DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by maartenba

The Code Junkie's blog » Integrating WCF with your favorite IoC

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:26:28 GMT

A while back I was working on a project where I had to implement a Windows Communication Service for authenticating users. Internally the service was going to use a user repository to validate the provided credentials. I wanted to design the service in such a way that it didn't take a hard dependency on a specific user repository implementation, instead I wanted to make use of the Dependency Inversion Principle to decouple the service's dependency on the user repository.

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."

Bing and Google Agree: Slow Pages Lose Users

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:37:20 GMT

Today representatives of Google Search and Microsoft's Bing teams, Jake Brutlag and Eric Schurman respectively, presented the results of user performance tests at today's Velocity Conference. The talk was entitled The User and Business Impact of Server Delays, Additional Bytes, and HTTP Chunking in Web Search. These are long-term tests were designed to see what aspects of performance are most important. To know how to improve their sites both Bing and Google need to know what tweaks to page load perceptions and realities help or hurt the user experience. This is one of the first performance tests that has actual data (and is not strictly anecdotal). The numbers may seem small, but they if you are dealing in millions/billions they add up quickly.

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.

Back to Basics - Trust Nothing as User Input Comes from All Over

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:58:12 GMT

A good reminder why all input should be treated as malicious. It can cause embarrasing errors or worse open us up to attack vulnerabilities.

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.

The "Sim City" effect

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:30:00 GMT

What happens when you turn your back on a software development project.

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.

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."

Daily tech links for .net and related technologies - June 9, 2009

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Daily tech links for dotnet and related technologies.

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.

Code Contracts Primer - Part 1: Introduction

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:59:27 GMT

If you are not familiar with the Code Contracts library which is coming out of Microsoft R&D labs, you need to check this pretty cool little library out. As of Vs2010/.Net 4.0 this library will be making the jump out of the R&D labs. This is the first in a series where we will walk though various parts of the contracts library.

Model View Presenter (MVP) design pattern and data binding

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:45:00 GMT

Model View Presenter (MVP) design pattern is the evolution of the MVC design pattern and it's aimed at providing a cleaner separation of concerns between the view, the model, and the controller improving the architecture (you can use several UI technologies without recompiling the business logic components) and testability of the enterprise solution. The pattern was originally developed at Taligent in the 1990s. In this article, I will explain the principles and how to use the MVP design pattern along with data binding with an example using C# language in Microsoft.NET.

Handling Legacy URLs with ASP.NET MVC

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:00:00 GMT

According to Google's Webmaster tools, there are about 15,000 incoming links to my site. 13,000 of those reference a .ASPX file on disk. When I convert to MVC, with new Search Engine Friendly urls, all those links will break unless I do something about it. Presenting users with a 404 - file not found is not an option. I need to show them the content they were expecting, and update Search Engines with the news that things have changed. Here's how I will be managing those Legacy URLs.

Scott Guthrie's links for May 30th

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:30:00 GMT

More of Scott Guthrie's links: May 30th Links: ASP.NET, AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio.

ASP.NET MVC - Poll Result, jQuery UI MVC Component Demo and More Fe...

Thu, 21 May 2009 05:06:48 GMT

Few days back I ran a Poll to gather the feedback on ASP.NET MVC View Components that I am planning to build building. Though it is certainly not possible to get everyone's vote of the ASP.NET MVC Community, but I think the result has enough votes to represents the whole community:

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.

Book Review - Wrox Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0

Thu, 21 May 2009 22:19:48 GMT

A review of Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 from Wrox. A great book from Rob Conery, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, and Scott Guthrie.

Update of .NET RIA Services (preview) is available

Tue, 19 May 2009 15:27:15 GMT

Update of .NET RIA Services preview has been become available.

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 to test your multi-threaded code (part 3 of 3)?

Wed, 13 May 2009 21:16:05 GMT

In the last post we learned how to find and fix a simple multi-thread problem. Now we will see a more complex scenario and see how CHESS wil find the solution.

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. "

Creating Your First MVC ViewEngine

Tue, 12 May 2009 01:46:02 GMT

A question that I have been hearing a lot lately is: How do I change the view location in MVC? But what they really mean to say is: How do I create a new ViewEngine that uses the view locations of my choosing? It is actually very simple to do, and once you see it, I think you will agree with my assessment. The first thing we are going to do to create our custom ViewEngine, is define the paths that we want to use for our master pages, view pages, and shared pages. I have taken the liberty to define the following paths, you can customize them however you wish: