In his Practical Review of ASP.NET MVC , Josh Charles provides a helpful review of ASP.NET MVC from a Rails developer’s perspective. It seemed fair and balanced, and the end result is that there’s room for improvement, which we’re taking to heart. However, that’s not the part that caught my attention. He mentioned that he wrote a cycle method but couldn’t write it as an extension method to HtmlHelper . this was an instance method that would take two strings and return the one that it didn’t return the last time it was called. In my templates, I used this to change the classes for each row of data, to give them different background colors. I considered writing an extension method to the Html object used for other Html operations in the view page...(read more)

If you try to use a Login Control and change the contents of the control when someone logs in, you have to be really careful how you do it.  You can only change things after certain events to ensure that the template is correct.  Also, some...(read more)

In this tip, I show how you can create custom route constraints that prevent you from accessing a URL unless you are local and authenticated. I show you how you can create a LocalConstraint and an AuthenticatedConstraint. I also demonstrate how you can test your custom constraints. When you create an MVC route, you can add constraints to a route. For example, the following route maps browser requests to a controller named Blog and an action named Archive: routes.MapRoute( "BlogArchive", "Archive/{entryDate}", new { controller = "Blog", action = "Archive" } ); This route, named BlogArchive, maps three parameters. The controller parameter is assigned the value Blog and the action parameter is assigned the...(read more)

Recently, Adam Kinney came by my office to interview me for a Channel 9 episode discussing ASP.NET MVC CodePlex Preview 4. I’ve known Adam for a long time, even before he joined Microsoft. I think we met (in person) at Tech-Ed 2003. In any case, we talk a bit about ASP.NET MVC and Preview 4, all the while I tried very hard not to put my foot in my mouth. At the end there are some outtakes of me impersonating Scott Hanselman doing an impersonation of Sean Conery. That wasn’t to make fun of Scott, but totally out of love and respect. ;) On Gaming In the interview, I mentioned that I used to work at a skill gaming company called SkillJam which is no longer around. We had a tournament engine that allowed users to play games of skill for money. I...(read more)

We recently had a customer that wanted to sort a dynamic column in a DataGrid and so I thought it may be something that others would like to be able to do. You get your data for your dynamic column and then do something like below to insert it into an...(read more)

HerdingCode has recently posted a PodCast with Glenn Block where he talks about Prism , Unity and, of course MEF ! Episode 11: Glenn Block on Prism, Unity, and MEF (part 1)   You gotta love the fast forwards in here.. I wish I had those in my meetings, of course i would never fast forward Glenn ;-) Read More......(read more)

A client grid control is probably the most requested control for the Ajax Control Toolkit . It will come eventually but if you need a simple grid control right now, DotNetSlackers' Ajax Data Controls do a pretty good job. Their grid supports pagination , sorting , drag and drop of columns , in-place edition and is server-integrated. They also provide repeater types of controls but those are made a little more complex to use because of the lack of data binding. The whole thing is open-source . w00t! Check it out: http://dotnetslackers.com/projects/AjaxDataControls/GridView/Default.aspx Read More......(read more)

Ed Jolly has asked me to post this, and I’m happy to oblige: Greetings Blog Readers, My name is Ed Jolly, and I am a director in the Commercial Technical Support (CTS) organization at Microsoft. I am here to request a few minutes of your time. We would...(read more)

I just read a really interesting article about how Microsoft is helping to bring the Olympics to the PC.  You can read the article here . One of the amazing things about this is that Microsoft got involved in January and was able to make all of this...(read more)

I just saw that we released another round of PDC sessions... This is the first PDC for years where I have not been personally deeply involved in the planning, so it is fun for me to watch in unfold..  https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/sessions.aspx If you have not already, please register as the early bird discount runs out on August 15th.  I thought I'd highlight a few of the sessions I have some context on.  I'd love to have your feedback on these as well any other thoughts you have about PDC this year.    Deploying Web Applications with IIS7.0 and the Web Deployment Tool There is some very cool work going on in Dev10 to make it much easier to deploy ASP.NET applications to testing and production and...(read more)

A while back I talked about how testable code helps manage complexity . In that post, I mentioned one common rebuttal to certain design decisions made in code in order to make it more testable. Why would I want to do XYZ just do improve testability? Recently, I heard one variation of this comment in the comments to my post on unit test boundaries . Several people suggested that it’s fine to have unit tests access the database, after all, the code relies on data from the database, it should be tested. Implicit in this statement is the question, “ Why would I want to abstract away the data access just to improve testability? ” Keep in mind, I never said you shouldn’t test your code’s interaction with the database. You absolutely should. I merely...(read more)

Here is the answer to the question that was posted, here . There are a few ways to answer this, you can use the brute force method or you can look for an easier way. This actually turns out to be a problem space where there is a specific way to solve...(read more)

Just wanted to pass along some really interesting labs that I came across the other day.  These labs cover the following topics: IE 8 Activities AJAX Developer Tools Standards Support IE 8 WebSlices You can check out all these labs at Internet Explorer...(read more)

Mircea recently published a set of tools we have been using recently in design and Architecture reviews of the .NET Framework.  You can download the three new tools Deps, Layering, and potentialCallers here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/fxarch   Enjoy!   Deps Deps.exe constructs the dependency diagrams between assemblies, and carries out cycle detection analysis. The command line format is: deps.exe {d|s} <mscorlib_path> <path_list> [:assembly_name] Example: deps s c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\mscorlib.dll c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727 :System The tool produces the files: Full.dot. This is a graphviz – formatted file containing the inter-assembly dependencies, based on what...(read more)

In this tip, I demonstrate how you can create a special controller that you can use to test your custom routes. I also explain how you can give your routes back their names so you can more effectively unit test your routes. In this tip, I demonstrate how you can create a custom controller that you can use to debug the custom routes that you add to your ASP.NET MVC applications (see Figure 1). I also explain how you can create unit tests that test your custom routes by name. Figure 1 – Using the RouteDebugger Controller I was inspired to undertake this project by Phil Haack’s ASP.NET Routing Debugger: http://haacked.com/archive/2008/03/13/url-routing-debugger.aspx However, there are some important differences between the Route Debugger...(read more)