DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by melzie215

Timing The Execution Time Of Your MVC Actions - Nick Berardi's Coder J

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 01:30:52 GMT

Awesome approach for timing MVC Actions

Easy Mail Delivery with SMTP Smart Host

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 00:00:52 GMT

I knew the downfalls of using the default localhost and the potential mail delivery problems if I didn't properly set the DomainKey, DKIM, SPF, SenderID, Reverse PTR, and blah blah blah. But it wasn't really worth the hassle for me to properly set all this, because I can sent the number of emails sent from my server on one hand each day. And a 4 out of 5 times they were administrative emails sent to my Gmail account. But given all that it is still no excuse for poor email hygiene.

Who Loves Their Developers More

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 00:06:53 GMT

Last night as I was talking with Danny Diaz about the importants of good programming language documentation. It occurred to me that the level of effort a company puts into its documentation is a direct reflection on how it sees the developer in relation to its products. If there is a lot of thought, love, and detail put into the documentation the company most likely cares very much about the developers experience from cradle to grave. If the documentation is haphazardly put together and no common UIX efforts were made then the company most likely cares very little about new developers, and only begrudgingly puts documentation online for its seasoned developers because it is the industry norm and is expected of them.

Turning JSON into a ExpandoObject

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:09:38 GMT

Recently I had the need for a web service of mine to take a JSON blob as an input. This isn't really exciting or all that interesting a problem, but I really didn't enjoy the code smell that came from drilling in to the resulting Dictionary object that comes from desterilizing the JSON object into something that .NET understands.

Run Cassandra As A Windows Service

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 20:02:59 GMT

One of the main issues that comes up over and over again for Cassandra is: How do I run Cassandra as a Windows Service? In this post I am going to answer that question and in the process demonstrate how to do it in less than 10 minutes.

Your First Fluent Cassandra Application (part 2)

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 13:22:46 GMT

Last time I demonstrated how to create your first Fluent Cassandra app. After we finished learning about how to create records and save them to the database, I issued a challenge to implement comments for our command line blog app we created.

Your First Fluent Cassandra Application

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 20:15:52 GMT

As your are probably aware by now if you follow my Twitter status or have looked in to some of my recent posts. I am developing a library called FluentCassandra which is a .NET library for using the Cassandra database in a .NETty way. The project has progressed quite nicely in the last couple of months and I am finally ready to start talking about it and giving examples on how it can be used in your applications. So lets gets started.

Creating a Time UUID (GUID) in .NET

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 20:04:13 GMT

Since we're going to want to display lists of entries in chronological order we'll make sure each Columns name is a time UUID and set the ColumnFamilys CompareWith to TimeUUIDType. This will sort the Columns by time satisfying our "chronological order" requirement. So doing stuff like "get the latest 10 entries tagged 'foo'" is going to be a super efficient operation.

Cassandra Jump Start For The Windows Developer

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:00:00 GMT

Cassandra is an open source distributed database management system. It is an Apache Software Foundation top-level project, as of February 17, 2010, designed to handle very large amounts of data spread out across many commodity servers while providing a highly available service with no single point of failure. It is a NoSQL solution that was initially developed by Facebook and powers their Inbox Search feature. Jeff Hammerbacher, who led the Facebook Data team at the time, has described Cassandra as a BigTable data model running on an Amazon Dynamo-like infrastructure.

The difference between Routing and Rewriting

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 15:52:24 GMT

The benefits of a URL Rewriter have been explained many times, by many people, so I am not going to add just another rant to the web about keeping your URL's clean for the search engines. I will just leave you with Jeff's explanation of why you shouldn't ignore the URL. Having multiple URLs reference the same content is undesirable not only from a sanity check DRY perspective, but also because it lowers your PageRank. PageRank is calculated per-URL. If 50% of your incoming backlinks use one URL, and 50% use a different URL, you aren't getting the full PageRank benefit of those backlinks. The link juice is watered down and divvied up between the two different URLs instead of being concentrated into one of them. While Jeff only focuses on the reasons related to SEO, there are many other reasons to make your URL's "look-and-feel" a hire priority. One that is often touted as a wonderful reason to use a URL Rewriter is to produce pretty looking URL's, and even though this one of many reasons to use a rewriter, it is really a small part of why you want to have a URL Rewriter in your arsenal as a web developer. Other reasons include forcing your domain to a constant www vs non-www address, having helper URL's such as http://www.microsoft.com/sql that redirect to their actual location, and many others.

Editable MVC Routes (Apache Style)

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:30:05 GMT

After remembering a post by Phil Haack about Editable MVC Routes. By merging together Routing and Rewriting in the same process, and making the routes as editable as the rewriter rules I might be able make the differences or at least the benefits of having both a little more clear, because developers could play with both in real time and start to connect in their mind when one is more useful than the other. So I started with the latest release of my URL Rewriter and created a contrib project on GitHub that extended the Apache support in the rewriter to also include System.Web.Routing. The syntax looks similar to the Apache mod_rewrite but specific for routes.

.NET 4.0 and System.Threading.Tasks

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:45:00 GMT

Quick look at threading in .NET 4.0 and the new System.Threading.Tasks.

