DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by bart.plasmeijer

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.

Making Unity work more like the others

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 00:16:14 GMT

I love MS Unity as an IoC container, it has some great features. Though I found it to function incorrectly at two points (it's not that the path chosen by the Unity team is incorrect, I just want/excpect it to act differently). The first thing that bothered me was the fact that Unity throws an exception when Resolve<T> is not able to resolve the given type: I'd prefer it to return null instead, hence most containers do that. The second, even more irritating point, was that ResolveAll<T> only returned the named instances/types instead of all registered types

First steps with Lightweight Test Automation Framework and ASP.NET MVC

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 07:46:02 GMT

Microsoft's newly-Codeplexed Lightweight Test Automation Framework lets you test UI behaviors in ASP.NET applications. But what does it actually do? How does it work behind the scenes? How do you use it with ASP.NET MVC? This post explains the architecture and provides a downloadable demo project.

MvcContrib v1.0 Released! Download now!

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:16:08 GMT

After official release of ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RTM it's time to release the first version of MvcContrib too! It's ready; download it ;-)

ASP.NET MVC goes RTM before MIX09

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:46:04 GMT

Not sure if the release was intentional or just someone that forgot to set the timezone field while publishing the download, but ASP.NET MVC has been RTMed before MIX09.

ASP.NET MVC Domain Driven Design

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:01:03 GMT

The first in a series of posts detailing how to create ASP.NET MVC projects in a way that facilitates DDD. Fluent NHibernate, NHibernate.Burrow, and MVCContrib will be used.

Silverlight.FX project page

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 06:57:05 GMT

Silverlight.FX is a light-weight application framework for building Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight 2.

Fluent NHibernate - AutoPersistenceModel auto mapping

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:12:26 GMT

An blog post presenting Fluent NHibernate AutoPersitanceModel through simple code example

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.

Editing a variable-length list of items in ASP.NET MVC

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:16:02 GMT

It's always awkward to create the right UI for variable-length lists, because you don't know how many input controls to render. How would you do it with ASP.NET MVC? Steven Sanderson shows a fairly elegant technique, including a live demo.

Fluent NHibernate's AutoPersistenceModel: I Love it!

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:16:04 GMT

I checked out the latest version of Fluent NHibernate today and noticed the AutoPersistenceModel. I looked at the unit-tests to see what it's supposed to do and I loved what I saw.

New ASP.NET Charting Control

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:31:03 GMT

From ScottGu's blog. Brand new, Free, ASP.NET 3.5 chart control. It looks very nice!

Grouping Controllers with ASP.NET MVC

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 07:01:02 GMT

question that often comes up is how do you group controllers when building a large application with ASP.NET MVC. Often, the question is phrased as whether or not ASP.NET MVC supports "Areas", a feature of Monorail. According to the Monorail documentation, MonoRail supports the concept of areas, which are logical groups of controllers. All controllers belong to an area. The default area is an empty (unnamed) one

Delete entity or collection in Linq to SQL without getting them

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:16:15 GMT

In order to delete an entity or a collection of entity in Linq to SQL, you have to first get them and then delete them. This requires additional database roundtrip. Here's a strongly typed maintenance free way to delete entities directly using their primary key.

SubSonic MVC Addin

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 05:31:03 GMT

good work!

SVN-Monitor is finally out for free download!

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 02:31:02 GMT

A full-featured .net application that integrates SubVersion, TortoiseSVN and all your checked-out folders and repositories. Use it to perform all your svn commands and monitor all your projects' activities in a single place. Access all commands from the tray menu or from the main window. This is a must-have tool for every windows+svn user!

ScottGu: ASP.NET MVC Beta

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:46:03 GMT

One of ScottGu´s monster blogposts

ASP.net MVC goes Beta

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 11:31:05 GMT

Hot on the heels of Silverlight, MVC is out of preview and into Beta today.

Make Visual Studio Generate Your Repository

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:31:03 GMT

As many of you may know, I've been goofing around with Code Generation again with SubSonic's new MVC Addin. One of the things I really wanted to try and flex is Visual Studio 2008's code generation bits - T4. Not many people know it even exists, and to me it's one of the Great Hidden Secrets of Visual Studio 2008.

Client Templating with jQuery

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:16:05 GMT

Client templating in Javascript can be a great tool to reduce the amount of code you have to write to create markup content on the client. There are a number of different ways that templating can be accomplished from a purely manual approach to a full templating engine. In this entry I'll look at several different approaches.

SubSonic MVC Scaffold Addin

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:46:06 GMT

Scaffold your tables using SubSonic in asp.net mvc

jQuery ajax with asp.net mvc preview 5

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:31:10 GMT

How to use the AjaxHelpers in preview 5 with jQuery as the ajax engine

Client & Server Side Validation in ASP.NET MVC

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:46:02 GMT

Emad Ibrahim talks about Client (with jQuery Validation Plugin) & Server Side Validation in ASP.NET MVC.

ASP.NET MVC Application Building: Forums #1 - Create the Perfect App

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 19:46:03 GMT

n this series of blog entries, I build an entire ASP.NET MVC Forums application from start to finish. The goal is to discover and promote best-practices for building applications with the ASP.NET MVC framework. In this first entry, I discuss the overall goals for the forums application. I discuss the importance of avoiding code smells and how software design principles and patterns can help you write code that is resilient to future change. I also justify my choice to use test-driven development while building the Forums application.

ASP.NET MVC UserControls Start to Finish

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:46:12 GMT

The ASP.NET MVC framework ships with a number of Visual Studio project and item templates to ease our development tasks. One of these templates is a UserControl built specifically for the MVC framework. We are going to walkthrough building a re-usable Header control that can be added to the top of related pages (in this specific case, this Control will be added to all Account pages).