Articles : Page 1 of 4
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ASP.NET MVC Now Accepting Pull Requests
Mar 1229Changing a big organizations is a slow endeavor. But when people are passionate and persistent, change does happen. Three years ago, the ASP.NET MVC source code was released under an open source license. But at the time, the team could not accept any code contributions. In my blog post talking about that release, I said the following (emphasis added): Personally (and this is totally my own opinion), I’d like to reach the point where we could accept patches. There are many hurdles in the w...
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Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part II: Hot data objects
Mar 1219This is the second post, originally from my personal blog, in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF After the rush to get moving on stuff, I temporarily lost interest. I went almost two weeks without touching the project, in part because the next thing on my backlog was doing up a bunch of administrative pages. So boring. Unfortunately, because most of the site's content is user-generated, you need some...
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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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Using SignalR to broadcast a slide deck
Dec 1106Last week, Ive discussed Techniques for real-time client-server communication on the web (SignalR to the rescue). Weve seen that when building web applications, you often face the fact that HTTP, the foundation of the web, is a request/response protocol. A client issues a request, a server handles this request and sends back a response. All the time, with no relation between the first request and subsequent requests. Also, since its request-based, there is no way to send messages from the serv...
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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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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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Preventing CSRF With Ajax
Oct 1111A long while ago I wrote about the potential dangers of Cross-site Request Forgery attacks, also known as CSRF or XSRF. These exploits are a form of confused deputy attack. Screen grab from The Police Academy movie.In that post, I covered how ASP.NET MVC includes a set of anti-forgery helpers to help mitigate such exploits. The helpers include an HTML helper meant to be called in the form that renders a hidden input, and an attribute applied to the controller action to protect. These helpers...
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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...
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Prevent Forms Authentication Login Page Redirect When You Don’t Want It
Oct 1104Go that way instead - Photo by JacobEnos CC some rights reserved In an ASP.NET web application, it’s very common to write some jQuery code that makes an HTTP request to some URL (a lightweight service) in order to retrieve some data. That URL might be handled by an ASP.NET MVC controller action, a Web API operation, or even an ASP.NET Web Page or Web Form. If it can return curly brackets, it can be respond to a JavaScript request for JSON. One pain point when hosting lightweight HTTP ser...
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Calling ASP.NET MVC Action Methods from JavaScript
Aug 1119In a recent blog post, I wrote a a controller inspector to demonstrate Controller and Action Descriptors. In this blog post, I apply that knowledge to build something more useful. One pain point when you write Ajax heavy applications using ASP.NET MVC is managing the URLs that Routing generates on the server. These URLs aren’t accessible from code in a static JavaScript file. There are techniques to mitigate this: Generate the URLs in the view and pass them into the JavaScript API. This ...