Performance Optimizations Made By JavaScript Minimizers

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:06:37 GMT

In the first post about JavaScript compression and the different levels supported by the three major competitors in the JavaScript minimization, obfuscation, and optimization tools space. I the article I discussed which tool provided the best compression in regards to the resulting byte count. And found that Google took the over all crown with Microsoft following very closely behind. This post will look at the performance optimizations made to the code, after it is run through the JavaScript Minimizers

Large or asynchronous file uploads in ASP.NET MVC

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 19:30:01 GMT

The challenge of uploading large files in ASP.NET through HTTP is not a new challenge. In addition to handling large files, users often request an experience that shows the progress of an upload as it occurs. When you have either or both of these requirements, or if you simply need direct control of a stream of file data uploaded from a browser, you invariably hit the wall. I set about solving the problem in an ASP.NET MVC-specific way.

Yahoo YUI Compressor vs. MS AJAX Minifier vs. Google Closure Compiler

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:00:00 GMT

A while back, YUI Compressor was king of the hill, and for the most part the only game in town that was really designed for production use. Since then a number of new competitors have been released by Google and Microsoft, and Nick Berardi checks out how they stacked up against the YUI Compressor.

Show CodeRush Xpress 9.2 Menu in Visual Studio

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 17:07:29 GMT

As promised to the people of my last post for CodeRush Xpress 9.1, here is the updated scripts for CodeRush Xpress 9.2, which was released last week.

Static Constructors in .NET 3.5, still a bad thing?

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 19:38:40 GMT

Recently at the Philly.NET User Group, Kathleen Dollard gave a great presentation on the use of generics and rethinking object orientation. Both topics were very engaging. But the part of the night that I found most intriguing was a conversation, that I had in a Ruby Tuesdays after the presentation, about the useage of static constructors and if they are still a bad thing to use in your code. Many years ago, I had read the articles by K. Scott Allen and Brad Abrams, explaining why the original FxCop rule, "Do not declare explicit static constructors", existed and the IL command beforefieldinit, that caused the FxCop rule to trigger and cause performance issues. Jon Skeet explained it best in a recent Stack Overflow post.

CodeRush Xpress 9.2

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 05:45:03 GMT

The free CodeRush Xpress from DevExpress provides C# and VB developers with powerful extensions to Visual Studio. These features include editing and refactoring tools that make it easier for you to quickly produce well designed code. Version 9.2 of CodeRush Xpress, which shipped on August 25, 2009, has greatly improved memory and performance characteristics.

Refactoring Techniques: Learning the Wrap Method

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:15:02 GMT

Taking a look at the Wrap Method refactoring technique outlined in detail in Working Effectively with Legacy Code. We will walk though this technique and take a look at how it can help you to create better and more maintainable code.

Creating Your First MVC ViewEngine

Mon, 11 May 2009 23:46:02 GMT

A question that I have been hearing a lot lately is: How do I change the view location in MVC? But what they really mean to say is: How do I create a new ViewEngine that uses the view locations of my choosing? It is actually very simple to do, and once you see it, I think you will agree with my assessment. The first thing we are going to do to create our custom ViewEngine, is define the paths that we want to use for our master pages, view pages, and shared pages. I have taken the liberty to define the following paths, you can customize them however you wish:

The State of ALT.NET

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:16:02 GMT

Over the past 6 months I have been trying to really quantify what it means to be using ALT.NET practices. And I can honestly say that I still honestly don't know what it means to be an ALT.NETer. But I have come to a number of conclusions about the state of the ALT.NET community, that I wanted to share. (1) The ALT.NET Community is fractured among itself. (2) Take the religious zealotry out of ALT.NET (3) Craftsmanship with out Engineering is no way to program software.

Introducing the ASP.NET MVC (Part 6) - The View

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:14:48 GMT

This is a continuation of my Introduction to ASP.NET MVC series. As I outlined before this is in an effort to write the book and keep blogging, I decided to write/blog the last chapter, Chapter 2. I am doing this so I can receive feedback on this chapter as early as possible. Because this chapter, in my opinion, is probably the most critical of the book, it defines the context around ASP.NET MVC and how it differs from ASP.NET Web Forms, as well as giving a historical perspective of the MVC pattern.

Intro to ASP.NET MVC (Part 2) - ASP.NET MVC vs. ASP.NET Web Forms

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 07:43:59 GMT

Introducing the ASP.NET MVC (Part 1) - The Model-View-Controller Patte

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 05:16:02 GMT

About a month and a half ago I announced that I am writing a book, I was really overwhelmed by the amount of support that I received from this announcement. Both myself and Al are really looking forward to the day when this book ships, and we start receiving real feedback on all our hard work. However, both of us would like to start receiving feedback as soon as possible, so. In an effort to write the book and keep blogging, I decided to open source the last chapter, Chapter 2, that I have to write. I am doing this so I can receive feedback on this chapter as early as possible. Because this chapter, in my opinion, is probably the most critical of the book, it defines the context around ASP.NET MVC and how it differs from ASP.NET Web Forms, as well as giving a historical perspective of the MVC pattern.

ASP.NET Confirmation Button using JQuery

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:46:04 GMT

Creating a ASP.NET Confirmation Button control that uses JQuery and its plugin SimpleModal to implement modal confirmation popups.