Friday, June 29, 2012




Weekly digest #3

Safely Test a JavaScript Change Without Touching the Server–A Huge Time Sever,  Ed Hintz:The fastest bug fixes are the ones you can make and test right on the spot.  However, many times access to the web server in order to update JavaScript files is not possible, convenient, or is potentially dangerous (affects all users if your fix fails miserably).

Using controllers from an external assembly in ASP.NET Web API,  Filip W.: In general, in my day-to-day job, I am working with large enterprise web applications, where clean projects, noise reduction and test driven development are holy. Therefore I have always been a big fan of placing MVC controllers outside the actual web application project, in a separate class library (or libraries).

ASP.NET Web API vs. ASP.NET MVC “APIs”, Dave Ward: I’ve been receiving lots of emails asking my opinion about ASP.NET Web API lately. One of the most recent messages boiled them all down pretty well in its subject line:
ASP.NET Web API – Why is it so cool?

Single Page App Using Knockout and ASP.NET, Bangla Gopal Surya: In this article, I will discuss how to create a sample single page application using Knockout and ASP.NET. This app shows a list of users based on types like Users, Admin Users, Super Admin Users, and shows user details upon selection of a user.

Understanding a Simple Async Program, Alan Berman: The Async feature in Visual Studio 2012 RC makes it easy to invoke asynchronous methods. If you mark a method with or async modifier, you can use the await operator in the method. When control reaches an await expression in the async method, control returns to the caller, and progress in the method is suspended until the awaited task completes. When the task is complete, execution can resume in the method.

NaN and typeof, Kiro Risk: First, NaN is not a keyword (unlike true, false, null, etc..), it is a property of the global object. The value of NaN is the same as the value of Number.NaN.

Tips on Web Developing and Designing, AJ Banda: For three years, I have done a lot of web site application and most of them are corporate sites. So I thought of sharing some of the things I have learned from my work. Let's start by differentiating the term web designer and web developer. It should be clear that this two jobs are related to each other but not similar.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Weekly digest #2

SignalR – Group Notifications, Dane-Garrin Balia: The aim of what we will be trying to accomplish in this tutorial is to create a sample Broadcast Notification System using SignalR where specific groups can receive "notifications" in real time, from an external application.

ExecutionContext vs SynchronizationContext, Stephen Toub: I’ve been asked a few times recently various questions about ExecutionContext and SynchronizationContext, for example what the differences are between them, what it means to “flow” them, and how they relate to the new async/await keywords in C# and Visual Basic.  I thought I’d try to tackle some of those questions here.

The Three Models of ASP.NET MVC Apps, Dino Esposito: When you use the standard project template for creating ASP.NET MVC 3 applications in Visual Studio 2010, the newly created project comes with a predefined folder named Models. The Models folder goes hand-in-hand with two other predefined folders called Views and Controllers. Models, Views, and Controllers form the triad of roles that underlie any application that conforms to the popular MVC (Model-View-Controller) design pattern.

C# 5.0 Async Tips and Tricks Part 1, Jérôme Laban: This article is a discussion about how C#5.0 async captures the executing context when running an async method, which allows to easily stay on the UI Thread to access UI elements, but can be problematic when running CPU-bound work. Off of the UI thread, an async method may jump from thread to thread, breaking thread context dependent code along with it.

IIS Best Practices, CenkIscan: For a very long time, I have been asked for a document on IIS best practices. There are some blogs/articles on the Internet but I could not find a complete one. Actually, the main problem here is that there can not be “best practices” for a web server. A web server is just a hosting platform for applications, and, each and every application has its own needs. Therefore, in many cases, you will not have one universal best practice.

A Gentle Reintroduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript Part 1, Matthew Podwysocki: In the previous post, I briefly covered that yes, the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript is alive, with two releases to show for it.  Before going into the depths of what’s in the box for V1 and V2, I want to step back and cover some of the basics and why you might care about this library.  It’s great to talk about APIs and general capabilities, but let’s first cover asynchronous and event-based programming in JavaScript today.

Getting started with Lucene.NET–Searching, Ricci Gian Maria: In the previous part I’ve showed how easy is to create an index with lucene.net, but in this post I’ll start to explain how to search into it, first of all what I need is a more interesting example, so I decided to download a dump of stack overflow, and I’ve extracted the Posts.Xml file (10 GB of XML file), then I wrote this simple piece of text to create the lucene index.

The theory behind covariance and contravariance in C# 4, Tomáš Petříček: In C# 4.0, we can annotate generic type parameters with out and in annotations to specify whether they should behave covariantly or contravariantly. This is mainly useful when using already defined standard interfaces. Covariance means that you can use IEnumerable<string> in place where IEnumerable<object> is expected. Contravariance allows you to pass IComparable<object> as an argument of a method taking IComparable<string>.

Saturday, June 09, 2012

Weekly digest: 9 June, 2012

A gentle introduction to Backbone with jQuery, Rocky Jaiswal:Backbone is a great JavaScript framework, I am sure most developers would have heard about it. I spent some time learning Backbone and want to share the little I have learned so far.

Types of Duplication in Code, John Sonmez:One of the biggest reasons to refactor code is to eliminate duplication.  It is pretty easy to introduce duplication in our code either unintentionally or because we don’t know how to prevent or get rid of it.

AspectMap – Aspect Oriented Programming for Complete Beginners, Chris Surfleet:In computing, aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm which aims to increase modularity by allowing the separation of cross-cutting concerns

ASP.NET for Mobile, One ASP.NET and Realtime ASP.NET with Signalr - Video of Scott Hanselman's talks in Russia:The English versions of my three talks (plus one open Q&A sesssion) are now all up for your viewing pleasure.

Differences Between NHibernate and Entity Framework, Ricardo Peres:NHibernate and Entity Framework are two of the most popular O/RM frameworks on the .NET world. Although they share some functionality, there are some aspects on which they are quite different. This post will describe this differences and will hopefully help you get started with the one you know less. Mind you, this is a personal selection of features to compare, it is by no way an exhaustive list.