DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by beckelmw

OpenID for ASP.NET MVC, A Quick Setup

Sun, 26 Sep 2010 18:00:52 GMT

If you need to get your ASP.NET MVC website setup with some basic OpenID Authentication, I can help get you started. All you need is a DLL, a view, and two controller actions.

How A .NET Developer Learned Ruby And Rake, To Build Apps In Windows

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 00:45:52 GMT

Leverage powerful open source tools to improve your build and development processes.

AutoPoco v0.2 Released

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 12:30:00 GMT

New Features in AutoPoco :-)

Git's guts: Branches, HEAD, and fast-forwards

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 16:58:11 GMT

Lets get some learning done. There are a few questions that keep cropping up when I introduce people to Git, so I thought I'd post some answers as a mini-series of blog posts. I'll cover some fundamentals, while trying not to retread too much ground that the fantastic Git community book already covers so well. Instead I'm going to talk about things that should help you understand what you and Git are doing day-to-day.

It's Okay To Write Unit Tests

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:45:00 GMT

A few simple reasons why you should be writing unit tests.

Selective Unit Testing - Costs and Benefits

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Test Driven Development is widely regarded as a hallmark technique of professional software development, but should you really do it all the time? Steve Sanderson argues that unit tests yield significant practical business value only for certain kinds of code. This blog post suggests what might be the underlying forces that determine whether unit tests will justify the long-term expense of creating and maintaining them. These ideas are then applied to structuring an ASP.NET MVC application.

Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control with ASP.MET MVC

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 19:57:12 GMT

As you delve more into ASP.NET MVC you start to come across a whole new way of doing things that Web Forms development didn't really expose you to. Inversion of Control (IoC) and Dependency Injection (DI) are two phrases that crop up a lot in the MVC space. So what are they all about? And should you care?

Reimagining www.asp.net - Part One: The Home Page Experience

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:30:00 GMT

How would you redesign www.asp.net if you could start from scratch?

xVal v1.0 is now released

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:00:00 GMT

In case you're not aware, xVal is a validation helper for ASP.NET MVC that lets you use your own choice of server-side validation framework (e.g., Microsoft's DataAnnotations attributes, or Castle Validator, or NHibernate Validaion) and dynamically generates client-side validation code from your rules. Version 1.0 adds new features including dynamic client-side validation summaries and remote (ajax) validation rules.

Microsoft Chart Controls to PDF with iTextSharp and ASP.NET MVC

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:22:18 GMT

If you are developing a business application using ASP.NET MVC, and need to produce some kind of dashboard-style reporting, the Chart Controls from Microsoft are a good place to start. Having a summary in some form of document, say a PDF is also a common requirement. This article introduces you to satisfying both needs.

Is Silverlight the new WebForms?

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:30:01 GMT

Is Silverlight becoming the same crutch that WebForms was nearly a decade ago?

ASP.NET MVC MvcSiteMapProvider 1.0 released

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:15:00 GMT

Back in March, I blogged about an experimental MvcSiteMap provider I was building. Today, I am proud to announce that it is stable enough to call it version 1.0! Download MvcSiteMapProvider 1.0 over at CodePlex. Ever since the source code release I did back in March, a lot of new features have been added, such as HtmlHelper extension methods, attributes, dynamic parameters, . I'll leave most of them up to you to discover, but there are some I want to quickly highlight.

My Barriers to Learning TDD

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 11:45:42 GMT

As a follow up to my previous post declaring that I finally "get" TDD to some extent, I figured I'd reflect on the barriers that I have had up to this point which made it difficult for me to learn how to unit test in some effective manner as well as truly understanding the benefits of TDD practices. Now, I am by no means claiming to be an expert in unit testing, mocking, or TDD. I didn't open the refrigerator, drink some of the TDD-flavored Kool-Aid, and threw on a subsequent Mortarboard to illustrate that I've somehow graduated into this new, higher level of software development. I'm still learning from others as well as my own errors experiences just like everyone else. The purpose of this is to reveal to others some of the issues that I had and hopefully provide some insight on how to overcome such.

Finally Understanding the Merits of TDD

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:00:07 GMT

I'm not a TDD person...or at least I wasn't until last week. Up until then, I had read the blogs and looked at the examples to try to understand TDD and unit testing (with mocking) in general. Almost all of the examples I was shown demonstrated very basic scenarios that, in most cases, were too trivial to show value. I would ask people who would speak about unit testing in general how you'd do a specific scenario and would get mix responses ranging from "just try it" to "you should be using this tool and it'll just write the tests for you".

How to: "Kick It" or "Shout It" from Google Reader

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 02:00:00 GMT

Evernote published a Google Reader "Send To" "how to" today, and I showed DZone readers how to push items to DZone's queue yesterday. Here's how you can send stories to DotNetKicks or DotNetShoutout.

Integration Testing Your ASP.NET MVC Application

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:15:00 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.

IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit (ScottGu)

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 08:45:05 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."

25+ Best ASP.NET MVC Tutorials and Articles

Thu, 21 May 2009 13:32:36 GMT

In this article we collected best tutorials and articles about ASP.NET MVC.

YUI Compressor for Visual Studio

Wed, 13 May 2009 02:01:14 GMT

Add a custom tool in visual studio for YUI Compressor.

Returning PDFs from an ASP.NET MVC action

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 19:36:57 GMT

This feature is based on a post from Bill Barry, "Using Spark to render PDFs," to the Spark discussion group. It's based on iTextSharp, a port of the iText Java PDF library. It seemed like such a useful twist on the view engine, and so applicable to web sites, that I integrated what Bill had done into the Spark project and added a PdfViewResult action result for the ASP.NET MVC library.

How I handle JSON dates returned by ASP.NET AJAX

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:01:04 GMT

The problem of how to handle dates in JSON is one of the more troublesome issues that may arise when directly calling ASP.NET AJAX web services and page methods.. Since the question of how I handle this problem is something asked often in emails and in comments on other posts here, I want to address the topic with its own post.

ASP.NET MVC brings FUN back inside web development, on .NET

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:01:03 GMT

Simone writes about his impressions on ASP.NET MVC and why it has reactivated the motivation of developers on the .NET community for web development.

An Aha Moment on MVC Validation Extensibility in DefaultModelBinder

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:16:02 GMT

It is obvious that I don't like using IDataErrorInfo for use with a validation framework, like the Validation Application Block, so what is this validation extensibility API that scott mysteriously speaks of?

Should We Solve Institutional Problems In Our Code?

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 02:46:02 GMT

Is it okay for us to solve deficiencies in our development teams with code?

ASP.NET MVC Free eBooks

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:16:11 GMT

Here's a list of all sample chapters of ASP.NET MVC books available to the community.