BusinessRx Community

HTTP Redirection Tip

Scott on Writing — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:26:00 GMT

I'm writing a series of concise montly web development tips over at DotNetSlackers.com . My first tip, published in December, looked at caching data for the lifespan of a request , which is a quick and easy way to improve the performance of data-driven web applications that have pages where the same data is requested multiple times per request. My most recent tip takes a deeper look at HTTP redirection . Every ASP.NET developer is familiar with Response.Redirect, but do you know what happens behind...(read more)

Rails for .NET Developers and the Alt.Net Podcast

Infozerk Inc.: averyBlog — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 23:32:19 GMT

Last year I had the opportunity to be a technical reviewer on Rails for .NET Developers by Jeff Cohen and Brian Eng (of Softies of Rails fame). I haven't done a technical review in a long-time and it wasn't half as painful as I remembered. It helped that the book is well written and an enjoyable read. I definitely think this book is the best place to start for a .NET developer who wants to learn Rails. The book isn't a substitute for reading mainstays like Agile Web Dev with Rails or The PickAxe...(read more)

2008 In Review

Infozerk Inc.: averyBlog — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 03:55:14 GMT

It's New Years Eve and what better way to spend the night then writing up a post about the last year. The biggest change this year was the birth of my wonderful daughter Katherine, who we affectionately call Rin. It truly has been life changing and while it would be nice if she slept a little bit more than she does she is an extremely cute and happy baby who is growing and learning so quickly. I feel good about what I was able to accomplish this year. I covered some of the progress on The Lounge...(read more)

ASP.NET MVC Design Gallery and Upcoming View Improvements with the ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate

ScottGu's Blog — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 08:44:10 GMT

Today we launched a new ASP.NET MVC Design Gallery on the www.asp.net site. The design gallery hosts free HTML design templates that you can download and easily use with your ASP.NET MVC applications. Included with each design template is a Site.master file, a CSS stylesheet, and optionally a set of images, partials, and helper methods that support them. The gallery allows you to preview each of the designs online, as well as download a .zip version of them that you can extract...(read more)

Your Developer Horoscope

OdeToCode Blogs — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 03:41:00 GMT

Aries (March 21-April 19): Avoid committing yourself to the next project at work. It’s going to become a death march , and you know it. Save your skills and energy for some open source hacking. Taurus (April 20-May 20): You’ve been flirting with functional programming and now it’s time to take the plunge. Free your soul of side-effects and embrace a monad . It will make you feel good. Gemini (May 21-June 21): You are entering a period of introspection. For pair programming , it’s best to hook up...(read more)

Four Helpful Custom Base Page Features

Scott on Writing — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:23:00 GMT

One of the first things I do when creating a new ASP.NET web application is create a custom base page class and add a handful of useful methods I've used in other projects. My latest article on DotNetSlackers.com shares four helpful features that you can add to your base page class: Display a JavaScript Alert Recursively Search the Control Hierarchy Record Page Execution Times Set the Page's Title Read more at: Four Helpful Features to Add to Your Base Page Class ....(read more)

The Lounge - One Year Later

Infozerk Inc.: averyBlog — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 22:33:51 GMT

On December 16th 2007, a year ago today, I took over The Lounge Advertising Network from my buddy Kevin F. Here is a quick summary of the first year: Grew from 10 publishers to 40 Launched the Small Publishers Room Launched the first .NET focused RSS advertising offering with the RSS Room Launched the Podcast and Screencast rooms Started the year with 2 advertisers, sold out all rooms for the first time in July. I also have a couple of new things to announce today. The first is a couple of new publishers...(read more)

Units of Work

OdeToCode Blogs — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 03:09:00 GMT

The Unit of Work (let’s call it UoW) is another common design pattern found in persistence frameworks, but it’s new to many .NET developers who are just starting to use LINQ to SQL or the Entity Framework as the “new ADO.NET”. First, the obligatory P of EAA definition : A Unit of Work keeps track of everything you do during a business transaction that can affect the database. When you're done, it figures out everything that needs to be done to alter the database as a result of your work. Please think...(read more)

XM Radio Player Part III : Choices

OdeToCode Blogs — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 02:20:00 GMT

