DotNetKicks.com - Stories tagged with ASPNETMVC

How to pass Dictionary as a parameter to an ActionResult

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:48:07 GMT

I'm using jQuery to make an Ajax call using an Http Post in ASP.NET MVC. I would like to be able to pass a Dictionary of values. I finally figured out the best solution is to pass JSON via the Http Post and use a custom ModelBinder to convert the JSON to a Dictionary. One thing I did in my solution is created a JsonDictionary object that inherits from Dictionary so that I can attach the custom ModelBinder to the JsonDictionary type, and it wont cause any conflicts in the future if I use Dictionary as a ActionResult parameter later on for a different purpose than JSON.

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 1: Introduction

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:00:05 GMT

"Once upon a time, Microsoft started a Windows Azure developing contest named new CloudApp();. While it first was only available for US candidates, the contest was opened for international submissions too. Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker and his fellow knightsmen at RealDolmen decided to submit a small sample application that could be hosted in an unknown environment, known by the digital villagers as "the cloud". The application was called TwitterMatic, named after the great god of social networking, Twitter. It would allow digital villagers to tell the latest stories, even when they were asleep or busy working."

Use specific return types in your ASP.NET MVC action methods

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:30:00 GMT

When looking at ASP.NET MVC examples on the web almost all action methods return ActionResult, even methods that could return a specific subclass...

OpenForum - A Free Forum for ASP.NET MVC Applications

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:15:01 GMT

One of the things that I really like about the MVC framework is that it offers some unique possibilities when it comes to third parties developing entire sub-systems that can easily be plugged into existing applications. Recently, I had some "down time" at my work and decided to take the opportunity to experiment with doing just that. Here are the results of that experiment. OpenForum is a forum that can easily be plugged into any MVC application with very little effort. In fact, there are only three steps to get OpenForum working with most MVC applications.

ASP.NET MVC Validation Refresh: Best Techniques & Frameworks

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:30:52 GMT

I just wanted to do a "refresher" post regarding ASP.NET MVC validation as many things have changed over the last couple of months and there is a lot of information out there. I wanted to aggregate my known validation options and recommend them in one tabular list.

ASP.NET MVC: An Application Platform

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:32:09 GMT

When deciding on your ASP.NET development platform I recently read a recommendation that boiled down to: application? WebForms. Web site? MVC. MVC isn't just for creating SEO/RESTful web sites. It's a full fledged application platform with everything you need.

Application-wide action filters in ASP.NET MVC

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:30:02 GMT

Ever had a team of developers using your ASP.NET MVC framework? Chances are you have implemented some action filters (i.e. for logging) which should be applied on all controllers in the application. Two ways to do this: kindly ask your developers to add a [Logging] attribute to the controllers they write, or kindly ask to inherit from SomeCustomControllerWithActionsInPlace. If you have been in this situation, monday mornings, afternoons, tuesdays and other weekdays are in fact days where some developers will forget to do one of the above. This means no logging! Or any other action filters that are executed due to a developer that has not been fed with enough coffee. Wouldn't it be nice to have a central repository where you can register application-wide action filters? That's exactly what we are going to do in this blog post.

The ASP.NET MVC ActionController - The controllerless action

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:51:17 GMT

There has been quite a bit of discussion about how controllers are really namespaces trying to get out once you use the concept on a nontrivial application. Brian Donahue's post on The anti-controller revolution prompted me to do this little experiment. He references some twitter posts by Jimmy Bogard, one of my esteemed consultants at Headspring Systems. Chad Myers also has opined about the notion of more independent actions and has cited precedence.

Drag and Drop Categorized Item List with jQuery and ASP.NET MVC

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:20:43 GMT

How to drag items between categories (sections) and sections between columns using jQuery and ASP.NET MVC. Part 1 focuses on layout and using jQuery UI's sortable functionality.

ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, One-to-Many and Many-to-Many INSERTS

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:58:30 GMT

Taking on two new technologies - ASP.NET MVC and the Entity Framework - at the same time was bound to provide some "interesting" moments. Getting data out via EF has so far been pretty straightforward. But when it got to building the back end of my site, I had some fun trying to manage INSERTS with One-To-Many and Many-To-Many relationships.

Revised: ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:19:47 GMT

A while ago, I did a blog post on combining ASP.NET MVC and MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework), making it possible to "plug" controllers and views into your application as a module. I received a lot of positive feedback as well as a hard question from Dan Swatik who was experiencing a Server Error with this approach. Here's a better approach to ASP.NET MVC and MEF.

