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Speed up Visual Studio Builds - Arik Poznanski's Blog

Mon, 16 May 2011 23:20:34 GMT

Recently I got involved in a big project where we had a single solution with approximately 100 projects.

Using FTP to access Windows Azure Blob Storage

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 06:24:17 GMT

A while ago, I did a blog post on creating an external facing Azure Worker Role endpoint, listening for incoming TCP connections. After doing that post, I had the idea of building a Windows Azure FTP server that served as a bridge to blob storage. Lack of time, other things to do, you name it: I did not work on that idea. Until now, that is.

ASP.NET MVC 2 Localization complete guide

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:45:05 GMT

This is a full guide for localizing asp.net mvc 2 web application covering following aspects: views localization, simple culture switching mechanism, model validation messages localization, DisplayName attribute localization and problem solving with caching(OutputCache) and localization.

Translating routes (ASP.NET MVC and Webforms)

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:30:45 GMT

For one of the first blog posts of the new year, I thought about doing something cool. And being someone working with ASP.NET MVC, I thought about a cool thing related to that: let's do something with routes! Since System.Web.Routing is not limited to ASP.NET MVC, this post will also play nice with ASP.NET Webforms. But what's the cool thing? How about. translating route values?

Exploring the ASP.NET MVC 2 futures assemby

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:15:00 GMT

The latest preview of ASP.NET MVC 2, preview 2, has been released on CodePlex last week. All features of the preview 1 version are still in, as well as some nice novelties like client-side validation, single project areas, the model metadata model, . This post dives into the accompanying futures assembly and discovers... ViewState is coming back!

SQL Azure Manager

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:00:04 GMT

SQL Azure manager: a community effort to quickly enable connecting to your SQL Azure database(s) and perform basic tasks.

REST for ASP.NET MVC SDK

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:15:10 GMT

Earlier this week, Phil Haack did a post on the newly released REST for ASP.NET MVC SDK. I had the feeling though that this post did not really get the attention it deserved. I do not have the idea my blog gets more visitors than Phil's, but I'll try to give the SDK some more attention by blogging an example

Signed Access Signatures and PHP SDK for Windows Azure

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 07:24:01 GMT

The latest Windows Azure storage release featured a new concept: "Shared Access Signatures". The idea of those is that you can create signatures for specific resources in blob storage and that you can provide more granular access than the default "all-or-nothing" approach that is taken by Azure blob storage. Steve Marx posted a sample on this, demonstrating how you can provide read access to a blob for a specified amount of minutes, after which the access is revoked. The PHP SDK for Windows Azure is now equipped with a credentials mechanism, based on Signed Access Signatures. Let's see if we can demonstrate how this would work.

Accessing ServiceConfiguration in FastCGI (PHP) web role

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 07:52:45 GMT

While working on a sample PHP application hosted on Windows Azure, I found that it is nearly impossible to retrieve information from the Windows Azure ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file. Also, it is impossible to write log messages to the Windows Azure Web Role. Well, both are not 100% impossible: you can imagine dirty hacks where you let a ASP.NET page do something from PHP and stuff like that. But how about a clean solution? How about. A PHP extension module?

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 1: Introduction

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:00:05 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."

Application-wide action filters in ASP.NET MVC

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:30:02 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.

Revised: ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 06:19:47 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.

ASP.NET MVC TDD using Visual Studio 2010

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:15:07 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.

A view from the cloud (or: locate your ASP.NET MVC views on Azure)

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:30:00 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.

ASP.NET MVC Domain Routing

Wed, 20 May 2009 18:09:52 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.

ASP.NET MVC Subdomain Routing

Fri, 15 May 2009 00:31:02 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.

ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 20:46:14 GMT

Microsoft's Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a .NET library (released on CodePlex) that enables greater re-use of application components. You can do this by dynamically composing your application based on a set of classes and methods that can be combined at runtime. Think of it like building an appliation that can host plugins, which in turn can also be composed of different plugins. Since examples say a thousand times more than text, let's go ahead with a sample leveraging MEF in an ASP.NET MVC web application.

