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  • ASP.NET MVC Route based on Web Browser/Device (e.g. iPhone)

    - by Alex
    Is it possible, from within ASP.NET MVC, to route to different controllers or actions based on the accessing device/browser? I'm thinking of setting up alternative actions and views for some parts of my website in case it is accessed from the iPhone, to optimize display and functionality of it. I don't want to create a completely separate project for the iPhone though as the majority of the site is fine on any device. Any idea on how to do this?

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  • .NET Framework 4.0 installation is very slow

    - by Dimitri C.
    On my Windows Vista, it takes a full 12 minutes to install the .NET Framework 4.0. a) Is this normal? b) If not, can something be done about it? The reason I'm concerned about the speed is because it slows down the testing of our product installer considerably. Testing an installer is time consuming already, but this new .NET Framework installer makes it almost undoable. Detail: I did the test on a clean Vista inside a VirtualBox virtual machine. This setup does not show any performance issues in other situations. I tried both dotNetFx40_Full_x86_x64.exe and dotNetFx40_Client_x86_x64.exe. They both take approximately the same time to install.

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  • Attempting to install .NET framework 4 *full* installs *client* instead

    - by msorens
    On a Win7 SP1 32-bit machine, I initially had .NET 4 client installed and wanted to upgrade to .NET 4 full. I downloaded the full installer dotNetFx40_Full_x86_x64.exe from Microsoft. After download the file showed 48.11MB, the correct size for the full package (vs. 41MB for the client). I ran the installer and it first prompted to repair or remove the existing package. I chose to remove, so uninstalled the two parts, 4 extended and 4 client. Reboot. I reran the installer and it began installation, showing that it was installing the client. Though this raised an eyebrow for me, I let it run to completion, thinking it might be reporting the full install in sections. But after completion, I again ended up with 4 extended and 4 client installed! Obviously I am missing something; ideas...?

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  • Why does my .NET 4 application know .NET 4 is not installed

    - by Tergiver
    I developed an application that targeted .NET 4 the other day and XCOPY-installed it to a Windows XP machine. I had told the owner of the machine that they would need to install .NET Framework 4 to run my app and he told me he did (not a reliable source). When I ran the application I was presented with a message box that said this app requires .NET Framework 4, would I like to install it? Clicking the Yes button took me to the Microsoft web site and a few clicks later .NET 4 was installed, and the application successfully launched. Now I normally don't develop applications that target the latest version of .NET, I always target the lowest version I can (what features do I really need?). So this was my first .NET 4 app (and I only targeted 4 because it used a library that did). In the past, XCOPY-installing .NET applications to a machine that didn't have the correct version of .NET installed resulted in the application simply crashing on startup with no useful information presented to the user. Was it built into my app because I targeted .NET X? Was it something already installed on the target machine? I love the feature, I just want to know precisely how to leverage it in the future.

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  • Dissecting ASP.NET Routing

    The ASP.NET Routing framework allows developers to decouple the URL of a resource from the physical file on the web server. Specifically, the developer defines routing rules, which map URL patterns to a class or ASP.NET page that generates the content. For instance, you could create a URL pattern of the form Categories/CategoryName and map it to the ASP.NET page ShowCategoryDetails.aspx; the ShowCategoryDetails.aspx page would display details about the category CategoryName. With such a mapping, users could view category about the Beverages category by visiting www.yoursite.com/Categories/Beverages. In short, ASP.NET Routing allows for readable, SEO-friendly URLs. ASP.NET Routing was first introduced in ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 and was enhanced further in ASP.NET 4.0. ASP.NET Routing is a key component of ASP.NET MVC, but can also be used with Web Forms. Two previous articles here on 4Guys showed how to get started using ASP.NET Routing: Using ASP.NET Routing Without ASP.NET MVC and URL Routing in ASP.NET 4.0. This article aims to explore ASP.NET Routing in greater depth. We'll explore how ASP.NET Routing works underneath the covers to decode a URL pattern and hand it off the the appropriate class or ASP.NET page. Read on to learn more! Read More >Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • WebGrid Helper and Complex Types