WPF , AJAX , or Silverlight RIA ? I gots more options than a block of Velveeta . XBAP ? XCOPY ? XAP files are just ZIPs ! Let me run my bits on your silicon chips. When I started to think of what my XM Radio Player would look like, I could only picture two things: Rectangles with rounded corners. Gradient color fills. Given this detailed initial vision I knew I had to pick WPF. What about Silverlight? I considered Silverlight, but three factors kept me away. One issue would be the cross domain calls...(read more)

Identity Maps

OdeToCode Blogs — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 02:14:00 GMT

There are a couple of important patterns in play when you use a persistence framework. These patterns have been around for quite some time but are relatively new to .NET developers who are jumping into LINQ to SQL and the ADO.NET Entity Framework. The first of these patterns is the Identity Map pattern. There are various aliases for this pattern. Some frameworks call it the “identity cache” while others have an “entity uniqueing” implementation. Using examples as tests , we can describe its behavior...(read more)

XM Radio Player Part II : Scraping

OdeToCode Blogs — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 02:12:00 GMT

Just to make sure everything was as easy as it looked in Fiddler – I wrote a quick and dirty piece of throwaway code to see if I could programmatically login to XM and play a stream of music with Windows Media Player. It was ugly, but … public void Can_Start_Media_Payer_With_Xm_Stream() { var cookies = new CookieContainer (); // step 1: get auth cookie HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest .Create( "http://xmro.xmradio.com" + "/xstream/login_servlet.jsp" ) as HttpWebRequest ; request.CookieContainer...(read more)

What Would You Be Doing If Computers Didn't Exist?

Scott on Writing — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:45:00 GMT

Over Thanksgiving weekend Fredrik Normen asked an interesting hypothetical question: What would you be doing today if computers didn't exist? I've been programming since age 10 when my family procured its first personal computer and my dad showed me how to use GW-BASIC and your imagination to make computer games. So it's hard to imagine a life without computers. (Heck, it hard to imagine life without the Internet, yet close to half of my computing lifetime was spend disconnected. I guess I have a...(read more)

Leeroy Jenkins in Software Development

OdeToCode Blogs — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 02:12:00 GMT

The Jenkins video always makes me laugh. It’s the short and sad tale of a man who doesn’t have the patience for planning, nor the stamina for statistical analysis. He’s a man who leaps into action without thought of consequence. To Leeroy, there are no 50,000 foot views, no discussions, and … no tomorrow. In the video you can watch as Leeroy’s guild is decimated by dragons who take advantage of the chaos provided by Leeroy’s thoughtless actions. You might be thinking I’m going to liken Leeroy to...(read more)

Dec 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight/WPF

ScottGu's Blog — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 08:43:00 GMT

I'm flying out later today on a pretty intense business trip (22,000 miles, 5 countries, 3 continents, 1 week, no sleep... :-), so my blog activity over the next week and a half will be pretty light. To keep you busy till I return, here is the latest in my link-listing series . Also check out my ASP.NET Tips, Tricks and Tutorials page and Silverlight Tutorials page for links to popular articles I've done myself in the past. ASP.NET Geolocation/Geotargeting Reverse IP Lookup Code : Scott...(read more)

XM Radio Player Part I : Fiddling

OdeToCode Blogs — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 03:12:00 GMT

I’ve had an XM radio subscription for a couple years now but I’ve never been entirely happy with any of the options for XM Radio Online . XM’s online player has changed very little over the years, and it is missing many simple features you can find in other third party players and real radio hardware – like artist and song notifications. A couple days ago I started to think about just writing my own XM radio player for the heck of it. The first step was to see what goes on between the browser and...(read more)

New ASP.NET Charting Control:

ScottGu's Blog — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 06:38:14 GMT

Microsoft recently released a cool new ASP.NET server control - <asp:chart /> - that can be used for free with ASP.NET 3.5 to enable rich browser-based charting scenarios: Download the free Microsoft Chart Controls Download the VS 2008 Tool Support for the Chart Controls Download the Microsoft Chart Controls Samples Download the Microsoft Chart Controls Documentation Visit the Microsoft Chart Control Forum Once installed the <asp:chart/> control shows up under the "Data" tab...(read more)

Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcut Tip: Ctrl+-

Scott on Writing — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:17:00 GMT

