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Keyvan Nayyeri

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Community Server REST API - BlogsNovember 17

In the first two parts of this post series about Community Server REST API I introduced the API and covered the development model.

While these two posts would be enough for an ordinary developer (familiar with core Community Server architecture) to start developing applications with Community Server REST API, I thought it would be worth having an adjunct post that takes a pragmatic approach in the development with REST API by specializing in one of the subsystems like blog system.

Therefore, here is a post that covers development for blog APIs in REST API in general, and shows you the process in a nutshell without stepping in all details. I try to implement a few common scenarios in this post to exhibit my intention.

Add a Blog Group

As the first example, I create a new blog group and set its properties then add it to the system, and finally delete it!

static void Main(string[] args)

{

    Console.Title = "Community Server REST API - Blogs";

 

    BlogsService service = new BlogsService("http://localhost/cs/", "admin", "2nw9q0ki");

 

    Blo

Change I NeedNovember 12

Sometimes things don’t turn out to be as same as our expectations and we face with difficulties in handling them, and lately I’ve ran into such a situation that I never experienced in my life.

Before finishing my service, I expected to confront with a short period of abeyance or inundation because I had heard about that from some friends who had finished the military service sooner than me, and actually I faced with the later situation and overwhelmed by lots of tasks that require much time to be done.

The reason that I’m writing this stuff on my blog is to clarify some points about the recent suspension on my blog and my online activities. I’ve been blogging for almost 3.5 years and never had less than 20 blog posts per months but last month I published 17 posts to not attain my own record. Of course, this isn’t important at all because I’m not blogging for records but when you do something on a regular basis and on a constant rhythm, something like this situation gets bolder in your mind.

Blogging is something banal for its own but no one can gainsay that a person can feel good about such a disruption in his regular works. Moreover, I’m in a very sensitive part of my life that can influence my overall life forever, and it requires me to put more effort into that.

Since the beginning of my military service and even long time before then, I had some long term plans for my future life that I could achieve after finishing the se

Custom JSON Serialization in ASP.NET AJAXNovember 11

As you would already know, JSON serialization of server objects is an inherent task in ASP.NET AJAX workflow, and plays the key role in developing AJAX applications. However, default JavaScriptSerlializer included in ASP.NET AJAX framework has some restrictions for specific classes and you encounter problems when using this default serializer. The solution is, extending the serializer with your own converters that target these specific types.

Fortunately there is a simple and easy to develop extensibility point in ASP.NET AJAX that allows you to do this, and in this post I want to walk through an example that covers this topic.

In order to extend ASP.NET AJAX to be able to serialize your objects in JSON format, you can derive from JavaScriptConverter abstract base class located in System.Web.Script.Serialization namespace which has two methods and one property to override:

• SupportedTypes: Returns an IEnumerable collection of types that can be serialized/deserialized by this custom converter.
• Serialize: Gets an object as well as a JavaScriptSerializer instance, and serializes the object in a dictionary of string keys and their corresponding values then returns the result.
• Deserialize: Gets a dictionary of string keys and object values, the type of object, and a JavaScriptSerializer instance, and deserializes the data in dictionary to the original type.

Giving an example would be enough to show how to use

What’s New with Beginning ASP.NET MVCNovember 7

Most likely you’ve noticed the recent decrease of activity on my blog and the temporary change in the content style. Like my anticipations for the first few weeks of the post-service era, I’ve been busy with some stuff that didn’t allow me to handle the load in the past few weeks and I guess that this progress continues until the end of November. There have been many reasons for this but one of the secondary reasons is the book that Simone and I have been working on: Beginning ASP.NET MVC.

It’s been quite a while since the last time that we gave an update on the status of this book, so I thought it’s good to share some news with our followers publicly especially because there have been some important news coming out of P

The Future of WaegisNovember 6

Now it’s over four months of public existence of my Waegis spam filter service, and in this while it has grown smoothly. It’s also over three months of deploying the first stable version of the site and releasing it to the web. Since the beginning I had defined a roadmap for the next two major releases of the application and adding new features to the system. My initial plan was to release the second version by the end of November 2008 but to be honest, my recent business with personal stuff (that is the main reason to see the recent abeyance on my blog) hasn’t allowed me to accomplish this, and it looks like that I have to postpone the new release until the first quarter of 2009.

But I think that it’s worth sharing some parts of my plans publicly (and of course keep some exciting news private) because recently I experienced an acceleration in the number of clients, and some of them contact me to ask about the possibility for using free commercial services for their sites. Therefore, it would be interesting to know some parts of my plans for the future