    - by imran_ku07
        Introduction:           WebGrid helper makes it very easy to show tabular data. It was originally designed for ASP.NET Web Pages(WebMatrix) to display, edit, page and sort tabular data but you can also use this helper in ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. When using this helper, sometimes you may run into a problem if you use complex types in this helper. In this article, I will show you how you can use complex types in WebGrid helper.       Description:             Let's say you need to show the employee data and you have the following classes,   public class Employee { public string Name { get; set; } public Address Address { get; set; } public List<string> ContactNumbers { get; set; } } public class Address { public string City { get; set; } }               The Employee class contain a Name, an Address and list of ContactNumbers. You may think that you can easily show City in WebGrid using Address.City, but no. The WebGrid helper will throw an exception at runtime if any Address property is null in the Employee list. Also, you cannot directly show ContactNumbers property. The easiest way to show these properties is to add some additional properties,   public Address NotNullableAddress { get { return Address ?? new Address(); } } public string Contacts { get { return string.Join("; ",ContactNumbers); } }               Now you can easily use these properties in WebGrid. Here is the complete code of this example,  @functions{ public class Employee { public Employee(){ ContactNumbers = new List<string>(); } public string Name { get; set; } public Address Address { get; set; } public List<string> ContactNumbers { get; set; } public Address NotNullableAddress { get { return Address ?? new Address(); } } public string Contacts { get { return string.Join("; ",ContactNumbers); } } } public class Address { public string City { get; set; } } } @{ var myClasses = new List<Employee>{ new Employee { Name="A" , Address = new Address{ City="AA" }, ContactNumbers = new List<string>{"021-216452","9231425651"}}, new Employee { Name="C" , Address = new Address{ City="CC" }}, new Employee { Name="D" , ContactNumbers = new List<string>{"045-14512125","21531212121"}} }; var grid = new WebGrid(source: myClasses); } @grid.GetHtml(columns: grid.Columns( grid.Column("NotNullableAddress.City", header: "City"), grid.Column("Name"), grid.Column("Contacts")))                    Summary:           You can use WebGrid helper to show tabular data in ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web Forms and  ASP.NET Web Pages. Using this helper, you can also show complex types in the grid. In this article, I showed you how you use complex types with WebGrid helper. Hopefully you will enjoy this article too.  

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  • ASP.Net MVC 1.0 Web Hosting

    - by Saravanan I M
    I am developing a website using ASP.Net MVC 1.0. Can i host that website on a server having ASP.Net 2.0? Because my hosting provider supports only ASP.Net 2.0. Does anyone know how to host a website developed using ASP.Net MVC 1.0 in a web server supports ASP.Net 2.0

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  • Easiest Way To Get Started In Dot Net

    - by Avery Payne
    Ok, so the initial search in StackOverflow shows nothing related for this question. So here it goes: Let's pretend for a moment that you're just getting started in a career in computer programming. Let's say that, for whatever reason, you decide to use the .Net framework as a basis for your programming. Let's also say that you've been exposed to some programming background, but not one in .Net, so it seems foreign to you at first. And lastly, you don't have the benefit of 25 years of exposure to the Win32 API, which explains why it seems so foreign to you when you start looking at it. So the questions are: What is a comprehensive overview of what .Net is? It appears to be a combination of a runtime environment, a set of languages, a common set of libraries, and perhaps a few other things...so it's about as clear as mud. Specifically, what are the key components to .Net? What is the easiest way to understand .Net programming with regard to available APIs? Which language would best suit beginning programming out of the "stock" languages that Microsoft has to offer? (C++, C#, VB, etc.) What are some differences between .Net programming and programming in a procedural language (aka Pascal, Modula, etc.) What are some differences between .Net programming and programming in a "traditional" object-oriented language? (aka Smalltalk, Java, Python, Ruby, etc.) As I currently understand it, the CLR provides a foundation for all of the other languages to run on. What are some of the inherent limitations of the CLR? Given the enormous amount of API to cover, would it even be worth learning a .Net language (using the Microsoft APIs) given that you would not have prior exposure to Win32 programming? Let's say you write a for-profit program with .Net. Can you resell the program without running afoul of licensing issues? Let's say you write a gratis (free) program with .Net. Can you offer the program to the public under a "free" license (GPL, BSD, Artistic, etc.) without running afoul of licensing issues? Thank you in advance for your patience.

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  • Default.aspx with IIS 6.0 and .Net 4?

    - by Amitabh
    We have deployed a .net 4 asp.net site on IIS 6.0. Default.aspx is configured as one of the default document. When we access the site using the following url http://testsite We expect it to render http://testsite/Default.aspx But instead we get 404 Not found error. We did not had this issue when it was deployed on .Net 2.0. Only thing that has changed on the server is that we use .Net 4 instead of .Net 2.