ASP.NET MVC Installer For Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 And Roadmap

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 08:30:00 GMT

"Today I'm happy to announce that we're done with the work I described and the installer is now available on CodePlex. Be sure to give it a try as many of the new VS10 features intended to support the TDD workflow fit very nicely with ASP.NET MVC, which ScottGu will describe in an upcoming blog post."

Creating a Tag Cloud using ASP.NET MVC and the Entity Framework

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:45:01 GMT

A Tag Cloud is a visual depiction of Tags or categories on a web site. CSS is used to set the variable font size of each Tag to illustrate its relative frequency or popularity within the site. As part of the migration of my site to ASP.NET MVC, I am introducing one to replace the Categories navigation that appears on the left hand side of each page, which contains a count of items within each category.

A view from the cloud (or: locate your ASP.NET MVC views on Azure)

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Hosting and deploying ASP.NET MVC applications on Windows Azure works like a charm. However, if you have been reading my blog for a while, you might have seen that I don't like the fact that my ASP.NET MVC views are stored in the deployed package as well. Why? If I want to change some text or I made a typo, I would have to re-deploy my entire application for this. Takes a while, application is down during deployment, . And all of that for a typo. Luckily, Windows Azure also provides blob storage, on which you can host any blob of data (or any file, if you don't like saying "blob"). These blobs can easily be managed with a tool like Azure Blob Storage Explorer. Now let's see if we can abuse blob storage for storing the views of an ASP.NET MVC web application, making it easier to modify the text and stuff. We'll do this by creating a new VirtualPathProvider.

Handling Legacy URLs with ASP.NET MVC

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:00:00 GMT

According to Google's Webmaster tools, there are about 15,000 incoming links to my site. 13,000 of those reference a .ASPX file on disk. When I convert to MVC, with new Search Engine Friendly urls, all those links will break unless I do something about it. Presenting users with a 404 - file not found is not an option. I need to show them the content they were expecting, and update Search Engines with the news that things have changed. Here's how I will be managing those Legacy URLs.

A Degradable jQuery AJAX Email Form for ASP.NET MVC

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 07:45:10 GMT

Pretty much every web site on the Internet features a form for users to provide feedback via email to site owners. Migrating to ASP.NET MVC requires a slightly different approach to that used by Web Forms development, so this article looks at one way to implement a web site contact form using the MVC framework and jQuery that degrades nicely. AJAX functionality is said to be "degradable" if a way is provided for the process to work, even though users don't have Javascript available to them.

ASP.NET MVC Domain Routing

Wed, 20 May 2009 20:09:52 GMT

Ever since the release of ASP.NET MVC and its routing engine (System.Web.Routing), Microsoft has been trying to convince us that you have full control over your URL and routing. This is true to a certain extent: as long as it's related to your application path, everything works out nicely. If you need to take care of data tokens in your (sub)domain, you're screwed by default.

Book Review - Wrox Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0

Thu, 21 May 2009 22:19:48 GMT

A review of Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 from Wrox. A great book from Rob Conery, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, and Scott Guthrie.

ASP.NET MVC Subdomain Routing

Fri, 15 May 2009 02:31:02 GMT

One of the propagated "great features" for ASP.NET MVC is the full control you have over the routing and url's of your webapplication. In order to demonstrate this, let's walk through a sample that specifically handles subdomain routing.

More ASP.NET MVC Best Practices

Wed, 06 May 2009 21:16:02 GMT

In this post, I'll share some of the best practices and guidelines which I have come across while developing ASP.NET MVC web applications. I will not cover all best practices that are available, instead add some specific things that have not been mentioned in any blog post out there. Existing best practices can be found on Kazi Manzur Rashid's blog and Simone Chiaretta's blog.

Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Book Released!

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:37:33 GMT

The longly anticipated ASP.NET MVC book entitled "Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0" has just been released and available over at Amazon.com right now. Published by Wrox and content put together by some of our greatest names in the .NET community, Scott Guthrie, Rob Conery, Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack.

How to handle non-English characters in ASP.NET MVC routes

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:04:07 GMT

A simple but useful trick to overcome built-in decode functionality in ActionLink in order to show non-English parameters as a part of a URL in ASP.NET MVC.

IRouteHandler in ASP.NET MVC

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:00:20 GMT

Keyvan explains how to write a RouteHandler that checks for banned IPs and blocks any further processing

You should NOT use ASP.NET MVC if. . .

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:12:42 GMT

Jeffrey Palermo shares his opionions when you should NOT use ASP.NET MVC.

ELMAH: Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET (and MVC too!)

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:01:11 GMT

ELMAH has been one of the most useful tools for ASP.NET developers to log errors on their web applications. Now Scott has a nice talk on how to use it even in your ASP.NET MVC applications. Cool!