DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by simonech

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

Ajax survey 2009: jQuery and MS Ajax are almost tied

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:45:00 GMT

Simone posts the results of the survey about ajax adoption among .NET developers. jQuery gained 58% since 2007 and now is almost tied to the MS Ajax stack (Control toolkit and ajax core)

Open Source ASP.NET Maintenance Mode Module - AM3

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:45:01 GMT

Web developers at times need to put their web applications in an offline mode so as to prevent visitors from accessing the site while they are updating it. The classic way to do this would be to upload an app_offline.html file to the root of the web application. The limitation of this technique is that even the developer cannot visit the site! A developer might need to ensure if everything is working fine and at the same time prevent other users from accessing the web site.

The "Sim City" effect: warning signs and avoidance

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:21:08 GMT

Can you forsee the "Sim City" effect and can you avoid it happening?

Abandon ASP.NET WebForms!

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 07:45:01 GMT

Interesting experiance with classic web forms....

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.

Life After Loops

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:15:00 GMT

Eliminating cumbersome looping code using Linq

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.

Visual Studio 2010: Web.config transforms

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:15:00 GMT

Recently I wrote about Visual Studio 2010 and multiple web.config files support. Let's see how to play with web.config transformation so we can use one configuration on development environment and the other for production environment.

Automagic Time Localization

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:30:00 GMT

A trick to localize timestamps without requiring users to pick their time zone manually.

Asp.Net vs php : Speed Comparison

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:00:00 GMT

Why is the myth that php is faster than Asp.Net so prevalent? Asp.Net is faster than php, here are the facts. So many times I have heard php pushers claim that php is so much faster than Asp.Net and that Asp.Net is clunky and slow. The most annoying part is that everything I have read (that is not factless opinion), and I mean everything, says that this is wrong; but for some reason, this myth is widely accepted. It has become a religious argument that ignores the facts...

Integration Testing Your ASP.NET MVC Application

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 09:15:00 GMT

Unit tests are great for proving the correctness of a single component. But how can you prove that you whole ASP.NET MVC application hangs together properly - including its view templates, configuration settings, and database schema? Integration tests cover what unit tests can't - Steven Sanderson shows one way to approach it with ASP.NET MVC.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Daily tech links for .net and related technologies - June 6, 2009

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 15:15:00 GMT

Daily tech links for .net and related technologies.

Wrox Blox NHibernate with ASP.NET Problem-Design-Solution

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 23:33:58 GMT

This Wrox Blox demonstrates how to start using NHibernate in line of business applications using ASP.NET and VB.NET. Using NHibernate will speed up your application development by removing the need to build your own Data Access Layer (DAL). In addition, you can focus solely on the business problem instead of the infrastructure concerns. Using a simple demo application as an example, this Wrox Blox shows how easy it is to get started with NHibernate and build your DAL in minutes instead of hours. Readers will also see how the POCO pattern enables you to keep your DAL as unobtrusive as possible as well as being interchangeable for future DAL implementations. You will also see how NHibernate has many enterprise patterns built into it, like the Unit of Work pattern and the Identity Map.

Should We Return Null From Our Methods?

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 18:15:06 GMT

I read a interesting article recently about the potential perils of Null Check Hell. The author's suggestion? Stop allowing any of your methods to return nulls, ever . No nulls returned, no null checks necessary. Problem solved, right?

Learning how to add IntelliSense for the Spark View Engine

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:45:05 GMT

Learning how to add IntelliSense for the Spark View Engine inside Visual Studio

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."

5 Quick Steps to Get Introduced with VSTS and TFS 2010 Beta 1

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 06:15:00 GMT

As the Beta 1 releases is pretty infant, there are very limited resources available in the web and community, so I just wanted to gather all of the useful resources with respect to these two tool in one places, so that anyone can move forward from installation to first "Hello VSTS/TFS" excitement smoothly.

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.

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.