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  • ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: Deploying ASP.NET MVC 3 web application to server where ASP.NET MVC 3 is not installed

    - by mbridge
    You can built sample application on ASP.NET MVC 3 for deploying it to your hosting first. To try it out first put it to web server where ASP.NET MVC 3 installed. In this posting I will tell you what files you need and where you can find them. Here are the files you need to upload to get application running on server where ASP.NET MVC 3 is not installed. Also you can deploying ASP.NET MVC 3 web application to server where ASP.NET MVC 3 is not installed like this example: you can change reference to System.Web.Helpers.dll to be the local one so it is copied to bin folder of your application. First file in this list is my web application dll and you don’t need it to get ASP.NET MVC 3 running. All other files are located at the following folder: C:\Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET Web Pages\v1.0\Assemblies\ If there are more files needed in some other scenarios then please leave me a comment here. And… don’t forget to convert the folder in IIS to application. While developing an application locally, this isn’t a problem. But when you are ready to deploy your application to a hosting provider, this might well be a problem if the hoster does not have the ASP.NET MVC assemblies installed in the GAC. Fortunately, ASP.NET MVC is still bin-deployable. If your hosting provider has ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 installed, then you’ll only need to include the MVC DLL. If your hosting provider is still on ASP.NET 3.5, then you’ll need to deploy all three. It turns out that it’s really easy to do so. Also, ASP.NET MVC runs in Medium Trust, so it should work with most hosting providers’ Medium Trust policies. It’s always possible that a hosting provider customizes their Medium Trust policy to be draconian. Deployment is easy when you know what to copy in archive for publishing your web site on ASP.NET MVC 3 or later versions. What I like to do is use the Publish feature of Visual Studio to publish to a local directory and then upload the files to my hosting provider. If your hosting provider supports FTP, you can often skip this intermediate step and publish directly to the FTP site. The first thing I do in preparation is to go to my MVC web application project and expand the References node in the project tree. Select the aforementioned three assemblies and in the Properties dialog, set Copy Local to True. Now just right click on your application and select Publish. This brings up the following Publish wizard Notice that in this example, I selected a local directory. When I hit Publish, all the files needed to deploy my app are available in the directory I chose, including the assemblies that were in the GAC. Another ASP.NET MVC 3 article: - New Features in ASP.NET MVC 3 - ASP.NET MVC 3 First Look

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  • Best way of implementing DropDownList in ASP.NET MVC 2?

    - by Kelsey
    I am trying to understand the best way of implementing a DropDownList in ASP.NET MVC 2 using the DropDownListFor helper. This is a multi-part question. First, what is the best way to pass the list data to the view? Pass the list in your model with a SelectList property that contains the data Pass the list in via ViewData How do I get a blank value in the DropDownList? Should I build it into the SelectList when I am creating it or is there some other means to tell the helper to auto create an empty value? Lastly, if for some reason there is a server side error and I need to redisplay the screen with the DropDownList, do I need to fetch the list values again to pass into the view model? This data is not maintained between posts (at least not when I pass it via my view model) so I was going to just fetch it again (it's cached). Am I going about this correctly?

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  • ASP.NET MVC 2 RC2 Routing - How to clear low-level values when using ActionLink to refer to a higher

    - by Gary McGill
    [NOTE: I'm using ASP.NET MVC2 RC2.] I have URLs like this: /customer/123/order/456/item/index /customer/123/order/456/item/789/edit My routing table lists the most-specific routes first, so I've got: // customer/123/order/456/item/789/edit routes.MapRoute( "item", // Route name "customer/{customerId}/order/{orderId}/item/{itemId}/{action}", // URL with parameters new { controller = "Items", action = "Details" }, // Parameter defaults new { customerId = @"\d+", orderId = @"\d+", itemId = @"\d+" } // Constraints ); // customer/123/order/456/item/index routes.MapRoute( "items", // Route name "customer/{customerId}/order/{orderId}/item/{action}", // URL with parameters new { controller = "Items", action = "Index" }, // Parameter defaults new { customerId = @"\d+", orderId = @"\d+" } // Constraints ); When I'm in the "Edit" page, I want a link back up to the "Index" page. So, I use: ActionLink("Back to Index", "index") However, because there's an ambient order ID, this results in the URL: /Customer/123/Order/456/Item/789/Index ...whereas I want it to "forget" the order ID and just use: /Customer/123/Order/456/Item/Index I've tried overriding the order ID like so: ActionLink("Back to Index", "index", new { orderId=string.empty }) ...but that doesn't work. How can I persuade ActionLink to "forget" the order ID?

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  • How do build a composite or template control in ASP.Net MVC, or the equivelant?

    - by Jason Jackson
    In our current ASP.Net Webforms application we have several composite/template server controls that only exist for a common look and feel. For example, we have a panel control that has a title, a place for buttons related to the contents of the panel, and of course the contents. How is this best accomplished in MVC? RenderPartial doesn't get done what I need here. Should I still be using the same controls, but just on a view page? These controls don't really do anything on postback, they are only there for a common look and feel.

