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Managing Models in ASPNET MVC - VisualStudio Magazine

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:11:00 GMT

Peter Vogel looks at the least important component of the ASP.NET MVC, the Model, and goes on to discuss a strategy for integrating the model, the controller and the view. One of the key design criteria for a ...

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How to Validate Forms with ASP.NET MVC 2 Data Annotations - VisualStudio Magazine

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 06:11:00 GMT

Simplify the task of validating Web form input by using attributes. If standard validators don't meet your needs, you can create custom data annotations for richer validations. The movement toward declarative ...

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...

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:01:04 GMT

I took the log reporting dashboard for MVC (www.codeproject.com and turned it into a MVC Turbine plugin. Here's a demonstration of how easy it ...

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...

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 09:15:00 GMT

#14 | How Do I: Return JSON Formatted Data for an AJAX Call in an ASP.NET MVC Web Application? 15 minutes, 48 seconds

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Cover Story: Get Ready for the Entity Framework - VisualStudio Magazine

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 08:35:00 GMT

The ADO.NET Entity Framework 4, updated and released alongside the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 in April, is emerging as the default way to do data access in .NET-based applications. With the second generation ...

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Introducing Team Crossword from Microsoft FUSE Labs - Softpedia

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 07:59:00 GMT

Microsoft FUSE Labs has quietly introduced a new project, developed primarily by only three members of the team, which worked together throughout their semi-annual creative week. Team Crossword is now live and available ...

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NET MVC

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 07:32:00 GMT

#13 | Creating a Movie Database Application in 15 minutes with ASP.NET MVC 12 minutes, 4 seconds

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NET MVC

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:00:03 GMT

Join author Jonathan McCracken as he demonstrates building the QuoteOMatic application in ASP .NET from his new book, "Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC ...

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MvcTurbine Routing Demonstration

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:49:05 GMT

A short demonstration of Mvc Turbine routing and how it differs from regular ASP.Net routing ... mvcturbine mvc turbine asp.net ...

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NET MVC in 4 minutes

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 23:23:01 GMT

yt:stretch=16:9 yt:quality=high

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The Fast Track From Code to Cloud - TechNewsWorld

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:59:00 GMT

The evolution of software libraries, development environments, and dynamic language platforms now provides us with the tools to develop applications faster, with better unit and continuous testing support. As cloud ...

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The Fast Track From Code to Cloud - TechNewsWorld

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:43:00 GMT

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...

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 07:44:00 GMT

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Viewing Views in ASP.NET MVC - VisualStudio Magazine

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 06:32:00 GMT

Peter continues his look ASP.NET MVC for ASP.NET developers (using the brand new version of ASP.NET MVC) by linking a view to a controller. As I said in the first article in this series ( ASP.NET MVC for the ...

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The Fast Track From Code to Cloud - TechNewsWorld

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 05:06:00 GMT

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The Fast Track From Code to Cloud - Linux Insider

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:56:00 GMT

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The 'meaningful' mobile web that talks to phones properly - Computer Weekly

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 03:29:00 GMT

While many industry commentators still argue that the mobile web has yet to truly flourish, the lack of common standards and the differentiation between platforms is in itself encouraging the development of ancillary ...

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Controlling Controllers in ASP.NET MVC - VisualStudio Magazine

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 07:03:00 GMT

Peter Vogel begins his series on introducing ASP.NET developers to ASP.NET MVC by looking at the C in MVC: Controllers An ASP.NET MVC application consists of three components, obviously: Models, Views and ...

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Programming news: SQL Server drivers for PHP 2.0, NetBeans 6.9.1

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 04:51:23 GMT

Read about IronRuby, Splunk's App-of-the-month contest, a free Windows Phone 7 programming e-book, top project challenges, and more.

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NET MVC 3

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 03:06:04 GMT

Beautifying your ASP.NET MVC 3 website is very easy using free CSS templates. This video demonstrates how to replace the project template provided ...

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ASP.NET MVC meets HTML5

DigiMortal — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 21:00:00 GMT

Today I tried out ASP.NET MVC HTML5 Helpers Toolkit by Dean Hume. Although browsers today support HTML5 partially it is time to start playing with it. As soon as HTML5 gets common standard in web you should be able to react fast. In this posting I will introduce you HTML5 Helpers Toolkit and some HTML5 field types.

