Contents tagged with .NET
Agile Fragile
I’m going to indulge myself by having a nice old fashioned rant. The topic of choice is “Agile”. A few experiences and conversations of the recent past have compelled me to write something on this topic. So here goes nothing
The Other Side of NuGet
NuGet is a very nice addition to the .NET developers’ arsenal. It is a central place for every library and framework in .NET. It has pretty good tooling integrated into Visual Studio and the command line options are pretty sweet too. It can pull down specific libraries including their own dependencies saving the developer a lot of time and effort in figuring them out manually. For the continued growth of the open source .NET community, NuGet is pretty much something that should have happened years ago. Yet there are some things about NuGet you need to be careful about.
DDD North 2011
One week after DDD Belfast, I was up in Sunderland for the first ever DDD North. The session line-up looked fantastic and it geared up to be a fantastic day.
DDD Belfast 2011
After repeated attempts to resume blogging, I think I’m pretty much determined to end my hiatus. And I’ll start off with my experience at DDD Belfast.
ASP.NET MVC Gotcha – String as Model
A very common task in ASP.NET MVC is to return a ViewResult from a controller Action. This is usually achieved by a simple:
Ninja Coding: Composition over Inheritance–Even when Overriding
We’ve all heard it a million times – composition is favourable to inheritance. But inheritance can sometimes come with its own charms. One of its main attractions is to do some grunt work in a base class and have the ability to override that behaviour in a derived class. Framework developers favour an abstract base class as it leaves the potential to add features in the future without breaking all client code. The usual approach towards to polymorphism is achieved by declaring a method (or property) as virtual in the base class and overriding in the derived one(s). And this usually works out quite well (if you do find yourself using inheritance). This would typically look like this:
ViewBag can be good…honestly
A lot of people seem to have an allergic reaction towards anything not “strongly typed”. They abhor ViewBag and resent ViewData[“key”] for passing values from the controller to the view. They write viewmodels that aggregate a few other viewmodels or worse, use inheritance to generate complex hierarchies. And in order to try and keep all that clean, they use design patterns and what not to achieve “compile time checking”, “testability” and a few other mirages of “good code”. Maybe I like leaning over the edge a bit, but I really can’t understand why something that is to be a data carrier has to be part of something that’s as complex (if not more) than a trivial application’s domain. Here are some of the drawbacks of strongly typing all viewmodel data:
Introducing MSMSpec
Introducing SeleniuMspec
Happy new year to you all. And to celebrate, I’ve just published my first codeplex project. SeleniuMspec is a template that you can use to generate MSpec BDD tests from Selenium IDE. I’ve been using both Selenium and MSpec for a while now and thought this might save a few seconds when writing some integration tests.
ASP.NET MVC 3 CTP1 View Improvements
ASP.NET MVC 3 CTP1 has introduced many improvements, not least of which is in the View. This screencast explores the improvements in the View, specially looking at the awesome new ViewEngine – Razor. It covers Razor syntax, layouts, templates, issues with namespaces etc. It also looks at the new dynamic viewmodel and shows how it can be used to clean up view code. It's just over 45 minutes long and we do go into a little depth. Hope you enjoy it :)
Selecting ListView Items with CheckBoxes
Often we need to enable users to select multiple items from a ListView control and do a batch operation on them. While the ListView control does enable selection, it only supports selecting one row (item) at a time. This article shows a nice, easy and reusable way to enable multiple selection with checkboxes.
ASP.NET Routing with IIS 7 – Remember Your Modules
ASP.NET 4.0 introduces routing and it works very well. With IIS 7, there are some interesting configuration options that can help improve your site's performance. When done wrong, they can have unexpected side effects. And we're going to look at one of them today.
Anonymous Types are Internal, C# 4.0 Dynamic Beware!
C# 4.0 has introduced the dynamic keyword. You can declare a variable as dynamic and regardless of what can be inferred at compile time, you can access any properties and call any methods and your code will still compile. Resolving of those properties and methods will be done at runtime. If at runtime, they aren't found, you'd get a runtime exception. If they are found, your code will run fine.
ASP.NET MVC – Unit Testing JsonResult Returning Anonymous Types
Unit testing of ASP.NET MVC JsonResults can be a source of confusion. The problem arises from the fact that an Action Method itself doesn't produce any html / json / string output – it simply returns an Action Result. ASP.NET MVC then calls the ExecuteResult() method on that Action Result. The ExecuteResult() method is what causes output to be written to the Response stream. Let's take the following controller and action method for example:
Fetching a Property Value via Reflection
Reflection is a method by which we can use metadata at runtime to dynamically create an instance of a type, bind the type to an existing object, or get the type from an existing object and invoke its methods or access its fields and properties. It has many uses, ranging from allowing usage of attributes to creating instances of dynamically generated classes and using them. You can even use reflection to read and modify private member variables of an object. Today, we're going to look at a very simple example which will allow us to read the value of a public property given an instance.
Encrypted Hidden Redux : Let's Get Salty
This article builds on the ideas presented in my earlier article http://www.heartysoft.com/post/2010/02/25/Encrypted-Hidden-Inputs-in-ASPNET-MVC.aspx
MVC 2 RC 2 Templated Helper Bug and a Potential Solution
ASP.NET MVC 2 introduces templated helpers. They're a convenient and type safe way to render model data. There is a potential problem in the way in which the system processes the lambda expression passed in to the helper. The problem causes overridden properties to be ignored and uses the base class' declaration of the property instead. This can have adverse reactions where the client side validation feature of ASP.NET MVC 2 is used.
Encrypted Hidden Inputs in ASP.NET MVC
There are many situations where we need to persist some data during the user's session. There are a few options in achieving this:
Exposing a WCF Service for Ajax and Silverlight
One of the most attractive features of WCF is that you get to write a service once and expose it to be used by multiple clients using different technologies and protocols. How a WCF service is exposed can be changed simply by changing the configuration file, without needing to recompile the code. In this article, we're going to create a WCF service and expose it to Ajax. We'll test the Ajax service by calling it from ASP.NET Ajax 4.0 and jQuery. We'll then expose the service to Silverlight through binary encoding, which will increase data transfer efficiency. Finally, we'll create a small Silverlight 3.0 application that will call the service.
Ajax, Asp.net Ajax, jQuery – Misconceptions and Facts
There seems to be some confusion among a lot of developers about Asp.net Ajax. This article will hopefully clear some doubts regarding what it is, what it isn’t and where jQuery comes in.