DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by SickDotNet

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."

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.

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 TDD using Visual Studio 2010

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:15:07 GMT

Phil Haack announced yesterday that the tooling support for ASP.NET MVC is available for Visual Studio 2010. Troy Goode already blogged about the designer snippets (which are really really cool, just like other parts of the roadmap for ASP.NET MVC 2.0). I'll give the new TDD workflow introduced in VS2010 a take.

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.

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.

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.

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

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 22:46:14 GMT

Microsoft's Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a .NET library (released on CodePlex) that enables greater re-use of application components. You can do this by dynamically composing your application based on a set of classes and methods that can be combined at runtime. Think of it like building an appliation that can host plugins, which in turn can also be composed of different plugins. Since examples say a thousand times more than text, let's go ahead with a sample leveraging MEF in an ASP.NET MVC web application.

C# Regions are not Useful? Give me a Break

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 10:46:02 GMT

I often see arguments about use of regions in C# code. And this is one of the most annoying things I see on the Internet in my opinion when it pertains to code structure. Whoever says regions are not to be used, I'd love to see your code and know what standards you have established as a team with your code base. I bet you it's a mess and the reason you don't like regions is because the developers on your team has abused use of them and that there is no logical pattern or team standard established.

Using the ASP.NET MVC Futures AsyncController

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:31:04 GMT

Last week, I blogged about all stuff that is included in the ASP.NET MVC Futures assembly, which is an assembly available on CodePlex and contains possible future features (tonguetwister!) for the ASP.NET MVC framework. One of the comments asked for more information on the AsyncController that is introduced in the MVC Futures. So here goes!

Back to the future! Exploring ASP.NET MVC Futures

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:01:19 GMT

For those of you who did not know yet: next to the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 version and its source code, there's also an interesting assembly available if you can not wait for next versions of the ASP.NET MVC framework: the MVC Futures assembly. In this blog post, I'll provide you with a quick overview of what is available in this assembly and how you can already benefit from. "the future".

New CodePlex project: MvcSiteMap â?" ASP.NET MVC sitemap provider

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:16:03 GMT

If you have been using the ASP.NET MVC framework, you possibly have been searching for something like the classic ASP.NET sitemap. After you've played with it, you even found it useful! But not really flexible and easy to map to routes and controllers. To tackle that, last year, somewhere in August, I released a proof-of-concept sitemap provider for the ASP.NET MVC framework on my blog. The blog post on sitemap provider I released back then has received numerous comments, suggestions, code snippets, . Together with Patrice Calve, we've released a new version of the sitemap provider on CodePlex: MvcSiteMap. This time I'll not dive into implementation details, but provide you with some of the features our sitemap provider erm. provides.

CRUD with ASP.NET MVC (screencast)

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 22:46:02 GMT

Abstract: "In this video, the new tooling for Visual Studio included in ASP.NET MVC release candidate is demonstrated to create a create, read, update and delete user interface within 15 minutes."

Easy embed workflow in your application

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 19:46:16 GMT

Whilst enterprise architectures mostly focus on BizTalk as a standalone server, WF is meant to be a more core-based addition for embedding within application. Embedding is not always as intuitive as it should be, though. To this end, I've created the following self-titled "WorkflowExecutive" helper class. It allows you to easily start any referenced Workflow, pass along parameters to it and handle exceptions.

Announcing my book: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:01:02 GMT

Maarten Balliauw announces his new book and provides a large retrospective on the writing process itself. Must read for everyone thinking about writing a tech book!

Verifying code and testing with Pex

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:46:05 GMT

Earlier this week, Katrien posted an update on the list of Belgian TechDays 2009 speakers. This post featured a summary on all sessions, of which one was titled "Pex - Automated White Box Testing for .NET". Here's the abstract: "Pex is an automated white box testing tool for .NET. Pex systematically tries to cover every reachable branch in a program by monitoring execution traces, and using a constraint solver to produce new test cases with different behavior. Pex can be applied to any existing .NET assembly without any pre-existing test suite. Pex will try to find counterexamples for all assertion statements in the code. Pex can be guided by hand-written parameterized unit tests, which are API usage scenarios with assertions. The result of the analysis is a test suite which can be persisted as unit tests in source code. The generated unit tests integrate with Visual Studio Team Test as well as other test frameworks. By construction, Pex produces small unit test suites with high code and assertion coverage, and reported failures always come with a test case that reproduces the issue. At Microsoft, this technique has proven highly effective in testing even an extremely well-tested component." After reading the second sentence in this abstract, I was thinking: "SWEET! Let's try!". So here goes.

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 4 - Membership and authentication

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 20:31:18 GMT

This post is part 4 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is all about implementing authentication in CarTrackr. Other parts: Part 1 - Introduction, containg links to all other parts Part 2 - Cloud-enabling CarTrackr Part 3 - Data storage Part 4 - Membership and authentication (current part)

When Should I Write Tests?

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 13:46:03 GMT

The definitive answer to a question that comes up all the time...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 3 - Data storage

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:16:16 GMT

This post is part 3 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is all about implementing cloud storage in CarTrackr. Other parts: Part 1 - Introduction, containg links to all other parts Part 2 - Cloud-enabling CarTrackr Part 3 - Data storage (current part)

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 2 - Cloud-enabling CarTrackr

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 03:16:11 GMT

This post is part 2 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is all about enabling the CarTrackr Visual Studio Solution file for Windows Azure.

Track your car expenses in the cloud! CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Par

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 04:46:07 GMT

As you may see in the title, I will be starting a series on modifying my CarTrackr sample application to a cloud-based, Windows Azure application. At this point, I don't know if it's easy nor do I know what it takes to achieve this goal. I only have some assumtions on how CarTrackr can be converted to a cloud application. This post is part 1 of the series, in which I'll describe the architecture of Windows Azure and what I think it takes to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application.

New Entity Framework / LINQ blog!

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 13:50:24 GMT

Just a quick recommendation note: One of my colleagues, Julien Hanssens, has started blogging on his experiences with the Entity Framework and LINQ. Here are some links to get you started

LINQ and Dynamic Query Expressions

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:57:02 GMT

In this article I wish to elaborate on the "how-to" and advantages of providing a dynamic and type-safe 'engine' for developers on which you can query any random property.

Entity Framework and Stored Procedures limitations

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:14:21 GMT

Know what you cannot do with the ADO.NET Entity Framework and stored procedures.

CarTrackr - Sample ASP.NET MVC application

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 05:32:39 GMT

Some people may have already noticed the link in my VISUG session blog post, but for those who didn't... I've released my sample application CarTrackr on CodePlex. CarTrackr is a sample application for the ASP.NET MVC framework using the repository pattern and dependency injection using the Unity application block. It was written for various demos in presentations done by Maarten Balliauw.