DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by TroyMG

What's Nu in the .NET World Part 2: Creating a Gem

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 00:46:13 GMT

If you are not familiar with the Nu project start by reading my first post in this series that gives an introduction to getting started with this promising tool. As a quick reference I'll post a paragraph from the last post introducing Nu: "Nu is an open source tool built by Dru Sellers (and several others) that aims at bringing Gems, one of Ruby's most revered features, to the .NET world. If you are not familiar with Gems I suggest you take a minute to read up on them. I would venture a bet that you are already familiar with at least one gem - Ruby on Rails. The following line of code is all that is required to install the Ruby on Rails gem (after installing the Ruby library of course)." This post is focused on sharing my experience in creating my first gem for the Spark View Engine. I would be doing you a great disservice if I did not start by saying how easy it is to create a gem. Actually easy is the wrong phrase - crazy easy is more telling. Since I would never ask you to take my word for it, it must mean it is time to show some code.

Mercurial: Create Remote Repositories Using PowerShell

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 02:24:05 GMT

One limitation when using http as a publishing mechanism is that you cannot create a repository remotely; no if, ands, or buts about it. Another twist was that our CM (Configuration Management) procedures dictate that our developers are not permitted to RDP into the Mercurial server. This left us trying to decide how to allow developers to create repositories remotely since our http communication channel does not allow remote repository creation. This post details an approach leveraging PowerShell as a solution to this problem.

How Fanboys See .NET ORMs

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:15:00 GMT

A play off of the recent "How Fanboys See Operating Systems" post.

jQuery 1.4 Released!

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:00:07 GMT

In celebration of jQuery's 4th birthday, the jQuery team is pleased to release the latest major release of the jQuery JavaScript library! A lot of coding, testing, and documenting has gone into this release, and we're really quite proud of it.

ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2 Released

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:45:00 GMT

Today we just released ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2 for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (and ASP.NET 3.5 SP1), which builds on top of the work we did in Preview 1 released two months ago. Some of the cool new features we've added to Preview 2 include...

Automating .NET and NHibernate Development With IronRuby + Rake

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:15:01 GMT

Using IronRuby to automate .NET development tasks.

Spearmen, Javelin Throwers, and the State Pattern, oh my!

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 23:32:15 GMT

Jamie Farser & Ayende Rahein recently had a conversation about using the State Pattern for units in a game Jamie is building. I've been following along trying to figure my way through the state pattern as well, and decided to take a stab at my own solution to Jamie's problem.

Asp.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit Released

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:30:06 GMT

Almost six months after the official release of Asp.Net MVC 1.0 and nearly a year after the last release of the starter kit, I've finally rewritten and released the Asp.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit.

Combining Assemblies Using ILMerge

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:15:02 GMT

When creating solutions that include multiple projects, Visual Studio creates an assembly for each project. This can lead to libraries that are complicated to use, needing many references. Using ILMerge, the assemblies can be combined into a single file.

Windows Azure Commercial Availability and Announcing Business Model

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:29:19 GMT

Today, during the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2009 we announced the business and partner model for the Windows Azure platform including service level agreements and support programs.

Creating an MVC Project in Visual Studio 2010

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:44:20 GMT

Earlier today Phil Haack announced that the Asp.Net MVC installer for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is now available on CodePlex along with the bonus of some basic snippets for use with MVC projects. This is exactly what I have been waiting for before installing Visual Studio 2010, so I decided to give it a shot and report back on my experience. I'm happy to say that the basic experience went flawlessly for me, though it appears that may not hold true for everyone.

Return of the PagedList<T>

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:21 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.

How to improve the performances of ASP.NET MVC web applications

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:46:04 GMT

Today I stumbled upon a nice presentation that Rudi Benkovic gave last week at the Slovenian DotNet User Group, about ASP.NET MVC Performances. It is an in depth analysis of a Digg-like site and how it went from serving (on a test machine) 6 req/sec to 390 req/sec. The analysis prove the usual rule of performance optimization: no matter what you do to optimize your code, the biggest performance hit is data retrieval, and the first thing you have to optimize is always this. But apart from this obvious outcome, I just want to take out from this presentation the 3 point that are really specific to ASP.NET MVC

Fluent ADO.NET (there's actually a good reason for it!)

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:46:02 GMT

More DAL silliness, but for a good reason. The author was restricted from using an ORM by his client so he came up with a cool way to make his life a little easier. Pretty cool. Scratch that itch!

Using complex types to make calling services less... complex

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:46:03 GMT

A detailed examination of how jQuery can call ASP.NET AJAX web services (or page methods) with complex types as parameters, to simplify the process of serializing and sending several fields of data at a time.

SELECT TOP N Rows Per Group/Category in SQL Server

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:01:03 GMT

I call this a query with the 3S - Short, Sweet and Simple - Check this cool example by SuprotimAgarwal to select top 'n' rows for each group or category..

ASP.NET - YSlow and ASP.NET: 100 points "A" grade is possible

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:46:02 GMT

Just in case if somebody doesn't know what YSlow is? YSlow is Firefox add-on integrated with Firebug. It analyzes web pages and tells you why they are slow. You can run it on you project and see your grade. You can do some easy improvements and maybe even get D grade. However to get higher then D grade becomes a real challenge. Below I will describe how I got A grade (100 points) on my web blog application.

xVal 0.8 improves client side validation in ASP.NET MVC

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:01:16 GMT

xVal is an open source validation framework bridge for ASP.NET MVC. Its new release, version 0.8, became available this morning and adds the following features: Support for NHibernate.Validator, Internationalization, Custom validation logic, Fluent syntax for defining ad-hoc validation rules, Comparison validators, and more.

Tips for Managing ASP.NET MVC Views

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:46:09 GMT

The author gives some tips on managing asp.net mvc views and organizing files withing an asp.net mvc project. Includes suggestions on keeping code out of views.

A New Look for Visual Studio 2010!

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 03:46:02 GMT

At the PDC and TechEd EMEA last year we described our new editor support built on the WPF technology in .NET Framework 4.0. Today I'm happy to reveal the new UI for Visual Studio, also built on WPF:

Azure - Performance, IoC, and Instances

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:01:04 GMT

My experience so far working with Azure. Some performance testing, IoC container incompatibilities, and frustration with instances.

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!

ASP.NET MVC Result Caching

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:01:03 GMT

Different approach on MVC Caching. Cache the ActionResult through an action filter, without affecting the Session or other non-deterministic data to be shown in the View.

Extending Ninject to inject dependencies into Action Filters

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 05:16:09 GMT

In this last post of the series Simone shows the changes he did to Ninject to make it transparent for the developer to inject dependencies into ASP.NET Action Filters. And he also release the small integration library as opensource

NHV.Loquacious : fluent-configuration for NHV

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 23:16:10 GMT

The new EMBEDDED configuration, based on fluent-interface implementation, for NHibernate.Validator.