Stacking Code

Projects

Building Neno

Neno is a feature-poor blog engine built with ASP.NET MVC, NHibernate, and other technologies (see The Stack below). The Building Neno series is a collection of blog posts about Neno's evolution from File New Project to where it is today. The idea was for Neno to power the Building Neno series right from the very beginning, which it managed to do using XML and Linq to XML. Neno has suffered from incremental over-engineering ever since.

The Series

You can find all the posts in the Building Neno series here.

The Source

Neno is closely related to Moja, a burgeoning reuse library evolving alongside Neno. You can find the source for both projects on Bitbucket.

• http://bitbucket.org/stackingcode/neno
• http://bitbucket.org/stackingcode/moja

For now, the Moja Visual Studio projects are included in the Neno Visual Studio solution. It is recommended the source code for Neno and Moja be downloaded into adjoining directories, lest some references be lost. For example:

hg clone https://bitbucket.org/stackingcode/neno StackingCode\Neno
hg clone https://bitbucket.org/stackingcode/moja StackingCode\Moja

The source, as it exists at the time of each post, is tagged with the post's publish date and slug. When reading a post in the series, you can update to the right version of the code like this...

hg update -r "2010/11/24/hello-world"

Updates work in both directions, whether you're moving forwards or backwards through the tags.

There's no need to close Visual Studio before updating -- Visual Studio will prompt to reload the affected projects and files after the update. Don't forget to do the update for both Neno and Moja.

If you're not familiar with Mercurial, I recommend downloading TortoiseHg and reading the fantastic primer by Joel Spolsky, Hg Init. Alternatively you can browse the source on Bitbucket, view individual changesets, and even view and download by tag.

The Stack

Neno currently uses the following technologies:

Application

• C#, XML and T-SQL
• OpenID
• NHibernate 3.0
• Spring Ninject
• FluentNHibernate (but not how you think)
• SQL Server 2008 R2

Web UI

• C#, XML, HTML and CSS
• ASP.NET MVC 2
• Spring Ninject
• Blueprint
• MarkdownSharp
• jQuery
• Prettify
• OpenID with DotNetOpenAuth
• DeepZoomTools
• PivotViewer