Meet up. Clean up. Feel good.

TrashMob is a website dedicated to organizing groups of people to clean up the world we live in. Users create cleanup events, publicize them, and recruit people to join up, as well as ask for assistance from sponsors to help haul away the garbage once it is gathered. The idea is to turn what can be an intimidating process for event organizers into a few mouse clicks and simple forms. And once the process is simple, events will spring up all over the world, and the cleanup of the world can begin.

Years ago, Scott Hanselman (and others at Microsoft) built out the NerdDinner.com site as a demo of the capabilities of ASP.NET MVC. I actually went to a bunch of the nerd dinners which were fantastic and had a huge roll in my career, including eventually leading me to join Microsoft. This site is based on both that code and the idea that getting people together to do small good things results in larger good things in the long term.

My passion is fixing problems we have on the planet with pollution and climate change. I've been thinking about what technology can do to help in these areas, without creating more problems. And I keep coming back to the thought that a lot of this is a human problem. People want to help and they want to fix things, but they don't know where to start. Other people have ideas on where to start, but not enough help to get started.

I read about a guy in California named Edgar McGregor, who has spent over 600 days cleaning up a park in his community, two pails of litter at a time, and I thought, that was a great idea. His actions inspired me to get out and clean up a local park one Saturday. It was fun and rewarding and other people saw what I was doing on my own and I know I have already inspired others to do the same. And then I passed by an area of town that is completely covered in trash and I thought "this is too much for me alone. It would be great to have a group of people descend on this area like a mob and clean it up in an hour or two". And my idea for TrashMob.eco was born.

Basically, TrashMob is the NerdDinner.com site re-purposed to allow people to start mobs of their own to tackle cleanup or whatever needs doing. And I keep coming up with more and more ideas for it. I'm hoping this site grows organically because of the good that we can do we get together.

To see what is currently deployed to the prod environment, go to: https://www.trashmob.eco

To see what is currently deployed to the dev environment, go to: https://as-tm-dev-westus2.azurewebsites.net/

As of 5/26/2021, we are now in Beta launch. We'll hold at Beta until a few more key features are complete so we can do a grand-relaunch when those features go in. Beta also means that if things really go wrong, we may have to delete data manually and depending on load, site availability is not guaranteed.

ABSOLUTELY! Ping Joe Beernink if you want to get involved. All kinds of skills needed, from reactjs to website design, to aspnet core, to Xamarin, to deployment / github skills.

1. You must install the .net 5 SDK
2. Install Visual Studio Code
3. Connect to github and clone the repo
4. Install the Azure CLI

If you are not doing any database changes (i.e. design work, error handling, etc) you can save yourself time and money by doing the following and using the shared Dev environment:

1. Send the email address you use on GitHub to Joe Beernink
2. Joe will add you as a contributor to the Sandbox subscription
3. Joe will add you to the Dev KeyVault with Secret Get and List permissions
4. Log in to the Sandbox subscription, and go to the Dev Azure SQL Database
5. Click on Firewalls and Virtual Networks
6. Add a new Rule with your email address as the name, with the start and end ip address set as your Client IP Address (see the line above the form for what Azure thinks your IP address is)
7. Save changes
8. Run the following script on your machine from the TrashMob folder in the project to set up your dev machine to run the project locally. You must be logged into Azure in your PowerShell window in the correct subscription

.\setupdev.ps1 -environment dev -region westus2 -subscription 39a254b7-c01a-45ab-bebd-4038ea4adea9

You must use this if you are making database changes to ensure you do not break the back end for everyone else:

1. Follow the Infrastructure Deployment Steps (here)[.\Deploy\readme.md].
2. Run the following script on your machine from the TrashMob folder in the project to set up your dev machine to run the project locally. You must be logged into Azure in your PowerShell window in the correct subscription

.\setupdev.ps1 -environment <yourenv> -region <yourregion> -subscription <yourazuresubscription>

i.e.
.\setupdev.ps1 -environment jb -region westus2 -subscription <insert guid here>

Because of RedirectUrls, life is a lot easier if you stick with the same ports as everyone else.

cd to the TrashMob/Properties folder: Add the following launchsettings.json file (may need to create it if you don't have it already):

{
  "iisSettings": {
    "windowsAuthentication": false,
    "anonymousAuthentication": true,
    "iisExpress": {
      "applicationUrl": "http://localhost:44332/",
      "sslPort": 44332
    }
  },
  "profiles": {
    "IIS Express": {
      "commandName": "IISExpress",
      "launchBrowser": true,
      "environmentVariables": {
        "ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT": "Development"
      }
    },
    "TrashMob": {
      "commandName": "Project",
      "launchBrowser": true,
      "environmentVariables": {
        "ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT": "Development"
      },
      "applicationUrl": "https://localhost:44332;http://localhost:5000"
    }
  }
}

The mobile app is written using Xamarin. It requires a few prerequisites in order to get it compiling and running.

