DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by simonech

Introducing Wijmo, a feature-packed jQueryUI based widget library

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 17:23:50 GMT

A introduction to Wijmo, a jQuery UI based component library, and the rational behind the decision of adopting it vs other component libraries

Evolution of the Async Controller in ASP.NET MVC

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:08:26 GMT

Asynchronous operations in ASP.NET MVC have always been left a bit behind. They appeared in ASP.NET MVC 2, remained untouched in v3, but now in MVC 4 (especially in combination with C# 5 and async/await) they reached the same easiness of use of the standard synchronous controller. Check out that absolutely awesome stuff you can do with them now!

How To Build a Modern Website in 2011

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:10:43 GMT

Over the past 12 months I've been on a self-imposed quest for knowledge. We're at a changing - almost revolutionary - point with the web as I (start) writing this on November 1st, 2011. Here's why

Windows Phone 7.5 - Using advanced tiles API

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:00:26 GMT

There is not any doubt, the first thing you meet when you use Windows Phone are the tiles. These are the large squares on the home screen that identifies some applications and they are also a distinguishable character that make your Windows Phone unique. As you know for sure, the tiles can be attached or detached from the home screen and some particular software can take advantage of double size tiles. While this is not a feature available to developers, in OS7.5, the tiles gained new features and a new set of APIs that you can use to enrich your applications. As an example you are now able to update your tiles from inside the application and you can use double faced tiles to improve information to the user. In this article I would like to explore these new features and show how to take advantage of them, while porting your software to the new operating system.

An Introduction to ASP.NET MVC Extensibility

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:41:12 GMT

ASP.NET MVC has been designed with extensibility as its design principle. In fact, the best way to develop applications with ASP.NET MVC is to extend the system, Simone Chiaretta starts a series that explains how to implement extensions to ASP.NET MVC, covering the entire pipeline. But first, an overview...

Customise Subtext Core Pages - Part 1

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 16:54:11 GMT

I wanted to take time out from subtext themes for a moment and go over a topic that I think will be of some use to such webmasters that use subtext on a multi-blog platform. Customising Subtext core pages.

OWASP Top 10 for .NET devs part 8: Failure to Restrict URL Access

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:13:26 GMT

What makes this particular risk so dangerous is that not only can it be used to very, very easily exploit an application, it can be done so by someone with no application security competency - it's simply about accessing a URL they shouldn't be. On the positive side, this is also a fundamentally easy exploit to defend against. ASP.NET provides both simple and efficient mechanisms to authenticate users and authorise access to content. In fact the framework wraps this up very neatly within the provider model which makes securing applications an absolute breeze.

OWASP Top 10 for .NET developers part 7: Insecure Cryptographic Storag

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 07:23:21 GMT

In the 7th part of the series on addressing the OWASP Top 10 within ASP.NET, we look at how cryptographic storage can be implemented securely. The post looks at how poorly implemented hashing can be easily broken with rainbow tables then moves onto secure hash algorithms, proper use of salts and the implementation of symmetric encryption.

Why is a Y in the Windows Phone Mango Camera API

Wed, 25 May 2011 19:53:36 GMT

The new Windows Phone Mango tools will contain the Webcam CaptureSource and VideoSink API from Silverlight 4. Additionally it also introduce the new FileSink class which can be used to record the video stream as MP4 to the Isolated Storage. Most important a new PhotoCamera class with a lot of functionality is present in Mango. This blog post tries to fill the gaps and provides some information especially about the PhotoCamera's YCrCb capture methods.

Augmented Mango - SLARToolkit for Windows Phone

Wed, 25 May 2011 19:54:13 GMT

This post announces the new Windows Phone version of SLARToolkit and also provides a sample.

The importance of performance testing in a Windows Phone 7 application

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 11:14:33 GMT

Simone Chiaretta highlights the importance of performance testing your applications on the Windows Phone 7 platform (where devices are not as powerful as desktops and server), illustrating with an example of an issue which caused him performance problems.

Continuous code quality measurement with NDepend and TeamCity

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 11:40:21 GMT

One thing I've found about code reviews in the past - either manual or auto-generated - is that if you do them at the end of a project, it's too late! You always end up between a rock and a hard place where on the one hand, you feel you've got a steaming heap of garbage, but on the other hand you've got deadlines and anxious customers. What you really want to do is to bring your code quality metrics bang into the development process so they're visible to everyone every single day. You kick them off on day one when there's an empty project and you don't stop until the whole thing is delivered. This is where the build server comes into play.

