DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by brianmd

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.

Exploring Code Contracts: Taking a look at Pre/Post Conditions

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:15:00 GMT

Taking a look at the new Code Contracts library which is out of MS Research and will be part of .Net 4.0/Vs2010. Contracts allow for many different ways to perform language agnostic code validation and in this episode we are going to focus on how to setup pre and post condition validation.

MVC support in existing ASP.NET control suites

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:35:35 GMT

One of the problems with embracing MVC is that the toolsets we may have used in our standard ASP.NET web forms projects may now not work in a new MVC project. However, do not fear! some of the big guns in the control suite market already have MVC support, so you may not need to re-invest in new MVC versions of the same suites or have to start re-inventing the wheel building MVC controls yourself.

Opinionated Input Builders for ASP.Net MVC using partials

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:00:00 GMT

The goal of these control helpers is to reward you for developing MVC with the Model first. Yeah there is a reason that Model View Controller starts with the Model. Using the strongly typed views in the aspx view engine we can carry the type down to the control helpers with intellisense and then build html input control based on conventions for rendering specific CLR types to specific HTML output.

Code Contract framework

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:31:27 GMT

When we write code we often have to validate the parameters passed into our methods to make sure that they are appropriate, this usually leaves us with repettitive and ugly code at the start of each method. How nice would it be if we could replace that with a more readable & more concice structure so that we can simply write: Require.That(fileInfo, IsNot.Null, Is.ExistingFileSystemObject)

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.

ASP.NET MVC Installer For Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 And Roadmap

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 08:30:00 GMT

"Today I'm happy to announce that we're done with the work I described and the installer is now available on CodePlex. Be sure to give it a try as many of the new VS10 features intended to support the TDD workflow fit very nicely with ASP.NET MVC, which ScottGu will describe in an upcoming blog post."

22 Visual Studio Short Keys and 6 Short-cut Ways to Custom Jobs

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:15:00 GMT

Efficient programmers use short keys in IDE like Visual Studio. This saves time and in many cases makes the work run faster also. I also love short keys. They are smart! And there also go some tricks that help make your visual studio days a party! I have listed here some short cuts and some tips with the hope that this will be helpful to you all.

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.

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 4.0 Extensible Output Caching

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:12:18 GMT

A number of Exciting ASP.NET features are coming in the .NET Framework version 4.0. These features are included in Visual Studio 2010 release. This post explains about one of those features core services in ASP.NET 4.0

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.

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.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 released + matching T4 Editor available

Mon, 18 May 2009 19:00:59 GMT

As Somasegar pointed out VS 2010 Beta 1 ships now. and we tangible engineering is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of tangible T4 Editor 1.5 for Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 - which was released today - so same day as VS 2010 Beta 1 did release - yes!

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.

Mocking - VISUG session (screencast)

Wed, 13 May 2009 18:00:33 GMT

Abstract: "This session provides an introduction to unit testing using mock objects. It builds a small application using TDD (test driven development). To enable easier unit testing, all dependencies are removed from code and introduced as mock objects. Afterwards, a mocking framework by the name of Moq (mock you) is used to shorten unit tests and create a maintainable set of unit tests for the example application. "

Mocking - VISUG session

Fri, 08 May 2009 17:54:33 GMT

Thursday evening, I did a session on Mocking for the VISUG (Visual Studio User Group Belgium). As promised, here is the slide deck I've used. The session will be available online soon, in the meantime you'll have to go with the slide deck.

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.

Find and Reproduce Heisenbugs - CHESS is the tool for you

Tue, 05 May 2009 11:48:41 GMT

Microsoft is mainly known for 2 things. Windows and Office. However, for programmers, Microsoft is also know for many more projects/product like .NET, Enterprise Library, ASP.NET MVC, Team Foundation Server, SharePoint, etc. Among the few tools that are not really known and publicised at the moment are the projects inside Microsoft Research. This is the land of Beta or "software-never-to-be-released".

Castle Windsor 2.0 RTM Released!

Tue, 05 May 2009 13:46:04 GMT

Some would say that it is about time, I would agree. Windsor might not be the OSS project in pre release state for the longest time (I think that the honor belong to Hurd), but it spent enough time at that state to at least deserve a honorary mention. f you will look, you won't find Windsor 1.0, only release candidates for 1.0. As I believe I mentioned, Windsor has been production ready for a long time, and for the full release we decided to skip the 1.0 designator, which doesn't really fit, and go directly to 2.0

I Spose I'll Just Say It: Still Waiting For a GOOD Reason to Learn MVC

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 05:31:13 GMT

Why you shouldn't learn MVC Earlier today Rob Connery posted about why he thinks You Should Learn MVC. Rob is a great guy and we always have lively discussions whenever we meet at conferences. I was in the middle of writing a long comment on his blog when I decided it might be better as it's own post.

ELMAH: Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET (and MVC too!)

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:01:11 GMT

ELMAH has been one of the most useful tools for ASP.NET developers to log errors on their web applications. Now Scott has a nice talk on how to use it even in your ASP.NET MVC applications. Cool!

MSDN session on ASP.NET MVC

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:44:15 GMT

As promised to all people attending my online session on ASP.NET MVC this afternoon, here is the slide deck I've used. I must say, doing a presentation using Live Meeting and a Microsoft Roundtable device seemed a bit strange at first. However, the setup that is used to do this kind of sessions is really cool to work with! Make sure to check Katrien's blog for all other Live Meeting MSDN sessions that are planned.

How to improve HtmlHelper.RenderPartial perf: don't run in debug mode

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 07:01:01 GMT

There has a been a lot of talking on a possible "big design flaw" in ASP.NET MVC: partial view path resolution was not cached. After a bit of testing I found out that caching kicks in only in release mode. So probably all the other tests were run in debug mode.

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.