DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by brianjlowry

Automatically minify and combine JavaScript in Visual Studio

Thu, 21 May 2009 05:06:38 GMT

As you begin developing more complex client-side functionality, managing the size and shape of your JavaScript includes becomes a key concern. It's all too easy to accidentally end up with hundreds of kilobytes of JavaScript spread across many separate HTTP requests, significantly slowing down your initial page loads. I hope you'll find that this technique is a good compromise between the tedium of using manual minification tools and the overwrought complexity of setting up some of the more "enterprisey" automation solutions.

Kona 3: Learning Behavior Driven Development (BDD)

Fri, 15 May 2009 22:46:26 GMT

Holy cow! Another *DD - man I really must have an IV with that Alt.NET Punch just coursing like a train in my veins! I ask for your patience with this one - cause I think BDD is a really good tool to know - whether you use it or not - knowing the workings of it will allow you to have some intelligent conversation the next time you're in Austin :).

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.

How Rapid is Rapid? How Quick is Quick?

Thu, 14 May 2009 02:31:02 GMT

An unusual take on the importance of raw performance in logging systems. Sometimes less is more. Rather, in logging, as in most software design challenges, keeping the big picture in mind is the most important thing. Concepts extend to other design topics.

Code Generation Should be the Nuclear Option

Wed, 06 May 2009 09:16:02 GMT

So let me first just start off by saying: I do not like code generation. In certain cases I think it can help greatly, but many people are far too eager to jump to this solution. I don't think that there is anything particularly evil about the process of generating code, but I do feel like using code generation as a day to day tool is a very bad practice. Code generation should be the tool of last resort when there is no good way to cleanly implement a solution which doesn't require code to be spread out everywhere.

Practical .NET Unit Testing - Free paper released

Fri, 01 May 2009 07:46:02 GMT

A free unit testing paper that covers why you should write unit tests, the mechanics of unit testing, common testing strategies, designing for testability, and advanced testing techniques. It's an ongoing project, but it's complete enough to hopefully start getting early feedback and suggestions!

Creating Visual Studio Templates from your Web Projects

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 06:16:03 GMT

Visual Studio has the nice capability to create project templates from existing projects and with a little bit of work it's real easy to create a project environment that's ready to roll without having to dig for related components first. This applies to Web projects more than anything for me as I have a fair bit of generic utility code that is project specific and needs to be added to just about all projects. Templates make this real quick and easy. Here's how.

ASP.Net - Never again fear publishing your website with debug=true

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:31:02 GMT

What makes the deployment element special is that it is a machine level configuration element. When its retail attribute is set to true, it will disable the <compilation debug="true"> for ALL ASP.Net applications running on that machine. In addition, it turns of detailed errors messages being sent to remote machines and disables the ability to trace output.

I Spose I'll Just Say It: You Should Learn MVC

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:31:21 GMT

I'm never shy about my opinion - why start now? I've been reading a lot of posts flying about on whether you should learn MVC, Summing up the differences so you can decide when to use it, I even found a post that offers a scorecard approach! I remember reading the latter post thinking to myself "how can you possibly put a number next to Testability? And why it is only 2 more points than "using a RAD designer"? Isn't this missing the entire point?

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

Do We Create Type Systems In Dynamic Languages?

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 21:17:57 GMT

Justin Etheredge examines whether home-grown type systems appear in large projects written with dynamic languages.

5 reasons why you should use ASP.NET MVC

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 22:01:03 GMT

I'll be fair with you readers. I've only toyed with the ASP.NET MVC framework. It looks great as of now but it's the first full blown MVC framework that we have that is backed by Microsoft. However, there is a lot of opposition nowadays that tend to be formulated like this: Why should I use ASP.NET MVC? WebForms works well. Other problems come from the lack of server controls. When a developer look at that and he then wonder why he should have to write HTML and Javascript when before he could have retrieved all that beautiful information with a simple postback.

File Uploads in ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RTM

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 06:16:10 GMT

I had not messed around with file uploads in ASP.NET MVC for a while and so when I fired up ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RTM I was pleasantly surprised to find out how easy they had made it!

Ten C# Keywords That You Shouldn't Be Using

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:31:03 GMT

Overview of some not-so-common keywords and reasons to avoid them...or understand what the implications are if we use them.

ASP.NET MVC source code under MS-PL

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:16:03 GMT

Scott Guthrie announces that the ASP.NET MVC source code is being released under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL). MS-PL is an OSI-approved open source license. The MS-PL contains no platform restrictions and provides broad rights to modify and redistribute the source code.

ASP.NET MVC Best Practices (Part 1) - Kazi Manzur Rashid's Blog

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 07:46:02 GMT

In this post, I will share some of the best practices/guideline in developing ASP.NET MVC applications which I have learned in the hard way. I will not tell you to use DI or Unit Test instead I will assume you are already doing it and you prefer craftsmanship over anything.

Beginning Mocking With Moq 3 - Part 4

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:46:03 GMT

into to mocking using moq libary, part 4

5 Useful SQL Server Scripts

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 07:01:05 GMT

Collection of 5 useful scripts for SQL Server.

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 ;-)

SpicIE -- framework for developing managed BHOs

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:55:36 GMT

SpicIE makes it easy to develop plugins for IE in managed code.

A guide to Silverlight 3 new features

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:31:13 GMT

Tim Heuer provides an amazing look into Silverlight 3's new features.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 has been released!

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:31:02 GMT

To keep up with a good tradition (see here and here), I'm being one of the earliest bloggers having great news on ASP.NET MVC: we are at version 1.0! This means production ready, supported, stable, .! Grab the download at Microsoft.com.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 released

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:01:26 GMT

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RTM is released

How .NET Regular Expressions Really Work

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:46:04 GMT

A very deep dive into the source code for how .NET Regular Expressions really work

Beginning Mocking With Moq 3 - Part 3

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 02:31:04 GMT

Beginners introduction to mocking using the recently released Moq 3 framework. This is part 3 of the series