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  • IIS 6/.Net 2:How can user A get the user cookie for unrelated user B who is in a different session a

    - by jon.ediger
    1) user A goes to the site, creates an account, and logs in 2) user b goes to the site. Rather than having to log in, user b enters as though user b is user a. User b gets access to all of user a's data and can brows the site as user a. Note: user b does not log in. User b just hits the site, and the site returns as if user b is already logged in as user a. Note 2: user a and user b are on distinct computers. Also, static variables are not involved in the code. Setup: IIS 6 .Net 2.0 OutputCache off for the pages in the site

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  • How can I perform a normal postback on an ASP.NET page with AJAX history enabled?

    - by Nick
    I have an ASP.NET 3.5 page with an update panel and history enabled. It works fine when I perform async postbacks but I get problems when I want to perform a normal postback. The page load happens fine for the normal postback but then I get asynchronous page loads from the script manager which load the ajax history in. If I could have the ajax history not loading for the times I want to perform a normal postback then everything would be fine. Is there anyway to do this?

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  • Best way of implementing DropDownList in ASP.NET MVC 2?

    - by Kelsey
    I am trying to understand the best way of implementing a DropDownList in ASP.NET MVC 2 using the DropDownListFor helper. This is a multi-part question. First, what is the best way to pass the list data to the view? Pass the list in your model with a SelectList property that contains the data Pass the list in via ViewData How do I get a blank value in the DropDownList? Should I build it into the SelectList when I am creating it or is there some other means to tell the helper to auto create an empty value? Lastly, if for some reason there is a server side error and I need to redisplay the screen with the DropDownList, do I need to fetch the list values again to pass into the view model? This data is not maintained between posts (at least not when I pass it via my view model) so I was going to just fetch it again (it's cached). Am I going about this correctly?

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  • How to solve the performance decay of a VB.NET 1.1 application?

    - by marco.ragogna
    I have single-thread windows form application written with VB.NET and targeting Framework 1.1. The software communicates with external boards through a serial interface, and it mainly consist of a state machine that run some tests, driven in a loop done with a Timer and an Interval of 50ms. The feedback on the user interface is done through some custom events raised during the tests. The problem that is driving me crazy is that the performance slightly decrease over time, and in particular after 1200/1300 test operations. The memory occupied does not increase over time, it is only the CPU that seems interested by this problem. The strange thing is that, targeting framework 2.0 and using the same identical code, I do not have this problem. I know that is difficult without looking at the code, but do you have suggestions how can I approach the problem?

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  • Quick methodology to show client a working demo

    - by LordCover
    I am not starting an argumentative discussion here and this post is not about career development, but from the commercial point of view: If a company was using ASP.Net MVC as a main methodology to build their web sites and application. However, ASP.Net MVC takes more time to show a functional application than ASP.Net Web Forms, for example, building domain models would take some time which obviously can't be represented on a UI at that current stage. My question is, if a client wants to see a functional demo application (just a proof of concept) so he knows that the company he is dealing with is professional and capable of doing that. Would it be better to do that demo in ASP.Net Web Forms only to show the client, and then work on the real application using ASP.Net MVC? If not, what are the (quick) alternatives?, I mean, if we tell the client to wait till we have a working demo (by ASP.Net MVC) we may lose the client and the whole project opportunity.

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  • Where would async calls make sense in an ASP.net (MVC) Web Application?

    - by Michael Stum
    I'm just wondering, if I have an ASP.net Web Application, either WebForms or MVC, is there any situation where doing stuff asynchronously would make sense? The Web Server already handles threading for me in that it spins up multiple threads to handle requests, and most request processing is rather simple and straight forward. I see some use for when stuff truly is a) expensive and b) can be parallelized. but these are the minority cases (at least from what I've encountered). Is there any gain from async in the simple "Read some input, do some CRUD, display some output" scenario?

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  • VSTO is Free But Aspose is Speed

    - by Ken Cox [MVP]
    I’ve taken over the completion, deployment, and maintenance of an ASP.NET Web site that generates Office documents using VSTO. VSTO’s a decent concept and works fine for small-scale scenarios like a desktop app or small intranet. However, with multiple simultaneous requests via ASP.NET, we found the Web server performance suffered badly. To spread out the server’s workload, I implemented MSMQ task queuing via a WCF Windows service.  That helped a lot. IIS didn’t drag with only one VSTO/Office instance running. But I  still found it taking too long to produce a single report. A nicely formatted VSTO Excel document was taking 45 minutes.  (The client  didn’t know any better and therefore considered 45 minutes tolerable.) On my own time, I pulled out an old copy of Aspose.Total for .NET. Within an hour, I had converted the VSTO Excel C# code to Aspose Cells code. The improvement was astonishing: Instead of the 45-minutes, the report took under a minute! I’ve pasted the client’s exact chat response after he tried the speedy Aspose version: “WWWWWOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Microsoft’s VSTO is a free product while the Aspose components cost $$$.  Certainly, it can be a tough call when budgets are tight. If you’re trying to convince the client to shell out for something more suitable for the application, get an eval version of Aspose.Total and offer a direct comparison demo. Ken Full Disclosure: Aspose (like several other component vendors) gives free copies of their suite to MVPs and other .NET influencers.

