MVC3 app_code directory

I just found out from K. Scott Allen’s MVC3 training video on Pluralsight that the app_code directory in MVC3 is alive and well. Basically the Razor helpers here are pre-compiled and can be accessed globally in the application.

Apparently the usage in a Razor page is as follows:

    @Common.Script(“myscript.js”, Url)

Note to self: compare and contrast with shared “editor” partial views.

Note: I composed this post with Windows Live Writer 2011 but it doesn’t seem to play well with Blogger’s own editor. ¡Qué pena!

MVC3 ModelState and overwriting model properties

I will expand this later, I swear.

Caution: when you are using strongly typed models in MVC3 and you modify a property of the model in an Action, that property will get discarded when you create the view unless you clear the ModelState first. When building the view, the model fields are overwritten with values from ModelState, so clearing the ModelState prevents this.

UPDATE 11/10/2011:
This only applies to values passed in via a POST (or a GET?) that you're attempting to override by changing the corresponding fields in the view model.

How To: Reset Identity column in SQL Server

Who knew? How To: Reset Identity column in SQL Server

In a nutshell:

DBCC CHECKIDENT('Company', RESEED, 1)

RegExes for replacing MVC3 hard-coded hrefs with @Url.Content hrefs

I'm posting this here mainly as a memory aid for myself.

My app is sprinkled with lots of links like this:

    <script src="../../Scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.11.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

I'd like them to look like this, since NuGet seems to be cognizant of such references and apparently changes them on upgrades:

    <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.11.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script>

So the following search and replace with RegExes will work:

Find what:	"\.\./\.\.{/[^"]*}"
Replace with:	"@Url.Content("~\1")"

Include the quotes, and be sure to select "Use regular expressions."

Note that the consistent relative path "../../" must be changed as per your circumstances.

UPDATE on 11/2/11:

This "Replace With" parameter might be better:

"@Href("~\1")"

UPDATE on 11/22/11:
Now, according to this article, I see that Url.Content is supposed to be better anyway.

How to display anything in Sharepoint 2010 pop up / modal window | Sharepoint Consultant, Automation & Stuff

How to display anything in Sharepoint 2010 pop up / modal window | Sharepoint Consultant, Automation & Stuff

WCF Notes

To discover WCF services, make sure that https is turned off. This is done in two places, apparently:

• In the binding, on the Security tab, Mode property, make sure the property is not set to “Transport”.
• In the service behaviors, serviceMetadata, make sure httpsGetEnabled is set to false and that httpsGetEnabled is set to true.

When you’re done, turn those things back on again.

Common Design Patterns Resources : Steve Smith's Blog

Steve Smith gave a great talk last night at Bennett Adelson's .NET SIG, with many good links. Here's the link to his blog post on it: Common Design Patterns Resources : Steve Smith's Blog

Irony - .NET Language Implementation Kit.

Wow. Very interesting stuff here. There are links here on how to implement a DSL. Irony - .NET Language Implementation Kit.

Here is one of the links: Writing your first Domain-Specific Language

Cleaning up POSTs in ASP.NET MVC | Jimmy Bogard's Blog

Cleaning up POSTs in ASP.NET MVC | Jimmy Bogard's Blog:

"What we see over and over and over again is a similar pattern of:

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Edit(SomeEditModel form)
{
    if (IsNotValid)
    {
        return ShowAView(form);
    }

    DoActualWork();

    return RedirectToSuccessPage();
}

Where all the things in red are things that change from POST action to POST action."

How to replace all automatic properties of string type with a string type which is never null

I have to do this in a piece of code, so I'm recording this here for my future reference.

In Visual Studio's Find and Replace dialog, type the following in the "Find what:" field:
public string \{:i\} \{ get; set; \}

Type this into the "Replace with" field:
private string _\1;\npublic string \1 \{\nget \{ return _\1 ?? ""; \}\nset \{ _\1 = value; \}\n\}

This pattern of performing a test in the getter versus the setter guarantees that it will never be null, and is the pattern used in the TextBox web control's Text property.

Afterwards you'll want to reformat the code, and possibly rename the backing fields, e.g. _FirstName, to be more camel-cased instead of being Pascal-cased(-like), e.g. _firstName instead of _FirstName.

3 Free E-Books and a Tutorial on Erlang

From ReadWriteWeb: 3 Free E-Books and a Tutorial on Erlang

Date & Time Formats on the Web

Everything you've always wanted to know about date/time formats but were afraid to ask.

