Updated 01 Oct 2012 for version 1.0.960

About a month ago now I used RavenDB for the first time in a ‘real’ application. I think it’s awesome, frictionless and easy to get up and running. However I’ve heard from fellow developers that they think there is a high barrier to entry when compared to a traditional RDBMS approach such as SQL server. Yes when learning anything new there is a learning curve, but this post is to dispel the myth that setting up RavenDB is hard and to show you what you get for pretty much zero effort.

There are two flavours of RavenDB server and embedded. I’m going to show you in this post how to set up RavenDB embedded inside your MVC application.

Prerequisites

All you need installed is MVC 3 (steps are the same for MVC 4) and NuGet.
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I’ve been making use of the JsonValueProviderFactory a lot lately. The JsonValueProviderFactory was released as part of MVC 3 and is a really easy way to introduce Json into your web application. In fact all MVC 3 websites support posting Json off the bat with no code changes. Phil Haack wrote an excellent blog post introducing the JsonValueProviderFactory.

One limitation I’ve found with the current JsonValueProviderFactory is when you have a property in your model that is a dynamic type. Unfortunately the JsonValueProviderFactory is unable to bind deserialized Json to a dynamic property. Example below:

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I’ve been using Git for almost a year now (Thanks to @robcthegeek for introducing Git to @JustGiving). Before using Git I preferred SVN I’ve also suffered The Fail Server (TFS). The zero friction workflow and performance achieved with Git made me realise the friction of centralized version control systems. This post is a step by step guide for anyone using Windows who wants to get up and running on Git.

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You remember my Opteron Workstation Gaming Rig Hybrid aka Scylla right? It’s been almost 2 years since I built my rig and I think it’s time to look at a upgrade. What to upgrade though, the 9800GTX video card still runs all games very well, the processor and RAM is rarely fully utilised, however there is definitely a bottleneck after a little bit of digging around like most modern computers the hard drive is a clear bottleneck.

One of the major trends in the last couple of years is the use of Solid State Drives (SSD), from Wikipedia:

“A solid-state drive (SSD) is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data with the intention of providing access in the same manner of a traditional block i/o hard disk drive. SSDs are distinguished from traditional hard disk drives (HDDs), which are electromechanical devices containing spinning disks and movable read/write heads.”

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To use this extension download and reference MVC 2 Futures .

public static string ActionFor<TController>(this UrlHelper helper, Expression<Action<TController>> action) where TController : Controller
{
    return Microsoft.Web.Mvc.LinkBuilder.BuildUrlFromExpression(helper.RequestContext, helper.RouteCollection, action);
}

To use this extension in a view use:

Url.ActionFor<MyControllerType>(controller=>controller.MyAction())

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