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  • Send mail in asp.net

    - by Zerotoinfinite
    Hi Experts, I am using asp.net 3.5 and C#. I want to send mail from asp.net, for that I have got some details from my hosting provider which are these: mail.MySite.net UserName Password But I am unable to send mail through these details, I have done the following changes in my web.config file: <system.net> <mailSettings> <smtp> <network host="mail.MySite.net" port="8080" userName="UserName" password="Password" /> </smtp> </mailSettings> </system.net> Also, at the code behind I am writing this function: MailMessage mail = new MailMessage("webmaster@mySite.net", "[email protected]"); mail.Subject = "Hi"; mail.Body = "Test Mail from ASP.NET"; mail.IsBodyHtml = false; SmtpClient smp = new SmtpClient(); smp.Send(mail); but I am getting error message as message sending failed. Please let me know what I am doing wrong and what I have to do to make it work fine. Thanks in advance.

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  • Microsoft Introduces WebMatrix

    - by Rick Strahl
    originally published in CoDe Magazine Editorial Microsoft recently released the first CTP of a new development environment called WebMatrix, which along with some of its supporting technologies are squarely aimed at making the Microsoft Web Platform more approachable for first-time developers and hobbyists. But in the process, it also provides some updated technologies that can make life easier for existing .NET developers. Let’s face it: ASP.NET development isn’t exactly trivial unless you already have a fair bit of familiarity with sophisticated development practices. Stick a non-developer in front of Visual Studio .NET or even the Visual Web Developer Express edition and it’s not likely that the person in front of the screen will be very productive or feel inspired. Yet other technologies like PHP and even classic ASP did provide the ability for non-developers and hobbyists to become reasonably proficient in creating basic web content quickly and efficiently. WebMatrix appears to be Microsoft’s attempt to bring back some of that simplicity with a number of technologies and tools. The key is to provide a friendly and fully self-contained development environment that provides all the tools needed to build an application in one place, as well as tools that allow publishing of content and databases easily to the web server. WebMatrix is made up of several components and technologies: IIS Developer Express IIS Developer Express is a new, self-contained development web server that is fully compatible with IIS 7.5 and based on the same codebase that IIS 7.5 uses. This new development server replaces the much less compatible Cassini web server that’s been used in Visual Studio and the Express editions. IIS Express addresses a few shortcomings of the Cassini server such as the inability to serve custom ISAPI extensions (i.e., things like PHP or ASP classic for example), as well as not supporting advanced authentication. IIS Developer Express provides most of the IIS 7.5 feature set providing much better compatibility between development and live deployment scenarios. SQL Server Compact 4.0 Database access is a key component for most web-driven applications, but on the Microsoft stack this has mostly meant you have to use SQL Server or SQL Server Express. SQL Server Compact is not new-it’s been around for a few years, but it’s been severely hobbled in the past by terrible tool support and the inability to support more than a single connection in Microsoft’s attempt to avoid losing SQL Server licensing. The new release of SQL Server Compact 4.0 supports multiple connections and you can run it in ASP.NET web applications simply by installing an assembly into the bin folder of the web application. In effect, you don’t have to install a special system configuration to run SQL Compact as it is a drop-in database engine: Copy the small assembly into your BIN folder (or from the GAC if installed fully), create a connection string against a local file-based database file, and then start firing SQL requests. Additionally WebMatrix includes nice tools to edit the database tables and files, along with tools to easily upsize (and hopefully downsize in the future) to full SQL Server. This is a big win, pending compatibility and performance limits. In my simple testing the data engine performed well enough for small data sets. This is not only useful for web applications, but also for desktop applications for which a fully installed SQL engine like SQL Server would be overkill. Having a local data store in those applications that can potentially be accessed by multiple users is a welcome feature. ASP.NET Razor View Engine What? Yet another native ASP.NET view engine? We already have Web Forms and various different flavors of using that view engine with Web Forms and MVC. Do we really need another? Microsoft thinks so, and Razor is an implementation of a lightweight, script-only view engine. Unlike the Web Forms view engine, Razor works only with inline code, snippets, and markup; therefore, it is more in line with current thinking of what a view engine should represent. There’s no support for a “page model” or any of the other Web Forms features of the full-page framework, but just a lightweight scripting engine that works with plain markup plus embedded expressions and code. The markup syntax for Razor is geared for minimal typing, plus some progressive detection of where a script block/expression starts and ends. This results in a much leaner syntax than the typical ASP.NET Web Forms alligator (<% %>) tags. Razor uses the @ sign plus standard C# (or Visual Basic) block syntax to delineate code snippets and expressions. Here’s a very simple example of what Razor markup looks like along with some comment annotations: <!DOCTYPE html> <html>     <head>         <title></title>     </head>     <body>     <h1>Razor Test</h1>          <!-- simple expressions -->     @DateTime.Now     <hr />     <!-- method expressions -->     @DateTime.Now.ToString("T")          <!-- code blocks -->     @{         List<string> names = new List<string>();         names.Add("Rick");         names.Add("Markus");         names.Add("Claudio");         names.Add("Kevin");     }          <!-- structured block statements -->     <ul>     @foreach(string name in names){             <li>@name</li>     }     </ul>           <!