A starter project to get started with Razor.Servicestack, Windows Azure, SQL Azure, (Azure) blob storage, social sign-ins, and AngularJS.
This project was started in order to experiment and road test both the Razor.ServiceStack project and Windows Azure, and to build an web app using them. The idea is simple, this app is an online photo manager, like a simple Dropbox for your photos. Can can sign in using your social accounts such as Twitter or Facebook, and allows you to store your photos in the cloud. The solution file is a Visual Studio 2012 Windows Azure cloud service project.
*We’ve cooked in some useful things:
- Generic functions for managing files in Azure Storage.
- A generic repository for working with OrmLite.
- A customizable user entity and authentication session handling.
- Utilizes SquishIt to compress the Javascript and Css files on the fly, configured to work with Azure too!
- Uses Twitter Bootstrap.
- Wired up for AngularJS, including routing.
This project utilizes the core ServiceStack webservice framework to expose a simple but robust RESTful API. It then leverages the Razor.ServiceStack MVC Razor Engine to power the entire web application’s UI. The two provide a direct replacement or ASP.NET MVC and Web API. On top of this it utilizes the high perfomance parts that come with ServiceStack such as ServiceStack.Ormlite for the ORM, ServiceStack.Text for fast serialization, Funq for the DI framework, and ServiceStack.Caching for performance caching.
The immediate benefits we have seen are:
- The MVC views and REStful API are the same service implementation making one unified HTTP stack.
- The ServiceStack service implementation also supports SOAP and CSV as well as XML and JSON.
- Razor.ServiceStack has more flexible routing, and smarter view pages than ASP.NET MVC.
- Its also lighter and easier to configure than ASP.NET MVC.
- The components all work together out of the box: Ormlite, Funq, Caching and Text.
- ServiceStack supports social sign ins using Facebook and Twitter, as well as traditional manual user sign ups.
- Extendable authentication model allowing for many different types of authentication implementations, works across both the API and UI layers.
This was built from the ground up as an Azure Cloud Service application. We also wanted it to be completely Azure ready and to that end it needed to work with SQL Azure and Azure blob storage. The database can work off a local SQL Server database, and seamlessly deploys itself and transitions to SQL Azure with no configuration change at all on deployment. You can connect to, and upload the photos into Azure blob storage from you local machine as well as from within Azure, so you know from the start that it will work, and will continue to work once you have deployed to Windows Azure. ServiceStack.Caching also supports Azure In-Memory DataCaching.
Cross browser, extendable, and responsive design powered by the Twitter Bootstrap front-end framework. No customization has been done here, so if you are familar with Twitter Bootstrap then you can jump straight in and start working with it easily.