Microsoft Reactive Extensions Rx Observer Pattern Kata

Overview

NOTE: So this is not a discussion about Reactive Extensions by Microsoft in relation to what they are and why they should be used. This has already been coverved extensively on Microsoft's website HERE. 

The point of this post is to provide details of a Kata that can be practiced. The design pattern implemented here is the Observer pattern. Instead of implementing this pattern using Events, I am implementing this using Observables.

Observer Pattern and MSFT Reactive Extensions

So I was practicing my observer pattern programming kata and came across the MSFT Reactive Extensions. I am going to put up a post this week with a new kata that implements observer pattern using the Reactive Extension (Rx) --> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/gg577609

Susbribe to this blog now to be notified when this kata is available.

Display Flickr photos on .Net MVC web page

Functional Brief
I am working on a website for the Drumshanbo An Tostal Festival and one of the requirements was to show photos on the web site that the festival committee has stored on Flickr. I didn't want to just copy and paste a bunch of HTML onto the web page. I found that the existing web site they had was slow to load all of the Flickr images. What I really wanted to do was show a few photos and then provide a link to the full library of photos on Flickr.

Flickr allows you to add a set of photos as a PhotoSet. I wanted to get the last 5 PhotoSets from Flickr and display 7 photos from each set on the web page. The reason why I wanted 5 PhotoSets and 7 photos as that amount of photos fit in well with the size of the page space I wanted to fill.

C# Ternary Operator

Well I read about ternary operators the other day and wondered when I was going to get to use them.

The c# ternary operators replace the need for the if else statement. It's doing the same thing but it's certainly less typing involved and more condensed to look at.