-- Conditional code -->        @if(true) {                        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->        <text>         true        </text>;    }    else    {        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->       <text>       false       </text>;    }    </body> </html> Like the Web Forms view engine, Razor parses pages into code, and then executes that run-time compiled code. Effectively a “page” becomes a code file with markup becoming literal text written into the Response stream, code snippets becoming raw code, and expressions being written out with Response.Write(). The code generated from Razor doesn’t look much different from similar Web Forms code that only uses script tags; so although the syntax may look different, the operational model is fairly similar to the Web Forms engine minus the overhead of the large Page object model. However, there are differences: -Razor pages are based on a new base class, Microsoft.WebPages.WebPage, which is hosted in the Microsoft.WebPages assembly that houses all the Razor engine parsing and processing logic. Browsing through the assembly (in the generated ASP.NET Temporary Files folder or GAC) will give you a good idea of the functionality that Razor provides. If you look closely, a lot of the feature set matches ASP.NET MVC’s view implementation as well as many of the helper classes found in MVC. It’s not hard to guess the motivation for this sort of view engine: For beginning developers the simple markup syntax is easier to work with, although you obviously still need to have some understanding of the .NET Framework in order to create dynamic content. The syntax is easier to read and grok and much shorter to type than ASP.NET alligator tags (<% %>) and also easier to understand aesthetically what’s happening in the markup code. Razor also is a better fit for Microsoft’s vision of ASP.NET MVC: It’s a new view engine without the baggage of Web Forms attached to it. The engine is more lightweight since it doesn’t carry all the features and object model of Web Forms with it and it can be instantiated directly outside of the HTTP environment, which has been rather tricky to do for the Web Forms view engine. Having a standalone script parser is a huge win for other applications as well – it makes it much easier to create script or meta driven output generators for many types of applications from code/screen generators, to simple form letters to data merging applications with user customizability. For me personally this is very useful side effect and who knows maybe Microsoft will actually standardize they’re scripting engines (die T4 die!) on this engine. Razor also better fits the “view-based” approach where the view is supposed to be mostly a visual representation that doesn’t hold much, if any, code. While you can still use code, the code you do write has to be self-contained. Overall I wouldn’t be surprised if Razor will become the new standard view engine for MVC in the future – and in fact there have been announcements recently that Razor will become the default script engine in ASP.NET MVC 3.0. Razor can also be used in existing Web Forms and MVC applications, although that’s not working currently unless you manually configure the script mappings and add the appropriate assemblies. It’s possible to do it, but it’s probably better to wait until Microsoft releases official support for Razor scripts in Visual Studio. Once that happens, you can simply drop .cshtml and .vbhtml pages into an existing ASP.NET project and they will work side by side with classic ASP.NET pages. WebMatrix Development Environment To tie all of these three technologies together, Microsoft is shipping WebMatrix with an integrated development environment. An integrated gallery manager makes it easy to download and load existing projects, and then extend them with custom functionality. It seems to be a prominent goal to provide community-oriented content that can act as a starting point, be it via a custom templates or a complete standard application. The IDE includes a project manager that works with a single project and provides an integrated IDE/editor for editing the .cshtml and .vbhtml pages. A run button allows you to quickly run pages in the project manager in a variety of browsers. There’s no debugging support for code at this time. Note that Razor pages don’t require explicit compilation, so making a change, saving, and then refreshing your page in the browser is all that’s needed to see changes while testing an application locally. It’s essentially using the auto-compiling Web Project that was introduced with .NET 2.0. All code is compiled during run time into dynamically created assemblies in the ASP.NET temp folder. WebMatrix also has PHP Editing support with syntax highlighting. You can load various PHP-based applications from the WebMatrix Web Gallery directly into the IDE. Most of the Web Gallery applications are ready to install and run without further configuration, with Wizards taking you through installation of tools, dependencies, and configuration of the database as needed. WebMatrix leverages the Web Platform installer to pull the pieces down from websites in a tight integration of tools that worked nicely for the four or five applications I tried this out on. Click a couple of check boxes and fill in a few simple configuration options and you end up with a running application that’s ready to be customized. Nice! You can easily deploy completed applications via WebDeploy (to an IIS server) or FTP directly from within the development environment. The deploy tool also can handle automatically uploading and installing the database and all related assemblies required, making deployment a simple one-click install step. Simplified Database Access The IDE contains a database editor that can edit SQL Compact and SQL Server databases. There is also a Database helper class that facilitates database access by providing easy-to-use, high-level query execution and iteration methods: @{       var db = Database.OpenFile("FirstApp.sdf");     string sql = "select * from customers where Id > @0"; } <ul> @foreach(var row in db.Query(sql,1)){         <li>@row.FirstName @row.LastName</li> } </ul> The query function takes a SQL statement plus any number of positional (@0,@1 etc.) SQL parameters by simple values. The result is returned as a collection of rows which in turn have a row object with dynamic properties for each of the columns giving easy (though untyped) access to each of the fields. Likewise Execute and ExecuteNonQuery allow execution of more complex queries using similar parameter passing schemes. Note these queries use string-based queries rather than LINQ or Entity Framework’s strongly typed LINQ queries. While this may seem like a step back, it’s also in line with the expectations of non .NET script developers who are quite used to writing and using SQL strings in code rather than using OR/M frameworks. The only question is why was something not included from the beginning in .NET and Microsoft made developers build custom implementations of these basic building blocks. The implementation looks a lot like a DataTable-style data access mechanism, but to be fair, this is a common approach in scripting languages. This type of syntax that uses simple, static, data object methods to perform simple data tasks with one line of code are common in scripting languages and are a good match for folks working in PHP/Python, etc. Seems like Microsoft has taken great advantage of .NET 4.0’s dynamic typing to provide this sort of interface for row iteration where each row has properties for each field. FWIW, all the examples demonstrate using local SQL Compact files - I was unable to get a SQL Server connection string to work with the Database class (the connection string wasn’t accepted). However, since the code in the page is still plain old .NET, you can easily use standard ADO.NET code or even LINQ or Entity Framework models that are created outside of WebMatrix in separate assemblies as required. The good the bad the obnoxious - It’s still .NET The beauty (or curse depending on how you look at it :)) of Razor and the compilation model is that, behind it all, it’s still .NET. Although the