DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by javery

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 1: Introduction

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:00:05 GMT

"Once upon a time, Microsoft started a Windows Azure developing contest named new CloudApp();. While it first was only available for US candidates, the contest was opened for international submissions too. Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker and his fellow knightsmen at RealDolmen decided to submit a small sample application that could be hosted in an unknown environment, known by the digital villagers as "the cloud". The application was called TwitterMatic, named after the great god of social networking, Twitter. It would allow digital villagers to tell the latest stories, even when they were asleep or busy working."

Exploring Code Contracts: Taking a look at Object Invariant Conditions

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:45:00 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 utilize the Object Invariant checking to maintain an objects state.

Use specific return types in your ASP.NET MVC action methods

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:30:00 GMT

When looking at ASP.NET MVC examples on the web almost all action methods return ActionResult, even methods that could return a specific subclass...

WPF Localization Guidance Paper Posted on CodePlex

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:46:21 GMT

I'm happy to announce that my WPF Localization paper went live a couple of days ago on CodePlex. This document provides an overview of localization in .NET in general as well as specifically to WPF. It covers localization with the rigid LocBaml approach, as well as using Resx resources for binding using markup extensions and attached properties respectively.

Building a Single Sign On Provider Using ASP.NET and WCF: Part 1

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:02:24 GMT

Need a cross-domain, cross-platform single sign-on provider? Here's how I did it. This is the first in a 4 part series addressing issues around cross-domain authentication with AJAX on the ASP.NET platform.

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

How we do MVC - View models - Jimmy Bogard -

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:09:32 GMT

Jimmy talks about View Models and how to use them in an ASP.NET MVC Project.

20 Most Interesting Silverlight Tutorials

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:45:00 GMT

In this article we presents a collection of best Silverlight tutorials.

Creating Custom Functions w/ NAnt

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:00:03 GMT

Taking a look at how to create a custom function for your NAnt script. After you have the basics of NAnt down you may quickly find out that there are features you need, but they are not part of the core library. The good news for you is that in very little effort or coding you can create your own custom assembly which will expose your newly created NAnt functions

SQL SERVER - 2008 - Management Studio New Features

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:15:22 GMT

This article describes the top 5 features of SQL Server Management Studio 2008. With the release of SQL Server 2008 Microsoft has upgraded SSMS with many new features as well as added tons of new functionalities requested by DBAs for long time.

OpenForum - A Free Forum for ASP.NET MVC Applications

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:15:01 GMT

One of the things that I really like about the MVC framework is that it offers some unique possibilities when it comes to third parties developing entire sub-systems that can easily be plugged into existing applications. Recently, I had some "down time" at my work and decided to take the opportunity to experiment with doing just that. Here are the results of that experiment. OpenForum is a forum that can easily be plugged into any MVC application with very little effort. In fact, there are only three steps to get OpenForum working with most MVC applications.

Profiling the Memory Usage of a .NET Application

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:45:02 GMT

Automatic memory management in .NET makes development a lot easier; however, it's still easy to introduce memory leaks into your application. For example, in a complex application, it's easy to forget to unregister event handlers, and these are notorious for holding on to objects which you don't need to keep in memory any more. This typically leads to an increase in memory usage which, if it remains unchecked and unresolved, can lead to your application exhibiting poor performance, or even running out of memory and crashing. This is where a memory profiler becomes necessary.

Never worry about ASP.NET AJAX's "d" again

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:30:00 GMT

Since a lot of people are having trouble with it, I want to share one method you can use to completely isolate your code from the ".d" problem. In this post, I will show you how to detect the ".d" and how you can completely isolate your $.ajax success handler from it.

JSON Hijacking

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:28:30 GMT

Phil talks about the dangers of JSON hijacking

JavaScript Shortcuts

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Write more compact JavaScript with these two tips.

Exploring how to use Expressions w/ Spark

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:15:00 GMT

Exploring how to use Expressions w/ Spark. We are going to take a look at the various different ways you can use Looping Expressions with the Spark View engine.

VAN Meeting with Ryan Svihla on the Castle Project

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Ryan will be doing a two part series on the Castle Project. Mark your calendar for some Castle Project fun.

Fluent NHibernate And You

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:29:30 GMT

a breif intro into FLuent NHibernate with code snippets.

PLINQO 3.0 - Even Better

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:15:00 GMT

A review of PLINQO 3.0 from CodeSmith including an overview of new features since version 2.0. "In case you're not familiar with PLINQO, this set of code-generation templates are designed to enhance the LINQ-to-SQL development experience. They're not only a time-saver like most code generation templates, but they allow you to overcome many of the limitations of raw LINQ-to-SQL."

Application-wide action filters in ASP.NET MVC

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:30:02 GMT

Ever had a team of developers using your ASP.NET MVC framework? Chances are you have implemented some action filters (i.e. for logging) which should be applied on all controllers in the application. Two ways to do this: kindly ask your developers to add a [Logging] attribute to the controllers they write, or kindly ask to inherit from SomeCustomControllerWithActionsInPlace. If you have been in this situation, monday mornings, afternoons, tuesdays and other weekdays are in fact days where some developers will forget to do one of the above. This means no logging! Or any other action filters that are executed due to a developer that has not been fed with enough coffee. Wouldn't it be nice to have a central repository where you can register application-wide action filters? That's exactly what we are going to do in this blog post.

Model design - refactoring domain models using LightSpeed

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:15:00 GMT

If you've used Visual Studio for any length of time, you undoubtedly make heavy use of refactoring. Even the simple refactoring of renaming a class or method and having Visual Studio automatically update all references is a huge time-saver. Until now model design with designers have not provided good refactoring support. This post details how the LightSpeed model designer now supports partial class, solution wide rename and convert to manual implementation refactorings. Provide feedback on domain model refactorings you would like to see.

Delayed execution vs ToList() in LINQ Database Queries

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:00:02 GMT

Should you use ToList() in your repository methods, or should you pass the iterator back to the UI to delay the execution of the query? Read on to find out why it's a bad idea to delay execution in this case.

The ASP.NET MVC ActionController - The controllerless action

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:51:17 GMT

There has been quite a bit of discussion about how controllers are really namespaces trying to get out once you use the concept on a nontrivial application. Brian Donahue's post on The anti-controller revolution prompted me to do this little experiment. He references some twitter posts by Jimmy Bogard, one of my esteemed consultants at Headspring Systems. Chad Myers also has opined about the notion of more independent actions and has cited precedence.

Learning the Decorator Pattern

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:15:00 GMT

Taking at how we can use the Decorator Pattern in our application. The decorator pattern is a structural pattern which allows you to attach new or additional actions to an object dynamically. Using the decorator pattern provides a very clean and flexible alternative to subclassing (via inheritance) your object and thus creating an unwanted inheritance tree

CLR Injection: Runtime Method Replacer

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:30:00 GMT

how the JIT compiles MSIL and create a utility that allow us to programmatically replace any JIT'ed method with another method at runtime. We will also create a debugging utility that will intercept JIT calls and print diagnostics information to the console.