1. Ensure you have installed the Xamarin components to Visual Studio

2. Install Android Studio https://developer.android.com/studio

3. Create an Android Emulator device in Android Studio

4. Load the TrashMobMobile.sln Project in Visual Studio.

5. Set your startup project to TrashMobMobile.Android

6. In order to have the maps feature work, you will need to do the following:

   1. Create a Google Maps account: https://developers.google.com/maps/gmp-get-started
   2. Get your Google API Key from your Google Project
   3. Create a gradle.properties file in your GRADLE_USER_HOME (i.e. c:\users\.gradle)
   4. Add the following line to your gradle properties file:

   GOOGLE_API_KEY = "<Your api key>"
   

   5. Restart your emulator. Maps should work now

   Never check in any file that contains your real api key.

In the Trashmob project folder, run the following command:

dotnet build

In the Trashmob project folder, run the following command:

dotnet run

or if using Visual Studio, set the TrashMob project as the start up project and hit F5.

If a browser does not open, open one for yourself and go to https://localhost:44332

If the app loads, but data does not, it is likely that the firewall rule is not set up correctly. Sometimes the IP address the Web Portal displays is different from the IP address of your machine. If you run into this issue, look in the debug window of VSCode. It will report a failure, and show that your actual IP Address is not enabled to access the database.

1. Copy the IP Address from the error in VS Code
2. Log in to the Sandbox subscription, and go to the Dev Azure SQL Database
3. Click on Firewalls and Virtual Networks
4. Add a new Rule with your email address as the name, with the start and end ip address set as your Client IP Address (see the line above the form for what Azure thinks your IP address is)
5. Save changes

The project uses Entity Framework Core V6 Model-First database updates.

1. Update the models / MobDbContext as needed in the repo.
2. To create the migration, do either of the following steps

In VS Code

dotnet ef migrations add <YourMigrationName>

or in Visual Studio Package Manager Console

First, set the Default Project to TrashMob.Shared, then run the following command:

  EntityFrameworkCore\Add-Migration <YourMigrationName>

3. In VS Code in the TrashMob Folder, run the following command

dotnet ef database update

This is a pay-per-use feature, so, for the most part, we're going to try to limit the number of people developing with this. To not send email, make sure to set the following user secret on your dev box

  dotnet user-secrets set "sendGridApiKey" "x"

To test sending email, copy the "sendGridApiKey" fron the dev keyvault to your machine and repeat the above, sustituting in the real key.

The call to find the distance between two points in Azure Maps is only available in S1 (Gen 1) or Gen2 Maps. This is significantly more expensive than the S0 maps, so for now, we default to S0 for all dev deployments, and have manually set Prod to Gen2. It is not recommended to rerun the infrastructure deployments to Prod, as this will overwrite this setting.

In the future, we may want to optimize the use of this function to reduce costs.

The Dev site is automatically deployed with each push to the Main branch via a GitHub action. This is the preferred method of updating the Development Server. If you need to push an update from your development machine instead, please let the team know that there are changes in the environment pending checkin.

The Production site is manually deployed via a GitHub action from the release branch. This is the ONLY way production should be updated.

Use Visual Studio Publish to publish the site to the dev server.

If setting up a new environment, you will need to add the IP Address of the App Service to the list of IP Addresses accessible in the SQL Server. This needs to me automated in the future to make sure that a change to an IP address doesn't break the site.

If you try to access a secure page, you will need a user id on the site. When you hit a secured page, the site will redirect you to a sign in page. Click the Sign up now link on the bottom of the login box. Multiple identity providers are now available, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft, along with the TrashMob tenant itself if you prefer not to use an integrated signup.

We currently use Microsoft App Center for building and distributing the Mobile apps. In order to get notified of a new distribution (or to download it).

1. Send a note to [email protected] requesting access to App Center. Please include the email address you wish to use to access App Center in the request and why you want to use a dev build.
2. A TrashMob.eco admin will review your request and if approved, will add you to the testers group.
3. You will receive an email notification when your request has been approved.
4. Click on the link to complete your onboarding.
5. You can either download the latest package at that point, or wait for the next build to be completed. You will be notified when a new version is available.

The mobile app is not yet in production, but when it is, it will be available in Google Play and the Apple Store.