Date & Time Formats on the Web: "There are several different formats used in different places in the technologies of the World Wide Web to represent dates, times and date/time combinations (hereafter collectively referred to as “datetimes” unless a distinction has to be made). This document presents a survey of the most significant, details which formats are mandated by the key technologies of the web, and offers advice for deciding what formats you should use in your own web applications."

Josh Reed Schramm - Software Development Thoughts And Opinions - Blog - Unit Testing Role Based Security w/ ASP.Net MVC

When attributes are an integral part of the work flow, testing is a bitch. Luckily I found this code.

Josh Reed Schramm - Software Development Thoughts And Opinions - Blog - Unit Testing Role Based Security w/ ASP.Net MVC: "I took Paul's code and turned it into a series of three controller extension methods which verify if the entire controller requires authorization, a particular method requires authorization or if a particular method requires a given role (i have not yet written the obvious 4th case - an entire controller requires a given role but it should be trivial.)"

Compiling MVC Views In A Build Environment

Compiling MVC Views In A Build Environment: "It turns out we had a bug in our project templates in earlier versions of ASP.NET MVC that we fixed in ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update.
But if you created your project using an older version of ASP.NET MVC including ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM (the one before the Tools Update), your csproj/vbproj file will still have this bug."

Knock Me Out

Knock Me Out: "Ideas, thoughts, and discussion about Knockout (KnockoutJS.com) and related technologies (jQuery and jQuery Templates)"

NIST - Structured Testing: A Testing Methodology Using the Cyclomatic Complexity Metric - McCabe Software

NIST - Structured Testing: A Testing Methodology Using the Cyclomatic Complexity Metric - McCabe Software

Why I Still L.O.V.E. ASP.NET WebForms - John Katsiotis

This guy uses the Model-View-Presenter (MVP) pattern with ASP.NET WebForms. A Microsoft MSDN link is here; a Martin Fowler article here.

Why I Still L.O.V.E. ASP.NET WebForms - John Katsiotis: "We will use the MVP pattern and the open-source project WebFormsMVP to accomplish that! Can’t wait? Download the sample!"

Don't mock HttpContext

Don't mock HttpContext: "It's so easy to take a direct dependency on HttpContext and not even realize it. If you're in the code behind in Web Forms or in a controller action in MVC, it's just right there, tempting you to use it to access session variables, application security, etc.

But don't."

dapper-dot-net - Simple SQL object mapper for SQL Server - Google Project Hosting

Wow. Impressive! Great for quick and dirty stuff, no? It uses dynamic types extensively.

dapper-dot-net - Simple SQL object mapper for SQL Server - Google Project Hosting: "Dapper - a simple object mapper for .Net
Dapper is a single file you can drop in to your project that will extend your IDbConnection interface."

Setting the Text of a ListControl in ASP.NET

If you try the following, it should set the visible text of the dropdown control in question, right?

    listControl.Text = "4 Year College";

Well, unfortunately, no! The "Text" property is named that way for consistency across all ASP.NET controls and refers to the form value that is passed to the server when the page is submitted. So unfortunately for me, the "Text" property silently rejected my attempt to set it and the page did not work.

You may be asking yourself why I am trying to set the visible text and not the value of the control. The reason is that the application I'm working on receives the displayed text from a web service and not the value that is passed in the form variables. Why not create a dictionary, look up the the text string in the dictionary, and pass that to the control?

The answer? I already have a dictionary. It's called the SELECT control itself. The generated HTML for my control is, say, the following:


This control is essentially a dictionary of key-value pairs: the key is the value attribute of the option tag, and the value is the visible text that is displayed for the given item in the dropdown list. So in the spirit of Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY), I wrote a extension function to allow me to set not just the value but also the text. I give you ListControlExtensions.cs:


Here's a typical usage. In this particular scenario, my data should be scrubbed, but if not I log a warning:

Five advanced Git merge techniques : Inside P4

Includes the handy-dandy command: git config --global merge.conflictstyle diff3

Five advanced Git merge techniques : Inside P4: "Five advanced Git merge techniques
by Edward Z. Yang

Have you ever performed a merge in Git and not have it quite turn out the way you wanted it to? For example, you accidentally converted all of your UNIX line endings to DOS line endings, and now the entire file reports a conflict? Maybe you see a conflict that you don't really care about resolving, and want to resolve as theirs? Or perhaps the conflicted file is empty and you can't figure out just what happened there?"

