Yesterday we released KiGG 3.0 and baselined the source code for version 3. No major changes in this release. We upgraded to ASP.Net MVC 2.0 on .Net 3.5 SP1 & VS2008.

This release is going to be the last release on .Net 3.5 SP1 and VS2008. We plan to upgrade to .Net 4.0 and migrate the solution to VS2010 and start use Entity Framework 4.0 and maybe abandon LINQ to SQL support.

Visit http://kigg.codeplex.com for more information.

Here set of requirements for your development workstation if you are planning to rebuild the source code or customizing it.

Development Workstation System Requirements

• Visual Studio.Net 2008 any edition with SP1 (Express Editions should work)
• .Net Framework 3.5 SP1
• ASP.NET MVC 2.0 RTM
• Included reference libraries (xUnit, Moq, DotNetOpenAuth, Enterprise Library etc...) -available with source code download-
• Database (Only one option is required)
  • SQL Server 2005 or later any Edition with Full-Text Search Services (Full-Text search is required for search)
  • MySQL 5.x
• IIS 6.0 or IIS 7.0 (didn't test it on Windows XP IIS 5.5)

Few months ago, on September 2009 my friend Rashid started to blog about this open source project “Shrinkr”. And I got a chance to assist him on this.

In the last few weeks we were working on preparing this first stable release. And now we got it and it’s live on http://rdir.in.

Yesterday Rashid announced the first release which you can download from here.

In this post I’m going to show few screenshots of the live Shrinkr. And highlights few technologies used on it.

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Introduction

This is part 4 of this series which I don’t know when it will ends :o). In part 3 I started to to explore the Core of KiGG. In this part we are still inside the core, but we are going further deep to have a look inside the infrastructure.

I’m going to talk about infrastructure for the next couple of posts or maybe more. Because actually it contains the heart of KiGG. For me this is a really interesting topic, it is kind of like a hobby but whereas other people like swimming or playing Poker Online, I like investigating infrastructures. I hope that you find what I write interesting and informative.

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Introduction

In part 2, we explored KiGG project structure. I gave a short brief and summary about each project in the solution. And briefly discussed the relation between them.

In this part we are going to start going much deeper. Staring with the Core, and this might take several parts by itself as the Core is huge and contains lots of stuff that worth to be discussed.

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Introduction

In part 1 I talked about KiGG high level architecture. In this part I am going to talk about KiGG project structure and summarize the purpose of each project in the solution. I’ll not go into deep details of each project. I’ll save that for some other posts, just be patient with me and stay tuned.

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Introduction

In this multi part series I am going to explore KiGG design and architecture as well as projects structures.

At the beginning I would like to give a brief about KiGG History.

About KiGG

KiGG is similar to DotNetKicks, Digg and DZone. However it much closed to DotNetKicks and way smaller than DZone. KiGG was founded by Kazi Manzur Rashid and first introduced in his article on DotNetSlackers.com: Kigg - Building a Digg Clone with ASP.NET MVC, that was on Feb 2008. It was built with First ASP.NET MVC preview.

In early this year 2009 on January, Rashid was almost done with KiGG, however ASP.NET MVC 1.0 was not released yet. At this time Rashid announced DotNetShoutout.com as first live application based on KiGG. On March 2009 Rashid released version 2.2 of KiGG after the release of ASP.NET MVC 1.0.

I joined the team on April and start working with Entity Framework implementation for KiGG as well as supporting the project.

Thank you Rashid for giving me this opportunity.

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Introduction

One of the features introduced in Entity Framework is being database independent. Which mean each database provider can support Entity Framework by implementing its provider.

This feature allows you build applications independent from the underplaying database provider. In this post I’m going to show how to build an application that support multiple databases using same conceptual model made by Entity Framework.

Entity Framework providers

Entity Framework is database independent. Each database provider could have its own Entity Framework provider. Currently there are several database provider who support the current version of Entity Framework that is released with .Net 3.5 SP1.

A list of Entity Framework providers can be found here.

Entity Framework multiple database support sample

In this post, I am going to demonstrate a sample application (based on northwind database) that is going to support both SQL Server database engine and MySQL database engine.

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Introduction

KiGG is a Web 2.0 style social news web application developed in Microsoft supported technologies. It is an open source project hosted on CodePlex. It is live and running as DotNetShoutout.com.

KiGG and Entity Framework

On May 2009, I’ve completed the implementation of Entity Framework support on KiGG. KiGG design was very flexible to plug another repository implementation other than LINQ to SQL. So basically now KiGG comes with 2 repository flavours, LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework.

Read about how to configure your KiGG application to use Entity Framework.

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I received an invitation to create first Egyptian Twitter like community on Yonkly.com. Thanks to Emad Ibrahim Creator and Founder of Yonkly.

Before I go further; you might ask What is Yonkly? My answer is: it is an enhanced twitter like mini blogging service. It is an open source project based on ASP.NET MVC. It is one of the first projects developed with early preview releases of ASP.NET MVC. This project was developed by Emad Ibrahim.

More information about Yonkly can be found at http://www.emadibrahim.com/category/yonkly/. You can download bits of this project from CodePlex.

2 different flavours of Yonkly are available through Yonkly.com, and Yonkly.net. The public Twitter clone is available at Yonkly.net, this is exactly like twitter with additional features like Groups. The other flavour which I am going to call community like edition is available under Yonkly.com. At Yonkly.com you can create your own community like Egyptian Yonklies I just created for Egyptian Tweeters. Both are in Beta as ASP.NET MVC itself is beta. Currently it require an invitation to be able to create your own network under Yonkly.com.

I think what is available on Yonkly.net should be available for each network under Yonkly.com. But this is something Emad should decide.

Today I was exploring Yonkly features while I was setting up egyonklies.yonkly.com. I was amazed by the provided features which I am sure is going to be enhanced and improved upon the release of ASP.NET MVC and in the upcoming releases of Yonkly.

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