DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by beckelmw

Integration Testing Your ASP.NET MVC Application

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 09:15:00 GMT

Unit tests are great for proving the correctness of a single component. But how can you prove that you whole ASP.NET MVC application hangs together properly - including its view templates, configuration settings, and database schema? Integration tests cover what unit tests can't - Steven Sanderson shows one way to approach it with ASP.NET MVC.

IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit (ScottGu)

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:45:05 GMT

"Today we are shipping the first beta of a new free tool - the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit - that makes it easy to perform SEO analysis on your site and identify and fix issues within it."

25+ Best ASP.NET MVC Tutorials and Articles

Thu, 21 May 2009 15:32:36 GMT

In this article we collected best tutorials and articles about ASP.NET MVC.

YUI Compressor for Visual Studio

Wed, 13 May 2009 04:01:14 GMT

Add a custom tool in visual studio for YUI Compressor.

Returning PDFs from an ASP.NET MVC action

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:36:57 GMT

This feature is based on a post from Bill Barry, "Using Spark to render PDFs," to the Spark discussion group. It's based on iTextSharp, a port of the iText Java PDF library. It seemed like such a useful twist on the view engine, and so applicable to web sites, that I integrated what Bill had done into the Spark project and added a PdfViewResult action result for the ASP.NET MVC library.

How I handle JSON dates returned by ASP.NET AJAX

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:01:04 GMT

The problem of how to handle dates in JSON is one of the more troublesome issues that may arise when directly calling ASP.NET AJAX web services and page methods.. Since the question of how I handle this problem is something asked often in emails and in comments on other posts here, I want to address the topic with its own post.

ASP.NET MVC brings FUN back inside web development, on .NET

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:01:03 GMT

Simone writes about his impressions on ASP.NET MVC and why it has reactivated the motivation of developers on the .NET community for web development.

An Aha Moment on MVC Validation Extensibility in DefaultModelBinder

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 06:16:02 GMT

It is obvious that I don't like using IDataErrorInfo for use with a validation framework, like the Validation Application Block, so what is this validation extensibility API that scott mysteriously speaks of?

Should We Solve Institutional Problems In Our Code?

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 04:46:02 GMT

Is it okay for us to solve deficiencies in our development teams with code?

ASP.NET MVC Free eBooks

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:16:11 GMT

Here's a list of all sample chapters of ASP.NET MVC books available to the community.

Using jqGrid with ASP.NET MVC: Finally, A Solution

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 00:41:56 GMT

Having introduced jqGrid and written LINQ extension methods to make supplying data to the grid easy, we're now ready to put together a demo application. The solution I'm going to build demonstrates sorting and paging. In a future post, I will enhance it to demonstrate search, formatting, and editing data. I've made the demo application available for download, but be advised that I intend to update it in the next few days; it's currently a work in progress.

How to improve the performances of ASP.NET MVC web applications

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 22:46:04 GMT

Today I stumbled upon a nice presentation that Rudi Benkovic gave last week at the Slovenian DotNet User Group, about ASP.NET MVC Performances. It is an in depth analysis of a Digg-like site and how it went from serving (on a test machine) 6 req/sec to 390 req/sec. The analysis prove the usual rule of performance optimization: no matter what you do to optimize your code, the biggest performance hit is data retrieval, and the first thing you have to optimize is always this. But apart from this obvious outcome, I just want to take out from this presentation the 3 point that are really specific to ASP.NET MVC

Project Kobe community feedback

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 11:31:02 GMT

A project that we recently worked on in my team is Kobe , a Web 2.0 service development resource kit. The goal of the resource kit was to provide a collection of resources in the form of presentations, white papers, and a working sample application to enable business and technology decision makers to develop a good foundational understanding of Web 2.0 services, a conceptual architecture of a Web 2.0 service, challenges to think through when embarking on a new Web 2.0 service development project, and Microsoft platform implementation assets that are available and can be applied to materialize Web 2.0 services.

Kobe - Oh Dear Lord Why?!

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:31:02 GMT

Karl Seguin weighs in on the latest MS ASP.NET MVC sample app

Kobe - MS New Web 2.0 Resource Kit in ASP.NET MVC and My thoughts

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 09:16:02 GMT

If you recently visited the home page of www.asp.net you will find that Microsoft has released a new Resource Kit for developing Web 2.0 Applications. The resource kit contains a sample reference application that is developed in ASP.NET MVC framework. Since both of these are my area of of interest, I downloaded the codes and give a quick walkthrough. Prior getting to the main discussion, I just want to remind you that it is the second reference application (after Oxite) that is named under Microsoft, so you are suppose to get some quality....

