PeterKellner.net

Over the past couple years, the focus of the web development I’ve been doing involves building highly flexible, highly scalable and straight forward web sites to implement and maintain Line of Business (LOB) applications.  As you can probably tell from my posts, I’m very “practical” focused, and at the same time have a desire to build awesome web applications.

The technology pairing I’ve chosen is Microsoft’s .Net platform with MVC on the server, and ExtJS on the client.  Though it’s possible to still use ExtJS with standard html/aspx pages, I’ve found the best combination is to use 100% JavaScript on the client (ExtJS) and have all the server side technology be 100% service based.  I’ve used LINQ2SQL extensively as well as Entity Framework in the latest Visual Studio 2010 release.

The learning curve was quite steep to actually be able to efficiently build highly flexible, highly scalable applications using these technologies, but now that I know it, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’m considering putting together a series of 4 Day Classes around the country (or even world) that would basically teach people the methods and patterns I’ve learned and essentially leap frog a development team into being able to quickly do what it has taken me years to figure out.  I’ve been fortunate enough to know the top 1% instructors and I’m sure with the right incentive, can get them to join me in both putting together these classes as well as teaching them.

I’ve recently started using Microsoft’s WCF Data Services which supports OData Services.  What this means is that we can access resources by simply specifying a URI.  This concept greatly simplified building an ORM layer on a web site, as well as creating the linkage between the server side data and the client side application, which in my case is usually a browser.

So, the issue this blog addresses is that if you form a URI with the parameter $top={anything}, your data will automatically be sorted.  The documentation for OData on top basically says that, but it could be clearer.  It says the following:

“If the data service URI contains a $top query option, but does not contain a $orderby option, then the Entries in the set needs to first be fully ordered by the data service.”

What actually happens is when you use the orderby clause, the data will be sorted 100% of the time for you, whether you do it or not.