C# Regions are not Useful? Give me a Break

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 08:46:02 GMT

I often see arguments about use of regions in C# code. And this is one of the most annoying things I see on the Internet in my opinion when it pertains to code structure. Whoever says regions are not to be used, I'd love to see your code and know what standards you have established as a team with your code base. I bet you it's a mess and the reason you don't like regions is because the developers on your team has abused use of them and that there is no logical pattern or team standard established.

Using the ASP.NET MVC Futures AsyncController

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:31:04 GMT

Last week, I blogged about all stuff that is included in the ASP.NET MVC Futures assembly, which is an assembly available on CodePlex and contains possible future features (tonguetwister!) for the ASP.NET MVC framework. One of the comments asked for more information on the AsyncController that is introduced in the MVC Futures. So here goes!

Back to the future! Exploring ASP.NET MVC Futures

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:01:19 GMT

For those of you who did not know yet: next to the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 version and its source code, there's also an interesting assembly available if you can not wait for next versions of the ASP.NET MVC framework: the MVC Futures assembly. In this blog post, I'll provide you with a quick overview of what is available in this assembly and how you can already benefit from. "the future".

New CodePlex project: MvcSiteMap â?" ASP.NET MVC sitemap provider

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:16:03 GMT

If you have been using the ASP.NET MVC framework, you possibly have been searching for something like the classic ASP.NET sitemap. After you've played with it, you even found it useful! But not really flexible and easy to map to routes and controllers. To tackle that, last year, somewhere in August, I released a proof-of-concept sitemap provider for the ASP.NET MVC framework on my blog. The blog post on sitemap provider I released back then has received numerous comments, suggestions, code snippets, . Together with Patrice Calve, we've released a new version of the sitemap provider on CodePlex: MvcSiteMap. This time I'll not dive into implementation details, but provide you with some of the features our sitemap provider erm. provides.

CRUD with ASP.NET MVC (screencast)

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:46:02 GMT

Abstract: "In this video, the new tooling for Visual Studio included in ASP.NET MVC release candidate is demonstrated to create a create, read, update and delete user interface within 15 minutes."

Easy embed workflow in your application

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:46:16 GMT

Whilst enterprise architectures mostly focus on BizTalk as a standalone server, WF is meant to be a more core-based addition for embedding within application. Embedding is not always as intuitive as it should be, though. To this end, I've created the following self-titled "WorkflowExecutive" helper class. It allows you to easily start any referenced Workflow, pass along parameters to it and handle exceptions.

Announcing my book: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:01:02 GMT

Maarten Balliauw announces his new book and provides a large retrospective on the writing process itself. Must read for everyone thinking about writing a tech book!

Verifying code and testing with Pex

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:46:05 GMT

Earlier this week, Katrien posted an update on the list of Belgian TechDays 2009 speakers. This post featured a summary on all sessions, of which one was titled "Pex - Automated White Box Testing for .NET". Here's the abstract: "Pex is an automated white box testing tool for .NET. Pex systematically tries to cover every reachable branch in a program by monitoring execution traces, and using a constraint solver to produce new test cases with different behavior. Pex can be applied to any existing .NET assembly without any pre-existing test suite. Pex will try to find counterexamples for all assertion statements in the code. Pex can be guided by hand-written parameterized unit tests, which are API usage scenarios with assertions. The result of the analysis is a test suite which can be persisted as unit tests in source code. The generated unit tests integrate with Visual Studio Team Test as well as other test frameworks. By construction, Pex produces small unit test suites with high code and assertion coverage, and reported failures always come with a test case that reproduces the issue. At Microsoft, this technique has proven highly effective in testing even an extremely well-tested component." After reading the second sentence in this abstract, I was thinking: "SWEET! Let's try!". So here goes.