Using jqGrid with ASP.NET MVC: LINQ Extensions

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 21:55:33 GMT

Mere hours after I posted the first in a planned series of posts on using jqGrid in ASP.NET MVC applications, Phil Haack, a rather-more-widely-read-ASP.NET-MVC-blogger, wrote a long post on, er, exactly the same thing. Who, me, bitter? Naahhh. :) But it turns out that we're using the grid in a different way, and I think the difference is important. So rather than just referring you to Phil's post and skipping the rest of the series, I think I still have some important information to contribute. In particular, I'm using the grid in a way which allows me to write an extension method for IQueryable<T> which returns data suitable for the grid, without having to know anything about the type T. If you look closely at the code in Phil's post, you will see that populating the cell array requires custom code (or use of reflection) every time you want to return data to a grid.

Using jqGrid with ASP.NET MVC: Introduction

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 21:54:27 GMT

This is the first post in a short series on using the jqGrid jQuery plug-in with ASP.NET MVC. In this short introduction I will describe the plug-in, list some of its strengths and weaknesses, and explain why we selected it for our MVC applications. In the next few days, I will give detailed information about how to use the grid in your own applications.

Adaptive Rendering in ASP.NET MVC - Kazi Manzur Rashid's Blog

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 23:31:02 GMT

ASP.NET MVC comes with different action results for various purpose, but some times, you will find those are not adequate for your scenario, lets consider the following screenshot: When user navigates to a different tab or change the sort order or moves to a different page number, it will load the content as an ajax call, but if the user has JavaScript turned off, it will redirect to a regular url. One solution would be to create separate sets of controller actions that will return either the complete view (in case JavaScript is turned off) or the partial view and use the jQuery load to show the content. But the problem of this approach is that we will be duplicating the same logic for both the actions, moreover we will be returning the unnecessary html tags rather than pure json object that is sufficient for rendering the view. A better solution would be adaptive rendering. If you are not familiar with adaptive rendering then let me clarify it a bit, it is a process where the server responds differently depending upon the browser capability. So it has a broader scope(e.g. mobile devices, text only browsers etc) comparing to our above JavaScript on/off scenario. But for the time being let us only focus on the above, so instead of creating pure html/ajax only version we would like to take the advantage of the browser capability and for this we will create a new action result, the beauty of the new action result is, the controller remains completely unaware of what kind of request it is serving. Lets take a look of the controller action that is serving both:

Using jQuery Grid With ASP.NET MVC

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:31:02 GMT

Continuing in my pseudo-series of posts based on my ASP.NET MVC Ninjas on Fire Black Belt Tips Presentation at Mix (go watch it!), this post covers a demo I did not show because I ran out of time. It was a demo I held in my back pocket just in case I went too fast and needed one more demo. A common scenario when building web user interfaces is providing a pageable and sortable grid of data. Even better if it uses AJAX to make it more responsive and snazzy. Since ASP.NET MVC includes jQuery, I figured it'd be fun to use a jQuery plugin for this demo, so I chose jQuery Grid.

How to choose between ASP.NET MVC and Web Forms

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:16:02 GMT

Introducing a worksheet from the upcoming book "ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Programming" to help developers make a decision to choose between MVC and Web Forms in ASP.NET.

ASP.NET MVC Tip #50 - Create View Models

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:21:05 GMT

Recently, I noticed a nice pattern in the Nerd Dinner application. Nerd Dinner uses strongly typed view model classes to pass data from a controller to a view. This pattern provides you with a convenient way of representing complex view data.

5 Blogs ASP.NET MVC Developers Should Be Following

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:46:07 GMT

Everyone knows that Phil Haack, Rob Conery, Scott Hanselman, and Scott Guthrie all provide good ASP.NET MVC content on their blogs. I wanted to provide a list of excellent resources on ASP.NET MVC that are a little less well known.

Don't Get Bit By Lazy Evaluation

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 07:01:12 GMT

A very good explanation of how delayed evaluation can cause subtle problems in your code.

13 ASP.NET MVC extensibility points you have to know

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:46:06 GMT

One of the main design principles ASP.NET MVC has been designed with is extensibility. Everything (or most of) in the processing pipeline is replaceable so, if you don't like the conventions (or lack of them) that ASP.NET MVC uses, you can create your own services to support your conventions and inject them into the main pipeline. This post shows 13 extensibility points that every ASP.NET MVC developer should know, starting from the beginning of the pipeline and going forward till the rendering of the view.

Using complex types to make calling services less... complex

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:46:03 GMT

A detailed examination of how jQuery can call ASP.NET AJAX web services (or page methods) with complex types as parameters, to simplify the process of serializing and sending several fields of data at a time.