HTML5 Helpers Toolkit is easy to install. Just download the package, unpack it and reference the DLL you found from package. That’s all. You don’t have to do anything more. If your browser doesn’t support HTML5 then HTML5 fields are rendered as usual textboxes and you can extend them using jQuery by example.

E-mail field

HTML5 defines many types for input boxes. One of the types is e-mail. Here is the demo of e-mail field with placeholder value. Yes, in HTML5 textboxes support placeholders and we don’t have to mess with JavaScript anymore. This is how e-mail box is defined.


<form>
    <%= Html.Html5TextBox("userEmal", InputTypes.InputType.Email,
                          "plah@plah.com") %>
</form>

And here is the result on Firefox 4 Beta.

Nice, isn’t it? I discovered one cool thing when I tested HTML5 Helpers Toolkit with Opera. I tried to submit form where e-mail address is not valid. And this is what happened:

Form was not submitted and all I got was this error message in red box. Cool!

Slider

As a next thing let’s see how to get numeric slider on page without any JavaScript. Numbers in slider box definition have the following meaning: minimum is 1 and maximum is 50, step is 2 and default value is 25.


<form>
    <%= Html.Html5Range(1, 50, 2, 25, null) %>
</form>

And here is the result on Chrome.

If we want we can use usual HTML to decorate slider with numbers mentioned above. But I like the result – simple, calm and clean.

Date picker

Now let’s do something that only Opera seems to support right now – let’s create HTML5 date picker. Definition is here.


<form>
    <%= Html.Html5TextBox("deliveryDate", InputTypes.InputType.Date) %>
</form>

And here is the result on Opera.

Seems good to me. And again – no additional JavaScript is needed. Until other browsers also start supporting this kind on input box you can use jQueryUI Datepicker component.

Conclusion

Although HTML5 is not here yet it is coming very soon and seems like ASP.NET MVC will be soon ready for it. Although HTML5 Helpers Toolkit doesn’t provide all HTML5 controls yet it is still great start and I think this project is worth keeping eye on it. It is very easy to install and very easy to use and I suggest you to try it out as soon as possible.

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Performance tuning tricks for ASP.NET and IIS 7 – part 2

Mads Kristensen — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 06:28:00 GMT

In part 1 of this series, we looked at some tricks to optimize the performance of any website running in IIS 7 by only modifying the web.config. In this part we will focus on handling browser caching issues and optimize the number of JavaScript and CSS files loaded from an ASP.NET website. NB! All t ...

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ASP.NET MVC 3: Using HttpNotFoundResult in controller tests

DigiMortal — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 21:00:00 GMT

Lately I blogged about HttpNotFoundResult and HttpStatusCodeResult action results that come with ASP.NET MVC 3. These results are ideal for controller tests as we don’t have to mess with HttpContext and Response objects anymore. In this posting I will show you how to use HttpNotFoundResult in controller tests to check if errors are given correctly to user.

Let’s suppose we have controller method that displays product details.


public ActionResult Details(int productId)
{
    var product = _repository.GetProductById(productId);
 
    if (product == null)
    {
        var result = new HttpNotFoundResult("Product not found");
        return result;
    }
            
    // ...
 
    return View();
}

If product is not found (whatever the reason is) then Details() returns HttpNotFoundResult to let user know that requested product doesn’t exist. If product is there then Details() makes some processing and returns regular view that displays product information.

Now let’s write test to make sure that in the case of missing product error 404 will be returned.


[TestMethod]
public void ProductPageShouldReturn404IfProductNotFound()
{
    var productId = 1;
    Product product = null;
 
    var repositoryMock = new Mock<IProductRepository>();
    repositoryMock.Setup(c => c.GetProductById(productId))
                    .Returns(product)
                    .Verifiable();
 
    var result = _controller.Details(productId);
 
    repositoryMock.Verify();
    Assert.IsNotNull(result);
    Assert.IsInstanceOfType(result, typeof(HttpNotFoundResult));
}

This test makes sure that GetProductById() method is called from product repository mock and also it makes sure that this method returns null. After calling Details() method from controller we check three things:

is GetProductById() method called?
is return value not null?
is return value of type HttpNotFoundResult?

If all these conditions are met then test succeeds. Our tests as you can see, is pretty short and all it does is checking returned type. We don’t have here any dealing with HttpContext and Response and that saves us a lot of trouble. At least in more complex tests.