WCF How To’s Index - Alik Levin's - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

WCF How To’s Index - Alik Levin's - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

ASP.NET MVC 3 Roundup of Tutorials, Videos, Labs, and other Assorted Training Materials - Jon Galloway

Terrific resource!

ASP.NET MVC 3 Roundup of Tutorials, Videos, Labs, and other Assorted Training Materials - Jon Galloway

Caffeine-Powered Life - Nested Collection Models in ASP.NET MVC 3

Wow! Caffeine-Powered Life - Nested Collection Models in ASP.NET MVC 3: "We want to create form where I can save information about a person. That person has zero or more phone numbers and zero or more email addresses. The customer would like to edit everything about a person all at once, on a single form. This is a dynamic nested model problem."

IIS Express FAQ : IIS Express : Microsoft Web Platform : The Official Microsoft IIS Site

After I relocated an IIS express application, it stopped working. Even though I re-registered it with Visual Studio, it appeared "stuck" in its old location. The problem is that Visual Studio doesn't tell you that it hasn't really done anything at all when it claims that it's successfully registered your app after you've moved it. After reading this FAQ I was able to delete the broken site registration and then re-add it in Visual Studio. To fix my problem, I ran "%userprofile%\documents\IISexpress\config" from the Windows start menu, did a ctrl-F to find the application name, and simply deleted the configuration node.

IIS Express FAQ : IIS Express : Microsoft Web Platform : The Official Microsoft IIS Site: "Q: Does IIS Express use the same configuration system as IIS 7.x?

A: Yes, IIS Express uses the same applicationhost.config and web.config files supported by IIS 7.x. The key difference is that with IIS Express, the configuration is maintained on a per-user basis. In particular, whereas IIS has a global “applicationhost.config” file, IIS Express maintains a user-specific “applicationhost.config” file in the %userprofile%\documents\IISexpress\config” folder. This lets a standard user run IIS Express and also lets multiple users work on the same machine independently, without conflicting with each other. Some settings require Administrator user rights to set and modify (see question above about running as a standard user)."

NuGet Action Plan - Upgrade to 1.1, Setup Automatic Updates, Get NuGet Package Explorer - Scott Hanselman

NuGet Action Plan - Upgrade to 1.1, Setup Automatic Updates, Get NuGet Package Explorer - Scott Hanselman

Visual Studio Troubleshooting

Article from Microsoft on Visual Studio 2010 Troubleshooting.

The art of simplicity: Load testing with Fiddler

The art of simplicity: Load testing with Fiddler

Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 43 - Out-of-process queries with IQueryable - Jon Skeet: Coding Blog

Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 43 - Out-of-process queries with IQueryable - Jon Skeet: Coding Blog

Interesting stuff throughout, but here's the summary at the end:

"This was really a whistlestop tour of the "other" side of LINQ - and without going into any of the details of the real providers such as LINQ to SQL. However, I hope it's given you enough of a flavour for what's going on to appreciate the general design. Highlights:

• Expression trees are used to capture logic in a data structure which can be examined relatively easily at execution time
• Lambda expressions can be converted into expression trees as well as delegates
• IQueryable and IQueryable form a sort of parallel interface hierarchy to IEnumerable and IEnumerable - although the queryable forms extend the enumerable forms
• IQueryProvider enables one query to be built based on another, or executed immediately where appropriate
• Queryable provides equivalent extension methods to most of the Enumerable LINQ operators, except that it uses IQueryable sources and expression trees instead of delegates
• Queryable doesn't handle the queries itself at all; it simply records what's been called and delegates the real processing to the query provider"

Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 43 - Out-of-process queries with IQueryable - Jon Skeet: Coding Blog

Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 43 - Out-of-process queries with IQueryable - Jon Skeet: Coding Blog

Interesting stuff throughout, but here's the summary at the end:

"This was really a whistlestop tour of the "other" side of LINQ - and without going into any of the details of the real providers such as LINQ to SQL. However, I hope it's given you enough of a flavour for what's going on to appreciate the general design. Highlights:

• Expression trees are used to capture logic in a data structure which can be examined relatively easily at execution time
• Lambda expressions can be converted into expression trees as well as delegates
• IQueryable and IQueryable form a sort of parallel interface hierarchy to IEnumerable and IEnumerable - although the queryable forms extend the enumerable forms
• IQueryProvider enables one query to be built based on another, or executed immediately where appropriate
• Queryable provides equivalent extension methods to most of the Enumerable LINQ operators, except that it uses IQueryable sources and expression trees instead of delegates
• Queryable doesn't handle the queries itself at all; it simply records what's been called and delegates the real processing to the query provider"

Formula for computing how many end users to interview

From http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/customers-observe.php:

"Stalking Customers

When I worked at Intuit (makers of TurboTax, Quicken & QuickBooks) we used a method called "follow-me-home." It was as effective as it was simple in identifying customer problems and needs.  

