll talk about a theme related to the “discourses of society,” motivated by passages such as this one, from the Universal House of Justice’s 2010 Ridván Letter to the Bahá‘í­s of the world (p10):

Isolating code from dependencies is crucial for developing small, well-defined, easy-to-understand tests. And it is an absolute must when those dependencies call external resources, such as a database, filesystem, or heavy-duty component (e.g. for interacting with office docs). But how do you introduce isolation in new unit tests for legacy .Net code? Well, that depends… and I have a flow chart and brief notes to help you figure it out.

Desiring to learn about both Node.js (particularly as an API server) and ASP.Net Web API, I decided to throw one more technology in the mix and see which one is faster at relaying messages to a service bus, namely, RabbitMQ.

This is part two in a series. Part 1.

Let’s start with Node.js. I already let you in on the fact that formatting a message for .Net to pick it up is tricky, and I won’t get into the detail of that yet. For now, let’s concentrate on setting up node.js and communicating with RabbitMQ. We’ll get the finer points of interacting with .Net later.

Desiring to learn about both Node.js (particularly as an API server) and ASP.Net Web API, I decided to throw one more technology in the mix and see which one is faster at relaying messages to a service bus, namely, RabbitMQ. Naturally, such a test does nothing to prove that one framework is generally faster than the other, but it is a fun exercise nonetheless.

Thus the challenge is this: accept a string message via POST, forward it to the service bus, and return HTTP Status Code 202 (Accepted) along with an acknowledgment that repeats the original message. Both REST services should be self-hosted; free from additional cruft like error-handling*; and should utilize an url like http://localhost:port/Message/mymessage, where “mymessage” is the string to be sent across the bus.