I learned this Visual Studio keyboard shortcut from a client a couple of months ago. I use it several times a day now. Typing the Ctrl key and - (the minus key) returns you to the previous cursor location, be it in the same file or in a different, open file . Visual Studio maintains your position in a file as a stack. So as you do a Find and jump to a particular location in a file, or right-click on a method or property name and choose “Go To Definition” Visual Studio keeps track of your position...(read more)

jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008

ScottGu's Blog — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:07:17 GMT

Last month I blogged about how Microsoft is extending support for jQuery . Over the last few weeks we've been working with the jQuery team to add great jQuery intellisense support within Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (which is free). This is now available to download and use. Steps to Enable jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 To enable intellisense completion for jQuery within VS you'll want to follow three steps: Step 1: Install VS 2008 SP1 VS 2008 SP1 adds richer...(read more)

New Version of Error Logging Modules and Handlers (ELMAH) Available

Scott on Writing — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:34:00 GMT

ELMAH is a free, open-source library created by Atif Aziz for logging errors that occur in an ASP.NET application. I've written about ELMAH many times before ; its one of the first things I setup when creating a new ASP.NET application. A new version - ELMAH 1.0 BETA 3 - was recently released. With just a few minutes of setup and configuration you can have ELMAH automatically log unhandled exceptions to a number of different data stores - SQL Server, Oracle, a Microsoft Access database, an XML file,...(read more)

Spike Code and Source Control

OdeToCode Blogs — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 02:12:00 GMT

Jeremy’s post “ Don’t Check In Spike Code ” reminds of something I’ve advocated for years: dedicate a place in your source control repository where each developer can check in their “experimental” code. The rule of thumb is to throw away code you write for a spike , but all code can be valuable, even if it isn’t production worthy. Here are the kinds of things I’ve checked into “experiments/sallen” over the years: Code to isolate and reproduce compiler, framework, and library bugs. Code written to...(read more)

Running the Same Query Against Multiple Databases

Scott on Writing — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

One of my clients has a data-driven Software as a Service (SaaS) web application that is used by a dozen different customers. In particular, this client of mine has a web application that's used by various clinics and hospitals to track, schedule, and bill health care-related activities. As discussed in the Multi-Tenant Data Architecture guide from Microsoft, there are three approaches for modeling data that comes from many distinct customers: Separate Databases - each customer has a separate database...(read more)

Update on Silverlight 2 - and a glimpse of Silverlight 3

ScottGu's Blog — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 07:01:49 GMT

We shipped Silverlight 2 last month. Over the last 4 weeks, the final release of Silverlight 2 has been downloaded and installed on more than 100 million consumer machines. It has also recently been published to corporate administrators via the Microsoft SMS and Microsoft Update programs to enable them to automatically deploy across enterprises. Over 1 in 4 computers on the Internet now have some version of Silverlight installed. Silverlight 2 was a major release, and delivered...(read more)

Single Letter Variable Names Still Considered Harmful

OdeToCode Blogs — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 02:12:00 GMT

There is a lot of humor in the Bad Variable Names entry on the c2 wiki. I like this confession from Alex: The worst of which was my counter variable names. I now use i, j, k, and so on for local counts and things like activeRowCount for the more descriptive names. Before, in the early years mind you, it shames me to say, I would name my counters things like Dracula, Chocula*, MonteChristo. They are all counts after all. I apologize for my intial variable naming conventions and shall go beat my face...(read more)

Styling a Silverlight Twitter Application with Expression Blend 2

ScottGu's Blog — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:15:09 GMT

Silverlight 2 provides a rich platform for building cross-browser/cross-platform RIA applications. One of the things that makes Silverlight so powerful is the ease with which developers and designers can collaborate together on projects. Developers can use Visual Studio to open and edit Silverlight 2 projects and get a powerful code-focused .NET development environment, and designers can use Expression Blend 2 SP1 to open and edit the exact same project and use a creative tool to sculpt...(read more)

Mapping with Expressions

OdeToCode Blogs — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 02:12:00 GMT

Once you know about the magic of Expression<T> , it’s hard not to make use of it. Or perhaps, abuse it. Here is an excerpt of a class I wrote that uses Expression<T> as a reflection helper. public class PropertySpecifier <T> { public PropertySpecifier( Expression < Func <T, object >> expression) { _expression = (expression.Body) as MemberExpression ; if (_expression == null ) { // raise an error } } public string PropertyName { get { return _expression.Member.Name; }...(read more)