DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by Vort3X

Measuring the Performance of Asynchronous Controllers

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:15:00 GMT

It's easy enough to start using Asynchronous Controllers with ASP.NET MVC 2.0. But how do you know whether it's giving you any benefits? You might be surprised to learn that, in many default scenarios, you won't get any benefit unless you also make some crucial configuration changes. In this blog post you'll see a simple way to load test your asynchronous controllers, and find a rundown of important configuration options that will dramatically affect their behavior.

Why Linq2NHibernate is not production ready

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:08:01 GMT

An opinion on why you shouldn't be using Linq2Nhibernate in production systems

Tekpub: Concepts - Lambdas

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:15:00 GMT

A new episode in the concepts series at TekPub covering Lambdas.

NHibernate and Execution Plans

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Lately we have been investigating ORM's (Object Relational Mapping) frameworks for use on a large enterprise level website which we been given the rare opportunity to rebuild from the ground up in Microsoft MVC. We decided to go ahead with NHibernate until stumbled across a major issue causing queries run by NHibernate not re-using SQL Server execution plans.

Channel 9 Learning Center - Just Launched!

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:15:08 GMT

The Channel 9 Learning Center is the destination for free technical training on emerging Microsoft products and technologies. The Learning Center consists of a set of courses with each course including a set of videos, hands-on labs, and source code samples to get you up-to-speed quickly.

ReSharper Discount & Extended Trial

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:00:00 GMT

I have had a few emails recently asking if I am still able to obtain the 10% discount coupons and 60 day extended trial for ReSharper

xVal v1.0 is now released

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:00:00 GMT

In case you're not aware, xVal is a validation helper for ASP.NET MVC that lets you use your own choice of server-side validation framework (e.g., Microsoft's DataAnnotations attributes, or Castle Validator, or NHibernate Validaion) and dynamically generates client-side validation code from your rules. Version 1.0 adds new features including dynamic client-side validation summaries and remote (ajax) validation rules.

Writing Great Unit Tests: Best and Worst Practises

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 05:30:04 GMT

A suite of good unit tests is immensely valuable: it documents your design, and makes it easier to refactor and expand your code while retaining a clear overview of each component's behaviour. However, a suite of *bad* unit tests is immensely painful: it doesn't prove anything clearly, and can severely inhibit your ability to refactor or alter your code in any way. How can you be sure to write unit tests that contribute positively to your project and don't end up being a liability?

Pay Attention to the Foreach Implicit Casting

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:15:00 GMT

In order to reduce an explicit conversion effort using the foreach statement, the C# developers decided to do an automatic conversion for us. We must pay attention to it...

What is Unit Testing?

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:45:02 GMT

good introductory article explaining what unit tests are (and are not) and why you should use them

If At First You Don't Succeed - Retrying Mail Operations in .NET

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:45:01 GMT

Mail sent from your application didn't go through? Don't give up so easily! The majority of mail server interruptions are very temporary in nature, lasting only a few seconds. Instead of failing right away, why not give your SMTP client another shot?

Learning Doesn't Work if You Don't Do It Right...

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:56:03 GMT

If you're going to spend time reading and searching, make sure you know what works best for your brain.

Learning new Programmming Languages and Technologies

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 10:00:00 GMT

Recently, I've read article after article about how part of being a good software developer is about being open to new technologies, and to "learn new things" - and I'd be foolish not to agree. However...

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.

dashCommerce: State of the Union Address 2009

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:18:18 GMT

dashCommerce 2009 achievements.

LINQ to SQL changes in .NET 4.0

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:15:00 GMT

What's fixed and breaking changes for LINQ to SQL in .NET 4.0

The Greatest Exception Handling WTF?!? of All Time

Thu, 28 May 2009 10:00:00 GMT

The Exception object has ONE purpose and ONE purpose only - to represent a runtime error, nothing more. Exceptions should never be used for purposes for which they were not intended -- or you could end up with this monstrosity...

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.

Installation and Configuration of Microsoft Velocity

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:01:18 GMT

David walks us through how to install and configure Microsoft Velocity.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 released

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:01:26 GMT

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RTM is released

Getting Mono and Visual Studio to play nice together :: Part 2

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 01:01:02 GMT

Chris Cyvas continues his profiles of getting Mono and Visual Studio to play nice together. In a previous post, Chris documented how to get some Mono Project Templates to work with Visual Studio. In this post, Chris creates some Mono Item Templates for use with your Mono Project Templates.

ASP.NET - YSlow and ASP.NET: 100 points "A" grade is possible

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:46:02 GMT

Just in case if somebody doesn't know what YSlow is? YSlow is Firefox add-on integrated with Firebug. It analyzes web pages and tells you why they are slow. You can run it on you project and see your grade. You can do some easy improvements and maybe even get D grade. However to get higher then D grade becomes a real challenge. Below I will describe how I got A grade (100 points) on my web blog application.

A New Look for Visual Studio 2010!

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 04:46:02 GMT

At the PDC and TechEd EMEA last year we described our new editor support built on the WPF technology in .NET Framework 4.0. Today I'm happy to reveal the new UI for Visual Studio, also built on WPF:

ASP.NET SEO and the Canonical Tag

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 06:16:13 GMT

Recently, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo announced support for a new canonical tag in an effort to combat duplicate urls (read duplicate content) on websites.

A Failure in Microsofts Open Source Strategy

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 21:16:13 GMT

If they want their development tools to be the tools to develop with and they want Windows to be the platform to deploy solutions on (open source and otherwise), then they need to consider, very carefully, how they expect to achieve that. You've got to do more than release open source software . . .