We went to a customer's house or workplace and watched them do what they do and recorded their behavior and problems they encountered and how they solved them.  Data from follow-me-homes were used for new product ideas and improving existing products. "

Scott Hanselman - Creating a NuGet Package in 7 easy steps - Plus using NuGet to integrate ASP.NET MVC 3 into existing Web Forms applications

Scott Hanselman - Creating a NuGet Package in 7 easy steps - Plus using NuGet to integrate ASP.NET MVC 3 into existing Web Forms applications

Also my comment on how to wire up the resultant .csproj file to have the MVC context menus:

Woot! I added the GUID {E53F8FEA-EAE0-44A6-8774-FFD645390401} to the ProjectTypeGuids node of the .csproj, and it's a bone fide MFC project with context menus in the Solution Explorer.

This is the result, with the new GUID underlined:

{E53F8FEA-EAE0-44A6-8774-FFD645390401};{349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}

The perils of using Func instead of Expression in an IQueryable

This is sort of a LINQ 101 thing, but I haven't had much of an opportunity to use LINQ to SQL yet, believe it or not.

I learned the hard way: when using IQueryable against a database, any predicates handed around should be  Expression<func<type, bool>> instead of just Func<type, bool>. Func<type, bool> is evaluated in memory! That means that the entire table is fetched from the database, then filtered in memory. Bad, bad, bad!

7 Common Project Management Problems (And How to Solve Them)

7 Common Project Management Problems (And How to Solve Them)

Video Series: How To Give Great Presentations

Video Series: How To Give Great Presentations: "UGSS (Microsoft's User Group Support Services) have just published a video series that I recorded last year on How To Give Great Presentations. This free series of 8 videos covers the following subjects:-"

Scaffold your ASP.NET MVC 3 project with the MvcScaffolding package « Steve Sanderson’s blog

Very cool. This thing will generated CRUD support, list views, etc.

Scaffold your ASP.NET MVC 3 project with the MvcScaffolding package « Steve Sanderson’s blog: "I’ve been working with Scott Hanselman lately on an enhanced new scaffolding package called MvcScaffolding. The term “Scaffolding” is used by many software technologies to mean “quickly generating a basic outline of your software that you can then edit and customise”."

How To Use Amazon EC2 as Your Desktop - RestBackup™ Blog

How To Use Amazon EC2 as Your Desktop - RestBackup™ Blog: "In this article, I describe how I use EC2 as my Linux development desktop. I provide detailed instructions for every step of the setup process. This guide assumes that your client machine is Windows."

Scott Hanselman - Link Rollup: New Documentation and Tutorials from Web Platform and Tools

Scott Hanselman - Link Rollup: New Documentation and Tutorials from Web Platform and Tools:

"Intro to ASP.NET MVC 3 onboarding series.

Scott Hanselman and Rick Anderson collaboration and Mike Pope (Editor)

Both C# and VB versions:

• Intro to ASP.NET MVC 3
• Adding a Controller
• Adding a View
• Entity Framework Code-First Development
• Accessing your Model's Data from a Controller
• Adding a Create Method and Create View
• Adding Validation to the Model
• Adding a New Field to the Movie Model and Table
• Implementing Edit, Details and Delete
• Source code for this series"

Michael C. Kennedy's Weblog - 11 Killer Open Source Projects I Found with NuGet

Michael C. Kennedy's Weblog - 11 Killer Open Source Projects I Found with NuGet: "11 Killer Open Source Projects I Found with NuGet

Wednesday, January 19, 2011 5:18:17 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
So maybe I'm late to the party, but I recently started playing with NuGet. It's a killer new way to find, install, maintain, and manage references to open source libraries in Visual Studio 2010. Plenty of people have written about it (Phil Haack and Scott Hanselman for example). Let's just say you should learn about NuGet if you don't know it already.

What I want to talk about is all the cool open source projects I found just by flipping through the pages of the NuGet directory in the Visual Studio 'Add Library Package Reference' dialog."