DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by johnsheehan

A Simple .NET Profanity Filter

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:29:48 GMT

A website I am working on right now accepts public comments, and one of the requirements is to do a basic check for dirty language. Surprisingly for such a common problem I wasn't able to find any code on the net that did what I wanted and so I've ended up writing my own. The Censor class is pretty simple: you give it a list of words you want to censor, either simple text or with wildcards, and the censor will star out any matches it finds.

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...

Performing Set Operations with LINQ

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:05:52 GMT

LINQ's set operations provide an easy (and fast!) way to filter or combine collections of objects in .NET. The four extension methods that perform set operations - Distinct, Except, Intersect, and Union - are available through the IEnumerable<T> and IQueryable<T> interfaces and use an instance of IEqualityComparer<T> to produce a result based on the presence or absence of equivalent elements.

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

Pulling others up

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:45:00 GMT

What should you do when you're in a situation where the people you're working with aren't using the latest and greatest technology and might not be using the so-called "best practices" that you subscribe to?

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.

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.

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.

Unit Testing ASP.NET MVC

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:28:41 GMT

Justin Etheredge describes how to build testible applications in ASP.NET MVC, discussing how to get the maximum benifit from automated test and demonstrates writing tests for the different pieces of your MVC applicaiton.

JSON Hijacking

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:28:30 GMT

Phil talks about the dangers of JSON hijacking

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.

If At First You Don't Succeed - Retrying Mail Operations in .NET

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:45:01 GMT

Mail sent from your application didn't go through? Don't give up so easily! The majority of mail server interruptions are very temporary in nature, lasting only a few seconds. Instead of failing right away, why not give your SMTP client another shot?

Exploring how to use Expressions w/ Spark

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Taking a look at the various different ways you can use Expressions with the Spark View engine. We are going to review simply scenarios such as math based expressions and move up to looking at nested if-then-else statements.

Return of the PagedList<T>

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:00:21 GMT

It has been nearly a year since I posted an updated version of the PagedList<T> functionality originally created by Scott Guthrie and posted by Rob Conery. Since then I have used the class in a number of projects and find it indispensable. A few days ago, Craig Stuntz reported an interesting observation: when the first page is returned, the class performs a Skip(0). Suprisingly, this is not free. With that in mind, I set out to correct that issue as well as incorporate a few changes I've made over the past year. The result is nearly identical to the last posted version, just a bit more readable.

SubSonic 3.0: ActiveRecord

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:45:00 GMT

Google's project site is down for a while and I have some perf tests running in the background so I thought it might be time to crank out a few more "preview" posts of SubSonic 3.0. This one's about ActiveRecord - one of my favorite patterns for its ease of use and versatility.

SubSonic 3.0: The SimpleRepository « Rob Conery

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 10:45:01 GMT

Rob is adding a very nice simple repository to SubSonic 3.0 that will give SubSonic top-notch POCO support and very slick migrations. Mapping files be damned!

Zen and the Art of Project Management

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 03:15:00 GMT

Nate Kohari, the developer of Ninject, announces Zen, a project management system based around lean/kanban.

11 keystrokes that made my jQuery selector run 10x faster

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:15:00 GMT

An in-depth analysis of the performance concerns when using a popular jQuery selector and a couple ways to dramatically speed it up, including benchmarks.

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."

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."

ASP.NET MVC and the Templated Partial View - Death to ASCX

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:00:22 GMT

We are used to master pages and applying them to ASPX pages. Then we pull small parts of the view into user controls or ASCX. In ASP.NET MVC, we use ASCX files as partial views because the user control model is so baked into our thinking. I propose that ASCX does not provide much benefit in ASP.NET MVC. It's usefulness may end with using the extension as a naming convention for the easy identification of partial views. Beyond that, it's pretty thin.

Visual Studio 2010: Multiple web.config versions

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:30:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 has support for multiple web.config files. It is one feature of new web application packaging and deployment system. We can create now separate web.config files for each configuration we have for application.

LINQ to SQL changes in .NET 4.0

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:15:00 GMT

What's fixed and breaking changes for LINQ to SQL in .NET 4.0

The Greatest Exception Handling WTF?!? of All Time

Thu, 28 May 2009 10:00:00 GMT

The Exception object has ONE purpose and ONE purpose only - to represent a runtime error, nothing more. Exceptions should never be used for purposes for which they were not intended -- or you could end up with this monstrosity...

Saying Hello to the Spark View Engine

Wed, 27 May 2009 21:15:00 GMT

Taking a introductory look at the Spark View engine. The Spark is a view engine for Asp.Net Mvc and Castle Project MonoRail frameworks. The idea is to allow the html to dominate the flow and the code to fit seamlessly.