>Mongo

>I’ve started to look at some of the NoSQL databases that are being talked about a lot.  I decided to start by playing with Mongo, using the c# driver posted by samus (Mongo c# driver) on github.

So far, it’s pretty interesting.  I’ve done some basic performance testing and it is pretty fast; seemingly better than the SQL Server I’m used to.  And that’s with no performance work and not worrying about it.  Granted by databases aren’t big yet but still.  For it to be fast with me not understanding the product that fully yet is pretty good.

Plus, creating databases and collections in the store is easy.  You just reference them and they are created.  I wish SQL Server had a way of letting the request create the data.  That would  be a nice feature to add though I can just imaging the number of problems that would create in performance and data management.

I do wish the driver would take either a JSON formatted string to populate the document or that it would use reflection to populate the document.  And then do the opposite to get the database stuff back into the model. Ah well, I know what I’ll be working on next with this.

>ASP.NET MVC

>I’ve started creating my first ASP.NET MVC project and I have to say, I’m enjoying it quite a bit.  The ease with which you can work in testing and the power built in are pretty cool features.  And, having the jquery “built-in” is nice. 

I’d say my favorite features are:

1. Not having the page bloat you get with web forms and view state.
2. Not having the complications of adding fancy “ajaxy” features if you don’t want to use the overhead of update panels.
3. Not having to deal with the headaches of View State and Ajax is really nice.

I’m impressed how easy it was to pick up and how some of the features were implemented.  I really like the way that did the data binding to the models.  It’s easily customized but works well right-out of the box.  And, adding things like the MS AntiXSS library to help prevent cross site scripting attacks is sweet.  And since I’ve been doing a lot of CSS based design previously, formatting the pages is not any more of a challenge than it was with web forms.