syntax may look foreign, it’s still all .NET behind the scenes. You can easily access existing tools, helpers, and utilities simply by adding them to the project as references or to the bin folder. Razor automatically recognizes any assembly reference from assemblies in the bin folder. In the default configuration, Microsoft provides a host of helper functions in a Microsoft.WebPages assembly (check it out in the ASP.NET temp folder for your application), which includes a host of HTML Helpers. If you’ve used ASP.NET MVC before, a lot of the helpers should look familiar. Documentation at the moment is sketchy-there’s a very rough API reference you can check out here: http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/tutorials/asp-net-web-pages-api-reference Who needs WebMatrix? Uhm… good Question Clearly Microsoft is trying hard to create an environment with WebMatrix that is easy to use for newbie developers. The goal seems to be simplicity in providing a minimal development environment and an easy-to-use script engine/language that makes it easy to get started with. There’s also some focus on community features that can be used as starting points, such as Web Gallery applications and templates. The community features in particular are very nice and something that would be nice to eventually see in Visual Studio as well. The question is whether this is too little too late. Developers who have been clamoring for a simpler development environment on the .NET stack have mostly left for other simpler platforms like PHP or Python which are catering to the down and dirty developer. Microsoft will be hard pressed to win those folks-and other hardcore PHP developers-back. Regardless of how much you dress up a script engine fronted by the .NET Framework, it’s still the .NET Framework and all the complexity that drives it. While .NET is a fine solution in its breadth and features once you get a basic handle on the core features, the bar of entry to being productive with the .NET Framework is still pretty high. The MVC style helpers Microsoft provides are a good step in the right direction, but I suspect it’s not enough to shield new developers from having to delve much deeper into the Framework to get even basic applications built. Razor and its helpers is trying to make .NET more accessible but the reality is that in order to do useful stuff that goes beyond the handful of simple helpers you still are going to have to write some C# or VB or other .NET code. If the target is a hobby/amateur/non-programmer the learning curve isn’t made any easier by WebMatrix it’s just been shifted a tad bit further along in your development endeavor when you run out of canned components that are supplied either by Microsoft or the community. The database helpers are interesting and actually I’ve heard a lot of discussion from various developers who’ve been resisting .NET for a really long time perking up at the prospect of easier data access in .NET than the ridiculous amount of code it takes to do even simple data access with raw ADO.NET. It seems sad that such a simple concept and implementation should trigger this sort of response (especially since it’s practically trivial to create helpers like these or pick them up from countless libraries available), but there it is. It also shows that there are plenty of developers out there who are more interested in ‘getting stuff done’ easily than necessarily following the latest and greatest practices which are overkill for many development scenarios. Sometimes it seems that all of .NET is focused on the big life changing issues of development, rather than the bread and butter scenarios that many developers are interested in to get their work accomplished. And that in the end may be WebMatrix’s main raison d'être: To bring some focus back at Microsoft that simpler and more high level solutions are actually needed to appeal to the non-high end developers as well as providing the necessary tools for the high end developers who want to follow the latest and greatest trends. The current version of WebMatrix hits many sweet spots, but it also feels like it has a long way to go before it really can be a tool that a beginning developer or an accomplished developer can feel comfortable with. Although there are some really good ideas in the environment (like the gallery for downloading apps and components) which would be a great addition for Visual Studio as well, the rest of the development environment just feels like crippleware with required functionality missing especially debugging and Intellisense, but also general editor support. It’s not clear whether these are because the product is still in an early alpha release or whether it’s simply designed that way to be a really limited development environment. While simple can be good, nobody wants to feel left out when it comes to necessary tool support and WebMatrix just has that left out feeling to it. If anything WebMatrix’s technology pieces (which are really independent of the WebMatrix product) are what are interesting to developers in general. The compact IIS implementation is a nice improvement for development scenarios and SQL Compact 4.0 seems to address a lot of concerns that people have had and have complained about for some time with previous SQL Compact implementations. By far the most interesting and useful technology though seems to be the Razor view engine for its light weight implementation and it’s decoupling from the ASP.NET/HTTP pipeline to provide a standalone scripting/view engine that is pluggable. The first winner of this is going to be ASP.NET MVC which can now have a cleaner view model that isn’t inconsistent due to the baggage of non-implemented WebForms features that don’t work in MVC. But I expect that Razor will end up in many other applications as a scripting and code generation engine eventually. Visual Studio integration for Razor is currently missing, but is promised for a later release. The ASP.NET MVC team has already mentioned that Razor will eventually become the default MVC view engine, which will guarantee continued growth and development of this tool along those lines. And the Razor engine and support tools actually inherit many of the features that MVC pioneered, so there’s some synergy flowing both ways between Razor and MVC. As an existing ASP.NET developer who’s already familiar with Visual Studio and ASP.NET development, the WebMatrix IDE doesn’t give you anything that you want. The tools provided are minimal and provide nothing that you can’t get in Visual Studio today, except the minimal Razor syntax highlighting, so there’s little need to take a step back. With Visual Studio integration coming later there’s little reason to look at WebMatrix for tooling. It’s good to see that Microsoft is giving some thought about the ease of use of .NET as a platform For so many years, we’ve been piling on more and more new features without trying to take a step back and see how complicated the development/configuration/deployment process has become. Sometimes it’s good to take a step - or several steps - back and take another look and realize just how far we’ve come. WebMatrix is one of those reminders and one that likely will result in some positive changes on the platform as a whole. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET   IIS7  