Conclusion

HttpNotFoundResult and HttpStatusCodeResult are very good choices if we want our ASP.NET MVC applications to be more easily testable. This way we can avoid HttpContext and other related objects. If you want to customize HttpStatusCodeResult then please read my blog posting ASP.NET MVC 3: Creating HttpStatusCodeResult with view based body.

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ASP.NET MVC 3: Global action filters

DigiMortal — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 21:00:00 GMT

ASP.NET MVC 3 supports global action filters. Global action filters are applied to all actions in web application. By example, you can use global action filters for common security checks. In this posting I will show you how to write dummy action filter, register it as global and test it.

Creating action filter

Let’s start with our primitive action filter that is able in some cases ruin page layout for IE. Am I evil? Yes, I am! But I want this example to work on IIS and Cassini both so let’s make something trivial.


public class MyActionFilterAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    public override void OnResultExecuting(ResultExecutingContext context)
    {
        base.OnResultExecuting(filterContext);
 
        context.RequestContext.HttpContext.Response.Write("<!-- Buuu! -->");
    }
}

All this evil filter does is it writes string <!—Buuu! –> to response stream, so it is the first line of output.

Now open one of your ASP.NET MVC projects and run it. It does not matter if you run it on IIS or Cassini (ASP.NET development web server). If you look at page source you should see usual HTML there. Something like you see on image on right.

Registering global action filter

Now, without touching any controller let’s put our evil Buuu! in place. Open global. asax and modify Application_Start event so it looks like follows.


protected void Application_Start()
{
    AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();
 
    // Register global filter
    GlobalFilters.Filters.Add(new MyActionFilterAttribute());
    
    RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilters.Filters);
    RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
}

Compile your project and run application again. Now you should see output like this.

Without any additional modification to controllers and their methods we got our action filter work for all controllers. You can surf around your site and for every request you should see now my evil message.

Conclusion

Global application filters are powerful and easy to use features. You can use global filters for different purposes like establishing global security policies and controlling output. Of course, you may find many other uses for global action filters. ASP.NET MVC makes is very easy to register filters at global level and I think it is another great addition to MVC framework.

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ASP.NET MVC 3: Introducing Razor view engine

DigiMortal — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 21:00:00 GMT

ASP.NET MVC 3 brings us new view engine called Razor. Razor view engine was made available with WebMatrix first beta. Razor brings us new and very short syntax for writing views. In this posting I will introduce you shortly ASP.NET MVC Razor view engine.

New ASP.NET MVC project type

There is new ASP.NET MVC project type for Razor projects so you can start new application with Razor support already there.

The other options are project with ASPX based views and empty ASP.NET MVC project. As I am going to write sample application that uses Razor then it is not hard to guess which option I chose.

Razor files

New ASP.NET MVC Razor application is created like default ASP.NET MVC web application. The difference is that views are using Razor view engine. Project structure at file system level is same as before as you can see if you take a look at image on right.

There are some things you should know at this point:

Extension of Razor based views is .cshtml for view that use C# and .vbhtml for views that use VB.NET.
Files that cannot be shown by direct requests (master pages, partial views etc) have underscore (_) in the beginning of their names.

So if you try to make the request to _Layout.cshtml (this is master page) you will get error from server.

You can also see that there are controllers and models folders – things you don’t see in WebMatrix projects.

Razor syntax

Razor syntax is different from what we have seen this far. Razor provides us with way shorter and cleaner syntax and this is the reason why we should consider using it in our ASP.NET MVC projects. After playing with WebMatrix and Razor based pages I was pretty happy with Razor because my views looked cleaner than before.

Here is the example of Razor based view. This is the same Account/LogOn view that comes also with usual ASP.NET MVC default application. Although there is no syntax highlight yet you get the point.

Click on image to see it at original size.

Basically the rules are simple: everything that starts with @ is server-side code. If it is some known language structure that has body then it must be followed by { and }. Between them you can write whatever you want. Okay, there are more rules but all this is documented in WebMatrix tutorial Introduction to ASP.NET Web Programming Using the Razor Syntax.

Should I try it?

Well… Razor was a little bit weird for me when I started playing with it. For smaller views it does not give any strong effect. But when you try it out on more complex views you will see that views are much readable than before. Current preview of ASP.NET MVC 3 doesn’t support syntax highlight for Razor views but syntax highlight is coming with next releases. I still suggest you to try out Razor to find out if it makes anything better for you.

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