Lucene.Net needs your help (or it will die)

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 21:00:52 GMT

The Apache Foundation wants to kill Lucene.net. If you use it please chime in and help. This post explains a bit more in detail why this is happening

Hand picked sessions from PDC2010

Sat, 30 Oct 2010 12:45:52 GMT

If you are not living under a rock, probably you know that yesterday (October 28th) the PDC2010 started. If you missed the keynote of PCD 2010 here is a brief description of what I found interesting, the links to sessions I consider to be interesting (at least for me) and some considerations about SL vs HTML5.

Internet Explorer 9 Beta Features and Benchmarks

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 20:10:49 GMT

In case you are living under a rock, IE9 Beta was released today. This browser is a major update to the previous version IE8. It is also supposed to give Firefox/Chrome a run for its money. How did it turn out? Read below to find out. So what are the best features of IE9? Lets give it a quick run-through then we are going to look at a few key features and a benchmark (note the benchmark is against a beta - so things may change). Hardware accelerated HTML5 Support : This is absolutely the biggest reason to upgrade to IE9. This includes the new H264 Video Support, SVG and CSS3. Brand new JavaScript Engine: Called Chakra. This will run on a separate core and allow you to render JavaScript faster. DirectX Video Acceleration - This will use less of the CPU to render video. So far it has smoked Google Chrome while playing 2 720p videos at once. Developers Tools added. Just hit F12 to access the tools.

Mindscape releases NHibernate Designer for VS2010

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:00:52 GMT

Mindscape, developers of the LightSpeed ORM have released a visual designer for NHibernate users. Leveraging their years of developing a Visual Studio integrated model designer for LightSpeed, the NHibernate Designer means developers can quickly and easily start working with their NHibernate solutions. Supports full database synchronization, model first and data base first development models.

HTML5 Support In Visual Studio 2010

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:45:52 GMT

I was trying to play around with HTML5 assuming that VS 2010 had shipped with HTML5 support but to my dismay it was not the case. Bummer! So I did a bit of homework and came up with an easy workaround.

The NEW DotNetKicks front page is in beta

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 21:45:52 GMT

We are working on totally reworking how the front page of DotNetKicks works and the new version is now in public beta. Check it out, use it, and give us your feedback!

Ruby and .Net Developers Solve Two Different Kinds of Problems

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:00:52 GMT

Explains that a lot of Ruby's criticism of .Net's use of an IDE stems from the differences in the kinds of projects that are solved with each platform.

What's new in ASP.NET 4.0: Core Features

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:45:52 GMT

A nice overview with examples of the new features in ASP.NET 4.0

Mono Touch Books for .NET Developers and iPhone Development is out

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 13:41:16 GMT

Mono Touch Books for .NET Developers and iPhone Development is out -

ScottGu: Introducing "Razor" - a new view engine for ASP.NET

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 16:30:51 GMT

"ASP.NET MVC has always supported the concept of "view engines" - which are the pluggable modules that implement different template syntax options. The "default" view engine for ASP.NET MVC today uses the same .aspx/.ascx/.master file templates as ASP.NET Web Forms. Other popular ASP.NET MVC view engines used today include Spark and NHaml. The new view-engine option we've been working on is optimized around HTML generation using a code-focused templating approach. The codename for this new view engine is "Razor", and we'll be shipping the first public beta of it shortly."

Just released: Subtext 2.5.1 release notes

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 09:25:55 GMT

After a long year, 3 weeks ago we released Subtext version 2.5. After the release we found some quite high-priority bug and so now today Subtext 2.5.1 has been released, which fixes the following bugs:

What's new in Subtext 2.5: full-text search, related posts and more

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 12:45:52 GMT

In Subtext 2.5 we changed the internal search provider from the "like %term%" SQL based one to a more mature and powerful one powered by Lucene.net. I wrote about how Lucene.net is implemented inside Subtext, but it didn't show the benefits for the users. In this post I'm explaining the visible features of the full-text search.

Subtext 2.5 released

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 02:15:52 GMT

Today I'm excited to announce the release of Subtext 2.5. Most of the focus on this release has been under the hood, but there are some great new features you'll enjoy outside of the hood.