Entries Tagged 'Web 2.0' ↓

I needed to use a CDN in my ASP MVC app and needed it to be easy to develop against. I chose Amazon CloudFront since our servers are running on Amazon EC2 and we are also using Amazon S3 during our deployment. You can get a good introduction and step-by-step on CloudFront here.

As for the ASP MVC side, I wanted to have something like Url.Content where it converts my URL to my CDN URL while allowing for multiple development environments.

Here is how I did it:

A helper extension class on System.Web.Mvc.UrlHelper to add a new method to Url: This one is CdnContent

Here is an implementation

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Security.Policy;
using System.Text;
using System.Web.Mvc;
using System.Configuration;

namespace CdnHelpers
{
public static class CdnHelpers
{
private static AppEnvironment _appEnvironment = AppEnvironment.Unknown;
private static string _cdnBase = string.Empty;

private static AppEnvironment AppEnvironment
{
get
{
if (_appEnvironment == AppEnvironment.Unknown)
{
_appEnvironment =
(AppEnvironment)
Enum.Parse(typeof (AppEnvironment), ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["App.Environment"], true);
}

return _appEnvironment;
}
}

private static string CdnBase
{
get
{
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(_cdnBase))
{
_cdnBase = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["Cdn.Base"];
}

return _cdnBase;
}
}

public static string CdsContent(this System.Web.Mvc.UrlHelper url, string contentPath)
{
if (AppEnvironment == AppEnvironment.Local)
{
return url.Content(contentPath);
}
else
{
contentPath = contentPath.TrimStart('~');

return string.Concat(CdnBase, "/", AppEnvironment.ToString().ToLower(), contentPath);
}
}
}
}

AppEnvironment is an Enum:

    public enum AppEnvironment
    {
        Unknown,

        Local,

        Test,

        Dev,

        Staging,

        Production
    }

You need to add two keys to AppSettings of the Web.config:
App.Environment to determine which environment the code is running as and
Cdn.Base which would be something like http://cache.mydomain.com (no trailing slash)

Also add the namespace of the helper class to System.Web/Pages/Namespaces under Web.config

This should be it. Now you can replace a Url.Content with Url.CdnContent in the code.

I didn’t want to redirect all files by their extension to CDN but that’s not difficult to implement.

On deployment to Amazon:

• Amazon CDN files and folders are case sensitive.
• Create folders with the name of your environments under the root of the S3 bucket and deploy the files and folders there.

Evan Williams , the founder of Twitter has made his millions in Blogger. He is very well connected in Silicon Valley and Web 2.0 ecosystem. I also admit that Twitter can be a useful tool: Integrating it with other social networking websites like Facebook or even personal blogs can have good uses.

Everyday there are tens of new websites popping up on the internet providing different services: From URL shrinkers to Corporate collaboration tools. Now if each one of them had the problems Twitter has had for the past couple of months, it would have been dean in the water. Very dead indeed.

It was revealed recently that Twitter has only 1.5 million users. It might sound a lot but compared to many other websites, it is not a lot at all.

I guess Mr. Williams should be very lucky to have such good friends in the media to fan his hype so feverishly so he can manage to increase the number of the users of his service like that.