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  • Unit Testing (xUnit) an ASP.NET Mvc Controller with a custom input model?

    - by Danny Douglass
    I'm having a hard time finding information on what I expect to be a pretty straightforward scenario. I'm trying to unit test an Action on my ASP.NET Mvc 2 Controller that utilizes a custom input model w/ DataAnnotions. My testing framework is xUnit, as mentioned in the title. Here is my custom Input Model: public class EnterPasswordInputModel { [Required(ErrorMessage = "")] public string Username { get; set; } [Required(ErrorMessage = "Password is a required field.")] public string Password { get; set; } } And here is my Controller (took out some logic to simplify for this ex.): [HttpPost] public ActionResult EnterPassword(EnterPasswordInputModel enterPasswordInput) { if (!ModelState.IsValid) return View(); // do some logic to validate input // if valid - next View on successful validation return View("NextViewName"); // else - add and display error on current view return View(); } And here is my xUnit Fact (also simplified): [Fact] public void EnterPassword_WithValidInput_ReturnsNextView() { // Arrange var controller = CreateLoginController(userService.Object); // Act var result = controller.EnterPassword( new EnterPasswordInputModel { Username = username, Password = password }) as ViewResult; // Assert Assert.Equal("NextViewName", result.ViewName); } When I run my test I get the following error on my test fact when trying to retrieve the controller result (Act section): System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

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