Articles : Page 1 of 6
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Using an alternate JSON Serializer in ASP.NET Web API
Mar 1209The new ASP.NET Web API that Microsoft released alongside MVC 4.0 Beta last week is a great framework for building REST and AJAX APIs. I've been working with it for quite a while now and I really like the way it works and the complete set of features it provides 'in the box'. It's about time that Microsoft gets a decent API for building generic HTTP endpoints into the framework. DataContractJsonSerializer sucks As nice as Web API's overall design is one thing still sucks: The built-in JSON S...
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OSS and .NET Year In Review 2011
Dec 1126T’is the season for “Year in Review” and “Best of” blog posts. It’s a vain practice, to be sure. This is exactly why I’ve done it almost every year! After all, isn’t all blogging pure vanity? Sadly, I did miss a few years when my vanity could not overcome my laziness. This year I am changing it up a bit to look at the intersection of open source software and the .NET community in 2011. I think it’s been a banner year for OSS and .NET/Microsoft, and I think it’s only going to get better in 20...
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Changing the default HTML Templates to HTML5 in Visual Studio
Dec 1123If you're using Visual Studio 2010 to create Web applications, you probably have found out that the default Web templates for ASP.NET Web Forms and Master pages and plain HTML pages all create HTML 4 XHTML headers like this: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="$fileinputname$.aspx.cs" Inherits="$rootnamespace$.$classname$" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w...
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ASP.NET MVC + Selenium + IISExpress
Dec 1122The goal of this blog entry is to explain how you can create integration tests for ASP.NET MVC applications by using a combination of Selenium WebDriver and IISExpress. Integration tests are useful when you want to test an entire user story. For example, you might want to test whether a user can successfully add an item to a shopping cart. Adding an item to a shopping cart might require the execution of C# code, database code, and JavaScript code. Using an integration test, you can verify t...
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Scott Hanselman's 2011 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows
Dec 1101Everyone collects utilities, and most folks have a list of a few that they feel are indispensable. Here's mine. Each has a distinct purpose, and I probably touch each at least a few times a week. For me, util means utilitarian and it means don't clutter my tray. If it saves me time, and seamlessly integrates with my life, it's the bomb. Many/most are free some aren't. Those that aren't free are very likely worth your 30-day trial, and perhaps your money. Here are most of the contents of my ...
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Repaving your PC: the easier way
Nov 1128It"s been a while since I had to repave my laptop. I have a Windows Home Server (WHS) at home which images my PC almost daily and allows restoring it to a given point in time in less than 30 minutes. Which is awesome! And which is how I usually restore my PC into a stable state. Over the past year some hardware changes have been made of which the most noteworthy is the replacement of the existing hard drive with an SSD. A great addition, and it was easy to restore as well: swap the disks and r...
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New Bundling and Minification Support (ASP.NET 4.5 Series)
Nov 1128This is the sixth in a series of blog posts I'm doing on ASP.NET 4.5. The next release of .NET and Visual Studio include a ton of great new features and capabilities. With ASP.NET 4.5 you'll see a bunch of really nice improvements with both Web Forms and MVC - as well as in the core ASP.NET base foundation that both are built upon. Today’s post covers some of the work we are doing to add built-in support for bundling and minification into ASP.NET - which makes it easy to improve the perfor...
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Using the West Wind Web Toolkit to set up AJAX and REST Services
Nov 1103I frequently get questions about which option to use for creating AJAX and REST backends for ASP.NET applications. There are many solutions out there to do this actually, but when I have a choice - not surprisingly - I fall back to my own tools in the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit. I've talked a bunch about the 'in-the-box' solutions in the past so for a change in this post I'll talk about the tools that I use in my own and customer applications to handle AJAX and REST based access to servic...
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What I liked of Agile.NET 2011 Europe
Oct 1120A few weeks ago I attended the Agile.NET 2011 Europe conference, in Gent. In this post I just want collect some links to the slides of the event, and give some personal comments on the sessions and topics. Agile from A to Z It all started very early on Monday (probably it’s standard here in Belgium, but it’s my first conference that starts with the first session at 9:00am) with a nice keynote from Jon Jagger, titled “Agile from A to Z”. It was a nice collections of quotes and facts about Agi...
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Loading jQuery Consistently in a .NET Web App
Oct 1110One thing that frequently comes up in discussions when using jQuery is how to best load the jQuery library (as well as other commonly used and updated libraries) in a Web application. Specifically the issue is the one of versioning and making sure that you can easily update and switch versions of script files with application wide settings in one place and having your script usage reflect those settings in the entire application on all pages that use the script. Although I use jQuery as an exa...
